The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse: A Chet Gecko Mystery
The hardboiled detective genre, which hit its stride in the 1920s and '30s, has been spoofed mercilessly ever since. (The Steve Martin film "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" (1982) and the Seinfeld episode featuring Lt. Bookman ("The Library," 1991) are two particularly inspired, and relatively recent, examples.) Somehow, hardboiled detective fiction is such a rich vein in our culture that it still isn't tapped out, after more than 70 years of mocking. Men may not have worn fedoras since the Kennedy administration, but in the detective-spoof genre, they never go out of style.
In "The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse," Bruce Hale's twist on potboiler conventions is to make his wisecracking detective, Chet Gecko, not only a fourth-grader, but also a lizard. His client, Shirley (a name almost certainly chosen so Chet can quip, "Shirley, you jest") is a chameleon, while his sidekick, Natalie Attired, is a mockingbird. Chet's "office" is behind the aquarium in his homeroom, and his work on the case has to be squeezed in during recess, lunch hour, and a self-guided trip to the principal's office.
The language of "Chameleon" is as clipped and caustic as you would find in any dime detective novel, and therefore laugh-out-loud hilarious: "It was a hot day in September," Chet observes in chapter one. "The kind of day when kindergartners wake up cranky from their naps." His first-grade teacher, a horny toad, "has a face that only a mother could love. And horny toads' mothers abandon them at birth." The other kids waiting to see the principal "looked like football-team material–wide as refrigerators, but without the little lights inside."
Hale relies mainly on sentence fragments and sarcasm to make the spoof function; he doesn't overdo it with obscure slang from his readers' grandparents' era (or maybe even great-grandparents'). While this case, like all of the best ones, "started with a dame," Chet tells us, he quickly explains parenthetically, "That's what we private eyes call a girl."
The case itself, which concerns Shirley's mysteriously missing younger brother, is only semi-compelling. The joy of the book is the endless stream of jokes and snide observations and the delightful conceit that a fourth-grader would be able to sneak around gathering clues during a normal school day.
Just one aspect of this book irritated me: a couple of anti-girl remarks and Chet's dismissive attitude toward his wannabe partner, Natalie, who saves his bacon on several occasions. I understand that Hale is working within the conventions of a notoriously misogynistic genre...but nonetheless, I'm tired of the Smart-but-Unappreciated-Girl character that runs through children's literature.
