The Devil and the Detective

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/?ower-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. 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.