Bizarro Fiction Month Day 4: Jimmy Plush: Teddy Bear Detective

It's day 4 of Bizarro Fiction week here an the blog, and once again, I'm posting a review of a piece of bizarro fiction written by an author who I'll be reviewing again sometime later this month. This time, it's Garret Cook, whose Archelon Ranch I'll be reviewing sometime before the month ends. This time though, I'm taking a look at Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective.

Back when I was a kid, I used to love detective stories. These days, I don't read them so much except, for some cross genre stuff, like the Dresden Files. This makes  Jimmy Plush a good choice for me, because it is a bizarro detective short story collection (or at least an episodic novella posing as one). It's a good story, too. There's a lot of humor in it, even on the copyright page, which includes imaginary 50s era pulp magazine appearances for the stories.

The book is about a teddy bear detective named Jimmy Plush who used to be a human being named Hatbox. The two switched bodies in exchange for the original Jimmy Plush covering the original Hatbox's gambling debts.  Of course, the original Plush is actually evil and becomes the new Plush's archnemesis.

The whole world of this book is strange. It's full of criminal furries, living versions of normally inanimate objects, giants, martians, zuvembies, and that kind of thing.  The stories tell the story of how Jimmy plush battles various weirdos and like a Fu Machu-wannabe crime boss, who isn't really Chinese, or another crime boss who is a living Kewpie Doll, or a mad scientist with an army of zuvembies.

This book is funny enough that I actually laughed out loud several times while reading it.