Zahn’s rail-connected universe is by no means hard sf, but as in the previous book, Zahn delivers some solid science fictional twists to the mystery. One of them is so obvious that I got a little impatient waiting for the penny to finally drop, but I think that may have been in part a diversionary tactic on Zahn’s part.

Somewhere in the build-up to the climax I got a little confused about which planetary system everyone was off to and why, but my favorite plot twist snapped me back to full alertness.

I’m wrestling with myself over whether I want to read the final book now! of wait another month to prolong my enjoyment of the series. Now! may win.

needs more demons? nope.

Zahn is clearly aware of the sources he’s riffing on — at one point Compton and his maybe ally/maybe femme fatale actually watch Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes — but two attributes of the novel save it from sinking into parody. The first is Compton’s narrative voice, which seems to be modeled on Hammett’s Continental Op. He’s quietly competent, eschewing the misogyny and personal demons of Chandler’s Marlowe, and Compton always takes his own situation seriously, even when Zahn’s tongue slips into his cheek. The second is that the unraveling mystery works fairly well in science fiction terms. (There’s a point where the seasoned SF reader may find a conclusion obvious well before light dawns on Compton, but on the other hand Zahn finds more-or-less credible explanations for some of the flimsier tropes of detective/espionage fiction that he borrows.)

Night Train to Rigel wraps up with a lump of exposition before a pair of predictable (if emotionally satisfying) set-pieces, a minor flaw in a novel that seems tailor-made for the description “ripping yarn.” There are two more novels in the series (although this one is complete in itself) and I look forward to reading them once I dig out of my soon-to-be-overdue library book pile.

needs more demons? no.

I was primarily bothered by details of tone. Character names like Unwin, Pith, Screed and Travis T. Sivart (maybe he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going?) seem chosen either for humorous or allegorical effect. Those names, coupled with some early scene-setting strikingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil gave me misgivings that The Manual of Detection would either be a madcap fantasy à la Jasper Fforde or a derivative Orwellian/Kafka-esque exercise. It’s neither of those. I suppose it would be possible to read some aspects of The Manual of Detection as symbolic of commercial and governmental encroachment on privacy, but I’m inclined to read the novel at face value — a noirish detective story with some fantastic or magical realist aspects, that happens to be set in a surreal environment.

Be that as it may, after the first few chapters I was thoroughly captivated and quit worrying about whether character names were sometimes goofy. Berry displays a deep familiarity with the classic noir tropes and a nice sense of which ones to honor and which to subvert. His prose is marvelously suited to the book — spare, almost reportorial, enlivened by carefully positioned adjectives. I can well believe Berry spent hours polishing his deceptively simple sentences. When Unwin must revisit some of Sivart’s old case files, on the other hand, they recall Chandler’s cynical protagonists and the offbeat metaphors that define the typical first-person noir narrative voice (”I was about as useful as a jack-in-the-box with his lid glued shut,” is how he describes his lack of double-jointed ability to slip out of restraints).

Director Richard Linklater may be done making movies with dream-like themes, but if there are alternate universes there must somewhere be one where Linklater directs an animated adaption of The Manual of Dectection in a style similar to Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and I really hope it’s this one. Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville) could probably do it justice, too.

I also can’t discuss this book without mention how lovely the physical design of Penguin Press’s hardcover is — The Manual of Detection that exists inside the novel is described in some detail, and the real book matches the description, gold foil “Never Sleeping” logo and all. The poor marketing puff and pull quotes are relegated to the endpapers.

needs more demons? nope.

I have noticed that private detectives do not spend much time discussing the injuries incurred in the line of duty, or whatever it is they call their work. They alll seem to have this incredible ability to shake of serious beatings, sometimes with blunt objects, with a remark to the effect that they were a little stiff the next day but a good shower and massage would take care of it
…
I’m not like that. I bruise easily. The contusions I suffered from that fall in the warehouse in Bicêtre left ugly yellow and purple blotches. I’d probably have them for months. And they hurt. I won’t mention it again, but I did want you to know.

