The Pot Thief Who Couldn't Spell "Chile"

The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras - J. Michael Orenduff

Meet Hubert Schuze (pronounced, I believe, “shoes”). Hubert runs a pot shop in Albuquerque’s Old Town – no, New Mexico hasn’t legalized marijuana, he sells Native American pottery. Hubert’s a pot thief, at least according to the Feds, since he has no problem with digging up old pottery on public land and selling it in his shop. That’s not legal, but since he thinks the law is wrong, he engages in civil disobedience that just happens to fatten his bank account. Hubert’s forty-something, was kicked out of UNM’s archaeology program for – you guessed it – stealing artifacts, and keeps a great deal of company with a lovely Basque by the name of Susannah.

Hubert also likes to read non-fiction… and while he’s reading a collection of essays on Pythagoras (the eponymous theorem guy), he becomes embroiled in a bit of theater involving the theft of not one but two valuable pots. In fact, they’re the only two known complete pots attributed to the Mogollon culture – and both are (or were) in museums. Weirdly enough, two people end up dead over this caper, which means one per pot.

Of course, Hubert’s up to his bolo tie in the mess, since some guy offered him a tidy sum to steal one of the pots – and the other one turned up stolen just hours later. Add in a couple of dead bodies, and the pot’s… errr, the plot’s afoot. It’s a good thing Schuze is smarter than the average museum curator, or he’d be in a lot of trouble! When all is said and done and Hubert’s Miss Marple-style lecture to the suspects is over, he’s left a hero and had picked up enough to pay his quarterly taxes to boot. Not bad for a margarita-swilling slacker, eh? The first in J. Michael Orenduff’s series, The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras was first published in 2007 by the former president of the University of New Mexico. Orenduff draws on his personal knowledge of his native city for this entry in the series, although he has precious little to say about anything beyond restaurants and shops except for an occasional reference to sunrise over the Sandia Mountains. More’s the pity, since the landscape deserves far more attention. But I digress…

As a mystery, The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras is no great shakes, mainly because Orenduff fails to leave the clues necessary for a reader to track along with the amateur sleuth. Hubert solves one of the two murders via a series of deductions in which the crucial deduction is decidedly weak, while the second murder is completely lacking in motivation. I hope that the author improves in this sense through the next six books in the series – it was interesting enough that I will probably take a look at a second installment some day.

I might not, though: I found the character of Hubert to be rather unsympathetic. For one, there’s the endless rationalization of his law-breaking; for another there’s his constant companionship (and heavy drinking) with his friend Susannah. And while he bitches constantly about being broke, he eats almost every meal in restaurants and drinks four or five margaritas each night. And he listens to jazz… of course.

Most of all, though, Schuze peeves this reader because he keeps talking about “chilies.” I sure hope that he got stuck with that spelling by an editor, because a real New Mexican knows there’s only one I in “chiles” – and the proper spelling is preserved in The Congressional Record…

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