When a friend started talking with great enthusiasm about a novel she had just read called The Word on the Street, I was intrigued enough to ask how I might get my hands on a copy. "Oh, you can't buy it," she said. "It's not even published yet. I read a manuscript that I borrowed from a friend of a friend. I had to give it back, but I can ask, if you like."
I told her not to bother, thinking that I would wait until the book appeared in the shops; and I thought nothing more of this exchange until more than a week later when I received a small package in the mail. The envelope contained a floppy disk and instructions for printing out the contents. After a little bit of dexterous work with a pair of scissors, a stapler, and a strip of gaffer tape, I soon had in my hands a little home made book. My own personal copy of The Word on the Street.
At first sight, the novel appears to be a fairly conventional mystery thriller, firmly inhabiting the familiar noir world of Raymond Chandler and his imitators. All the usual elements are there: a missing girl and a father desperate for news; a belligerent pimp and a prostitute with a heart of gold; a corrupt policeman and a night club owner with a secret. To this cast the author adds a few fascinating creations of his own, like the leader of a bizarre new-age religious cult (and someone who is obviously not all that he seems).
The novel is certainly an accomplished piece of work, with scintillating dialogue and a narrative drive that sweeps the reader along at a cracking pace. Yet at the same time there is something odd, something skewed, something so obviously not quite right about this book; although on first reading whatever was wrong was so subtly wrong that I couldn't put my finger on it.
Then it suddenly dawned on me: it's supposed to be a comedy.
So I went back and started over from the beginning. Straight away, I could see that all the clues are there, staring me in the face. Exactly as you would expect in a mystery novel, of course; only I had been too stupid to spot them. But that was because these are not clues as to who committed the crime, but clues as to the nature of the novel itself.
And as soon as you do get the joke, it all starts to make perfect sense. It's like one of these puzzle pictures that looks like a jumble of chaotic images at first sight and then suddenly snaps into focus so that you can never see it any other way ever again. It is a satire so carefully contrived that the reader is left balanced on a knife edge, uncertain as to just how to interpret what he is reading, and whether or not he can even take anything that he is reading at face value at all.
The key is in the personality of J.F. Stringer (no first name provided) the cowardly and accident prone narrator/detective of the piece. His skills of detection, not to put too fine a point on it, leave a great deal to be desired. Instead of the super-intelligent sleuth that we might be expecting, Stringer blunders his way from misadventure to misadventure, getting himself mugged, loosing his wallet, and finally being framed for a murder he didn't commit. As circumstances conspire to lead him further and further away from solving the mystery (or so it seems), we follow him along increasingly digressive paths that we can hardly believe that even the author intended him to follow. It is only when we reach the denouement that we discover that there was nothing even vaguely random about the preceding 250 pages; in a concluding scene that stands comparison with those of the masters of the genre, all the pieces of the jigsaw fall neatly and irrevocably into place.
(To be frank, all but one of the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place; but this final loose end, I am reliably informed, forms the basis of a sequel. And it seems appropriate, somehow, that in this exquisitely constructed novel there should be one stray item left unaccounted for.)
Incidentally, the twist in the tail (obligatory to the genre, of course) comes as a genuine surprise (or at least it did to this reader ).
This book is not a passive read. You can't just let the action wash over you as you would in any airport blockbuster. The novel demands that you at least make an effort to meet it half way. You have to second-guess the narrator, constantly examine everything that he tells you and then assess what is (or what might be) going on.
In some ways, in fact, it is a book that only starts to make sense on a second reading, when you can actually start to see how carefully the clues were laid. But by then you are asking yourself a new set of questions. You start to wonder if these characters are not simply parodies of the stock company of the genre, but a set of archetypes as universal as the cast of the commedia del'arte. Is this not really some mythological epic of the sort discussed by Joseph Campbell, in which the holy fool wanders aimlessly through a forest of dangers until he finally achieves the destiny that he was fated to find from the start? Personally, I am not entirely sure, but I think that it could very well be.
Apparently there are sequels in the pipeline. I look forward to them with great expectation.
(c) John James Peabody, 2003