A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Evaluation
by Susan Dunlap
JONATHAN GASH – Firefly Gadroon. Lovejoy #6. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1984. Penguin, US, paperback, 1985. Printed beforehand by Collins, UK, 1982.
Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy collection is one you’ll both adore or viscerally dislike.
Lovejoy is immersed on the earth he loves — that of antiques, official or faux. (His personal run closely to the latter.) For Lovejoy, antiques are every thing — effectively, practically every thing. His secondary ardour is girls. Readers who share Lovejoy’s first fascination can be rewarded with descriptions of, for instance, hammering a reverse silver gadroon (oval fluting) or figuring out Shibayama knife handles.
In public sale scenes, Gash takes his followers into the English village world of off-the-wall bids, “miffs,” “nerks,” “groats,” those that “pong” or “do a beano,” and the “cackhanded,” “narked,” or “sussed.”
Lovejoy is charming and never above bending the legislation or the reality within the pursuit of a real vintage. The romantic escapades and amours of this sprightly rogue are a delight. However for readers with no real interest in or prior data of antiques, the unexplained commerce slang and the unabating dialogue of outdated treasures will be overwhelming and tedious.
Firefly Gadroon is the sixth within the collection. Lovejoy’s hassle begins — because it typically does — when he spots a luscious girl with lovely legs at an public sale. The item of his admiration “frogs” (will get) a small Japanese field he’s had his eye on, and never solely will she not promote it to him, she doesn’t even seem to know its worth.
Why, then, does she insist on holding it? That query leads Lovejoy into encounters with killers, police, worldwide smugglers, and, after all, nonetheless extra lovely girls. Lovejoy is at his roguish greatest on this journey, and the background is as colourful as ever.
The primary Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair (1977), includes a hunt for a misplaced pair of sinister dueling pistols. In The Vatican Rip (1982), the supplier undertakes the tough process of stealing a Chippendale desk from the Vatican. And in Pearhanger (1985), Lovejoy tries his hand at finding a lacking individual — and finally ends up suspected of homicide.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and revealed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
