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There's not a single murder in Brad Smith's BUSTED FLUSH. Except for the scene where the protagonist whacks a bully across the face with the short length of a two-by-four, the only crimes committed are theft and fraud. Too character-driven to be a straight caper novel, BUSTED FLUSH is a funny and fascinating story about the shady side of human nature.
In upstate New York, Dock Bass doesn't have a midlife crisis, he has a midlife awakening. To use a biblical expression, the scales fall from his eyes. He sees a discontented wife, a dishonest boss, and a bucolic past being wiped from the face of the earth by a newly-rich couple building a McMansion.
Dock throws clothes, books and fishing tackle into his red '91 Ford pickup truck and heads for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, leaving his wife and the local gossips to invent their own reasons for his disappearance.
Dock has a letter from a Gettysburg attorney advising him of an inheritance. It turns out to be a small farm passed down to him through a series of relatives he never really knew. Dock decides not to sell the property but to move in and renovate the old farmhouse.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., a star TV reporter named Amy is heading for Chicago to cover the baseball World Series. Amy, whose favorite person is herself with a Porsche Cayenne Turbo in second place, hates the assignment. She wants to go to Aruba to track a political scandal story. Her boss uses the carrot-and-stick approach: First, the World Series, then Aruba.
By the time the Series ends the big story is in Gettysburg, where Dock Bass's renovations have uncovered the workshop of a young photographer/inventor/diarist who died in the Civil War. His parents sealed off the room just as he left it, and sealed it has remained since 1864.
Among the contents are 223 glass photo plates which include seven candid shots of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, and a contraption called a phonautograph which seems to have recorded Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Word spreads. Collectors, connivers, Civil War buffs, outraged Edison scholars and reporters come from all directions. Typical are a New York agent who tells Dock that "the whole idea of the Civil War is sexy"; a rapper named J'Makir Slim who has written a hip-hop number based on the Gettysburg Address, and two local phonies who have designs on the entire treasure trove.
And then there's Amy. Once again, Aruba must wait. Her boss is a noted collector and he wants the phonautograph. He already has one but it doesn't have a cylinder with a recording of the Gettysburg Address. He sends the protesting Amy to Gettysburg with instructions to use her feminine wiles on Dock Bass and bring back the machine.
Her feminine wiles get her nowhere with Dock, but she has more maneuvers than Robert E. Lee and wouldn't acknowledge a lost cause if it turned around and bit her. Then into this stew plops a turnip named Leona, who claims to be the real heir of the farm's previous owner.
Dock is willing to turn it all over to Leona if her claim is legitimate. He tells Amy, "The pictures, the diary, the recording -- it's all about the Gettysburg Address, and everybody wants a piece of it. What they don't seem to realize is that everybody already has it. In a hundred and fifty years they haven't figured out what to do with it."
Still, the whole thing has a smell about it. Dock decides to call Leona's bluff and run one of his own, and that's why I stayed up most of the night to finish reading the book.
I kept thinking of Paul Newman in "Nobody's Fool." If Newman were 40 instead of 80, he would be the perfect Dock Bass, who is certainly nobody's fool. As it turns out, neither is Amy.
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