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Detective stories are great aren’t they? The murder mystery formula is so rigid and cliched that it’s like a comfy old jumper, and its sheer familiarity makes it a good vehicle for experimental poo poo. The setup is so helpful for authors, with automatic tension and conflict, that just about everything has been crowbarred into this format at some point no matter how thematically awkward. Sometimes you pick up a detective story and put down something else. Something weird. Equal Danger (Il Contesto) by Leonardo Sciascia, or Gladio Elysium Like every self-respecting investigator - that is, every investigator who entertains the same respect for himself that he wishes to arouse in his readers - Rogas lived alone; nor were there women in his life. (It seems - it seemed vaguely to him, too - that he might once have had a wife.) A detective story about the Years of Lead, written in 1971 and set around then in an ambiguous not-Sicily. This book is less than 120 pages in pretty big print. In the course of those pages half its country’s judges are merked in a hail of .38 bullets, we read a poem about necklaces of Marx’s dead sperm and the frauds who love to wear them, a cat is poisoned by strychnine in an Italian dessert I’d never heard of which would have been poisonous to cats without the strychnine, and not-Sicilian Keir Starmer goes on a psychopathic rant about the criminal justice system having papal infallibility. Scorn is piled on every line of work that appears, with the plod perhaps naturally getting the worst of it. Our hero is a cop named Amerigo Rogas who is very keen to let you know how many books he’s read and mysteriously short of sensitive, intellectual cop friends despite being some kind of hot shot crime solving ace. Assigned to the case of the initial judge shootings, Rogas learns of a man who did five years for what he believes was a frame job - sent down by one dead judge and confirmed on appeal by another. Our suspect then waltzes past a hapless police surveillance effort and judges continue to get blasted through the heart. But wait - witnesses saw a couple of suspicious bearded cadre-lookin fellas fleeing the latest scene. Could this still be a simple spree of revenge killings, or is something more Political going on? The style of the writing in this book is really quite bizarre and I’ve never read anything like it. Though it’s very quick to the point, with a lot of entertainingly pithy lines, it’s also a farcical stream of nightmare consciousness something like Kafka (or maybe Joyce, who, unlike Rogas probably, I have Not Read). Sciascia writes these threads of an apparent mystery that disappear unheralded into a much bigger and darker mystery that swallows the story. It’s one of those books you think about for a lot longer than you spent reading it, and it’s very atmospheric and evocative. Def worth picking up as it’s unusually breezy for a book that makes you feel like you did a little bit of an intellectualism. Anyone else read Sciascia or got more cool and weird detective stories? If you got em post em :3
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Apr 9, 2023 11:23
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The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda might qualify. Past the prologue, the first chapter opens with a casual interview where we're privy only to the answers, not the questions. The book does eventually settle into more orthodox modes of plot delivery, but it sets a certain tone that persists throughout the novel. Centered on an amateur investigation into a fictional mass poisoning at a birthday party in a Japanese town some decades ago, the book at times feels like an interrogation of true crime podcasts despite being written in 2005—too early to be predictably cynical about the whole thing. The actual mystery is there, it does its job, but I stuck with it for the way it gently encourages the reader to feel out the seam between narrative and fact, and what either of those things does or does not mean to a community traumatized by mass murder. It was vibes I dunno
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Apr 9, 2023 14:06
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Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem is a really weird noir detective/sci-fi novel. The main character is a private detective in a world where asking someone questions is seen as incredibly rude. Animals have been uplifted to have human intelligence but the procedure has also started being used on babies. The novel is a deliberate mash up between Raymond Chandler and Phillip K Dick.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:20
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These sound wicked, gonna give both of em a read. Of course a book can be weird and interesting without being all that good: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon - I can see the Third Russian Republic from my house My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with. There are things to like about this book, though it’s a noir which is also feverishly purple - a deep bruise in detective story form. We follow Meyer Landsman, a standard issue alcoholic detective with ex-wife issues and a half-Tlingit partner, living in the Jewish enclave set up in Sitka, Alaska after Israel blew up on the launchpad. A potential Messiah is found murdered sprawled across his chessboard and things get thorny very fast. Chabon doesn’t do succinct, and loves to bury you in schmaltz and weirdly unexamined tosh that’s not as progressive as he seems to think. The Dashiell Hammett stylings and kooky alt history setting were enough to drag me through it though. In the spirit of TSBF, everything is a book: On the Chorister (Peri tou khoreutou), by Antiphon of Rhamnos Fortune neither I nor any other could prevent from fulfilling her destined part in the life of each of us. Non-fiction in a time before cops. 5th century BCE Athens had trials but no real police; it would be up to your family or friends to investigate your brutal murder, and you’d have to write your own defence speech when accused of say, poisoning a choirboy. Unless you could pay history’s famous orator and oligarchy enjoyer Antiphon to do that for you. This is an interesting entry in the odd historical genre of Greek court speeches as it hinges on something I find morbidly fascinating - the accidental killer, something cars have made wonderfully more common in our era.
