Melancholia is a minor facet of the patchwork of warring motives and hidden urges that make up the flawed tapestry of a middle-aged man’s pursuit of his own destiny against the backdrop of the rougher undercurrents of Los Angeles and Tijuana in Zeb Beck’s THE MELANCHOLY STRUMPET MASTER. Scrambling for a PhD in Anthropology, world-weary Gilmore Crowell is documenting the lives of street women/sex workers (the strumpets of the title) in Tijuana. He’s been researching them for eight years, and to make a living he teaches at a juvenile penitentiary in Los Angeles. Predictably, Gilmore can only afford to rent a room in a sleazy flophouse in a marginal L.A. area. Life is raucous, with brawls, bars and bedrooms on both sides of the border. A clunker of a car that is of interest to the police complicates matters. Mostly cynical, not melancholy, Gilmore is far from being a strumpet master. The women manipulate him psychologically. The doctoral professor is becoming increasingly irritated at the non-appearance of the thesis, making the research increasingly pressured. At the penitentiary, events add to the pressure – particularly when an instructor finds the sex worker research on a computer. A fierce defender of the women’s self-respect, he erupts at any mention of “prostitutes” or “whores”. Along with these insults is the implication that Gilmore is sampling the goods. He vehemently denies the accusations – but temptation is always around the corner, sometimes literally.
Author Beck’s outstanding opening line draws the reader right in. Characters are fleshed out and understandable. But not Gilmore Crowell and this is where the weakness lies. His actions and activities are engrossing, but the question of “why” is not answered. Readers don’t know what caused him to land in this situation, why he is so cynical and, more importantly, don’t get a peek inside his soul. At times the fog lifts for a brief sentence or two, but then closes in again with another escapade across the border or at the penitentiary. The result is that it’s difficult to develop empathy or become really interested in the main character. But on all other counts Beck succeeds. The despair of a “juvie” penitentiary is vivid, along with the grittiness of Los Angeles and the pretentious, meaningless world of lower level academia. “I’m a morphological linguist. My work penetrates the object of phallocentric domination within the overarching bisexual intercourse…” says one doctoral candidate. Tijuana is well portrayed, just as it has been for so long, sleaze mixed with rubbernecking, partying tourists. If there were fewer back-and-forth trips to Tijuana and more delving into the main character’s motives, The Melancholy Strumpet Master would be extremely good.
Zeb Beck’s THE MELANCHOLY STRUMPET MASTER is a rambunctious tale that gives a vivid portrayal of the two sides of Tijuana, the grittier side of Los Angeles, the pretentious nature of much of academia and the despair of juvenile detention centers.
~Martin Rushmere for IndieReader