By the Balls: The Complete Collection
Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender
The Meat
By The Balls feels
like a hoax. It’s not simply because the concept behind the stories of P.I. Ben
Drake is in some sense fake—they are, after all, the work of Dashiell
Loveless, who is a definitely fake author. There’s a touch of con artistry in the story
behind the rise and fall UglyTown and the Jim Pascoe/Tom Fassbender partnership, at least in how
its presented in this collection’s introduction. It just all seems a bit off...
By the Balls: The
Complete Collection consists of ten short stories—five stand alones and the
five that make up 1999’s Five Shots and a
Funeral—and the novel By the Balls.
The stories follow the career of Ben Drake, a firefighter turned PI, and his entanglements with the underworld of Testacy City, Nevada. As far as PIs go, Drake is mild-mannered. He has little of Marlowe’s coolness, Hammer’s brutality, or the
Continental Op’s cunning. Ben Drake is in fact remarkably average—other than
his alcoholism, of course. And he is also a broken man, haunted by the death of
his wife. In fact, most women in Drake’s life seem to meet unfortunate ends. But maybe these things make him more average.
Drake’s average Joe persona stands in stark contrast to the comic otherworldliness of Testacy City. Otherworldly if you’ve never traveled through Nevada
outside of Vegas, or at least been to Reno. Testacy City is Reno’s evil twin. For one
thing, gambling hasn't taken a foothold here, mainly because
the city’s thriving criminal community wants to keep it that way. Pascoe and
Fassbender created a subtly odd cast of gangsters and crooks, noteworthy since
they did it in the nineties when all fictional criminals were required to have some quirk
or specific neuroses. The authors choose a more subdued approach compared to their contemporaries. A very large thug wearing an even larger suit. His
diminutive yet deadly partner. Their boss, Small-Tooth Kelly. There’s nothing
overtly odd about them: they don’t speak in outdated slang, or quote Chaucer
prior to dispensing with a beating. If anything, they’re closer to the stock
characters of classic hardboiled fiction than the hipster criminals of the
nineties. The city too feels like a stock character of old school noir, replete with debonair mod bosses
and drug-running Senate candidates.
All of this could have gone wrong. The very fact that the
stories center on a private investigator should have doomed the whole Ben Drake
venture from the start. But Pascoe and Fassbender, though obviously referencing
the classics, do so in a carefully self-referential way. Their absurdist and
counterintuitive treatment of genre themes—Drake’s almost pathologically platonic
treatment of women, for example—lighten the stories. Though By the Balls is tongue-in-cheek, the stories never stray into
parody. The authors' background in comics may also have influenced their skillfully
subdued yet cartoonish take on the hardboiled genre.
The stories themselves are almost comedic in their setups. Though some of the stories felt unnecessary, particularly those
providing background on central characters in the series (“Fireproof,” “Partners,”
“Across the Line”), they were for the most part fun, often madcap narratives
based on absorb premises. In this regard, “The Silent Ventriloquist” (case
one from the generally good Five Shots and a Funeral)
stands out. (I googled “Orpheus” and “Alexander Graham Bell" after reading it.) The centerpiece of this collection is By the Balls, wisely positioned in the last half of the collection.
The novel is far superior to the short stories that make up the rest of the
volume. It sticks with the basic absurdist and madcap nature of the shorter
pieces, but as a short novel this approach is particularly effective.
Finally, Akashic’s By
the Balls: The Complete Collection gets bonus points for including Paul
Pope’s artwork. Actually, I will give them two points on this. One bonus point
because I am a fan of Paul Pope. And a second point for the mere inclusion of
artwork. I have always found it odd that novels don’t include artwork more
often. Who doesn't like pictures?
The Math
Objective Score: 7/10
Penalties: -1 the inclusion "over twenty short essays" praising the authors
Bonuses: +1 for artwork; +1 for Paul Pope's artwork
Nerd coefficient: 8/10
