This book made me so sad. For a few days I was really down after it was over. I don't think it went where I wanted it to go. It is not my style of fiction, so maybe I was expecting more. Maybe it was too subtle for me. This is definitely a different sort of book, and I think it would please a "reluctant reader." ( )

I think what I liked about The Boy Detective Fails was that it turns the pristine childhood detective myth (see Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys, etc.), that I loved so much as a kid, completely on its head. In this book, the brilliant boy detective grows up, suffers heartache and loss, gets sent to a mental institution, and when he emerges, now 30, the world has evolved and decayed around him. Meno then takes this new character, evolved and somewhat decayed himself, and drops him into situations that his childhood counterpart would have handled easily (if the laws of childhood physics applied at all to adults) and shows us what real life is like. Well, sort of.

The writing is good. The narrator is sympathetic without being sentimental, occasionally breaking down the fourth wall to address the reader directly. Meno uses a number of post-modern styles in formatting (scattering words around a page, utilizing modern typesetting [I mean, "word processing"] tricks such as bullet points) to further illustrate his story.

Would I recommend this book? Sure. It's touching, well written, got good characters, interesting situations, a decent plot driving them. What's not to like. It's probably too eclectic for readers looking for the same old same old, but if you like to explore off the beaten path, I think this would be a fun adventure. ( )

Any book that plays with the theme of lost youth/innocence is going to be something that I'll fall for hard, which is why it surprised me that I wasn't flat-out in love with this book. All I can explain is that Meno, in the midst of his quirky scenes, sudden left turns, and puzzle gimmicks, ends up keeping some emotional distance from his characters.

The set-up is intriguing enough: the sister of a now-grown-up boy detective (who also served as Watson to his Sherlock) commits suicide, and the "boy" -- Billy Argo, now 30 years old -- wants to understand why. Along his path, he reminisces about past cases and even solves one that had been left unsolved (with some help from beyond the grave from his sister).

Lots of funny characters wander in and out of Billy's journey, including some of his arch-nemeses and a love interest. I commend Joe Meno for his creativity and for his playing with the novel form, but I had a hard time feeling like it all came together into something coherent and singular. Meno received much attention from an earlier novel (_Hairstyles of the Damned_), and I have to think that were it not for the success of that first book, this book may have had a harder time getting published. ( )

"The Boy Detective Fails" centers around Billy Argo, a once amazing boy detective who solved the most difficult puzzles and cases with his sister Caroline and their friend Fenton. His world turned upside down when his sister mysteriously committed suicide, and suddenly Billy didn't have an answer or know how to solve this one mystery. And his world crumbled. The novel followed Billy's picked up his quest years later, upon being released from a mental hospital for trying to kill himself. The world turned into a mystical place, where buildings disappeared into thin air, flipping the light switch in his room started a gently falling snow flurry, and coded messages appear from nowhere. (He also befriended two neighborhood children trying to discover who decapitated their pet rabbit.)

An intriguing fantasy -- almost like reading a Tim Burton film -- world that was a bit difficult for me to get into, at first. I found it too bizarre for my tastes, but I stuck with it not only because the story of Billy trying to solve his sister's suicide held my interest, but because Meno included a few puzzles for the reader to solve. (Many of the pages have an encrypted word at the bottom of the page, in much smaller font; also the "narrator" of the tale invites the reader to use a decoder key, presented at the back of the book, to help Billy decipher the mysterious notes he finds.) Gimmicky, yes, yet it added a bit of insight into Billy's character, his fascination with puzzles and with solving them. And I was hooked. And I was satisfied. ( )

I had him as a fiction writing professor at Columbia College Chicago. A rare teacher in that he cares about his students and wants them to care just as much about the craft of writing.
I appreciate his work and his efforts.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

So for today's review to make sense, I need to explain something to those who are reading it from outside of Chicago; that although our literary community here is a large and thriving one, with hundreds of published writers and hundreds of others who perform live on stages each week, there are perhaps only two handfuls of authors in the city now who have achieved legitimate national mainstream success, the kind of success where you can mention them to random people in other cities and they'll say, "Oh, I've heard of him. He's good." And these 10 or 15 writers tend to be revered by much of the rest of the community, for choosing to stay in Chicago and continuing to support the local scene here, instead of running off to Brooklyn like every writer and their hipster f--king uncle seems to have done by now; and this is especially true when they double as a professor at one of the local colleges as well, which most of these 10 or 15 most famous Chicago authors do, building these little undergraduate armies that not only adore them but almost worship them outright.

