Gumdrop Coal is one of Santa's favorite elves; he heads up the Coal Patrol, deciding which children are naughty enough to receive coal instead of toys. But when Gumdrop finds himself the prime suspect in a murder, he's forced to turn detective to find out who's trying to set him up. Could it be star reporter Rosebud Jubilee? Gumdrop's rival (and Santa's new favorite) Charles "Candy" Cane? Surely not Gumdrop's old pal Dingleberry Fizz?
Harmon hurls every big of Christmas lore he can find into his story -- songs, stories, TV specials, movies -- and is often very clever and innovative in finding ways to use them. (The characters from "The 12 Days of Christmas," for instance, are turned into a delightfully unexpected force of danger.) He falls flat in spots, most notably in his attempts to imitate two great holiday poems -- "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" -- which fail because he has absolutely no sense of rhythm or meter.
Where the book really collapses, though, is when Harmon attempts to link the sacred side of Christmas into his story, and to draw an explicit connection between the two characters at the center of the two Christmas stories -- Santa and Jesus. He makes the connection repeatedly, but here's his most concise statement:
[Santa] wasn't just a jolly old elf and toymaker. He was God's own angel, sent here to show the spirit of Christmas to the poor souls too stubborn or stupid or scared to step into a church. Believing Santa could deliver gifts to the whole world in a single night made it possible to believe that on one quiet night, God gave the whole world the greatest gift.
Now, I wouldn't argue that it's impossible to combine the secular and sacred sides of Christmas in one story -- A Charlie Brown Christmas does it brilliantly, and it's not a coincidence that Harmon's least annoying sacred moment is a direct reference to that classic -- but to do so, I think, requires absolute sincerity in all parts of the storytelling. When your main plotline is elf noir, a parody of a genre than sometimes comes close to parodying itself as is, there's an inherent smirking goofiness which, while entertaining, cuts against being able to suddenly play the religious stuff straight. The Jesus parts of the story are awfully jarring, and the way they're dropped into an otherwise comic tale feels disrespectful at best, if not flat-out blasphemous.
(It is interesting that Harmon never actually uses the words "Jesus" or "Christ;" it is always "the Child." The cynic in me suspects that Harmon and/or his publisher feared that bookstore browsers would be turned off by obvious Jesus references in a book that looks like, and mostly is, a silly holiday romp; "Child," on the other hand, is a much more innocuous and less religiously loaded word.)
If you're willing and able to overlook that particular bit of tonal awkwardness, then there is much to enjoy in The Fat Man. A lot of the comedy works very well; the mystery has a satisfying conclusion and some nice Gumdrop-in-peril scenes; and Harmon's appropriation of our cultural icons is sometimes quite ingenious. But be prepared to be jolted out of the story whenever Harmon shoves the Child into the narrative.
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