The Manual of Detection

by Jedediah Berry

In this tightly plotted yet mind-expanding debut novel, an unlikely detective, armed only with an umbrella and a singular handbook, must untangle a string of crimes committed in and through people’s dreams.

In an unnamed city always slick with rain, Charles Unwin is a humble file clerk working for a huge and imperious detective agency, and all he knows about solving mysteries comes from filing reports for the illustrious investigator Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing, and his supervisor turns up murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective, a rank for which he lacks both the skills and the stomach. His only guidance comes from his new assistant, who would be perfect if she weren’t so sleepy, and from the pithy yet profound Manual of Detection.

Unwin mounts his search for Sivart, but is soon framed for murder, pursued by goons and gunmen, and confounded by the infamous femme fatale Cleo Greenwood. Meanwhile, strange and troubling questions proliferate: why does the mummy at the Municipal Museum have modern-day dental work? Where have all the city’s alarm clocks gone? Why is Unwin’s copy of the Manual missing Chapter 18? And will it ever stop raining? When he discovers that the greatest of Sivart’s cases—including ‘The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker’ and ‘The Man who Stole the Twelfth of November’—were never solved correctly, he must enter the dreams of a murdered man and face a criminal mastermind bent on total control of a slumbering city.

The Manual of Detection will draw comparison to every work of imaginative fiction that ever blew a reader’s mind. But, ultimately, it defies comparison; it is a brilliantly conceived, meticulously realised novel that will change what you think about how you think.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Fantasy, Steampunk, Crime, Noir, Magical Realism

284 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Jedediah Berry is the author of two novels, The Naming Song (Tor Books, 2024) and The Manual of Detection (Penguin Press), and a story in cards, The Family Arcana. He lives in Western Massachusetts. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes.

Reviews

[carol. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Buy it if you must--the $2 sale is cheaper than a bottle of melatonin.

When I was in my mid-teens, one of my friends was rather obsessed with Film (capital intended). I watched a lot of movies that year, most of which I could tell you little about. Brazil remains completely hazy in my memory, only a single screen shot of a greyscale monolith interior, a voice echoing thinly off the bare walls, clear in my memory. Try as I might, I couldn’t get rid of that image while reading The Manual of Detection.

********************
Of course, I have more to say, but some of it is equally off-topic, and there are pictures of art and such, so it really doesn't belong on a serious, on-topic review site such as Goodreads. So you'll find it at:

http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/0...

[Kathrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a place in St. Louis where, for $12 and a willingness to put up with multitudes of loud children, you can crawl through endless disorienting cave-tunnels, drip down ten-story slides, ride a ferris-wheel 12 stories in the sky, watch trained children perform cat-in-the-hat tricks on 4-foot balls juggling knives, pet a shark, and drink a beer. It is the City Museum, and whatever I say, I cannot accurately describe it for you. It is a child's dream made manifest. Inside the skateboard-less skate park I found a little hole in the wall, just tall enough to squeeze my body through. So, against my better judgment, I squeezed through it. After crawling a few feet on hands and knees, I had a choice, left towards the light, right towards a slightly smaller hole. As it was early in the day and my energy still matched my kids, I went right. It got darker, and smaller. Right again, darker and smaller. I began to hear a circus. A circus? Is it a recording, or am I dreaming? There's a voice so close I can't understand why I can't see her. My knees are really starting to ache, but I want to find the source of that voice, that music. I finally realize I am trapped in the maze built under the seating of an actual circus, and the show is just inches above and around my head. It is that strange realization -- that I am utterly lost in darkness and a small, tight space, and that the sounds I hear don't make sense until I'm willing to accept the reality of a circus just above my head -- this is the same experience I had while reading this marvelous book.

I admit it took me around 50 pages before I could fit my ungainly body all the way into the mystery, but once inside, the floors tilted, the dark passages beckoned, and familiar objects appeared out of context and camouflaged in mystery. I can't recount the plot for you -- I won't tell it right anyway, and with each turn of the page is a shake of the kaleidescope and the scene shifts, beautifully, but in ways that can't be described without being present. A view through the kaleidescope can't be described, other than just saying, god, it's beautiful. This book is cinematic, in the way that I'm always awed how a director can plan a film sequence to blow your mind, but the script itself is just boring words on paper. This is book-form of what the film Inception wanted to be, this is steam-punk Water for Elephants, but with reason and insight on top of atmosphere. This is a fantastical, meticulously-crafted, kind-of genius 3-D puzzle you won't want to find your way out of.

[David Katzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, strange and immersive, The Manual of Detection is one of my favorite books in recent memory. The world Berry has invented feels like the movie Brazil crossed with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and inspired by classic noir detective stories and films, such as The Maltese Falcon. It's dark and grim yet somehow not depressing. I couldn't put it down.

