Patrick Irelan

In 24 chapters/essays Central Standard summarizes typical Midwestern life from the Great Depression to the present from the standpoint of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the author’s immediate family.

His father worked for the CB&Q and the Rock Island as a telegrapher/station agent and six of the essays (Western Union, The CB&Q, Thirteen Men, Great Plains, Tramps, and The Rock Island) concern specific details of railroad work and life. The author uses seventeen of the remaining eighteen essays to introduce the reader to other aspects of Midwestern life (farming, school, travel, etc.) and to some of the memorable aunts, uncles, and grandparents with whom he shared that time and place. In the final essay the author describes his trip through Nebraska in 2001 with his sister “to find the towns and, if possible, the CB&Q depots where she and my parents had lived in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s.”

It is easy to understand why The University of Iowa Press chose to publish this book. The book is well written and the author paints excellent word pictures. Even though my main reason for purchasing the book was for the accounts of railroad life I found all of the chapters to be of interest and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Midwestern history. See Common Knowledge for an example of the writing style. (Text Length - 157 pages, Total Length - 161 pages. Includes index)… (altro)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

In a way, pastiches can be a lot of fun, books that are specifically and deliberately designed to be a ripoff of a particular type of literary genre, which instead of a ripoff is known as a "loving homage" to that genre by its fans; but I always find the same problem with pastiches of hardboiled detective novels (and there are a lot of pastiches of hardboiled detective novels by now), which is that in order for one to work in a contemporary setting, the main character always comes off like some cartoonish anachronism, a "seedy private eye" who nonetheless has the kind of oak-paneled, antique-filled office that in the 2010s would be marketed as a vintage loft and sold for millions to creative-classers, and who never owns a cellphone and still gets all his information from paper newspapers, and who walks around talking like a wiseguy within a world of LOLcats and emoticons. And so too is the case with Patrick Irelan's The Big Drugstore, which is kind of a shame, because instead of an actual rat-a-tat crime novel I think he means it to be, it comes across more like a comedy about a guy who reads way too many rat-a-tat crime novels, even though I have to say that I really loved the central premise of the story, that our hero is a security guard at a Walgreens-type convenience store, who takes it upon himself to go into Philip Marlowe mode when the store's manager is murdered for unknown reasons right in his office under the guard's watch. (Also, I cracked up every time I spied on the back cover the reference to the "gritty and rough" streets of Davenport, Iowa, one of the many details that makes it hard to tell if the publisher is presenting this straightforwardly or with tongue in cheek.) Let's be clear, it's not a bad book at all, and fans of hardboiled pastiches should definitely pick it up; but it's pretty damn silly too, and fans of sincere contemporary crime dramas deserve to know this before buying a copy. It comes with a limited recommendation today, just to those people.

Out of 10: 7.4, or 8.4 for fans of hardboiled detective homages… (altro)