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Conrad Metcalf is a PI. But hešs not your bog-standard Sam Spade. Hešs a private inquisitor and lives in a deeply weird near-future world, peopled by evolved animals living alongside the humans and where the police monitor people through their karma levels and where everyone survives day-to-day on mind-numbing drugs. Oh, and villains end up in the deep freeze . . . But, in the best PI traditions, Metcalf is drawn into an investigation he'd have done best to ignore. He's been shadowing the wife of a doctor -- and then the quack turns up dead. This immensely clever pastiche of the hardboiled genre features the obligatory helpless dame or two, a raft of bad guys -- one of whom is a kangaroo -- and the usual good cop/bad cop combination (actually, mor e like bad inquisitor/even worse inquisitor in this case . . .) Lethemšs the man who brought us an investigator with Tourettešs Syndrome in MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. This time, too, he's produced a phenomenally clever piece of writing -- but GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC isnšt a science fiction mystery as such, more a chance to test the boundaries of two genres. It's a particularly visual book -- you can picture the kangaroo with the gun, and the babyheads in the bar who have the appearance of babies but without the cuteness and social graces, all, as the man says, to the accompaniment of occasional music. This is a book to admire for its cleverness and craftsmanship. Lethemšs prose is immaculate and his turn of phrase will make you purr. But somehow it never quite engages -- and you may be left thinking that it works best as an intellectual exercise.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, November 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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