Fun and Games
Duane Swierczynski
Mulholland Books, 2011
U.S. trade paperback, first edition
ISBN 978-0-316-13328-9
304 pages; $14.99

I recently discovered Duane Swierczynski’s writing with Expiration Date, reviewed here. Swierczynski is of the school of writers who want to glue their books to your hands until you finish them and finally set them aside with a sigh of pleasure – and immediately reach for the next book in the series. The writing is smooth and fast and fun.

In Fun and Games, Swierczynski starts a trilogy of novels starring Charlie Hardie. Charlie is an ex-policeman of sorts (what sort is not yet clear) who now housesits for the wealthy for his living. Housesitting, to him, means making sure the house is secure and then sprawling on a couch in front of a television set, watching old movies and drinking himself into unconsciousness. Hardie drinks to forget how he managed to get his best friend and his entire family killed – enough to drive just about anyone to the bottle.

Hardie lands a housesitting gig in the Hollywood Hills. The house belongs to a composer who is writing a score for a film in Russia, apparently having been called in at the last minute and therefore in such a rush that he has to leave the keys in the mailbox, rather than mailing a set to Hardie. When Hardie arrives, the keys aren’t there, and he has to climb over the roof and get in through the patio door. It’s pretty clear by now that Hardie isn’t your typical housesitter, who would have called a locksmith or the agency that doles out his jobs rather than climbing a roof.

But Hardie quickly has reason to display his uniqueness in great detail, for the house contains an intruder. She’s a little thing, this intruder, but she has starred in a lot of action films, and she knows how to defend herself from any and all threats, and Hardie sure as hell seems like a threat to her. Once she’s satisfied herself that Hardie is not, in fact, what she’s afraid of (after doing him some serious damage), she explains about Them. They’re The Accident People, the folks who make sure that the powerful (however you might wish to define that term) are never held responsible for anything they do wrong. A movie star is involved in a hit and run, killing a child? Easy to cover up. That same movie star starts to have an attack of conscience and wants to come clean? Then that movie star has to die to protect everyone involved in the cover-up. And it’s plenty easy to do, too.

Soon Hardie has joined forces with the woman he finds in the house, fighting for his life as well as hers. The bad guys are some of the most interesting villains I’ve come across. And Swierczynski writes this improbable tale of conspiracy featuring a hero that should have died ten times over with such panache that the reader never starts questioning the tale until long after finishing the book. Hardie is the best hero since Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, and has the added benefit of seeming a lot more human despite his unearthly resilience in the face of constant attack and injury. He’s the kind of guy I want to meet – and have watching my back if I’m ever in trouble.