Fiction Mondays: The Manual of Detection

Hello everyone! Sorry for the unannounced week off--I had several story deadlines the Friday before last, and my brain melted for an entire week after. Plus, I'm getting ready to move, so that's keeping me pretty busy. Finding an apartment is HARD.

So I'm back, and this week, I want to talk about a mystery novel which is really more of a fable (in the Calvino sense), Jedediah Berry's debut, The Manual of Detection. This book caught my eye when it was out in hardcover, and I finally picked it up when it came out in paperback, and I really loved it. It's a magical realist take on the noir genre, which doesn't make much sense when I say it like that, but really works in the world the author creates.

The plot revolves around a clerk in a large detective agency (clearly modeled on the Pinkerton Agency, complete with a large eye and the slogan "Never Sleep"), George Unwin, who is forced to act as a detective when the agency's superstar, Travis Sivart, goes missing. I can't really discuss much of the plot without giving too much away, but the mystery leads him to discover that some of the most famous cases, including "The Oldest Murdered Man" and "The Man Who Stole November Twelfth," were solved incorrectly. His efforts to correct them lead him to a dream-world and a vast conspiracy.

Berry takes the tropes of film noir and hard-boiled mystery and bends them to create a setting that is both alien and familiar. The action occurs in a city that is perpetually dim and rainy, where the old ways of criminals have been replaced by an element that is more devious and dangerous. All of the old elements are present--each detective is assigned a Girl-Friday type assistant, there's a femme fatale, the detectives are loners who frequent dive bars and carry revolvers--but once the plot gets rolling, these things turn out to be much more complicated than they appear. Travis Sivart, the missing detective, just wanted somewhere he could retire, out in the country, and Unwin's new assistant is a narcoleptic whose involvement in the agency is much deeper than it initially appears to be.

The book is divided up into chapters from the Manual of Detection, the book within the book that each detective is issued. There are chapters on interrogation, on nemeses, and a chapter that was cut from later editions, on a technique to enter dreams to solve a mystery. This book-within-a-book structure is where I really noticed the Calvino references, mostly If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, a book about trying to read a book. The book becomes very important to the plot of the novel, and, fittingly, the story ends in the eighteenth chapter, "On Dream Detection." It can be tough to pull off a dream sequence in a story, let alone several, and I think that making the plot revolve around the dreams of the protagonist and the entire city is a very bold move that pays off for Berry in this novel.

That's all I've got for today. Enjoy the long weekend.