Book Notes: Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes

June 29th, 2009

A Twin Peaks book, with the full title of: The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. It tells Agent Cooper’s backstory, starting as a young boy, through transcriptions of his quirky habit of recording notes in a personal tape recorder, usually addressed to a mysterious “Diane.”

The Good

• Largely met my personal list of expected expansions based on my viewing of the television show: How Cooper became an agent (check), the backstory of Windom Earle and his wife, Caroline, and even small details like who is Diane, Dennis (later Denise) Bryson, Gordon Cole, Cooper’s love for coffee (a college sweetheart introduces him to various brews) and pie.
• Captures that peculiar Twin Peaks mix of naivete and horror. Cole is a real loner as a youth, and his lack of worldly knowledge adds a fish out of water humor (particularly funny is his experience hitch-hiking home from a scout camp, and his first young love with the slightly older, drug-dabbling born-again Marie). Horror is deftly inserted at various points: how he comes across his mother’s ring, an arsonist college sweetheart, and his first few cases as a new F.B.I agent. Certain chill-inducing events — like the television show — are never explained (a man “painted blue” that appears outside Cooper’s window). Especially creepy are entire passages and even years transcribed as “erased” or “missing,” leaving unspeakable things to the imagination.

The Bad

• In the book, Cooper investigates the Teresa Banks murder in southwest Washington, which contradicts the depiction of that case in the movie, Fire Walk With Me, where Chester Desmond leads an investigation, while Cooper is back in Philadelphia.
• As Cooper’s entire lifetime was spent outside of Twin Peaks, none of that town’s unique denizens appear. There is only the tantalizing glimpse of the pacific Northwest in the final few pages.

Conclusion

If you’ve watched the television series and are hungry for more, this book provides that and then some. Damn good pie — I mean book.