Donald J Hauka – Mister Jinnah: Securities

Finished: October 17

2011 Book Count: 55

Confession: I LOVE books set where I live – which is beautiful Vancouver British Columbia. So imagine my joy when perusing the varied offerings of the annual Word on the Street festival at the library, I discovered a table that featured exclusively crime writers from Vancouver, and I happily walked away with several of their offerings weighing down my shoulder bag.

My favourite so far has been this one, Donald J Hauka’s Mister Jinnah: Securities. It’s about a fantastically mad East Asian African crime reporter named Hakeem Jinnah, who drives around in a van he has dubbed the “Satellite Guided Love Machine”. He is a ridiculous chain smoker and congenital coward who has a lot of complete nonsense to say about prostitutes and his various sexual harassment techniques, which you don’t realize is nonsense until you meet his wife, Manjit, who is probably the most beautiful and patient person on the planet. She is probably the most impossible and yet completely plausible character I have read for a long time – because she is such a steady and solid rock she seems to unconsciously give Jinnah permission to go out and do hideously stupid things and basically make himself the most outrageous person in any room. If he actually was a scummy bachelor or an terrible cheat he would have been just a boring stereotype, rather than a very interesting character whom I thoroughly enjoyed.

I really liked this book because it was really funny without being humorous, if that makes any sense at all. The situations were not ridiculous, but the characters dealt with them all with a very special kind of panache that I really appreciated. Very rarely did I get the feeling that Mr. Hauka was playing me for laffs, but rather that his characters actually had senses of humour.  I think it takes considerable talent to pull off lines like “come lie on my African love-rug” sound completely natural, and not just manufactured cliched harasser trash.

I suppose you want to know about the plot. Jinnah, mostly driven to show up a pretensious co-worker, gets involved, or rather proclaims a ‘Jinnahad’, on the investigation into the death of a notorious stock swindler. Did he commit suicide? Was he murdered? What the heck is going on with prices of oil in Indonesia? How many Russian peasant women can be convinced to marry lonely Chinese men? What happens to a Moslem when he is trapped in a graveyard surrounded by Christian corpses and helicopters? All these questions and more are answered, and done so with a swaggering style.

I really really liked this book, and I can’t wait to read the next one. Mr. Hauka, or may I call you Donald? I salute you.