Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed by Marc Blatte

Title: Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed	Loved it	Graded
Author: Marc Blatte
Genre: Crime
Publisher: Schaffner Press
Elements: Noir
Series: Stand alone

Outside one of the town’s hottest nightclubs, at 4 a.m., a young man is found murdered—no robbery, no clues—only yellow socks and bling to tell the victim’s tale.

Take to the streets with Detective Salvatore, aka “Black Sallie Blue Eyes,” Messina as he and his crew track down the killer, and meet up with a host of characters from all walks of New York society: rapstar wannabes; Wittgenstein-quoting record moguls; a kinky female wrestler; downtown hipster tweakers; a billionaire real estate tycoon; and one Eastern European refugee dead-set on revenge old-world style.

In what has been acclaimed as the first truly wonderful hip-hop noir, Marc Blatte has created a portrait of not only the city but society itself in this hilarious and rollicking first novel that is certain to draw comparisons to Tom Wolfe and Carl Hiaasen with its incisively satirical depiction of race, wealth, crime, amorality and justice.

Everybody knows the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. It's about an egg that falls off a wall and nobody can put him back together again. But what does it mean? Where did it come from? What are the events that led up to this?

And more importantly, who did it?

The synopsis pretty much sums up the whole book. It starts off when a street thug, Scholar, wanting to make money the easy way, plops down 10 grand on his accomplished record executive of a reluctant cousin (aptly named Biz for all the bizness he had) to make a record. The next day, a body is found and right then and there the mystery starts, leaving readers to wonder if either Scholar or Biz had anything to do with it.

Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed was like a breath of fresh air. Suspenseful, the writing was different and while there was a lot of street lingo, it was not hard to acclimatise myself at all. With its tight action and humourous plot, I couldn't put the book down. There was a lot of laugh out loud moments, such as this:

"Vooko, Vooko," Pashko is speaking to him from the grave. "In this country," he says, "they say that the best defense is an offense, by which they mean, kill your enemy before he kills you. Really, it is similar to our traditional way of thinking."

My favourite character was definitely Black Sallie Blue Eyes. Named for his blue eyes and decidedly black soul, he had one of the most captivating presence in the book, making his way through several corpses to find out whodunit.