For the first time in ages I’ve bought a book newly printed, all unknowing of its contents. Well, not quite, but I got probably more excited about The Manual of Detection than might seem justified by the sparse reviews and basic lack of hype to be found online. Below the cut, my anticipation and purchase, plus a pre-review and some quotes.

Edit: The book has a website, rather beautifully designed but (a) full of spoilers and (b) presumably flash-based, so Google doesn’t know about it. Doing my little bit for Teh Internets: Jedediah Berry‘s The Manual of Detection has just hit the bookstores. Check it out. Also, Small Beer have a mystery competition running, with signed copies as prizes.

I first noticed the title flicking through the Waterstones in-house ‘reviews’ magazine. I put “reviews” in scare-quotes because it’s really nothing more than condensed publishers jacket copy, with a paragraph of “I liked it for its atmosphere” tacked on the end; for some reason the title and cover of The Manual of Detection jumped out at me but the blurb completely failed to excite me.

But then! I discovered that the author, one Jedediah Berry, is assistant editor at Small Beer Press! Small Beer is most definitely Good People, and it intrigues me that the one and only book to catch my eye in the whole umpty-ten pages of that catalogue turns out to be one I’m guaranteed to want to check out.

Anyhoo, the Manual was released today and I trawled a couple of Amsterdam bookstores for it, forcing the Waterstones folks to go open a crate somewhere because it apparently hadn’t made its way onto the shelves. I am partway through the third chapter and very much in love.

The book is a handsome hardcover in green and gold, with the logo of a single eye on the back and the motto “Never Sleeping”. As Berry’s site will tell you, the story concerns an Agency clerk reluctantly promoted to Detective; to mark his promotion he is issued with The Manual of Detection, a hardcover volume in green and gold. Of course the Agency’s logo is “a single eye floating above the words ‘Never Sleeping’”.1

It’s too soon to tell if this book is going to live up to the promise of its first couple of chapters. But let me close with a few quotes, which leave me optimistic.

The opening sentence is “Lest details be mistaken for clues, note that Mr. Charles Unwin, lifetime resident of this city, rode his bicycle to work every day, even when it was raining.” Unwin is that sort of chap; he’s a filing clerk, and a good one, umbrella always in attendence. Believing his promotion to be a mistake, he contemplates misusing his new-found powers solely in order to discover who has conferred them upon him, so that he can ask to have them revoked. “Imagine the report he would have to write to explain his actions: the addenda and codicils, the footnotes, the footnotes to footnotes.”

With that in mind, here’s a slightly longer piece from Chapter 3 (“On Corpses”). I hope it will make clear why I’m expecting to continue to love this book.

It was [Unwin’s] personal curse that his shoes squeaked on polished floors. The type of shoes he wore made no difference, nor did it matter whether the soles were wet or dry. If the shoes contained Unwin’s feet and were directed along well-polished routes, they would without fail sound their joyless noise for all to hear.

At home he went about in his socks. That way he could avoid disturbing the neighbors and also indulge in the occasional shoeless swoop across the room, as when one is preparing a breakfast of oatmeal and the oatmeal wants raisins and brown sugar, which are in the cupboard at the other end of the room. To glide with sock-swaddled feet over a world of glossy panes; that would be a wonderous thing! But Unwin’s apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.

So much is perfect about this short sequence. Even the revelation that Unwin can be “frolicsome”, on the face of it quite absurd, is made entirely believable by … well, by the word itself, really.

Notes:

  1. The Detective who presents Unwin with the Manual tells him off for offering unwanted explanations: “We like our operatives to keep a few mysteries of their own. Page ninety-six of the Manual.” Of course I turned to page ninety-six, where, yes, we find Unwin turning to page ninety-six of his manual and reading that “If a detective does not maintain secrets of his own […] then he will never succeed in learning the secrets of others, nor does he deserve to.” I anticipate much from the observation that Unwin’s Manual is missing chapter 18; mine is entitled “On Dream Detection”. [↪]