Comments on: Something Strange Stirring in the Noir: Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection

By: Jeffrey Thomas

Jeffrey Thomas — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:42:48 +0000

http://www.jeffreyethomas.com/blog/?p=161
My take on the recent — and I’d say very exciting — proliferation of weird detective stories. FINCH will be hard to top, but I’m looking forward to some of the others discussed here.

By: Weirdboiled or Noird? « The Little Sleep’s Blog

Weirdboiled or Noird? « The Little Sleep’s Blog — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:19:48 +0000

[...] Weirdboiled or Noird? Jump to Comments China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer have recently blogged about the recent proliferation of noir/crime fiction gone weird. (See China’s post here, and Jeff’s here.) [...]

By: Steve Roby

Steve Roby — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:06:09 +0000

Skin Palace, not Dream Palace. (annoyed grunt)

By: Steve Roby

Steve Roby — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:05:10 +0000

Jack O’Connell had another Quinsigamond novel, The Resurrectionist, in 2008. Haven’t read it yet, but if it’s half as good as Wireless or The Dream Palace I’ll be happy.

By: Charles Tan

Charles Tan — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:50:38 +0000

I’d like to plug John Grant’s The City in These Pages for a police procedural that’s, well, you have to read it lest I spoil the story.

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:19:09 +0000

Thanks, Gabriel.

I’m also beginning to think my complete Dedalus library might be worth something…

By: GabrielM

GabrielM — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:08:14 +0000

Perhaps also worth mentioning that Zoran Zivkovic’s THE LAST BOOK, which came out recently, is styled as a police procedural. In his intro John Grant draws comparisons to recent European noir (Mankell, etc.), but in the end the book was not, to my mind, all that different from Zivkovic’s others.

By: GabrielM

GabrielM — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:01:49 +0000

>>Now I’m curious about Kubin, but I see his novel is going for well over $50. Oi. Chances are slim that my library’ll have a copy, but I’ll take a look.

I didn’t realize the Dedalus edition was out of print. It’s worth reading, but that’s a lot to pay for a trade paperback.

By: Alex Carnegie

Alex Carnegie — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:06:25 +0000

By the way, re. Chabon:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185835/

(I’ve been telling everyone since I found out. After pinching myself of course)

By: Alex Carnegie

Alex Carnegie — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:53:15 +0000

It certainly is nicely designed.

I can get almost fetishistic about hardback books, in that if I really like a novel then having the paperback is just not enough, and for some it’s as if it *needs* to be read that way (I couldn’t imagine not having ‘City Of Saints’ & ‘House Of Leaves’ in HB), and similarly as an object, a thing you can be proud to own (without wanting to sound too materialistic) I think it’s a little akin to the way people collect vinyl records. I’m not in the first-edition market just yet though.

A book is definately more than the text it contains, something that makes me slightly worry about the impact things like the Kindle will have on the book business in the future.

2009 – year of the gumshoe? There’s a lot to look forward to. It’s nice to see more pulp-noir elements surface – I used to read a good deal of James Ellroy and I’ve been missing that kind of hard-edged grit of late, it’s certainly something I’ve seldom found in Fantasy.

Interesting times!