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4.0 out of 5 stars
Every Little Crook And Nanny, April 28 2004
There is a firm tradition of using twins in comedy, to create misunderstanding that leads to farce. The ancient playwright, Plautus, knew the value of inserting identical twins into a plot, so that other characters would spend the whole time confusing them, accusing the wrong one of bad behaviour, etc. Shakespeare took this to the next level in The Comedy Of Errors, where we have not one--but two!--sets of twins, with wild misunderstandings ensuing, all because the audience knows about the twins, and yet the characters don't. The legendary show, The Flinstones, covered both bases: there were a few episodes where Fred had a doppleganger...and if that wasn't enough, then fine, finally Gazoo made duplicates of both Fred AND Barney.Every Little Crook And Nanny, by Evan Hunter, follows this tradition. It is a comedy of errors featuring two sets of twins. The first set of twins are "The Corsican Brothers", though admittedly, these two street-hustlers share the spotlight with an assortment of odd ducks in this humourous crime escapade. I should make it clear that the prime set of twins here--the twins that cause all the problems--are two piles of cash, fifty thousand dollars each, that both have something to do with mob boss Carmine Ganucci, whose money seems awfully mobile while he's away vacationing in Italy. The first fifty thousand dollars is being raised by a nanny and a small-time hood to pay for the return of Ganucci's son, Lewis, all without Ganucci (Ganooch) being told. The reasoning seems to be that what the crime kingpin doesn't know about the careless loss of his own son won't get anyone else hurt. The problem is, Ganucci mixes business with pleasure, over in sunny Italy, and wires home for fifty thousand dollars to pay for a shady business deal involving the transport of some silver-plated gold medallions. It doesn't take long for the two batches of $50,000 to get..."mixed up", steered off course, mistaken for the other, etc. It seems that this is what happens when snitches, lawyers, petty criminals, and crooked cops, all hear something about a certain fifty thousand dollar deal, and don't verify the specifics of which fifty thousand dollar deal, in particular. Chaos ensues; two money trails lead off in a zig-zag pattern to strange but delightful territory. This book is quite funny. If we stop worrying whether little future crime-king Lewis will get safely home, or whether Ganucci will fly home early and annihilate a nanny and a crook for their blunders in paying a ransom he didn't oversee--well, what we lose in suspense we gain in laughs. The photo gallery provided in the paperback edition is very amusing too, especially the picture of The Jackass. A silver-plated, golden bit of humourous crime reading.
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