The Spellman Files

Lisa Lutz's The Spellman Files is so. much. fun. I can’t remember the last time I was tooling around town, desperate for a few more errands to run so I could spend a little more time with this kooky crew. Izzy’s narrative voice is so wry, hilarious and sarcastic; my sense of humor to a T. As our narrator, the eldest Spellman daughter is so funny and realistic, and I loved the dynamic she shares with her parents and younger sister. In fact, Rae and Uncle Ray — her namesake — were two of my favorite characters in the book.

Though that would require me to choose a favorite. And I can’t do that.

I don’t read much mystery. For a true lover of the genre, The Spellman Files might not captivate the way it captivated me — but what I show more loved about the story was Lutz’s ability to plunk me in the middle of these dramas and give me full access to the chaos. Izzy speaks to us like we’re in on the joke, providing enough back-story on her eclectic family to keep us intrigued without overwhelming the reader. Young Rae was the perfect example of a character with personality bursting right out of her ears — and I loved it.

The book’s pace is brisk, marching us from putting out one fire to another. We’re told from the get-go that young Rae — who has recently become addicted to “recreational surveillance,” tailing strangers in alleyways — disappears. We also know that Uncle Ray, a cancer survivor, has a penchant for booze and ladies . . . and that the Spellmans are often required to retrieve him from his “lost weekends.” The pieces of a larger puzzle come together fairly easily, but I never felt like The Spellman Files was predictable. The shock of the cold case Izzy is working on wasn’t something I’d concluded on my own, though I can be a bit dense about these things.

What sent this book into awesome territory is absolutely the characters — and dialogue. Izzy’s interactions with Daniel had me giggling, and I loved a pivotal dinner table scene where Daniel meets the whole clan. Though the plot might not scream funny to you, I found this book downright hilarious. And when I learned it’s the first in a series, I actually clapped.

If reading has become a bit staid and boring for you, allow me to prescribe Lisa Lutz’s series. Described as “part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry,” The Spellman Files is the perfect cure for the humdrum winter reading months. I loved its San Francisco setting, too, and could imagine Izzy and Rae following strangers along the city’s curving streets. It was wickedly entertaining — and you can bet I’ll be grabbing the next one very soon. show less

When I started "The Spellman Files", I expected it to be a light-hearted, anarchic, PI story, with attitude. What I got was different and probably better.

"The Spellman Files" is full of witty lines and comic situations that spin out of control but at heart, it's really quite serious and more than a little sad. The laughter it produces is a defence mechanism for dealing with watching a family,that has no concept of normal, inflict damage on each other without any malice being involved.

The story is told from the point of Elisabeth Spellman, twenty-eight years old, still living at home, still single (possibly because she sees all of her lovers as future ex-boyfriends and refers to them by number for example ex-boyfriend #3 ) and still show more working for her parents in the family Private Investigation agency that she's been active in since her childhood.

She is the middle of three children. Her older brother is perfect and has escaped the family business and become a lawyer. Her (fourteen years) younger sister dreams of inheriting the business, does surveillance as a hobby, wants everyone to be happy and believes everything can be negotiated.

Much of the humour and all of the sadness in this book comes from the fact that the Spellmans' version of normal life is one in which family members spy on each other, engage in high-speed car chases and routinely interrogate, threaten and punish one another. There are no boundaries between work and family life. Privacy is something that you get only by taking active counter-surveillance measures. Trust is non-existant, yet love, quite deeply felt love, is all pervasive. Iz reminded me of the opening to a Philip Larkin poem: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad"

The story is told in an elaborately non-linear way that means that you discover the Spellman family an anecdote at a time, as you might be visiting them. The anecdotes have the grandiloquent titles that we give to stories that are part of family lore: "The War Of The Shirt" or "Fake Dental Appointment #2" or the one that opens the novel, "Car Chase #3". It takes skill to pull this off and Lisa Lutz does it flawlessly.

Ari Graynor does a wonderful job in narrating all this structured chaos and bringing the characters to life with distinct and easily recognisable voices. I suspect this is a book that is better in the audio version than as text because Ari makes sure no nuances are missed.

Even though I found the book more funny than sad, I couldn't put it down. It was weirdly compelling, perhaps because, beneath all the chaos and the mutual abuse, the Spellmans love each other as much as they are able, so their paranoia is always leavened with affection.

In the interview below, Lisa Lutz talks about "The Spellman Files" and shares some of here own experiences from working for a family PI business.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9R9X8e9gPs&w=560&h=315]

Click on the SoundCloud link below for a sample of Ari Graynor reading "The Spellman Files".

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/98433737" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /] show less

This book won’t work for some, but head into it in the right frame of mind and it’s a fun ride, a modern screwball comedy crossed with spy caper, [b:Harriet the Spy|232576|Harriet the Spy (Harriet the Spy #1)|Louise Fitzhugh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518446869i/232576._SX50_.jpg|1429939] meets [b:Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead|9231999|Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (Claire DeWitt Mysteries, #1)|Sara Gran|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312909281i/9231999._SY75_.jpg|14112168].

Isabel is a private investigator in the family business, Spellman Investigations. It’s been a hard road getting there after a decade of childish rebellion. show more “Since David [her brother] had cornered the market on perfection, I had to settle for mining the depths of my own imperfection.” Spellman co-workers include younger sister, Rae (“Rae would eventually throw everything off balance, but I’ll get to that later.”) Then there’s her parents: her mother, Olivia who met her father when she was spying on a potential brother-in-law, and her father and former police detective, Albert. Albert has a special sense of humor: “His sense of humor is purely cheap vaudeville, yet everyone falls for it. Some of his routines–like sneezing Eastern European names–he never grows tired of. Only his children have suggested he work up some new material.”