Much of The Alternative Detective’s pleasure is meta-textual — it assumes you’ve read enough hardboiled PI fiction that you will appreciate how it honors some of the time-worn genre conventions and inverts or undermines others, like the more-or-less invincible protagonist. The Alternative Detective also riffs on some of the shopworn plot elements of the genre, perhaps most explicitly on The Maltese Falcon-styled tales. For my taste, The Alternative Detective never got quite so silly that I stopped paying attention to its plot entirely; nor did it ever get so serious that I gave it the kind of scrutiny I give to Dashiell Hammett’s fiction.

I was a little bugged by the narrator’s hippie-ness (worse, actually: ex-hippie-ness) — but that’s mostly a personal problem on my part, and anyway I wasn’t bugged enough to stop.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no,” though it’s a close call.

As in the prior novel, Irby seamlessly melds real historical figures like Harvey Firestone, Joe Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, and her third husband Henri de La Falaise into his fast-moving, twist-filled plot. Also as in the previous book, Irby leans hard on coincidence, mostly to establish connections between his upper- and lower-crust characters, but that bugged me less this time. Once again, there’s enough accurate historical detail that the reader could learn a few things without it ever getting intrusive.

One feature I didn’t mention when I wrote about 7,000 Clams is that sometimes there’s an additional level of irony. Some of Irby’s descriptions of 1928 could easily apply to other years up to and including 2009, viz a northern society lady’s first glimpse of a swank hotel:

[She] joylessly trudges through the well-appointed lobby of the Flamingo Hotel located on the bay side of Miami Beach. It is a huge, hulking barn of pink stucco, with a decor that strikes her as relentlessly Florida: pastels, marine life, palm fronds. Everything is bigger than it needs to be, glossy to the pint of smarmy, overbearing in its irrepressible invitations to “have fun” and “relax,” and above all dedicated to the haughty display of wealth. Why wear one necklace when six will do just fine? These sunburned barbarians talk loudly, guffaw like baboons, and careen about like they have been jolted with electricity.

(7,000 Clams similarly featured a brief trip to a Baltimore cop bar that was almost like a scene from The Wire.)

Here’s my most telling reaction to this book: If Irby writes another novel about Hearn, I’ll certainly read it. But I hope he doesn’t — I hope he finds some other improbably charming lowlife to write about instead — because I’d like to think that after the conclusion of The Up and Up Hearn might get to live out the rest of his days without anything especially suspense novel-worthy befalling him.

needs more demons? nossir.

But there’s nothing fannish about 7,000 Clams. Ruth is portrayed as a man ruled by his appetites — for food, women, and amusement. He’s a bit of a stinker, frankly, even if he’s not totally charmless. His massive presence — literally and figuratively — forms the gravitational core around which the other characters orbit.

Irby is a history professor, and 7,000 Clams is spiced with enough historical detail that one can learn a bit from the book, but not nearly enough to detract from its substantial entertainment value. Irby skillfully blends a handful of historical figures with invented characters. His people are vivid and multi-dimensional, particularly the brutish yet lovable thug/grifter Frank Hearn, and the two strikingly different dames he gets entangled with in his pursuit of the titular 7,000 Clams. Irby also concocts a remarkably unpleasant but chillingly believable bogeyman (as well as giving a cameo to a real-life nasty). The dialogue is filled with the requisite snaps and wisecracks, and Irby’s descriptions are clear and vivid. The handful of awkward sentences are certainly forgivable in a debut novel.

My one gripe is that Irby’s plot leans awfully hard on coincidence. His St. Petersburg seems like such a small place that there would be no way for people with connections to avoid running into one another. But if the twists strained my credibility, they didn’t much reduce my enjoyment. There’s a sequel, The Up and Up, and I’m eager to read that, too.

needs more demons? nope

North by Northanger evades most of my specific criticisms of the previous novel: it’s much more credible and takes fewer (and, I think, more justifiable) liberties with Austen’s characters. Even better, its less bound by genre conventions than either of its predecessors. North by Northanger doesn’t work as a whodunnit — the attentive reader will likely pick up on several obvious clues well before the Darcys — but nonetheless effectively creates dramatic tension, leavened, as always, with humor. It’s possibly my favorite of the series so far, and certainly much more sure-footed than Suspense and Sensibility.

needs more demons? nope.

