“Detective Del Farmer is investigating a murder. But
the usual suspects are all in his head. ‘Believe in nothing, believe in Hell,
believe in the Brain Hotel... Secret Dead Men is the most inventive, uplifting,
hilarious, moving novel since Catcher in the Rye’ -- Ken Bruen Del Farmer isn't
your ordinary hardboiled private eye. Instead of collecting fingerprints or
clues, he collects souls of the recently dead. His latest dead guy, Brad
Larsen, might just be the key to destroying Farmer's longtime nemesis, The
Association. Of course, Farmer is sadly mistaken. Larsen isn't offering up the
goods. An FBI agent unstuck in time is toying with him. A mysterious couple
keeps trying to kill him. Another job-a mundane babysitting gig that pays the
bills-is threatening to steer him way off course into a violent hell of sexual
deceit, fractured identities and cheap apartment toilets.
It’s an enjoyable book, somewhat original and quirky.
While often humorous, it does contain enough hard-boiled aspects to fall within
the noir genre. The supernatural aspect is often confusing, even with
Swierczymski trying to explain it so even I can understand it. So it’s
combination or weird stuff, marked by pulp-ish aspects with lots a violence –especially
towards the end. It is set in the mid-1970’s, the Bicentennial year of 1976 to
be precise (and the authors note at the end is seemly a addendum about the
origins of tale, which sort of plays out like an extra chapter set outside
books universe).
For the most part, it’s fun book, even if it was confusing
at times. That becomes even more apparent towards the end, when everything sort
of enters a quantum singularity devised by science fiction writers to explain
the plot holes that time travel creates. It was maddening to keep things straight.
Though released in 2005 by the imprint PointBlank,
this book was re-issued 2024 by Titan Books, a division of Penguin Random
House, and Swierczynski has since written nine further crime novels, which apparently draw
heavily on crime noir themes, making frequent use of femmes fatale.
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