Disposable Lit Reviews

(G.O.D. Inc., No. 1)
TOR Books, 1987
320 pp.
ISBN 0-812-53306-2
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Somehow, I’ve managed to spend over 31 years on this planet without reading anything by Jack L. Chalker. That’s notable because the man isn’t a science fiction author, he’s a discrete publishing category. Go check out your local bookstore. (It’s okay, I’ll wait.) Chalker has been cranking out noves and series, usually three to five books to a set, for at least a quarter century. I’ve had a few of his books on my shelf, picked up at yard sales and such; they’re each from a different series, and this one was the only one that was first in the series, so that’s what we start with.

It’s a classic premise (or at least springboard) in popular SF; put a hardboiled detective in a case which takes a decidedly otherworldly turn. Hey., it’s not art, but it works as entertainment.

In this case, the private eyes are most of the sparkle of the book. Sam Horowitz, a bald Jewish ex-cop with a paunch, and his wife Brandy, a zaftig African-American, are on their last legs with the agency she inherited from her father. They’re a novel and engaging couple in their own right, though Chalker almost dooms things with a stylistic/structural fault right out of the gate. (Note to novelists: If you’re going to give me a chapter on character backgrounds, then just come out and give me a chapter on character backgrounds. Don’t give me two paragraphs of present day, then have the narrator stop the story for twenty pages of backstory, then act as if the preceding block of exposition was just an aside.)

As is the custom, the failing detectives have one last opportunity to do it right: A money launderer for the mob wants them to track down a crooked banker who absconded with two and a half million of the Mob’s money. Not entirely comfortable with the ethics of finding crooks for crooks, they take the case for the ten percent payoff, and for the thrill of the chase.

And what a chase it becomes. As near as they can figure, the banker was living a separate life as a transvestite — except it then turns out that there actually are two of him, and one’s honestly a her. And there’s a third one (another him), after the other two.

It couldn’t get weirder, they assume. That’s before they trace the banker’s connections back to a distributing outfit called General Ordering and Development, Inc., or “G.O.D.” for short. They seem to have an incredible range of marketing and trading operations, which extend all the way out of this world into alternate earths. They find this out the hard way — when they accidentally get shunted through the “Labyrinth” and end up trapped on a world empty of human habitation.

Given that the structure of the story is adopted from hardboiled crime and detection novels, the trail of subterfuges and doublecrosses is convoluted enough; taking it across variant earths adds a whole ‘nother dimension, so to speak. There’s a certain Rube Goldberg quality to the plot, but as I mentioned, the characters have enough charm in themselves to smooth over the rough spots, and Chalker’s prose style is unremarkable but transparent, giving the reader an easy ride.

There are another two novels in the series, as Sam and Brandy’s fortunes remain intertwined with those of G.O.D. Inc. If I find the next one before I run across the first volume of one of the other series, I’ll give it a go.

Nathan Shumate