Louise Lang
Nudists Die Too

First published in paperback by PublishAmerica, 2005, ISBN 1-4137-2427-2.

According to the blurb, "Louise Lang was inspired to write about the nudist lifestyle after living for a year with her husband Tom at nudist resorts. Since murders are her favourite form of fiction, Nudists Die Too is about a murder. Writing is a hobby along with reading, gardening, walking and cooking Italian." Since I enjoy pedantry, I have to point out that this book is about several things, not just "a murder". The blurb's definition of the book as "a murder mystery set mostly inside a nudist resort" is also untrue. The murder isn't very mysterious, and most of the book is set outside Olive Canyon Nudist Resort.

That previous paragraph is not an inspired way to begin a review, but so far I can't come up with anything better. And I don't feel inclined to devote much effort to this little book. I am sure Lang got a lot of satisfaction from writing the story, and I do not doubt the enthusiasm of her relatives and friends which she thanks in her acknowledgement. Unfortunately, I didn't get any real satisfaction from reading it, and I have no enthusiasm for it having read it.

My dissatisfaction is not with the writing itself. Lang has a good command of English, and has mastered the often-underestimated skill of writing dialogue which sounds like dialogue (most of the time), and has more than one voice in it. She has also set up a reasonable cast of characters - some appealing, some not, as in real life. She can even write neatly turned episodes and encounters. The problem, for me, is that the plot is weak, and depends on any number of distortions of matters such as police procedure (I really cannot believe that US police would hand over elements of a murder investigation to a complete amateur, let alone one who was related to the victim). Not only that, but scenes and whole chapters are thrown in which do nothing to advance the plot, do little or nothing to develop the characters and frustrated this reader intensely. If Lang wants to write a brief "slice of life" illustrating a day's sailing, or the problems of dealing with one's annual tax return, fine (she could offer them to a newspaper, along the lines of John Elder's column which included The Naked Hunchback. But please don't shoe-horn it into a story where it has no point. Except that, without these irrelevancies, there would be a lot less than 134 pages of large type.

I had other reservations. I found it very difficult to believe that a middle-aged woman could be entirely unaware that virtually every one of her close friends and relatives was into swinging - including with one another. There's an unsuccessful murder attempt that involves both technology and reactions to / assumptions about a noise that, again, I found wildly unlikely. Since Lang didn't convince me in these areas, I was always going to be less ready to suspend disbelief elsewhere, disrupting the narrative flow (when the author wasn't doing that by going off for a day's sailing or similar).

It's not all bad news. Not only does the writing flow, the noodist colony (sorry, "resort") is clearly based firmly in real life - see if you agree after reading the extracts. Olive Canyon seems to be the pen-name of Glen Eden, where Lang spent 1973 with her second husband. The nuddies are human, with a cheerfully and reassuringly normal range of bodytypes, frailties, problems and deficiencies - Lang is clearly no lover of the body-beautiful aesthic police who, in so many of the tales reviewed in these pages, populate their stories with exclusively vigorous, healthy, youthful and ideally-proportioned bodies. With all this going for her, I think Lang would have been better advised to attempt something less extravagant than a thriller. Perhaps a coming-of-age tale, or friction within a family or couple over nudity or time spent at the nudist club? Perhaps a club member might be fearful of their nudism being outed, perhaps the club photographer is falsely accused of kiddie porn by a tabloid? In my view, Lang could do worse than read A W Palmer's The Reluctant Nudist. Although a murder investigation is the primary plotline of that book, Palmer uses this as a way of introducing his characters and trying out various interactions amongst them, and examining their attitudes to social nudity. Solving the murder is never left entirely out of the picture, but for most of the book it takes second place. Sometimes Lang seems to be attempting the same thing, but when she does, the murder simply vanishes from the context and consciousness of the characters. Maybe she'll have another go, although the brief biography indicates the next book could easily be entitled Gardeners Cook Too.

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2006 August 3.
 
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