And thus do we come to Chicago author Joe Meno, a guy around my age and on the staff of Columbia College's well-known fiction program (a school also well-known for their film and photography programs), whose huge and surprising national success now has mostly come from his long-time association with Punk Planet (both the magazine and now the publishing company). And the reason I know that Meno has this entire small army of ultra-passionate fans is because of publishing here at the site last year an only so-so review of his first novel, 2004's maudlin indie-rock memoir Hairstyles of the Damned, which happened to also be the high-profile kickoff of Punk Planet as a small press; although none of his fans were outright rude or mean to me after I posted that mediocre review, I did certainly hear from a whole sh-tload of them, on a regular basis that has never stopped to this day, with most of them very patiently explaining over and over how I really owe it to myself to just read some of his newer work. "Seriously," the average email or comment would go, "just sit down and read some of his newer work. Seriously. You'll see then why everyone goes so nuts for him."

Okay, so this week I finally did; I finally got my hands on his latest novel, 2006's The Boy Detective Fails, also on the now-proven Punk Planet imprint (who also this year put out Elizabeth Crane's newest book, speaking of revered Chicago authors with national followings). And hey, guess what, Meno fans, you're right, you're right! This is an astounding novel, I have to admit, something that immediately rockets Meno past the "snotty college DJ with a book in him" level of his first manuscript and into the stratum of "an American version of Haruki Murakami" (or if you will, a more accessible Mark Danielewski), a dense and trippy story that is metaphorical, emotional, naked and layered all at once, the sure sign of a mature writer coming into his own for the first time. In fact, after finishing it, I had to ask myself why Meno didn't just start his career in novels with a story like this in the first place, instead of the semi-hacky material of Hairstyles, material that had already been mined to death by such writers as Nick Hornby, Chuck Klosterman and a million 19-year-old zinesters? If you've got this kind of novel in you, why not just start with this novel?

But then I remembered -- maybe Meno didn't have this kind of novel in him when he wrote Hairstyles, that maybe it took the writing of Hairstyles to be able to put together a novel like Boy Detective. And this of course gets into a subject I've talked about here at CCLaP many times before, one of the reasons that we long-term fans of certain artists become long-term fans to begin with; and that's the pleasures and frustrations of watching a certain artist over the course of their entire career, to watch them both grow and falter as a person and as a creative professional, and to see where the things from earlier in their lives take them later in life. Because make no mistake; when I say that this novel is "Murakamiesque," I mean that impossibly weird, unexplainable things happen on nearly every page, but with Meno confidently steamrolling ahead with the prose as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening at all. There's a difference between that and simply writing a story where weird stuff happens; to reach the kind of level that Murakami and Meno do, you have to write that story in a mature and steady hand, to be completely confident that your story is quite off the tracks altogether of mainstream normalcy but that you yourself are on the right track anyway.

In this case, Meno starts with what would've been a cutesy but otherwise empty Clown Girl style gimmicky literary trick; he envisions a world where such child detectives as Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew actually exist, and as adults have to a fault become overwhelmingly neurotic, barely functioning messes. Our hero Billy Argo, for example, is clearly a stand-in for Brown himself, a precociously intelligent child and cardigan-wearing Modernist poster-boy during his youth, who needs only to stare at random strangers through his magnifying glass to get them to blurt out embarrassing truths about themselves. As a middle-aged adult, though, we learn that Argo has been in and out of mental institutions for decades, with permanent bald spots on the sides of his scalp from all the electroshock treatments he's received, basically hanging up both the detective work and his entire life after the suicide of his beloved sister, fellow crime-fighter during their youths who became an aimless goth after Billy left for university. He spent a decade in a voluntary drug haze within a safely confined state institution because of all this; but now the government money for such programs have dried up, meaning that Billy himself is now dried out, sober and ejected from the hospital and suddenly in the glaring sun of a general population he barely understands anymore, an ugly and obscenity-filled world that is a far cry from his glittering early-'60s youth.