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Apr 9, 2023 18:06
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This is more on the goofy side of weird, but there's Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia. Dinosaurs still exist, but they're smaller now, and wear elaborate human disguises so they can walk around unnoticed! It's been 20 years since I read it, so I'm a little hazy on the plot, but it was enjoyably weird. There's another two books in the series, but it looks like the author mostly does TV stuff now, so that might be it. Oh, and one was adapted into a SyFy TV movie starring a Baldwin brother. Yes, it was not great.
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Apr 11, 2023 21:12
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Does the New York Trilogy count? Haven't read it for roughly 20 years. Not sure if it holds up.
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Apr 12, 2023 04:09
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Augustus Snodgrass posted:Does the New York Trilogy count? Haven't read it for roughly 20 years. Not sure if it holds up. Arrrghhhh, I remember reading this in high school and being so into the first story, and then the ending making me completely furious. For whatever reason his inspired me to read more of his novels whenever I could find them at the library, even though most of the time I ended up hating them, mainly for their absolute farts of endings. I do wonder if I'd get more out of them now or not.
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Apr 12, 2023 05:40
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https://www.sichris.com/Games/PataNoir If interactive fiction is permitted, I wrote this surreal noir game about a detective who can solve problems by manipulating hard-boiled similes.
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Apr 12, 2023 09:17
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Augustus Snodgrass posted:Does the New York Trilogy count? Haven't read it for roughly 20 years. Not sure if it holds up. Yeah it holds up and is definitely weird. Great stories. Came here to post them.
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Apr 12, 2023 20:26
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Shogi posted:Equal Danger (Il Contesto) by Leonardo Sciascia, or Gladio Elysium This sounds neat, definitely going to check it out. I really like The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. It’s about an injured and bored policeman who solves the 500-year-old murder of Richard the Third from his hospital bed.
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Apr 12, 2023 20:53
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Fatherland by Robert Harris. Set in a postwar europe where the Nazis won WW2, a detective investigates the murder of a Nazi and uncovers much more (you can guess exactly what easily enough). The weirdest thing about it is how fully realised the setting is
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Apr 13, 2023 13:50
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SimonChris posted:https://www.sichris.com/Games/PataNoir Awesome, ‘permitted’ is putting it lightly cos I love IF. In that same vein I nominate 9:05 by Adam Cadre, which is short and sweet and has a very cool twist that uses the genre smartly
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Apr 13, 2023 17:40
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chesterton's father brown short stories are great.
