No Sunscreen For The Dead - Tim Dorsey

    2019; 336 pages.  Book 22 (out of 23, with #24 due out next January) in the “Serge Storms” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Florida Crime Noir; Stoner Humor.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    Serge Storms has found a new passion in life.  A rich resource of historical information.  A veritable mother lode of Americana.  And his home state of Florida is blessed to have an abundance of it, just waiting to be tapped into.

    We’re talking about retirees, of course.  Otherwise known as, according to Serge: “bluehair, cotton-top, geezer, old biddy, old coot, old codger, old fart, over the hill, worm food, corpse-lite, junior varsity cadaver”.

    Along with his faithful sidekick Coleman, Serge is now on a mission to reach out to these people, to listen to their tales of ancient deeds, and to break bread with them, especially if they are paying for the meal.

    Alas, the lives of retirees is not always bliss.  Unscrupulous salesmen prey among them, fast-talking them into spending large amounts of money on things they have absolutely no need for.  They need a champion, someone to right these wrongs, someone to avenge these useless purchases.

    Perhaps Serge can be of assistance.

What’s To Like...

    Devoted readers of this series can rejoice, No Sunscreen For The Dead has the usual overall plot structure: Serge stumbles across an injustice and takes it upon himself punish the perpetrators in some very original ways, while Coleman provides comic relief by ingesting copious amounts of food, drugs, and alcohol and encouraging others to do the same.

    But there’s more to the plotline than that.  The FBI is puzzled by a strange spike in murder-suicides among the Florida retirees.  A nerdy data-cruncher can’t figure out why a client wants a database of people who are related but aren't twins, and have consecutive (last four digits of) social security numbers.  And we follow two guys named Teddy and Tofer who have a strange lifelong relationship that stretches way back to 1957.  You know that all these plot threads will eventually converge, and mix with Serge’s newfound desire to bask vicariously live the life of a retiree.  The fun is watching how Tim Dorsey accomplishes this.

    Unsurprisingly, the settings are limited to the state of Florida, mostly in the Tampa Bay and Sarasota area.  There are a few flashback scenes, some of which go back as far as 1957, and of course a whole bunch of clever Florida historical info dumps, delivered via short spiels by Serge.  I always love those.

    We get introduced to the Florida Amish retiree community, which I was unaware of, and who ride along the local highways at perilously slow speeds, but on tricycles instead of their traditional horse-and-buggy rigs.  Shoofly pies get mentioned (yum yum!), along with my personal gustatory weakness – Little Debbie snack cakes.  My personal hero, Rosa Parks, gets some nice ink, as does one of the watershed moments in the Korean War: Chosin Reservoir.  And I feel positively enlightened now that I know about the Teddy Roosevelt "Rough Rider" condoms.

    Everything builds to an ending that’s long of excitement although short on tension.  It felt more like vaudeville than breathtaking adventure, and seemed a bit contrived, but hey, what should we expect when Serge and Coleman are involved?

    No Sunscreen For The Dead is a standalone story, as well as part of a long-running series.  The pace is crisp, the wit is abundant, and all the plot threads get resolved nicely.  You don’t have to read this series in order.

Excerpts...

    Benmont grew up in a small coal-mining town in eastern Tennessee that had run out of coal.  The two children in his wallet were the product of a marriage to his high school sweetheart, who was an accomplished tuba player in the marching band and winner of the school’s contest to memorize the value of pi to the most digits.  The morning after his wife’s thirtieth birthday, she entered the Dollar Store and was overwhelmed with a shuddering realization that there was more to life than this.  Benmont came home to a half-empty closet and a note on the kitchen table.  (loc. 280)

    “Some scientists theorize that all of time has already happened, and the dimension is completely laid out like the others, but it’s just the constraints of our particular universe that create the illusion we’re flowing through it.”

    “Makes sense to me,” said Coleman, tapping an ash out the window.

    “And thank God it’s set up that way!” said Serge.  “Can you imagine if we could see all of time at once, but lose one of the other dimensions?  And then we’re a bunch of flat people who can’t move, like refrigerator magnets stuck to an infinitely large metal astro-plane stretching across the cosmos.”

    “I hate it when that happens.”  (loc. 1652)

Kindle Details…

    No Sunscreen for the Dead is presently priced at $10.99 at Amazon.  The other books in the series range in price from $2.99 to $12.99.

“What’s the point of retiring to Florida if you don’t follow the weather back home?”  (loc. 688 )

    There are a couple quibbles, but most of them are for readers new to this series.

    There is an abundance of cussing, but that’s the norm for a Tim Dorsey tale.  If you’re looking for a cozy crime story, this ain’t it.  There are also some innovative executions (see below) committed by our protagonist, but this is something Serge fans always look forward to.  Several reviewers were appalled by this, but that just makes it obvious they’ve never read a book from this series before.

    Other reviewers felt the flashbacks made it hard to follow the storyline, but I had no difficulties.

    It did seem like Serge went looking for trouble here, which felt different to me.  Usually trouble comes looking for Serge.  And last, and incredibly nitpicky on my part, if there was a tie-in between the story and the book’s title, I never saw it.

    But enough of the quibbles.  No Sunscreen For The Dead is another fine installment in this series, and it amused me from beginning to end.  There’s nothing highbrow about it, its sole aim is entertainment (well, okay, and maybe to educate you a bit about Florida), and to that end, it fully succeeds.

    7½ Stars.  For those who keep track of such things, there are three Serge “executions” in No Sunscreen For The Dead, and without giving any spoilers, we’ll simply say they involve glue, dust, and Brillo pads.