The surreal narrative begins with the main character, Charles Unwin, who is a clerk at an elaborate and serpentine detective agency, being unexpectedly promoted to detective and feeling convinced it is an error, which he then sets out to correct. His efforts to prevent his own promotion, and find the detective he was mysteriously promoted to replace, lead him into a twisted, multilayered conspiracy involving both the Agency, and its most notorious enemies.

This is a book worth reading without even skimming the back cover...allow yourself to be surprised by all the bizarre twists and turns and odd mysteries Unwin faces. Even the climax, despite the complexity of the plot, holds together wonderfully well. I loved this. Highly recommended.

[Forrest · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the elements of noir are present here: a dreary setting, half-understood mysteries, double- and even triple-crosses, multiple femme fatales, even a dark carnival filled with surly carnies. The voice of the book is flat and even - a little too flat and even for my tastes. It is well-written but I found the characters lacking in motivation and emotion. The main character is simply pushed along, with little or no internal impetus, toward the inevitable end. He's not really so much a protagonist as a reactionary element. The weaving of the story in and out of the waking world and the world of dream is intriguing and well-executed, allowing some characters to assume one face in one setting and another face in the other. The main character, Charles Unwin, is really the only fully consistent personality throughout but, frankly, this also makes him the most milquetoast character of the bunch. And when your main character is dull, well, it takes an outstanding writer to "lift" the story "up" from the doldrums. Unfortunately the writerly chops aren't quite enough to raise the water-level, as it were, to flood stage.

Still, this is an enjoyable read. The strange mixture of hard-boiled detective and magical realism is a new twist on two old themes, and no one can accuse the author of being unoriginal in this way. Inject a lot more pizzazz into Charles Unwin (both in his voice and in his motivations) and a little more into the others (except for Emily, whom I thought was great) and this would become a four star review very quickly.

[Amirsaman · Rating 4 out of 5]

اینسپشن از رو دست این کتاب کپی زده‌. علاوه بر اینکه معمای اساسی کتاب، سوال بزرگ فلسفی قرن گذشته است، یعنی چیستی حقیقت، داستان از الگوهای نوآر (مثل زنان قدرتمند و داستانی که پیچ‌های آن به تمامی باز نمی‌شوند) پیروی می‌کند.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved this book for about the first third, was on board for about half but finished it in a fog, still admiring Jedidiah Berry's skill but not at all sure I cared or even understood what was going on.

Among the book's delights is the description of the world of Charles Unwin, a clerk in a huge, rigidly bureaucratic agency who takes pride in his meticulous documentation of the cases solved by the renowned detective, Sivart. Unwin is comfortable with his routine, attaching his umbrella to his bicycle handlebars and pedaling the seven blocks to work in a big, unnamed city where it is always raining. When Sivart disappears and Unwin is promoted to detective, he wants only to find Sivart so he can return to his old life. With “The Manual of Detection” and the reports of Sivart's cases (among them “The Man Who Stole November 12th” and “The World's Oldest Murdered Man.”) as guidance, Unwin is quickly and reluctantly drawn into a dark, mysterious world in which nothing is as it seems.

So far so good – imaginative and entertaining. But as the plot thickens, so does the fantasy. And the more surreal it got, the less interested I was. I made it through the inhabitants of the city all sleepwalking and stealing alarm clocks but by the time we got to “dream-detection” – the good guys and the bad guys inhabiting each others' dreams for good and ill – I was pretty much disengaged.

[Cosimo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Principi di investigazione onirica

“Fece un passo indietro. Quella poltrona gli sarebbe saltata addosso se lui gliene avesse dato l'occasione, l'avrebbe divorato. Se solo avesse potuto chiamarla per nome, pensò, forse l'avrebbe ammansita. Oppure avrebbe potuto aprire l'ombrello e proteggersi da quella vista – ma purtroppo l'ombrello l'aveva dato a Edwin Moore”.

Una storia straordinaria, ricca di riferimenti e aneddoti, si sviluppa con una trama labirintica, geniale e ingegnosa e un racconto tra il fantasy e il noir che si rivela irresistibile e magico dall'inizio alla fine. Si ride, si sogna e ci si perde in questo libro, soprattutto ci si meraviglia: non con Kafka né con O'Brien, semplicemente in modo unico con Jedediah Berry.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A paranormal detective story that wasn't quite my thing. It was OK but nothing that interested me the slightest

[Carloesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Da tempo non leggevo un libro così divertente e appassionante allo stesso tempo. E’ un mistery, ma anche un romanzo umoristico e grottesco, un onirico rompicapo con echi di Kafka, di Chandler, di Borges, del cinema di Tim Burton, di Terry Gilliam, di Orson Wells, dei freaks di Tod Browning e del mondo dei fumetti.
Esordio interessantissimo (solo pochi racconti, prima di questo libro, inediti in italia) di un giovane scrittore americano dall’umorismo molto “british” e da una splendida capacità visionaria.
Lo consiglio caldamente.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

In an unnamed city which has certain resemblances to early-20th-century New York, many matters are regulated by the Agency, a large, somewhat Kafkaesque organization whose hierarchy runs, in descending order: Watchers, Detectives, Clerks, Under-Clerks. There's not much direct communication between the members of these four strata.

