Sitcom star Kenny Polizzi, world-famous from his years as the lead in Hollywood’s The Dwight House, shares some home secrets with a British talk-show host and the viewing audience: “Well, there’s a bit of me—a bit of most Americans, Johnny boy—that always feels kinda naked without a gun. But the United States, I’m sorry to say, is still quite a violent place. The only reason I need a gun over there is because everyone else I meet will also have a gun. Self-protection. Whereas here in this cute little island of yours it’s only the bad guys who got guns. What use would I have with a gun over here?” For American readers this speech must be the highlight of The Cinderella Killer, a passable but uninspired mystery by Simon Brett, an Englishman who’s been producing skinny whodunits since Harold Wilson’s final years as premier.
If you want to read the book don’t read this article, since I’m about to tell you that Kenny does indeed carry a gun in England, that he shoots someone with it, that he’s then shot with it by another American, and that a third American uses her own gun to shoot the second American. That’s a lot of American gunplay in dozy, defenseless Great Britain. Perhaps Kenny’s cover story about frontier life is meant to be read as a lot of guff. A fourth American, this one the sitcom star’s ex-wife, confirms that he “feels naked without a gun” but she herself betrays zero attraction to firearms (just lawsuits, that other American passion: “my lawyers will leave you so shredded and beat up that you’ll wish you’d never been born”). Still, we have all those Americans shooting each other, and nobody remarks on the strangeness of Kenny’s remarks. I expect that his picture of American life isn’t supposed to be all that outlandish. If so, the naivety of foreigners when they contemplate America is indeed marvelous. I read that a French movie from long ago told the story of a black fellow trying to get from the South to the North. Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line was the big problem, what with the wall, the barbed wire, the floodlights, the jeeps going back and forth.
The real place of guns in American life is crazy enough, as we learned once again this summer. But it isn’t as crazy as the Polizzi version, where you have to pack because God knows what the FedEx guy’s going to do. Real America is tortured by its gun problem, but Kenny Polizzi’s America couldn’t even function; the place would be at a standstill. You’d think that somebody, such as the book’s author, might have thought of this. You’d also think he had little use for the United States or its inhabitants. But we’re okay by him. Brits who dislike Americans harp on our alleged gullibility, ignorance, and thick-headed blindness to irony. But Kenny Polizzi’s no clodhopper. He wows the talk-show audience with his playful wit and deft handling of the host’s attempts at hardball—nobody even minds his crack about the “cute little island.” A Yank hater would never allow us to score like that. Though the book’s Americans all shoot each other, no invidious morals are drawn. There’s no “That’s the Yanks, tsk-tsk.” Instead, bare of ill will, there’s a simple “That’s the Yanks,” as there might’ve been “That’s the Italians” if everyone proved to be swarthy and passionate, or “That’s the Chinese” if they all knew Chinese astrology and spoke without contractions.
If they’ll excuse me, I find the Brits have more of a weakness than we do for pegging jokes to simple foreignness and the cultural earmarks that signify it. Hence the book’s idea of an American sitcom title is The Dwight House (the hero’s named Dwight and goofy characters live in his house). I can’t think of any sitcom title with a presidential slant except Mr. President and The President Show, which were both about presidents. But for a Brit mystery writer, a sitcom just has to be American and that’s enough. Well, no harm done. Anyone who can take our national tragedy and make it a foible (with three dead bodies) is doing us some sort of favor. I’m not sure what the favor is, but God bless that cute little island.