Charles Dennis. The Next to Last Train Ride (1977)

     Charles Dennis. The Next to Last Train Ride (1977) I bought this book to add to my collection of railroad-related fiction, but that’s all there is to recommend it, and it’s not enough. A mixed-up plot involving a coffin that supposedly contains the body of a Vietnam casualty, a woman with three breasts, a transfer of money between west and east coast crooks (in the aforesaid coffin), and of course a train, plus an assortment of other characters, all somehow related to the hapless hero, a failed and failing confidence trickster. All this might make for a saleable scenario or treatment suitable for the imagination of a movie studio executive, but it doesn’t translate into a readable book. Not unless the writer has the style and the timing to carry it off, and though Dennis tries hard, it doesn’t work. The strings on the characters are too visible, there’s a lot of the nudge-nudge wink-wink type of humour, and too many plot points are telegraphed, often two scenes ahead. To compensate for this, I guess, other events are complete surprises, contradicting expectations set up earlier. One wonders what will happen next on this silly odyssey, and if that was Dennis’s intention, he succeeds. But not enough to keep me slogging on to the end. If Dennis had focused on writing a novel instead of a movie-treatment, the book could have been very good. There’s more than a touch of the surreal, but one gets the feeling that Dennis is thinking more in terms of how the book will read to a director looking for movie material than in terms of how the story will unfold. * (2002)