Take Care of Mr. Wheeler. See That Some Harm Comes to Him

By Dan Hagen

The novelist Patrick Hasburgh has, I think, something in common with Ian Fleming.

Rattled at the prospect of a first marriage at the late age of 43, Fleming took his mind off his troubles by shaping his experiences as a World War II British intelligence officer and a determined womanizer — combined with his fussy-bachelor gentleman idiosyncratic taste in prewar Bentleys, Sea Island cotton shirts, Tiptree Little Scarlet strawberry jam and Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade — into the credible consumer-culture specificity he needed to ground the fantasy adventures of the protagonist in his first novel, James Bond.

Author Patrick Hasburgh with his brainchild

And in his first novel, 2004’s “Aspen Pulp,” Hasburgh forms us an unlikely detective hero from his own fairly glamorous background.

Working with the famed television writer and producer Stephen J. Cannell, Hasburgh wrote “The Greatest American Hero,” “The A-Team,” “LA Firefighters” and “SeaQuest 2032” and co-created “Hardcastle and McCormick” and “21 Jump Street,” the hit police series that brought Johnny Depp to national attention.

Handsome, young and successful in every sense sought by American society, Hasburgh reportedly did his share of sampling Hollywood’s various sybaritic delights. Then he got disgusted and decamped to Mexico to raise a family and ride the serene surf.

So here we have Jake Wheeler, a burned-out Hollywood writer living in Colorado, trying to climb gingerly out of a past pickled in booze and dappled with drug deals. It’s a character drawn, in Hasburgh’s own words, from “…a vague pattern of personal experience, providence and calamity.”

If Wheeler could write about TV detectives, maybe he could function as a real one? Wheeler is no more convinced by that dubious proposition than we are, but he’s a what-the-hell kind of guy.

As down at heel as Jim Rockford (another Cannell creation), but lacking even that private eye’s professional competence, Wheeler marches merrily into the murky-minefield search for a missing high school student.

I was slow to warm to Wheeler — somewhat put off, I think, by the self-pity that’s a recurrent downbeat note in his first-person narrative. But it’s a convincing characteristic in an addictive personality, and luckily it’s balanced by a dose of winning wit.

Wheeler, mourning a relationship that ended in April “like a bad Harry Chapin song,” confides, “I never got over Annie, but I did learn how to drink my way through the loneliness. I was even married once, briefly, during a weekend bender in Las Vegas, to an actress who didn’t know that Canada was north of the United States. I kid you not.”

I like to read Conan Doyle, Rex Stout and John D. MacDonald for the coziness of the homes their heroes have created for themselves. I like to read Ross MacDonald for the steadying, courageous liberal compassion of his hero. I like to read Adam Hall for the furious, fed-up professionalism of his “shadow executive.” And I like to read Patrick Hasburgh for his wit, for what his friend Cannell called “…Patrick’s social commentary, keen sense of dialogue and funny take on life.”

Finding his young female friend Lynda in bed with a “Persian” person, Wheeler wonders aloud whether it’s true that the states of Iran and Iraq are going to merge and form Irate, and chides her for “…screwing some guy that looks like he should be on the cover of Newsweek.”

Flush with ill-gotten gains, Wheeler buys himself a fire-engine red Hummer for $82,969. “Two jerry cans were strapped on the roof rack for extra water or fuel,” Wheeler observes. “Apparently this was a vehicle designed for soccer moms who wanted to make sure their kids would still get to practice in the event of a nuclear attack.”

On the move, Wheeler casts a cold eye not merely on Aspen, but also on Burning Man and Vegas, where he explains that Siegfried and Roy’s act “…closed down after the younger of the significant others had finally gotten a tiger to act like a real tiger.” Passing the Paris Casino, he observes that “…a quarter-scale Eiffel Tower straddled over it like a giant stick figure attempting to crap on the roof.”

Hasburgh has chosen his settings well. Idyllic resort destinations awash in undercurrents of criminal, personal and sexual corruption offer the same kind of dramatically useful ironies that Chandler and other detective story writers exploited effectively in perpetually summery, perpetually shadowy LA. Things do rot out there in the sun.

And that rot has spread far and wide in Wheeler’s post-9/11 nation. Jake Wheeler may be damaged goods, but so, clearly, is the 21^st century America in which he lives.

A latter-day knight errant needs a corrupt society the way Quixote needed windmills, and here and now offers possibilities as richly convincing as the lawless Jazz Age or the desperate Depression ever did.

Depp in "21 Jump Street," a series created by Hasburgh

Wheeler’s ironic comments on the irrationalities of the Bush administration, popular culture and the creeping U.S. police state are the last line of defense of a sane man, and the sane readers in Hasburgh’s audience can recognize a kindred spirit.

Wheeler tells us he’s heard about “…some poor bastard being arrested for carrying tweezers. Maybe he was planning to pluck the pilot’s nose hairs unless he was flown to Algiers.”

Wheeler reflects sourly, “That our cheerleader-in-chief and his madrassas of dissemblers had the Third World’s cheap seats cheering for Saddam’s side during the second half of the Gulf War also forbodes what else might happen when genetically connected Skull & Boners skip political science class.”

He sizes up Ann Coulter as “…a bleached bag of neocon bones who mixed WMDs with PMS for the electronic media.” And he has an idea for a Hollywood project to star Rose O’Donnell in “The J. Edgar Hoover Story.”

Clearly my kind of guy, after all.

Such sardonic observations serve to punctuate Hasburgh’s satisfying story of surprise and suspense. Hasburgh and the witty novelist Richard Russo have similar literary voices.

So, is Jake Wheeler finally paladin or patsy? Worth your while to take a trip to Aspen and find out.

I will tell you this much. Wheeler ends up in a spot tight enough to challenge even Mr. Bond at his Flemingesque best.

Patrick Hasburgh and his family and the "21 Jump Street" movie franchise. Patrick created the TV show.