Yeah, I know what a lot of you are saying at this point -- "Zuh? Wha? Come again?" And believe me, this is just the set-up I'm talking about; within the first 50 pages, all of the things I've described have already taken place, leading Billy on a new contemporary quest to understand himself and his sister's death, precisely through a weirder and weirder story involving a halfway house, a mute child bully, gaping underground caverns that might or might not actually exist, and the most unreliable narrator this side of American Freaking Psycho. But just like Murakami (and you know what I mean if you're a fan), Meno manages to pull all these disparate elements together, and in a way that seems effortless too, and deliver a story with a lot of raw and true emotional wallop at its center while still couched in a dreamlike fairytale narrative structure. It's a difficult thing to describe, fans of these stories will tell you, and almost impossible to actually describe where the line lays between these kinds of projects and unintelligible artsy messes; you just know it when you see it, I guess, and here Meno definitely has "it."

Like I said, I think a lot of it has to do with the author themselves getting to a point of real maturity in their careers, a point where they truly understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and are able to veer off suddenly from the norm without worrying fatally that they're heading down the wrong road. This is always where a good writer becomes a great one, after all, is the moment they step off that highway the rest of us are on and say, "You know, I think I'm going to create this brand-new road out of thin air, and I invite the rest of you to drive down it too once I'm finished building it." That's what makes a great artist great; they can imagine this new nonexistent road where none of the rest of us can, when all the rest of us are happy to keep driving down that boring ol' concrete road that everyone else is driving down. Or if you want to put it in even simpler terms in this case, let's say it like this -- that when you compare the two books directly, Hairstyles seems like the one that everyone wanted Meno to write and expected out of him, while Boy Detective is the one that no one but Meno himself could've envisioned beforehand. And it's precisely because of this that Boy Detective is so great, and Hairstyles so mediocre.

This only comes from being a more and more mature artist, and that in turn only comes from being a prolific artist, of simply writing and writing and writing if you're for example a writer, of just picking up that pen and starting the next novel as soon as the previous one is finished. It's a great thing to watch in Meno, to watch him grow as an artist like that, to actually follow through on the raw promise displayed in his earlier flawed work; it's always fantastic, I think, to watch a good writer become a great one right in front of you, and I'm sure is a big part of what inspires such a passionate audience around Meno's work in the first place. I'm happy that all of them bugged me so much over the last six months, and goaded me into reading Boy Detective and changing my opinion about his work; oh, that all of us could be as lucky as Meno, I suppose, and have the kind of passionate and proactive group of fans that he does. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to reading yet more of this intriguing author's work in the future.

Out of 10:
Story: 9.1
Characters: 9.0
Style: 9.8
Overall: 9.5 ( )

This book is cute, sweet & sad. It is a little cutesy in places. It is like a written-out comic book. I thought he made effective use of the image of disappearing buildings in Gotham. The universe is Batman's Gotham City, I think. or some variation.

There are books that you read in a haze of wonder, each page feeling like a dream you once had or a memory barely remembered. Lovely and wondrous and a little bit sad. Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails broke my heart and then, very gently pieced it back together, maybe even a little better and stronger than it was before. It is a story about mysteries, the small ones and the greatest ones, about growing up and about falling in love. The year nearly at an end, I can say that this novel was my favorite this year.

If you, as a child, were a religious watcher of Scooby Doo and read Encyclopedia Brown and other stories of childhood sleuths this novel will be of a particular interest. What happens to the child detectives we so loved when they grow up? What happens when they encounter a mystery that eludes them? The titular Boy Detective never failed to solve a mystery in his youth, with his sister and pal Fenton at his sides. As an adult, however, he struggles to cope with failure and with the always elusive mystery that is what happens when we die.

Some reviewers I've encountered on the net found the story in some ways disjointed. There are side characters and villains that, they say, appear out of context and are unnecessary filler. I disagree. These side characters build a world that is the Boy Detective's own. Without them he is even more alone, and the true heart of this story is that we do not need to be alone even in the face of a world that is tragically not as kind and warm as we would like it to be. An easy 5 stars.

http://cabal.knickmeyer.net/ ( )

Now in the form of a novel, Joe Meno has previously written this story as a short story (which I haven't read) and a play (which I saw performed by the House Theatre in Chicago). Both the play and the novel incorporate the same major themes and plot elements, so it is understandable that the novel seems to have a bit of extraneous material.

