Champion of the World

Starred review from May 1, 2016
In 1920s America, when professional wrestling is in its dying years as a serious sport, one high-stakes contest brings together athletes, gangsters, and long-suffering women in this fine debut. Five years after the embarrassing loss of his lightweight wrestling crown, Pepper Van Dean gets booted from the lousy traveling-carnival job he turned to for survival. His only option is a dubious deal with a former training partner and a Chicago gang leader who were both tied to his last professional defeat. The deal gets more complicated, as Pepper must train Garfield Taft, a charismatic athlete who is also a black ex-convict married to a white woman and hoping for a shot at the reigning white heavyweight wrestling champion. Such a match is unlikely amid American racism and fears of another embarrassment after Jack Johnson's grab of boxing's heavyweight title, but it's potentially lucrative. Then, while working out at a remote Montana lodge, Taft develops strange fainting spells and stranger marital problems. Canadian bootleggers arrive at the lodge with a shipment of booze to add another wrinkle. Back stories and subplots emerge and old wounds reopen as Dundas puts together a tightly woven piece of storytelling punctuated by some intriguing close-ups of wrestling when it was taken seriously. He will spring a penultimate twist that might not surprise many readers and a last one that's a doozy with a demon ex machina even nastier than the mobsters. Centered on the sweet-tough relationship of Pepper and his card shark wife, Moira, and enriched by a wrestling history that contrasts sharply with today's circus, the novel has the feel of noir but is rounder and richer than a Jim Thompson outing. Dundas suggests writers known for loosely historical works, such as Doctorow and Chabon, but he features a pared-down, punchy style that goes well with his characters' basic raw ambitions and emotions.

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June 1, 2016
In the early twentieth century, professional wrestling was legitcorrupt, like boxing, but not a stage show, as it is today. That's the world debut novelist Dundas re-creates in this rambunctious, page-turning tale of disgraced, former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean, now forced to scrounge a living on the carnival circuit, fighting challenge matches against brawny lumberjacks in the Northwest. Then an opportunity to return to the big time appears, but it comes with strings. A distinctly unsavory promoter wants Pepper to train an African American wrestler for the heavyweight championship, but, naturally, the fix is in. Multiple fixes, as it turns out, leaving Pepper and his wife, card-sharp Moira, square in the crosshairs of rival gangsters. Dundas draws evocatively on the rich history of boxing in fiction and filmespecially the 1956 Bogart movie The Harder They Fallbut layers the familiar archetypes with the fascinating history of scientific wrestling. There's a touch of The Hustler, too, thematically but also lyrically, with Pepper rhapsodizing about the beauty of wrestling much in the manner of Fast Eddie Felson musing on how his cue stick becomes an extension of his arm.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2016

Sportswriter Dundas crafts the story of disgraced former lightweight wrestling champion Pepper Van Dean, who's working the carnival circuit with his wife in the 1920s when he's asked to train an African American heavyweight looking for a comeback. What's really expected, though, is very different--and very dangerous. Lots of library marketing.

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