Review: Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?

Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This is a book with some faults, for sure. Not only does it need more editing (for excess commas between adjectives, missing quotation marks, other punctuation errors - including "rabbit's" when the plural, not the possessive, is intended - and homonyms like dowsed/doused and leeched/leached), but it overdoes the hard-boiled imagery more than somewhat, and drops an awful lot of brand names, presumably to give the feel of the time. I wouldn't mind so much, except it feels like the author is trying too hard for an effect that he's still not always pulling off.

Also, it's creepy enough that Baby Herman, a 36-year-old in the body of a baby but with the drives and bad habits of his actual age, pursues every woman in Hollywood; it's even more creepy that he frequently catches them. Please don't think about that too hard, or indeed at all.

It's full of small anachronisms, too, though the author tries to head those off with a foreword implying that his alternate version of the world differs from ours in a number of historical details as well as by having living "Toons". It's not completely clear when this is set - possibly 1939, since Gone with the Wind is about to be filmed and Clark Gable hasn't yet married Carole Lombard, though maybe postwar, since Gable's Air Force service is alluded to - but the foreword is signed "Eddie Valiant, 1947," and we get a number of cultural references from later than that. For example, the phrase "Say goodnight, Gracie" (from a TV show that debuted in 1950); a reference to Yul Brynner's role in The King and I, which began in 1951; a mention that Joseph McCarthy would have reason to target Edward R. Murrow, though Murrow's criticism of McCarthy didn't occur until 1954; and Rodan and Godzilla (the kaiju), 1956 and 1954, respectively. I think we can probably just assume that it's set generally in the period of the late 1930s to the 1940s (excluding the war years), in a loose historical continuity that isn't too close to ours, with the odd 1950s reference included by mistake. (In case you're wondering, I look up the references in Wikipedia using the function on my e-reader, and I happened to notice that a lot of them came from after 1947. The author, to be fair, didn't have such ready access to check this stuff when he wrote this in 1991, but that's also more than 30 years in which these issues, and the editing, could have been fixed but weren't.)

Still, it's otherwise amusing, and the mystery works as a mystery even when the comedy doesn't.

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