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Apr 14, 2023 10:52
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The fun thing about Father Brown is the contrast with your positivist Sherlockish type of detective who owns cases with facts and logic, dissecting the flow of events from a lofty external perspective. Brown being a priest and all understands the crimes with a more emotional framework, digging into the motivations and impulses that lead to murder
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Apr 19, 2023 20:21
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The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno is pretty good if you like stuff like The Venture Bros. It follows a young man who was a boy detective alongside his best friend and little sister who has spent years in a mental hospital after having a nervous breakdown when he went to college. He stays at a halfway home full of his former enemies and he can't decide if there's a mystery going on or just a bunch of coincidences.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:30
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Shogi posted:The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon - I can see the Third Russian Republic from my house Ugh, god, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is one of my favorite books of all time. I have an extreme weak spot for weird detective stories, so I'll nominate one of the weirdest ever put to page: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. This is a dense, dense, dense book, written with page after page of extremely obtuse Catholic mythology, the names and lives of saints, histories of heretics and purges and martyrs, and the narrator is not exactly the brightest candle on the altar - but at its core is one of the best Sherlock Holmes style detective novels ever written. The identity of the culprit and their motive is one of the greatest twists I've ever read, one of those things that you can't imagine coming but once it happens it's so obvious you're astonished you didn't realize it earlier. I am a big nerd for strange medieval monk poo poo so this book was a real winner for me, despite it being quite the endurance test. It's one of those books that's better on the second read, knowing which parts you can skim over and what details you can see were coming along. I'll also give Disco Elysium an honorary mention here, although it isn't a book, but it is an interactive fiction game so I at least want to mention it.
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Apr 20, 2023 04:16
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Oh yeah, I forgot that. It turns into an entertaining and faster paced whodunnit (still chockablock with historical in-jokes and references) about one third of the way through. If I remember correctly, Eco said he deliberately made the start of the book as dry as possible
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Apr 20, 2023 07:28
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Not exactly detective stories but I'm a huge sucker for stories about hitmen. Trevanian's 'The Loo Sanction' and 'The Eiger Sanction' are really fun books that both feature the same main character of Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor who moonlights as a talented assassin in order to fund his art collection. Along with 'Shibumi', the books are quasi-spoofs of various dimestore noir novels, but they're well-written enough to stand up on their own. Thomas Perry's ''The Butcher's Boy" series is another fun set of books featuring a (surprise!) debonair assassin, though these books are slightly more serious. The main character kills a senator and then goes to war with the mafia after they screw him over. The action scenes are very well-written, definitely decent books to read at the beach or on a plane. Tumble fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 12:58
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"The News from D Street" - short story by Andrew Weiner. It's an old fashioned missing persons/detective story with a twist. I read it in one of the sci fi pulps from the 80s, so that's a clue as to the twist. If you can find it in print, it is def worth the read.
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Apr 20, 2023 19:01
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Mieville's The City and the City is a good example in this vein. It's a detective novella, but it's set in an allegorical apartheid city where two cities exist in the same space, separated by context and culture, whose occupants are careful to not interact with each other or undo any interaction that happens by accident.
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Apr 26, 2023 19:44
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1secondpersecond posted:Mieville's The City and the City is a good example in this vein. It's a detective novella, but it's set in an allegorical apartheid city where two cities exist in the same space, separated by context and culture, whose occupants are careful to not interact with each other or undo any interaction that happens by accident. the gimmick is so good that it carries the whole book. I can't really remember much of the plot but the setting was just mind blowing and very thought provoking
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Apr 27, 2023 20:04
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Good shout re: The City and the City. In the fantasy-weird vein, there's A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny, which is narrated by Jack the Ripper's dog and that's about the least strange thing about it, I'm not sure how I forgot to mention it before
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Apr 29, 2023 22:16
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1secondpersecond posted:Mieville's The City and the City is a good example in this vein. It's a detective novella, but it's set in an allegorical apartheid city where two cities exist in the same space, separated by context and culture, whose occupants are careful to not interact with each other or undo any interaction that happens by accident. I started reading The City & The City and oh my god I'm in love. This book is so much like Disco Elysium it's uncanny, complete with the surreal science fiction elements in the background that nobody makes a big deal about because it's such an accepted fact about their world. I'm only a few chapters in right now but I am completely hooked.