A recent addition to the team is former officer and born-again gambler, Uncle Ray, perhaps the only straight-shooter in the family. “I asked him what he’d been up to for the past two weeks and he replied, ‘Let’s see. I went on a five-day bender, sobered up during a forty-eight-hour poker game. Had a few dates in Reno. Another poker game. Three days, for the life of me, I can’t remember.” Her brother David, refused to join the family business–he’s rebelled by becoming a lawyer. “The truth was, the job didn’t interest David. He thought people had a right to privacy. The rest of us did not.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is its deconstructed structure. A number of journal entries, flashbacks, interrogations and scene shots build both current story and background but require reader synthesis. Isabel is a little obsessed with keeping track (or proving her case) and a number of her exploits are list-oriented, reminding me of Cursed. For instance, there’s profiles summarizing relationships through “Ex-Boyfriend #8” (#6 and #9 “simply cannot reduce to the data that will fit on a three-by-five index card“) and Uncle’s series of benders, known as “Lost Weekend #.” There’s also the three main incidents that changed her path from her life of irresponsible hedonism to one of maturity. While it is the type of structure that can smack of authorial gimmick, here it worked. Perhaps the disjointed set-up allows for certain parallels to be made between the narrator and the reader, so that they are at similar perspective when the main event appears. However, Lutz is smart enough to not stay with the device too long; once past the introduction and historical context, narrative smooths out and becomes more linear.

Writing is clever with lines that make me laugh out loud. Much like the screwball comedy, the humor isn’t based on one-liners, but a clever set-up that suddenly resolves into an absurd scenario. There’s a scene on a stake-out with young Rae that particularly amused me. The romance plot is a series of harebrained schemes that escalate from one little lie.

Plotting is interesting; truly, the story is more about a dysfunctional family who specializes in investigative work than any specific mystery. There’s a sub-plot of Ex-Boyfriend #9, which really does start to resemble screwball comedy, and a war between the Ra(y/e)s that is remarkably calculating. Those who want a crime-solving story are apt to be disappointed. I hesitate to compare it to Janet Evanovich‘s Stephanie Plum series; this is in many ways darker, less functional, less “I Love Lucy.” There’s proliferate mention of drug use in the past, and some questionable family dynamics. The reader gets the feel there is a mystery in the beginning, but it’s only hinted at in an early interview with a police detective. Half-way through, Isabel is given her own cold case to work, but the conclusion and resolution were no real surprise to me as a reader. It serves more as a foil for the narrator’s own family. I didn’t mind the lack of suspense involved with it, as by then I understood the real story is the family and Isabel.

I enjoyed it–like frozen yogurt with sprinkles, it went down smooth and clean with no ice-cream headache or aftertaste. Note that it likely has high re-read potential, especially given it is more about character and relationships than mystery. Next one already ordered from the library.

5/24: Re-read. Still holds up; added it to my e-library when it was available for a deal. Also probably worth noting it passed the mom test. show less

The family business is snooping. The firm of Spellman Investigations, mom, pop, daughters, and alcoholic uncle are unconcerned about some abstract idea like a right to privacy, not for the people their clients want them to watch and not for other members of the family. This is what puts the fun in dysfunctional for these clan capers as twenty-eight-year-old Izzy tries to keep her love life of serial ex-boyfriends separate from her relatives, and keep her younger sister Rae from her Harriet the Spy hobby of recreational surveillance. A hobby that is surely the reason for her sudden disappearance.

A piece of light reading, just what was ordered after this month's-worth of work. The first in a series, this so-called mystery is full of wise-cracks and demented family members who somehow seem perfectly normal when taken as a group. I say 'so-called' because the family is definitely more important to the story than the mystery, which I unravelled almost immediately. But then, it wasn't at all the point. Not quite laugh-out-loud funny, but blithely wacky. I'll probably look for the next one.

Funny, creative, and clever, The Spellman Files introduces Isabel Spellman, known to her family as Izzy. I'm thankful to have discovered this first-in-the-series (currently there are 5 more books) which features a quirky private investigator and her dysfunctional family of detectives. As the book jacket reads: "To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman." While Isabel is a sharp and quick-witted PI, she is unsuccessful in the world of dating. There are running gags about her ex-boyfriends, her lack of fashion sense, her relationship with her brother, and parking in San Francisco. With the goal to move out and escape the Spellmans, Izzy is determined to solve an show more unsolvable mystery - which becomes her obsession. Will Izzy move out? Will she solve the mystery? Who will be ex-boyfriend #10? What makes this book a must-read is the character of Izzy as well as the writing style - both are unique and hilarious. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series. show less

Twenty-eight-year-old Isabel Spellman is good at her job as a private investigator, but Izzy decides that sixteen years devoted to working for her family’s firm is definitely long enough and she states her intention to leave. But there’s one last case to solve, a missing person cold case. And then Izzy’s teen-age sister, Rae, disappears.

This humorous, light-hearted tale, with its strong character development, offers readers plenty of zany escapades and laugh-out-loud moments. There’s a mystery along the way, but the highlight of this fast-paced narrative are the Spellmans themselves. With Izzy relating the hilarious doings, readers who appreciate witty stories will have no problem falling in love with the delightfully ditzy show more Spellman clan.

First in a series, the Spellman Mystery Series continues in five more volumes of entertaining family hijinks. Let the laughing begin.

Highly recommended. show less