Review: Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me: The Definitive Rerelease of the Cult Classic

Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me: The Definitive Rerelease of the Cult Classic by Will Viharo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not technically friends with Will, but I do “know” him in a way that makes it tough to have too much critical distance. I had a novel accepted by the press that was bringing him out, we corresponded a little about that, and I felt awfully good about myself to be on the same team. (The sad end to the story is that the press went out of business before it could bring my book out, sigh.) In any event, I’ve remained Facebook friends with him since, and I’ve enjoyed the nonfictional real-time descriptions of his “Thrillville” life.

What strikes me most about knowing Will is that he walks a fine line between an ironic and an authentic appreciation for Rat Pack/B-movie/’50s-pinup-girl culture. He’ll admit there’s something anachronistic and even cheesy about a tiki-lit bar, but then he’ll also make clear he enjoys the aesthetic in a genuine way. And part of his gift is that he opens that experience up to the rest of us, to those of us who’d have ‘squares’ to Sammy Davis, Jr., but who, by virtue of working to appreciate a tradition/cultural moment that most have moved past, are finally worthy of it.

I’ve read a couple of Will’s other books – which I enjoyed – but this is his greatest hit, the one that almost got made into a movie starring Christian Slater and that started Will’s longest-running detective series.

Vic Valentine narrates his detective experiences in the first-person, feeling half-sorry for himself and half-accepting the blame for his own decisions. You’ve read the situation a hundred times – the booze-addled detective who takes on a client looking for a dangerously beautiful woman – but the fun this time around is that Thrillville aesthetic. In other hands, I’d be bored when our narrator tells people that “Vic” is short for “victim.” Here it’s funny, funny the way a Dean Martin joke about being an alcoholic, unfunny from someone saying it today, still works if you’re in just the right mood and just the right place.

The eventual plot seems to me borrowed from, among other places, Devil in a Blue Dress. Vic gets hired to track down a woman who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend, so he’s interested in her as much for himself as for his client. There are a lot of coincidences, or near coincidences, but my inclination here (if not from another writer) is to accept it all. At one point, for instance, Vic opines that Frank Sinatra believed everyone was either a “bum” or a “punk,” and he puts it forward as a significant moral concept. There’s an absurdity to that claim, and we aren’t supposed to take it seriously, but we’re also supposed to see it as a kind of guide. If we are all indeed losers of a kind, there are different ways to be losers. We can either be the sort who get pushed around and feel sorry for themselves, or we can be the kind who acknowledge their culpability. We ‘re all still losers – except Sinatra himself, of course – but we have some power over our condition all the same.

In the end, though, the reason to read this is because it’s a good bit of fun. For all the attitude that Will flashes in his prose and in Vic’s ironic/sincere perspective on life, things move quickly. There’s a fundamental competence underlying everything.

I’m biased, but give it a shot. Will is a distinct voice, and he’s a legit underground, undiscovered artist.

Plus, like his favorite entertainers, he’s a swinging cat. And I mean that ironically. But also sincerely.


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