The Double: An Investigation

by Don Webb

When John Reynman stumbles upon a corpse on his living room floor, the body of a murder victim who looks just like him, he embarks on a dangerous investigation to uncover the dark secrets that led to the crime. A first novel.

Genres: Mystery

242 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Don Webb teaches High School English in a reform school in rural Texas by day, Creative Writing for UCLA Extension by night. He has a had a mystery series at St. Martin's Press, a series of books on contemporary and Late Antique magical practice from Runa Raven Press, and more than 300 published short stories of SF/F/H. His work has been translated into 11 languages.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough book for me to review for several personal reasons. First, Don Webb is both my friend and Teacher. Second, I recently asked for his feedback on a draft of my own first novel, a novel I must admit was influenced by reading this book. Third, I didn’t really enjoy reading this book, nor do I enjoy most of Don’s fiction.

That probably sounds rather contradictory, especially in this goodreads realm of reviews which are either uniformly positive or uniformly negative. How can I respect someone, to the point of calling them a Teacher and asking for their help with my own fiction, if I don’t “like” them as a fiction writer? Moreover, how can I confess that a book I didn’t “like” has influenced my own writing? I’ve flagged part of the problem with those quotation marks – facebook, youtube and other online sources have accustomed us to a binary choice between “liking” something and not “liking” it, forgetting that our feelings about a person, or their work, may have complexities much deeper than that. My feelings about Don and this book are complex, and I’ll try to unpack some of that complexity here.

The premise of this book is that a fellow named John comes home one day to find a corpse in his living room. Oddly that corpse looks exactly like him, down to having the same lame tattoos. This begins a deceptively simple effort to figure out who put that body in his house, who this person was, and why he was killed. I say “deceptive,” not just because the mystery is far from simple, but because it turns out that the quest is really about John coming to understand his identity and individuality, and about his transition from a schmuck to whom things happen into a person who does things for himself.

The book is set in Texas, and one of the really good things about it is how well Don knows Texas. Not the Texas you see on “Dallas” (or even “Slackers”) or the one you read about in articles on immigration reform, but the Texas only natives know. He uses odd geographic and cultural features such as Lighthouse Rock, Georgia O’Keefe, Southwest Airlines, and bar-hopping Santa Clauses as settings and details for his story. I’ve never had any especial desire to visit Texas, but if I ever do, I hope I can get Don to be my tour guide – it’s bound to be more interesting than what I’d find on my own.

So, what’s not to “like?” Well, I think a lot of the problem is in the front-end, as it were. In order to make John’s transformation work, Don is at great pains to show what a schmuck he is at the outset. Which kept me from identifying with him or caring about his quest, because (here it comes), I didn’t “like” John from the beginning. I’m not sure I really “like” who he turns into, either, although Don tries really hard to sell us on his newfound persona. Moreover, the premise about finding a corpse that looks just like you in your house sounds like a great opening, but I needed a better explanation for it than we get by the end. John seems to lose interest in it partway through, and it was, after all, basically a red herring to get things moving, but it just seems to require too much suspension of disbelief not to thoroughly deal with.

There’s one other problem for me, which is that part of the end of the book comes across as propaganda for polyamory, as John develops a relationship with two women. For some people, that might seem like a good thing, after all there isn’t a lot of positive press for non-traditional heterosexual relationships out there, but this came off as clumsy and unconvincing to me. Of course, Don was younger in 1998 (we all were), and I suspect that the School of Hard Knocks has taught him a thing or two since then, which would keep him from suggesting that polyamory would be the solution to anyone’s relationship problems. You bring your problems with you into any new relationship, even when you try changing the rules, as many of us have found out over the years.

So why do I say that the book has influenced me? Partly because, more than five years after reading it, I still feel like I’m struggling with some of its basic issues. The use of the mystery as a catalyst for personal exploration is particularly interesting to me, and it’s a lot of what I want to work out in my own novel. It would be a bit arrogant of me, as a first time writer, to say that I want to do what Don Webb was doing in “The Double,” only I want to do it better this time, but I'm giving it a try. It’s less daunting than trying to start out writing the next Ulysses or the next Dhalgren, at least.

[Connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Painfully 90s po-mo in the didactic mode. Interesting as a time capsule of pre-millennium Austin?