"An eight-foot-tall polar bear charged me, its claws outstretched, its mouth twisted into a savage snarl. I stepped back, one arm flung up to ward off the bear, the other hand flying into my jacket, drawing the revolver from my belly holster. I backpedaled toward the kitchen, legs tangling. I fell on my ass, but the pistol was out. I squeezed the trigger three times, dotting the polar bear's chest with a neat triangle of.38 caliber holes. But the bear didn't drop."
The first-person narration of this crime thriller conforms to all the expectations of hardboiled detective fiction. There is one major exception, however, to the traditions of this type of narrative device. As the name implies, most hardboiled detectives in fiction are not known for their wit or sense of humor. Charlie Swift is definitely an exception, and this passage proves the point. The description of this encounter with a bear is appropriately danger-filled if perhaps more than a little unexpected. Any fear that Charlie has finally met his match, however, vanishes with comic undermining of the climax. The polar bear turns out to be the work of an excellent taxidermist and not an actual living threat at all.
"I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer's headless body in the trunk, and all the time I'm thinking I should've put some plastic down. I knew the heap was a rental, but I didn't like leaving anything behind for the inevitable forensics safari. That meant I'd have to strip all the carpeting in the trunk, douche out the blood with Clorox, and hope Avis took a long time to notice. I should've just taken a second and put some plastic down."
The opening paragraph of the novel immediately identifies the geographical setting of the story as Florida. This novel joins an ever-growing list of crime thrillers set in the Sunshine State. Like many of the others, this novel adopts the hard-boiled language of the first-person narration but tells a Tarantino-like story that mixes rough violence with black comedy. The very first line situates the protagonist as being of perhaps questionable morality since he is driving around with a decapitated body in the truck of his car. His concern is not with the body itself or the circumstances leading to it being there. His concern is with the mess he now has to clean up. Crime stories set in Florida have a long history of mixing atrocious violence with what some might describe as sick humor.
"Me and Bob and the others were Stan's enforcers. The guys with the guns, the knives, the brass knuckles. The guys with the deep voices and the long shadows. The guys with the heavy footfalls on the stairs late at night. I'd read that in a dime novel once."
This quote obliquely alludes to the title of the novel. The "gun monkeys" of that title are the low-level operatives in an organized criminal hierarchy. They are the "muscle" though in this case the muscular powers of enforcement reside not in the biceps, but in the cold hard steel of pistols and blades. At the end of this passage, Swift references the cheaper paperback type of novel which once described novels such as Gun Monkeys itself. For most of the twentieth century, the hardboiled crime thriller was not even considered deserving of enough critical interest to be reviewed except in the rarest of cases when the author had managed to attain a level of respectability well into their career. In this case, the "dime novel" reference is more of a postmodern commentary that acknowledges the elevation of books centering on characters like the gun monkeys rather than those more powerful figures sitting at the top of the crime syndicate pyramid of power.
