The Manual of Detection

A Novel

Jedediah Berry

If Wes Anderson and Tim Burton joined forces to write a pastiche of a Sam Spade crime novel, it might be something like his delightful mashup of noir crime and darkly whimsical fantasy.

The story includes, but is not limited to, a reluctant detective, a mysterious agency, an unnamed metropolis pelted with rain, a sinister circus, twins with more brawn and anger than good sense, and much more.

There are two main characters: the very bureaucratic detective agency and Charles Unwin, our unwitting hero. The Agency is housed in a sprawling building that’s easy to imagine as a hulking gray edifice that took the idea of architectural Brutalism and ran with it. Inside are clerks, detectives, and watchers, all located on separate floors, mixing and mingling only under the direst of circumstances.

Charles Unwin has worked as a clerk to Detective Travis T. Sivart for 20 years, dutifully making sense of the detective’s reports and filing them away for posterity. Sivert is a superstar detective known for solving cases like ‘The Oldest Murdered Man’ and ‘The Man Who Stole November Twelfth.’ He’s also run afoul of the henchmen behind Caligari’s Traveling Carnival.

But our Charles is an unassuming fellow, happy to be a clerk in the banal safety of the fourteenth floor, among the rows of identical desks, each topped with a telephone, a typewriter, a green-shaded lamp, and a letter tray. He rides his bike to work every day, rigging an umbrella to the handlebars to protect him from the ceaseless rain.

On the day the story opens, Charles arrives at the train station and has an unexpected encounter with a detective. ‘Forget the fourteenth flour,’ the detective says. ‘Report to Room 2919. You’ve been promoted.’ Then he pulls a slim, green hardcover book with gold lettering from his pocket, hands it to Charles, and says, ‘Standard issue. It’s saved my life more than once.’ The title of the book is The Manual of Detection. When Charles tries to ask questions, the detective waves him off and warns, ‘If you ever see me again, you don’t know me. Got it?’ Then he disappears into the crowd.

When Charles reports to the Agency, he learns that his detective, Sivart, is missing — and then Charles finds their boss, the watcher, dead in his office. Does all of this have something to do with Sivart’s old cases? Or the femme fatale known as Cleopatra Greenwood? Or Caligari’s Traveling Carnival? Despite his desire to remain unnoticed, it’s now up to Charles to find out.

On his mission to solve multiple crimes, Charles is joined by a plucky assistant who may or may not be trustworthy, and his efforts are guided by The Manual of Detection.

Each chapter of the book opens with an excerpt from The Manual, which is a bit of fun and foreshadows the challenges Charles will face in the next phase of his investigation.

For example, there’s this bit on corpses: ‘Many cases being with one — this can be disconcerting, but at least you know where you stand. Worse is the corpse that appears partway into your investigation, complicating everything. Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance of one who assumes a corpse is always around the next corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.’

Swaths of this novel are a solid detective procedural with Charles interrogating suspects, following clues, and getting into and out of perilous situations. Other bits are purely fantastical — like a poker game at the Forty Winks bar where the stakes are the right to ask questions, rather than money. There’s a horde of sleepwalkers, each carrying a sack of alarm clocks. At one point, Charles is tailed by a spy with a portable typewriter that somehow types out what Charles is going to say just before he says it. It’s all a bit bananas, but makes oddball sense inside this fully-rendered world.

The final third of this book is a ride, a brilliant blend of noir and fantasy elements. And it’s a joy to join Charles as he bumbles his way into being a pretty good detective.

In newspapers Sivart was ‘the detective’s detective,’ but on the fourteenth floor he was one of their own. And they did not need the newspapers for their morsels of information, because they had their Unwin. During the processing period, his fellow clerks would quietly note the drawers he frequented, the indices to which he referred. The bolder among them would even inquire into his progress, though he was always certain to give some vague and tantalizing reply. Some of those files — in particular The Oldest Murdered Man and The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker — were discussed in clerical circles as paragons of the form. Even Mr. Duden alluded to them, most often when scolding someone for sloppy work. ‘You like to think your files stand up to Unwin’s,’ he would proclaim, ‘and you don’t even know the difference between a dagger and a stiletto?’ Often he simply asked, ‘What if Unwin had handled The Oldest Murdered Man that way?’ — Jedediah Berry

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