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May 3, 2023 18:13
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Youremother posted:I started reading The City & The City and oh my god I'm in love. This book is so much like Disco Elysium it's uncanny, complete with the surreal science fiction elements in the background that nobody makes a big deal about because it's such an accepted fact about their world. I'm only a few chapters in right now but I am completely hooked. The City & The City has been also been adapted into a BBC mini-series with beautiful discoelysiumesque visuals:       I don't think it is streaming anywhere, but I recommend tracking down the DVDs. It is a very faithful adaptation, and the minor changes they do make are improvements, imo. SimonChris fucked around with this message at 19:31 on May 3, 2023 |
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May 3, 2023 18:35
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Holy moly, that looks amazing! I'm definitely going to hunt that down as soon as I finish the book, that looks so much like my mental image of the setting it's uncanny.
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May 3, 2023 20:05
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Just finished The City & The City and it it easily one of the best books I have ever read. Holy poo poo. I'm still slightly shaken. The twists are incredible, I love works of fiction where the last 20% of it or so are completely wild and turn the entire thing on its head and this one delivered. Wow.
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May 11, 2023 04:04
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I feel it would be amiss not to mention Felidae by Akif Pirinnci, a creepy murder mystery story where most characters are cats and that's not even the weird part. Feel free to  it if you can, the author turned out to be an rear end in a top hat.
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May 16, 2023 12:23
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Fruits of the sea posted:Oh yeah, I forgot that. It turns into an entertaining and faster paced whodunnit (still chockablock with historical in-jokes and references) about one third of the way through. If I remember correctly, Eco said he deliberately made the start of the book as dry as possible Eco based the structure of the book on training as a medieval monk, so once you're through basic training, things become easier.
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May 16, 2023 13:30
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anilEhilated posted:I feel it would be amiss not to mention Felidae by Akif Pirinnci, a creepy murder mystery story where most characters are cats and that's not even the weird part. Oh poo poo, I didn't know the movie was based off of a book. One of the horniest movies I've ever watched, which was weird, because you know all of the characters are normal cats.
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May 16, 2023 15:29
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Youremother posted:Just finished The City & The City and it it easily one of the best books I have ever read. Holy poo poo. I'm still slightly shaken. The twists are incredible, I love works of fiction where the last 20% of it or so are completely wild and turn the entire thing on its head and this one delivered. Wow. it's definitely a book that in different hands could have been unreadable. I read it around the same time as playing disco elysium and they had a lot of similar vibes
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May 16, 2023 20:11
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The Magicians - James Gunn A detective discovers that magic is real and has to save the world from the ultimate evil.
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Sep 24, 2023 02:12
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A new one! Cahokia Jazz - Francis Spufford https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571336876-cahokia-jazz/ Alternative history 1920s noir where the Native American city of Cahokia was never abandoned, and instead exists as a Catholic-Aztec city state with a fractious relationship to the rest of the USA. Good so far (I'm about halfway through) and much more readable than other Spufford.
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Nov 10, 2023 12:41
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OptionalPirate posted:A new one! sounds quite a bit like The Yiddish Policemen's Union given the alt-USA premise. i picked up one of spufford's books a while ago and the first page was one huge and somehow slappable sentence, so i'm a little nervous about his written-word jazz. but still tempted to read it
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Nov 11, 2023 11:20
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I think we both tried the same Spufford and gave up at the same point. This one is genuinely much easier to get into. It's a bit Yiddish Policemen's Union in concept, but feels a bit more classic noir (perhaps it's the period appropriate racism).
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Nov 11, 2023 13:09
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muscles like this! posted:Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem is a really weird noir detective/sci-fi novel. The main character is a private detective in a world where asking someone questions is seen as incredibly rude. Animals have been uplifted to have human intelligence but the procedure has also started being used on babies. The novel is a deliberate mash up between Raymond Chandler and Phillip K Dick. i read this poo poo there was a gangster hitman kangaroo in it named joey and he does all the cliches straight its pretty funny
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Nov 13, 2023 22:06
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