Foozlers

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Take a dozen characters and jam them into 24 hours, situate them in the
seedier side of Vancouver, and what have you got? Well, among other
things, this novel—his first—from Tom Osborne, a Vancouver writer
who helped to found the notorious Pulp Press in the 1970s. Foozlers is
postmodernly funny. There is a sense of immediacy and of realism here,
all caught up in a kind of fictional redemption.

When Hector Moses Lake and Katrinna Reticuli—both junkies—steal a
rare cockatoo from a pet store to trade it for dope, there is a kind of
inevitability when they cross paths a short while later with three East
Indians, one of whom (Singh Sidhu) is headed very much against his will
toward an arranged marriage. Mixing it up with Lake and Sidhu are two of
Vancouver’s beaten-down police officers, Syvain Deacon and Styler
Ferguson, who have drawn this night-

mare shift, which includes having to coax a naked lady down from a roof
and discovering a homicide in which the victim has been flattened by a
truck.

Osborne’s plot fairly flies along—the book can be easily read in a
single sitting—and despite the general nuttiness of the characters,
there is certain truth to be discovered. When you think it can’t get
any worse—it can. And, as the cops, at least, understand, it always
does.