Review: Short Story Light on the Dubonnet Charm
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2014
Since Tony Dunbar's lawyer/detective Tubby Dubonnet loves New Orleans cuisine, I'll describe the Dunbar-Dubonnet style in recipe terms: heavy on the New Orleans flavor, heavy on the quirky characters, light on the plot. The recipe works well in the novels, when Dunbar has room to expound and expand on his descriptions, but in the tighter confines of a short story, the results are more like a mildly flavorful fast food."Envision This" is a short introduction to Dunbar and Dubonnet that's not really a mystery at all. Tubby is hired by an eccentric inventor, Jason Boaz, who has devised a next generation version of Google Glass--a set of contact lenses that allow the user to instantly access the Internet and, in a literal blink of an eye, find any information available. Boaz is planning to meet with some potential investors, who might be a little shady, and hires Tubby to safeguard his interests. Of course, as far as Tubby is concerned, that means more than examining some legal documents, so he brings in a private investigator named Raisin to serve as a bodyguard.Based on the description so far, you might guess this story is going to turn into a comic caper, and you'd be right. However, 23 pages (the length of the story) isn't much time to lay out a complicated heist and investigation, so author Dunbar makes things very simple. The investors aren't on the up-and-up, of course, and they do go after the invention, but the manner in which this occurs requires the good guys to behave in a manner that's not merely conventionally stupid, but mind bogglingly so.It was at this point, the moment of the theft, that the story lost me. Up until then, the bits and pieces of Dubonnet charm that Dunbar laid out were enough to keep me going, but, while Jason and Raisin were potentially fascinating characters, the story just didn't allow much time for character exploration, just a couple of lines here and there. The bad guys fare even worse; the most memorable and entertaining thing about them are names like Foxx Beaner and Bastrop Pillsbury.For two-thirds of its length, "Envision This" gets by on the rather whimsical charm of Dunbar's anecdote recounting style (I won't say story telling, because this tale is far from plot driven). Then, reality sets in. The bad guys don't so much as use guile or muscle to get their way but have it handed to them in a completely incredible fashion. Now, I understand that, in comic fiction, we can give authors more leeway than usual in laying out a story that passes the credibility test, but the Dubonnet series, light hearted as it may be, is still grounded to a certain extent in reality.Perhaps, in a longer story, Dunbar could have fleshed out Jason a bit more so that he doesn't come across as the world's dumbest genius. In this story, however, Dunbar just doesn't have the time to give Jason or Raisin enough character quirks to really interest readers in either of them. As a result, at what should be the story's climax, both Jason and the tale lose their charm very abruptly, like a burst balloon.My review shouldn't be taken as a condemnation of Dunbar or the Dubonnet series (I view a three-star review as a mild recommendation). Dunbar has made the story available on Amazon as a free sample, to invite readers to savor more of Dubonnet's charms. As such, there's enough here to make you want to go back for a full serving of Dubonnet. But viewed as a standalone story, "Envision This" is somewhat tasty but not all that fulfilling.