Humor, inhumanity add to the mystery

Just because a book is brutal doesn't mean it can't be devastatingly funny as well. At least that's true when the fiction comes from the twisted mind of Gold Dagger Award-winner Robert Wilson. Wilson revisits an unsettled West Africa in his second Bruce Medway mystery, "The Big Killing," and once again delves into his own heart of darkness to come up with both wit and gore. The European mystery maestro who made his name with the more formulaic (but still excellent) Nazi-loot whodunit "A Small Death in Lisbon" has found his metier in Medway's hot, humid world of shady dealings and bleak humor. In Medway's sphere, in fact, the brutality -- the violence, the corruption, the horror of poverty and desperation -- makes the humor necessary, if not necessarily poignant.

"It had not been a morning for skipping down to the beach to dance `highlife' into the long, torpid afternoon," Medway notes with characteristic understatement as this adventure opens, but his wry wit is the only thing that's dry. As his unhappy day dawns, Medway has been soaking his brain in booze to forget about the misadventures chronicled in the first book of the series, "Instruments of Darkness." But as he comes to, he hears that not only have mass graves been uncovered but that the eviscerated body of a political operative has washed up on a nearby shore.

Such mayhem is not that unusual for Africa, the London-born protagonist tells us in his colorful first-person narrative. (The fact that this novel, first published in the United Kingdom in 1996, is still timely confirms this observation.) Specifically, it's true for the Ivory Coast, where guns and diamonds are seeping across the porous borders of Liberia and Ghana, and the Ivorians' emotions over their own upcoming election swing between riotous enthusiasm and despair. It's the kind of country where a man like Medway, a washout in Europe, can make a living as a "fixer." "I do things for people who don't want to do the jobs themselves," he explains to one possible employer, the aptly named Fat Paul. Medway adds the caveats that he won't do anything criminal nor will he get involved in domestic affairs. But the pornographer Fat Paul, between loads of pineapple fritters, doesn't seem to be listening too closely as he outlines the seemingly simple job of dropping off a videotape.

Medway, when he meets him in the Grand Bassam bar, is desperate enough to take the gig without examining it too closely. Following his adventures in "Instruments of Darkness," he's in debt and still healing from a brutal beating. Plus, Heike, his girlfriend -- and possible love of his life, if he can accept it -- has hightailed it back to Germany after getting caught up and terrorized in the madness. In fact, the only benefit that has remained with him from that first outing is his friendship with Bagado, an impoverished but dignified Ivorian cop. But Bagado has paid: He's lost his job, partly through his association with Medway, and he isn't enjoying his new freelance life as a private eye. "This American expression `gumshoe' disturbs me," he says. "It sounds very low. Beneath the shoe is the gumshoe. I've ceased to evolve as a life form."

Things get worse for both of them, as they (along with a wild cast of characters from a spoiled rich kid to a Yeats-spouting gun dealer) find themselves involved in political machinations. When the notorious "Leopard" killer starts breathing down their necks -- he tears out his victim's innards with his "claws" -- the mismatched duo's adventures become dangerous as well. Juggling several jobs gets Medway and Bagado caught up in a kidnapping, and when a dangerous woman shows up, Bagado has his work cut out for him keeping Medway on the straight and narrow.

Through all the blood and guts, Wilson keeps his humor. Slightly askew references to Joseph Conrad and Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" surface, as one character is set up to ask, "Mr. Kurt . . . he dead?" and another witnesses "a dog skittering off into the bush with a severed hand in its mouth." But such doffs of the artistic cap further spice an updating of the classic Raymond Chandler noir. Bruce Medway is nobody's hero, but he's a lot of fun to follow, especially with Bagado by his side.