McNally's Gamble by Lawrence Sanders

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"I won't tell you where she held the mistletoe."

McNally's Gamble (1997) is the fourth installment of Lawrence Sanders' Archy McNally series that I am reviewing here on Goodreads and the least successful of the four. While the novel is quite strong on humor and the pleasantly flowery language is a joy to read the plot is not engrossing at all and the strange twists at the end seem artificial and lame.

After an awkward "criminal anecdote" only loosely connected with the plot the novel begins with Archy buying Courvoisier for his father's birthday. Of course Mr. Sanders' readers know that the father is the boss of a legal firm in Palm Beach, Florida, where Archy is the only employee of the Discreet Inquiries Department. One of the firm's wealthy clients, Mrs. Westmore, is planning to buy a Fabergé egg from a seller in Paris on recommendation of an investment advisor. Archy's discreet inquiries are focused on the advisor's bona fides and the soundness of the transaction. Later in the plot we meet Mrs. Westmore's adult children and we learn that the money she is planning to spend for the egg could be more productively used to finance her son's paleontology research on the origins of bipedalism. The plot becomes more serious when one of the characters marginally involved in the planned transaction is murdered.

Of course, this being an Archy McNally novel we cannot get away without some tactfully and delightfully told sex passages. Not only does Archy have a good time with his steady partner Connie, but we also are shown a glimpse of The Paroxysm of the Collapsing Cot that occurs during Archy's coupling with yet another fan of his manly charms. The reader will also learn about a rather imbalanced marriage between two of the characters in the plot, where an uxorious husband is juxtaposed with a concupiscent wife. Hey, three long words in one simple sentence! I am expanding my English vocabulary...

Unfortunately Binky Watrous also participates in the events: this slows the plot down and the meager comedic payout does not justify the many, many pages of text, dedicated to this least interesting of all Archy McNally regulars. Another weakness is the character of Natalie Westmore - totally implausible to me. On the positive side I love the reference to The Rule of Seventy-Two (I often mention it when teaching calculus) which is used for testing the legitimacy of a financial advisor.

The novel is worth reading only for the florid prose. To use the author's own phrasing the inanity of the plot gasts my flabber.

Two stars.



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