Since I keep reading the darned things, I can’t claim they don’t work for me as escapist entertainment at some level. But that doesn’t mean their weaknesses don’t irk me, and it doesn’t mean I don’t wish they were a little better.

Harris’s Dead Until Dark has many of the genre hallmarks, but it avoids some of the pitfalls.

First and foremost, the writing is markedly less clunky.

Paranormal romances often seem comic book-y to me (in a negative sense). Protagonists in the Anita Blake mold are generally some sort of short-fused bounty hunter with unusual (psychic/magical) abilitites. This leads to dreadfully clichéd set-pieces in which a character reacts to something innocent (a thrown snowball, a tap on the shoulder) with deadly force and only just manages to avoid skewering/shooting a lover/friend/girl-scout-selling-cookies because her reflexes are so supernally fast. Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse bucks the trend — she does have a superpower of sorts, but she’s a waitress and the novel is thankfully free of “don’t-sneak-up-on-me-I-almost-killed-you” bits.

Another way in which paranormal romances remind me of bad comic books is that events only have consequences when the consequences usefully advance the plot. In particular, Blake and her many imitators have trouble with murder. The vampires/werewovles/etc. kill people — that’s part of their nature. There’s usually a sort of what-happens-in-vampire-town-stays-in-town meme, with human authorities mostly staying out of monster business. But the vampire/werewolf/etc. societies don’t feel internally consistent in their attitude toward death; their mores are too essentially human. They usually come off a bit like squabbling drug gangs — that is, as if devauling (the taking of) life is a deliberate rebellion against the dominant social order, which is reinforced by the high value of life (when it is taken from your group, necessitating revenge).

Harris does a very nice job of side-stepping this mess; rather than warring drug gangs, her template seems to be the early days of civil rights, when cops are legally bound to uphold the rights of black folks, but aren’t necessarily happy about it. It’s much more satisfying in science fiction/consistent worldbuilding terms.

The whodunnit aspects of the plot weren’t completely successful for me, but no less satisfying than many mysteries without supernatural elements (of which Harris has written a goodly number).

My main gripe is with the tone — the novel mostly takes itself seriously (there’s some humor, but it arises from the characters and their interactions, not from outlandish plot elements — assuming you grant the fundamental vampires-walk-among-us proposition). But toward the end, there are a couple of twists that push it in a more overtly comic direction, which undercut the suspense for me a little.

Still, I liked it, and I look forward to reading more Harris.

needs more demons? nah.

Pride and Prescience owes at least as much to the gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe as to Austen (with several unambiguous nods in the direction of Brontë’s Jane Eyre to boot). But Bebris doesn’t play for broad laughs; if Elizabeth Darcy finds herself in a stereotypical Gothic novel circumstance — in a drafty, Stygian hallway, overhearing strange sounds, say — she reacts naturalistically, and Bebris doesn’t club the reader over the head with the echoes of other novels.

In general, it’s surprisingly successful. The mystery is fairly satisfying on its own terms, with several well-laid red herrings, although some purists might well feel that that the dénouement doens’t quite play fair. Bebris adopts a prose style that blends 19th- and 21st-century stylistic conventions; the vocabulary is mildly high-falutin’, and some of the sentences aspire to Austen’s elaborate, graceful structures and sly reversals, but there are also short declarative sentences (and even fragments) to nudge things along for the modern reader. The copy-editing seemed much more competent than in several of the other books I’ve read recently; I noticed a few descriptive words repeated in close proximity, but didn’t trip over any real clunkers. Darcy and Elizabeth seem a tad modern in some respects — their private conversations are more frank than I think Austen would have ever imagined — but they are also convincingly rendered as members of a society quite different from ours (especially in their attitudes toward the servant class).

Overall I enjoyed it, and will read more in the series.

needs more demons? negatory.

needs more demons? no, but Dorst needs to write more books.

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