Part of Series
Never have Tony Dunbar's diabolically complex plotting, on-the-nose characters, and hawk-like ability to seize upon and capture everything New Orleans been on better display than in his jaw-dropping new thriller. FLAG BOY, the tenth entry in his popular Tubby Dubonnet series, is Dunbar's most wickedly clever mystery since his Edgar-nominated CROOKED MAN, as dark and stormy a tale as ever slithered its noirish way out of New Orleans.The set-up alone's enough to make you believe in the butterfly effect. Two acrobats burglarize a house; a sultan moves into a French Quarter mansion; a Mardi Gras Indian, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is wrongfully arrested; and our hero, lawyer and sometime-detective Tubby Dubonnet, comes upon a double murder while paying a social call in the wilds of Mississippi. Thus is the stage set. You know instantly—because this is a Tubby Dubonnet mystery—that these disparate events are intricately intertwined. Next, as Elmore Leonard famously never said, all hell breaks loose—and with more than a touch of Leonard's own brand of wry and knowing humor. You can barely turn the page before a bloody massacre leaves the sultan's entire family dead; the Indian—now Tubby's client—gets fingered for this one, too; one of the acrobatic burglars hooks up with Tubby's best friend; and some way, somehow, Dunbar weaves each of these wildly divergent strands—and a few others—into the kind of old-fashioned puzzle mystery they just don't write anymore. It's as if James M. Cain married Agatha Christie. Nobody but Cain could pack a plot the size of all Louisiana into a space the size of a French Quarter balcony, and nobody but Christie could pull off the kind of riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma she pioneered. Dunbar does both—and all in one slim, thrill-packed book. Although perhaps at this point his long-time fans are thinking Wait! How does he work the food in? There's always food! Well, that's there, too.
Author
Tony Dunbar started writing at quite a young age. When he was 12, growing up in Atlanta, he told people that he was going to be a writer, but it took him until the age of 19 to publish his first book, Our Land Too, based on his civil rights experiences in the Mississippi delta. For entertainment, Tony turned not to television but to reading mysteries such as dozens of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories. Among his favorites are: Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, and Tony Hillerman, and John D. MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane. He has lived in New Orleans for a long, long time, and in addition to writing mysteries and more serious fare he attended Tulane Law School and continues an active practice involving, he says, “money.” That practice took a hit in the Hurricane Katrina flooding, but the experience did produce a seventh Tubby Dubonnet mystery novel, Tubby Meets Katrina The Tubby series so far comprises seven books: The Crime Czar, City of Beads, Crooked Man, Shelter from the Storm, Trick Question, Lucky Man, and Tubby Meets Katrina. The main character, Tony says, is the City of New Orleans itself, the food, the music, the menace, the party, the inhabitants. But Tubby Dubonnet is the actual protagonist, and he is, like the author, a New Orleans attorney. Unlike the author, however, he finds himself involved in serious crime and murder, and he also ears exceptionally well. He is “40 something,” the divorced father of three daughters, a collector of odd friends and clients, and he is constantly besieged by ethical dilemmas. But he is not fat; he is a former jock and simply big. Tony’s writing spans quite a few categories and is as varied as his own experiences. He has written about people’s struggle for survival, growing out of his own work as a community organizer in Mississippi and Eastern Kentucky. He has written about young preachers and divinity students who were active in the Southern labor movement in the 1930s, arising from his own work with the Committee of Southern Churchmen and Amnesty International. He has written and edited political commentary, inspired by seeing politics in action with the Voter Education Project. And he has had the most fun with the mysteries, saying, “I think I can say everything I have to say about the world through the medium of Tubby Dubonnet.” Hurricane Katrina and the floods, which caused the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans for months, blew Tony into an off-resume job serving meals in the parking lot of a Mississippi chemical plant to hundreds of hardhats imported to get the complex dried out and operating. It also gave Tony time to write Tubby Meets Katrina, which was the first published novel set in the storm. It is a little grimmer than most of the books in the series, describing as it does the chaos in the sparsely populated city immediately after the storm. “It was a useful way for me to vent my anger,” Tony says. Still, even in a deserted metropolis stripped of electric power. Tubby manages to find a good meal. The Tubby Dubonnet series has been nominated for both the Anthony Award and the Edgar Allen Poe Award. While the last one was published in 2006, the author says he is now settling down to write again. But about what? “Birds and wild flowers,” he suggests. Or “maybe television evangelists.” Or, inevitably, about the wondrous and beautiful city of New Orleans.
