Sean Beaudoin is the author of Going Nowhere Faster, which was nominated as one of YALSA's "Best Books for Young Adults"; Fade to Blue, which was called "Infinite Jest for teens" by Booklist, You Killed Wesley Payne, which was a Booklist Editor's Choice; and The Infects, which was called a "wickedly unpredictable adventure" by Publishers Weekly. His short stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications. Sean's website is seanbeaudoin.com.
You Killed Wesley Payne
eBook
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ISBN-13:
9780316122221
- Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
- Publication date: 02/01/2011
- Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
- Format: eBook
- Sales rank: 384,302
- File size: 758 KB
- Age Range: 12 - 18 Years
Available on NOOK devices and apps
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He's come to do a job.
A job that involves a body.
A body wrapped in duct tape found hanging from the goal posts at the end of the football field.
You Killed Wesley Payne is a truly original and darkly hilarious update of classic pulp-noir, in which hard-boiled seventeen year-old Dalton Rev transfers to the mean hallways of Salt River High to take on the toughest case of his life. The question isn't whether Dalton's going to get paid. He always gets paid. Or whether he's gonna get the girl. He always (sometimes) gets the girl. The real question is whether Dalton Rev can outwit crooked cops and killer cliques in time to solve the mystery of "The Body" before it solves him.
Sean Beaudoin (Going Nowhere Faster, Fade to Blue) evokes the distinctive voices of legendary crime/noir authors Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson with a little bit of Mean Girls and Heathers thrown in for good measure. It'll tease you, please you, and never ever leave you. Actually, that's not true. It's only a book. One that's going to suck you in, spit you out, and make you shake hands with the devil. Probably.
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The cliques rule the rackets in Salt River High. The two top outfits, the Balls (football players, "wearers of no-irony crew cuts") and Pinker Casket (thrash rockers, "most appropriate for funerals or virgin sacrifices"), are hurtling towards a turf war, and all the assorted mid-level cliques (and even the crooked Fack Cult T) are constantly looking for an angle to ride to prominence. At the center of the maelstrom is a body, Wesley Payne, a former member of the Euclidians (nerds, "fingertip sniffers"), who was found wrapped in duct tape, hanging upside-down from the goalposts. Teenage private dick Dalton Rev arrives to sort out the murder, locate a missing hundred grand, and if everything rolls his way, ride off into the sunset with the adorable Macy Payne. Beaudoin plays a Chandler hand with a Tarantino smirk in this ultra-clever high-school noir, dropping invented brand labels on everything from energy-drink ingredients (Flavor Flavah) to the Almighty ("Oh my Bob!"). Ever checking his moves against what his crime-novel hero, Lexington Cole, would do, Dalton himself is so straight hard-boiled, it's screwy: "Dalton played it cool. He played it frozen. He was in full Deano at the Copa mode." But in the end, none of the stylistic pastiche and slick patter would matter if they weren't hitched to such a propulsive mystery, with enough doublecrosses and blindsiding reveals to give you vertigo. Moreover, the opening "Clique Chart" might just be the funniest four pages you'll read all year.
In classic noir fashion, hard-case Dalton Rev is enticed by an apparently bereft, beautiful girl to take on a mystery involving the death of her brother, who was found trussed in duct tape and hanging from the goalposts on his high school's football field. Dalton is not as cool and in control as he appears, however; in fact, he takes his entire game plan from a fictional detective, Lexington Cole, whose exploits don't always model well for Dalton's circumstances, leading to some hilarious improvisations. The school in which Dalton is sleuthing is a hotbed of corruption and intrigue, ruled by virulently oppositional cliques, each with lucrative money-making rackets and all held in a tense stasis by the elusive cult of the Lee Harvies, who show up at random on the school roof with assault rifles to ride herd on the masses. The cliques themselves are the main characters here; they are introduced and flowcharted in introductory material, with descriptions reeking of hyperbolic, snort-evoking snark. Beaudoin's razor-sharp rhetorical wit plays smartly with the generic conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel, but the story is shaded throughout with typical adolescent male anxieties, making this parody more engaging and complex than the exemplars it plays off of. Even the sentimental heart of the piece, a talk between Dalton and his mother, who is despairing over the apparent failure of their family, is as emotionally resonant as the earnest attempts at this sort of conversation found in texts that take themselves more seriously. The hipster slickness of the narrative makes the accompanying glossary a welcome aid even though most of the terms are evident in context; like the glossary in Frank Portman's King Dork, it provides as much supplemental comedic value as it does genuine information. The short stories appended to the end are entertaining, and the excerpt from the Lex Cole novel makes one wish it were real. Give this to fans of King Dork and the indie film Brick and then direct them to Dashiell Hammett for a taste of the real thing, knowing that they just might like this better.
* "Beaudoin's razor-sharp rhetorical wit plays smartly with the generic conventions of the hard0boiled detective novel, but the story is shaded throughout with typical adolescent male anxieties, making this parody more engaging and complex than the exemplars it plays off of."BCCB (starred review)
"This dark, cynical romp is full of clever references and red herrings, which will delight the adult noir fan and pique the curiosities of the observant outcast teen who's looking for a way to infiltrate the in-crowd."Kirkus
"This book will entice teen readers with action, intrigue, and backstabbing, along with the more subtle undercurrents of dirty money, mafia-like dealings between the school's many social groups, and the satirical real-world parallels with high school."VOYA
Tough, suit-sporting, no-nonsense high-school sleuth Dalton Rev stalks the killer who masterminded the murder of popular in-guy Wesley Payne. Hired by Wesley's über-hot sister Macy, Dalton treads a dangerous path, where high-school cliques war like gangs and corruption is pervasive. Dalton's hilarious, hard-boiled Chandler-esque one-liners cut the intimidating come-ons of thuggish football players, snooty band snobs and jaded cops to the quick, though they also often require flips to the novel's glossary. They add to Beaudoin's ambitious, sharply scoped gumshoe universe, the complexity of which often overwhelms the plot and may leave many readers scratching their heads and leafing back to previous chapters to uncover who-did-what-when—though it's so adeptly constructed one might legitimately wonder if that's the point. Multiple characters simultaneously add intrigue and befuddlement, and the 30-plus pages of climax will have willing readers chuckling in amusement and less patient ones enraged. That said, this dark, cynical romp is full of clever references and red herrings, which will delight the adult noir fan and pique the curiosities of the observant outcast teen who's looking for a way to infiltrate the in-crowd.(Mystery. 12 & up)