Created by Jamie Mandelkau
There wasn’t much love for the off-beat The Leo Wyoming Caper when it was released in 1977, and it hasn’t much improved with age.
Dallas, Texas gumshoe DEUCE RAMSEY is hired to track down eccentric (ie: batshit crazy) millionaire and merry prankster Leo Wyoming, an aging hippie who’s planning a local “art happening”–the reenactment of the JFK assassination–as a prank.
Because everyone wants to see that again, right? Oh, what fun!
Unfortunately, during the actual reenactment, the man playing Jackie is murdered.
Its sole review on Goodreads tagged the book as “Very shaggy dog hang-out fiction that felt like a bad Vonnegut clone,” while Kirkus, after summarizing the plot, went on to ask “Z like in zany? Nope, more like in zilch.”
Me? I’m still marveling over the cover, an alterntive classic in its own right.
NOVELS
- The Leo Wyoming Caper (1977)Â |Â Buy this book
40+ yrs later the reviews still stand…I agree. Deuce Ramsey was named after my Amarillo drinking buddy, Buck Ramsey, Texan cowboy poet. Book/narrative was an ‘art’ project using ‘letters’ from Stanley Marsh’s archives, and a loose take on the genre which was Marsh’s favorite reading. Inclusive his other artworks: Ant Farm Cadillac Ranch, Robert Smithson Amarillo Ramp, John Chamberlain car sculptures. So far no one has discovered the joke, not a book but an ART PROJECT. Which we did get published. As another scribe so rightly put it…So it goes. JamieM