The Manual of Detection

I really enjoyed this book. Effortlessly beautiful, the writing is lyrical and dreamy. The reader feels they are peering into a strange new world that is familiar yet strange. Charles Unwin is but a cog in the great machinery of a national detective agency. A diligent and well-respected clerk, Unwin finds himself thrown off his established routine when he is unceremoniously promoted to detective. Though very familiar with all of the agencies high-profile cases, Unwin is rather unwilling to take on crime fighting himself. Unfortunately, he soon finds himself in the midst of one of the greatest capers the city has ever seen. Will he catch the infamous Hoffman before he can steal another day off the calendar or maybe something even worse?

So, imagine you trip & fall down Alice's rabbit-hole, tumbling past dreamscapes & spooky carnival sideshows before landing with a thump in a smoky jazz bar filled with pajama-clad characters from Inception & The Maltese Falcon. (Don't fail to notice the shadow of someone from Minority Report lurking in the deepest shadow. See it? Right by the deep-green poster with an all-seeing golden eye....) Feeling disoriented & sore from your fall, you head directly for the bar. Bartender Thursday Next suggests you try the "Drink Me" special & begins mixing it before you even open your mouth to speak. Into the shaker, she pours:
Magritte's umbrellas
Col. Mustard in the kitchen with a gun
A decoder ring from a Cracker Jack box
Elephant dreams
A ticking show more alarm clock
And a healthy shot of rain
With a flick of the wrist, Thursday shakes, then pours your drink over cubes of red leaves before adding a garnish of phonograph record speared on a freshly-sharpened pencil. She yawns & slides your drink across the bar. Fog is fingering its way out over the rim as you raise the glass in a toast to clerks, typewriters, & biloquists. You down the drink in one swallow while simultaneously tossing it over your left shoulder into the harbor, trailing a stretch of typewriter ribbon as it sinks below the surf.

Thirsty yet? If so, crack open the emerald cover of The Manual of Detection & fall right in.... show less

A strange, wonderful fever dream of a story, Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection features a delightfully bizarre plot against the people of an unnamed city, which suddenly-promoted clerk Charles Unwin must try to unravel before it's too late. Berry's mysterious detective agency is a bureaucratic labyrinth to savor, and his characters are fascinating.

Requires close attention, since every word matters and every detail counts for something (as it should in every good detective story!)

Some people like mysteries because, as a genre, these books include predictable features (corpses and detectives, for instance), while they exclude others (vampires and time travel, for instance). But this generic predictability doesn’t always hold true in recent mysteries, which sometimes trample the boundaries between mystery and fantasy or between mystery and the post-modern novel. Jedediah Berry’s 2009 book, The Manual of Detection, is an example of a mystery that shares features with magical realist or post-modern fiction.
Charles Unwin is an unambitious clerk in an unnamed detective agency whose logo and motto are practically identical with the old Pinkerton Agency. Unwin files the reports for a detective who goes missing, and show more Unwin is unwillingly promoted to the missing detective’s place. Thus far we might say we are in familiar territory, with an dozen Hitchcock thrillers. But not soon strange things begin to happen. Unwin discovers that his detective’s most famous cases, The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker, The Oldest Murdered Man, and The Man Who Stole November Twelfth, turn out to have been setups that he did not solve at all. Half the city seems to be asleep, part of a plot by the notorious Enoch Hoffman, whose circus specialty was “biloquism,” the ability to assume anyone’s voice. Sleep turns out to be very important in The Manual of Detection, which is, by the way, the name of a book given to Unwin when he is promoted, though the edition the detectives use is missing an all-important final chapter, on dream detection. The higher-ups in the agency use a technique which enables their operatives to eavesdrop on the dreams of others.
The book is full of allusions to detective fiction: to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Continental Op, to H.R.F.Keating’s bicycle-riding Inspector Ghote and to other mystery classics, but there are also unmistakable references to Jorge Luis Borges, to Franz Kafka, to Lewis Carroll, and to Mikhail Bakhtin’s book on the carnival impulse in human culture that is always at war with the conservative element. The villain here is part of a carnival, and the agency is at war with it, but when the agency adopts dream detection, it forms an alliance with the very people it opposes.
A Manual of Detection is a timely allegory about how much power we allow the watchers. In a time when an ex Vice-President makes the claim that in defense of the country, whatever methods work must be used without regard to whether they are right or wrong, this book asks the question whether we can tell the good guys from the bad guys when they use the same methods. show less

I sleepwalked through The Manual of Detection. A somnambulant tryst through the Agency and the dark fight for Truth and Goodness versus Evil and Exhaustion. I dreamed about it and I woke up in a sweat. It got into my head and I couldn't get it out, but that was OK. Marlowe was there or maybe it was the thin man. Alice and the rabbit. Incessant rain and autumn leaves yellow and brown and rotting. Old typewriters and goofy gangsters. Even a murder or two. I couldn't wake up. Jedediah Berry had caught me up in his carnival dream world at the edge of Gotham and when I woke I was sure it was all real. I was even a little damp around the edges.

Fascinating and surreal, this book put me in mind of the movie Dark City which is a mixture of noir and dream time in which things are not what they seem at first glance.

Charles Unwin, a clerk of the detective agency where he works, inexplicably gets promoted to detective when his detective, Severt(sp?) disappears off the grid. Unwin finds himself thrust into a surreal landscape of several crimes which he'd thought solved but due to some of his own conceits (such as his leaving out the more interesting details of Severt's musings over his cases) were actually not solved at all. It's up to Unwin to untangle the dreams of others, his own case files and the strange clues he's given by a variety of interesting people along the way to solve show more this riddle and get his old job back.

I like the feel of the story. The constant rain, the sense of shades of gray, Unwin's prized bicycle and umbrella, his habits and curiosity are so well described, you feel as if you're within the book itself. The structure of the book is more like a dream itself, with everything out of synch and not following any particular timeline. While this may seem confusing at first, the further into the story, the more sense it makes. It's well worth the time to puzzle your way through with Charles Unwin. show less

This book feels like it could by the archetype of the whole detective genre - It feels like the author tried to put all the detective elements into this book, and turned it into something that is completely unique, but at the same time, very recognizable as a detective story.

At the same time, its a work of fantasy (without the magic), instead we get an unnamed city, a whole crew of odd suspects, an organization that has its secrets, a bumbling detective, clues, hints, premonitions, and dreams. Ultimately, this is a book about dreams.

My only complaint is that I didn't like the ending - it fit, it was well done, but I wanted more explanation. Or maybe I'm just annoyed because I was over thinking the whole plot :)