Leonard Wise (2)

My main motivation for reading The Diggstown Ringers by Leonard Wise was my love for the film adaptation Diggstown, so I will readily admit to going in with an undeniable bias.

One of the obvious follies of comparing a book to the film adaptation is that pacing can be more important to a ninety minute feature with limited time to tell a story, which usually results in the loss of important background stories and character development that have time to unfold in a two or three hundred page show more (or more) novel. Ironically, this is one case in which the additional story elements in the book are what leave me preferring the film adaptation.

The basic story of Diggstown follows professional con artist Paul Augustus Caine (Pac to his friends) who celebrates the end of yet another jail sentence related to a failed con by embarking on a massive con involving a boxing match in the boxing-obsessed southern location of Diggstown. Pac brings with him a colorful crew of con artist characters, who help him infiltrate the town leaders and attempt to rig a ten-to-one boxing match featuring his childhood friend, reformed con-artist and former professional boxer “Honey” Roy Palmer. With any kind of grifter plot, complications arise as events complicate things, key elements to the plan remain unrevealed until the third act to increase suspense, and of course, in the end we end up rooting for the criminals as the people they endeavor to hustle a half-million dollars from reveal themselves to be far more amoral and devious than the “honest” above-board flim-flam artists.

With the exception of some minor differences in characters and minor plot points, both film and novel play out roughly the same. Where the Wise novel lost me early on was the inclusion of multiple minor characters and subplots involving the local Diggstown teenagers and some of the eventual boxing contenders, and the major subplot of the romantic involvement between middle-aged con artist Pac and teenage country girl Emily Forrester. Way too many chapters take the time to lay out the romantic triangles and complicated relationships of more high school seniors than the Breakfast Club despite practically none of it having to do with their limited peripheral involvement in the main story, all of which it becomes obvious early on is solely for the purpose of rounding out Emily as a “main” character so we care about professional con artist Pac becoming romantically entangled with her.

My main problem with this romantic subplot isn’t that we have a middle-aged stranger rolling into town and immediately falling in love with a seventeen-year-old girl (have no fear, she turns eighteen right before he deflowers her), something that her very affectionate and level-headed father (of course, he’s a transplanted city-slicker liberal) seems perfectly okay with the arrangement, and I won’t even put too much emphasis on the fact that this same man in an early chapter nearly rapes an unconscious woman after he drugs her to avoid sleeping with her. Giving an anti-hero protagonist undesirable traits isn’t anything new, and I don’t think it negatively impacts the overall story. No, the great sin that Wise’s Diggstown Ringers perpetrates on its readers is that the May-December romance storyline, ultimately, doesn’t really belong, or at the very least, doesn’t deserve the amount of attention it receives. If this was a tale of redemption, the young virginal Emily might play a bigger part, but with the exception of Pac’s aversion to relationships – a personality trait forcibly shoehorned into the first few chapters to make his infatuation with Emily more remarkable – there’s no overreaching character arc for Pac that is directly involved in the Diggstown caper. It would be like Humbert Humbert suddenly becoming embroiled in a boxing scam halfway through Lolita. Intriguing, but unnecessary.

My only other complaint could also be blamed on my bias towards the film adaptation; boxing match sequences can be riveting in a motion picture, but blow by blow description of a boxing match taking up entire chapters, in my opinion, lose some of the kinetic energy one would associate with a thrilling action sequence. Again, this could just be me, but it ended up making the climax drag on far longer than I would expect of a climax.

With all of my criticisms, The Diggstown Ringers is not a bad novel, and I did enjoy it overall. But if I was to recommend one or the other to someone, I would have to lean towards the film versions of Pac, “Honey” Roy Palmer, and their Diggstown ringers. show less