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The very first scene in HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED involves a Labrador retriever. More than that you really don't need to know, other than perhaps the scene also involves peanut butter --- no, that's too much information. Suffice it to say that the first scene is hilarious beyond words, and just leave it at that.
The initial scene of any book tends to be emblematic (mostly because this is what readers read when they are going through the bookstore). But the Labrador retriever scene is even more so, and that's saying something, because HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED is not really a "dog book." It is, emphatically, a "cat book." One of the main characters is an ever-so-reluctantly rescued feline, a kitten with the sobriquet "Crusty Boogers," named after its serious, chronic, and permanent sinus infection. But that's another issue altogether.
No, the bit with the Labrador retriever is important because the book itself is not too much dissimilar from a large, friendly, overbearing, clumsy dog. Although HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED --- like the Lab itself --- has many sterling qualities, it is a big sloppy mess of a book. It is endearing enough and eager to please, but it tends to lumber around a bit, and is never what you would call subtle or overly averse to knocking cups off of coffee tables.
HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED is in the tradition of Carl Hiaasen (who writes a back-cover blurb), but it's in an entirely different world. Its hero is Rick Shannon, full-time DJ for the last independent radio station in Vicksburg, Mississippi (and maybe in the entire world, by the time you read this). Shannon also heads Rockin' Vestigations, for which he investigates cheating husbands and solves musical mysteries.
At issue here is the fate of a long-lost blues recording --- a lost piece of the Mississippi past, on reel-to-reel. The tape --- if it exists --- has been sitting in the back of someone's safe deposit box for fifty years. If it can be found, digitally remastered, released on a CD, and sold at an independent record store near you, it is worth quite a few nickels. The recording --- known by blues historians everywhere as the "Blind, Crippled, and Crazy sessions," after the nicknames of the artists who created them --- is somewhere out there on Highway 61, and Rick Shannon is the one who's hired to help find it.
The Shannon character isn't especially interesting or compelling, unfortunately. But at least he's not that bright, either, which helps to move the story along. Also looking for the Blind, Crippled and Crazy sessions --- this book is nothing if not politically incorrect, joyfully so --- is an ex-convict named Clarence who has his own interest in getting his hands on the tapes, and maybe on the blues musicians who recorded them.
HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED is much more of a dark comedy than a mystery, which matches up well with the talents of author Bill Fitzhugh. Outside of the hilarious first few chapters, most of the laughs come from the incompetence of a hit man, who suffers through the sort of indignities that similar characters suffer through in Hiaasen novels. Fitzhugh also sets up something of a love interest for Shannon, who is more than a little incompetent in this area himself. But it's really more about music than anything else, and the reader is treated to long disquisitions on the history and theory of the blues, from Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a dusty crossroads to the appropriation of blues music by generations of white rock musicians.
This is a hard book to dislike, and it's probably best not even to try. It's a pleasant trip crisscrossing the rural back roads of Mississippi, with some good music on the radio and a wheezing cat in the back seat. If this sounds at all like a trip you'd like to take, then by all means, go.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes the Northbound blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog/.
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