Into it he adds Claire: its druggy, self-harming, hyper-intellectual, spiritually questing, maybe psychotic but thoroughly unrelenting outsider shamus.
Gran confidently assembles this cosy yet hardboiled grunge-social-realist material-yet-trippily-archetypal world. And for all the drug snarfing, Claire remains a very reliable narrator. The stories race ahead, as tough and beautifully written as any crime fiction. People see her coming and they call the cops. Sometimes the action will skip eight, ten hours or a whole day, then restart when a comatose Claire suddenly comes to with the breaking down of a toilet door by a terrified barman. If she happens upon a white powder or an amber fluid, or a pill, or something to smoke or sniff, she’s into it. It’s all delivered utterly straight-faced.įor another, Claire is a total dope hog. For one thing, Gran never, ever winks at the audience, never plays cute, never chases laughs. If this all sounds like a mighty piss-take on the Golden Age detective story, believe me it’s anything but. My favourite detective: Trixie Belden, the uncool girl sleuth with a sensitive moral compass (The international detective scene, with its arcane controversies and obsessional characters is a little like the chess world in The Queen’s Gambit, except with murders.) The world of amateur detection, it turns out, is a deeply riven one, with a few beleaguered Silettians duking it out against the ruthless anti-Silettians. It’s a series of words the author can arrange as he chooses”. Silette could easily have been mates with theory heavies like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, dropping as he does such whacky bon mots as “Karma is not a sentence already printed. The question is how will you bear your portion of the guilt?” (Good question!) We solve them anyway, knowing we are solving both everything and nothing”. The fictitious Silette (I Googled him, just in case) is forever coming out with naff-deep pronouncements like, “Mysteries never end. She refers to herself as the unquestioned World’s Greatest Detective, and makes frequent mention of past cases, which have names like The Case of the Silver Pearl, The Case of the Omens of No Tomorrow, The Case of the End of the World, The Case of the Confused Academic - the way Dr Watson might refer to Sherlock Holmes’ famous cases.Ĭlaire is never without her bible, Jacques Silette’s criminological masterwork, Détection. No office, no business cards, no website. Present day Claire is a “detective”, although what that means is unclear. Then one of the trio disappears, never to be seen again.
The girls quickly set about solving actual mysteries. Claire’s background (we learn) is as a schoolgirl detective, in the Nancy Drew cosy tradition, one of three brainy Brooklyn teens inflamed by pulp novels, mystery comics and mail-order sleuthing paraphernalia.
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