October 11, 1998
By Mark Lindquist
LOVE IS A RACKET
by John Ridley
John Ridley's crime-noir first novel,
''Stray Dogs,'' was made into the Oliver Stone movie
''U-Turn.'' This may explain why Ridley's second novel,
LOVE IS A RACKET (Knopf, $24), blends elements of the
noir novel with the Hollywood novel. True to the first
genre, the book's hero, a hard-drinking con man named
Jeffty Kittridge, owes money to Dumas, a bad guy with a
deceptively soft voice who just might kill him. True to
the second, Jeffty is also a hard-drinking, burned-out
screenwriter already being slowly killed by ''the gulag
L.A.'' Enter Mona, a street urchin with a striking
resemblance to the actress Pier Angeli -- who, Jeffty
reminds us, killed herself with an overdose of pills. The
first thing Mona says to Jeffty is ''Change?'' She's
begging for money, but the double meaning is soon clear.
Jeffty recruits her for a scam that could turn his life
around. The plotting is routine, but the writing is smart
and edgy and even moving; if Richard Ford wrote genre
fiction, it might read something like this. The only weaknesses result from
unfortunate conformities to the noir formula and a
digressive first act. Once Mona appears, however, Ridley
has us hooked on his game.
