The Simping Detective

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



This is a book for people who really love language. Simon Spurrier's amusing noir take on life in Mega-City One tackles some convoluted and twisted stories of crime and the clown on the mean streets who investigates it, but the plots are so strange, and so complex, that it is often difficult to follow the proceedings. His narration, on the other hand, is sublime. You can easily spend pages reading the amazing descriptions by the grouchy hard-boiled Jack Point before realizing that you lost track of exactly what it was Point was trying to tell you several minutes previously. If Spurrier's prose was poor, that'd be a problem, but it's told so well that it is worth the extra time spent contemplating the plot. And if you think that's not a compliment, you evidently haven't seen the Bogey and Bacall version of Chandler's The Big Sleep, which nobody can decipher either, but thrill to get lost in. Recommended.

(Originally posted January 07, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)