Drawing a Blank: Or How I Tried to Solve a Mystery, End a Feud, and Land the Girl of My Dreams (review)

Self-styled misanthrope Carlton Dunne IV avoids engagement with the human race by flying as low as he can below the social radar at his tony Connecticut boarding school, while concentrating his attention on the weekly comic strip, "Signy the Superbad," that he produces for a local paper. It's not much of a life, Carlton admits, but it's a stretch better than staying at home with his equally misanthropic architect father, who has already driven out his second wife and adorable stepdaughter, and who concentrates his attention on what he imagines to be an ongoing feud with his Scottish relatives over a dagger purloined in the thirteenth century. It seems that Carlton III isn't imagining things, though; he's kidnapped by descendants of the Forba clan and held hostage until evidence of the dagger can be produced and admissions of guilt made public, so Carlton IV takes a hasty flight to Scotland to do his filial duty. He's immediately taken under the wing of the lovely Aileen, who just happens to be on her way to Orkney as well, who knows a lot about the Forbas, and who promises to see Carlton through his ordeal. Grateful, smitten Carlton is completely taken in, fantasizing that Aileen is the Signy of his dreams, but readers will steadily catch clues that Aileen isn't all she appears. Although Carlton isn't quite as philosophical about human fate as Norma Howe's Blue Avenger (Blue Avenger and the Theory of Everything, BCCB 7/02), his superhero-styled road trip with the love of his seventeen-year-old life will ring a familiar bell. It takes some doing to stitch eighteenth-century prison architecture, frozen salmon, an incinerated country inn, cryogenics, and a happy family reunion into a coherent whole, but Ehrenhaft pulls it off with panache, and the "Signy" comics that document Carlton's shifting state of mind are an added pleasure.