Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Crime & mystery fiction
Weblink
http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue …

THE DEVIL AND THE DETECTIVE

John Goldbach

The Devil and the Detective is a noir novel about the biggest mystery of all – that of consciousness. It’s an unorthodox meditation on writing, love, violence and ideology – imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton.

Private detective Robert James is more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, receives a phone call in the middle of the night from Elaine Andrews, a young woman who has just found her much older husband dead on their living room couch, a knife protruding from his chest. Or at least that’s probably what happened.

Murder, corruption and betrayal ensue as hapless Bob is drawn into both the dark underworld of Elaine and Gerald Andrews – and the tangled web woven by his own mind. Along the way, he befriends a young grad student/ﬂower-delivery driver, Darren, who inadvertently becomes his sidekick: a Watson to his Holmes, or maybe more like a Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. Or is it the other way around? Either way, Bob and Darren can’t stop drinking, smoking and philosophizing long enough to keep up with the story.

Available products
Book Published 2013-04-30 by Coach House Books - Toronto (CA)
Book Published 2013-04-30 by Coach House Books - Toronto (CA)

Comments

When John Goldbach told me he had some noir he'd like me to see I told him I could sure use some decent noir, send it, and he did, and it is. Except it isn't really of course noir. It's noirtire, or satoir, where the fun is not in Take This Seriously but in the goofy edges of the detective. This detective has good goofy edges and I expect them to get goofier and better over time. Mr. Goldbach will be a fun writer to watch. Check him out.

The world has hitherto been divided into plotters who wrote in shoddy sentences and linguistic aesthetes who wrote beautiful sentences but couldn't make anything happen on the page, no plot. Goldbach manages to do both – a thrilling plot and beautiful language. He has raised the bar for both murder mysteries and literary writing. – Josip Novakovich