I love the core idea here, which is to start with the style of a child's detective novel, and the morally structured world that is implied there, and to portray growing up as the process of understanding that not all wrongs can be righted and not everything in this world can be explained. From this mystery and ambiguity, we get fear but also love. However, I think that the play just nailed it a bit more cleanly and succintly. ( )

This was a book I wanted to like. I was a big fan of Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys, and I must confess to borrowing a few of my sister's Nancy Drew novels. Yes, those stories were a bit hokey, often revolving around some nuance. But there was a sense that puzzles could be solved, and good would triumph.

Joe Meno turns that on its head in The Boy Detective Fails. Instead of a realistic take on a grown-up sleuth whose best days are now behind him, we instead get a pastiche that pokes fun of many of the same characteristics that made the simple youth-oriented stories so much fun. Encyclopedia Brown had stories about The Case of the Mysterious Handprints; the titular boy detective solves "Fatal Orphanage Arson." Meno seems to cross over genres, adding superhero-like characters like "The Blank" who shows up for the "Convocation of Evil," which the now-adult boy detective must stop.

There were great parts in the story. Some reviewers on Amazon were upset that they couldn't use the decoder ring (out of library books) to solve some of the rather simple cryptograms, but they did add a bit of interest. We get to meet Frank and Joe "Hartly," who, like our boy detective, have not had success as adults after years of teen-based investigation. And one scene where the boy detective provides incredible details about a fellow employee is almost vintage Sherlock Holmes.

Sadly, those moments aren't enough to hold the book together. Instead, we get a strange co-story about two misfit neighborhood children -- they cross paths with the boy detective, but then wind up going their own way. (There's also an encrypted story about one other character to be found at the bottom of several pages, but it's not very interesting -- and my copy had a typo in the first word.) Meno can certainly build empathy for his characters: there's nothing more sad than when our boy detective sits in his room, turns on the light, and watches the snow fall. It's tying these moments together with disappearing buildings and strange red rashes that make it so frustrating, because there's no context.

In the youth mysteries, everything was neatly tied up at the end of the story. Meno wants to challenge that, by giving the boy detective a mystery that may not be possible to solve (his sister's sudden suicide years before). No longer is the world a simple place; no longer can we count on a happy ending. You're kept guessing whether the boy detective ever breaks out of his melancholy, has success with women, or figures out why his sister died. The emotional pull of the book is strong, but the over-the-top characterization of peripheral characters makes you wonder why you care. ( )

This has got to be one of the dumbest books I have tried to read in ages. Don't believe I will run out and buy any more of Joe Menos books. ( )

This gem of a novel explores how the juvenile detectives of children's fiction would cope (or not) as adults in our real world. We see this world largely through Billy's neurotic gaze, hazy from his medication. He's 30 years old, and still hasn't coped with his sister's suicide. His world (and his pain) is to him a mystery that needs solving.

A review blurb on the back of the book says it will "break your heart, and then pick up the pieces and put you back together again." That is surprisingly apt. I haven't taken the time to try deciphering the coded messages at the bottom of the pages. But if you read this, try to find the hidden messages from Caroline's diary. ( )

This book was one of the weirdest books I have read in a while. And I do love weird books. The main chararcter is a "boy detective" who has grown up. He basically has to adjust to living in the real world, but does it in a very bizarre way. I think this is a quick, fun read! ( )

This is a quirky book that vacillates between surrealism and fact in a way that few others do. In one moment the lights are broken in his room and instead of illuminating they snow. In the next, notes left by a "ghost" turn out to have a logical reason for existing.

Crammed full of puzzles and cryptograms, despression and apathy, tragedy and failure, mental illness and monotony, humor and mystery - it is like nothing I have ever read. I laughed out loud when I read on page 2 that the young boy detective's favorite games were "Wild West Accountants" and "Recently Divorced Scientists", but that set me up to expect a farce, not a novel with this sort of range.

This book deserves to beome a minor modern cult classic and I recommend it to anyone who liked "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Haddon. ( )