Charles Unwin is the clerk whose responsibility it is to formalize, index and file the case reports of Detective Travis Sivart, the city's most prominent detective. One day he is abruptly informed that he has been promoted to fill the shoes of Sivart, who has gone missing, and is given a copy of the eponymous Manual of Detection to guide him. Plucking up all his courage, he goes to see the watcher who has made this appointment, hoping to persuade him it has all been a mistake and to restore the status quo, but by the time he gets there the man has been murdered; and soon thereafter Unwin finds himself framed for that crime. He spends most of the rest of the book in quest of the elusive Sivart, discovering along the way that there were flaws in the solutions of several of Sivart's most celebrated cases, and that some of the supervillains with whom Sivart has vied are perhaps not what they've seemed.

In particular, Unwin learns that the standard edition of The Manual of Detection is missing a chapter, the one on oneiric detection -- detection through dreams. Thus, while much of the novel's action takes place in mundane reality (or, at least, the version of it which the author presents to us as reality), there's also much that goes on within dreams, and within dreams that are themselves within dreams, and so on -- to the extent that it can be hard on occasion for the reader (or at least this reader) to work out which layer of derived reality is the one currently involved. This is the aspect of Berry's novel that I liked.

In a way the novel's like an expanded account of a dream; while the phantasmagoric nature of the events sometimes captivated me, there were also quite a few occasions when it occurred to me that there's a very good reason why people are generally discouraged from telling others about their dreams. It also means that throughout the text there's the sense that nothing that goes on, are the people participating, are of any consequence; there's no passion in the writing, and cannot be, with the result that it's pretty hard to muster any passion for the reading, either. By the halfway mark I was finding proceedings tedious (I was also finding it hard to remember, each time I picked the book up, what had been happening when I'd broken of); by three-quarters of the way through I was, alas, beginning to keep count of the pages left to go.

This alienation from the events of the text is unfortunately bolstered by the book's other major influence (if I can use that term loosely): surrealism, most especially the surrealism of Rene Magritte -- just to make sure we catch this, the title page bears a Magritte-style hat! It crossed my mind at one point that this book might be an exercise along the lines of "the detective novel Magritte might have written"; while I dismissed the notion immediately, it nevertheless did capture something of the feel of the text. The trouble is that the great delight of Magritte's paintings is that they portray a world that by definition we can't enter -- they're windows onto a dreamlike place of beautiful, consciousness-enflaming fantastication. If you're asked to step through the window and into that world, much of its magic ebbs because of your presence -- especially if your presence is prolonged to fill 278 pages.

I'd been looking forward acutely to The Manual of Detection -- it sounded to be right up my street (and the book's excellent, imaginative design enhanced this expectation) -- and must confess to being very disappointed. I was impressed by much in it, not least the author's first-rate imagination, and I'll be looking out for further books by Berry; but this one just didn't do it for me.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, imagine you trip & fall down Alice's rabbit-hole, tumbling past dreamscapes & spooky carnival sideshows before landing with a thump in a smoky jazz bar filled with pajama-clad characters from Inception & The Maltese Falcon. (Don't fail to notice the shadow of someone from Minority Report lurking in the deepest shadow. See it? Right by the deep-green poster with an all-seeing golden eye....) Feeling disoriented & sore from your fall, you head directly for the bar. Bartender Thursday Next suggests you try the "Drink Me" special & begins mixing it before you even open your mouth to speak. Into the shaker, she pours:
Magritte's umbrellas
Col. Mustard in the kitchen with a gun
A decoder ring from a Cracker Jack box
Elephant dreams
A ticking alarm clock
And a healthy shot of rain
With a flick of the wrist, Thursday shakes, then pours your drink over cubes of red leaves before adding a garnish of phonograph record speared on a freshly-sharpened pencil. She yawns & slides your drink across the bar. Fog is fingering its way out over the rim as you raise the glass in a toast to clerks, typewriters, & biloquists. You down the drink in one swallow while simultaneously tossing it over your left shoulder into the harbor, trailing a stretch of typewriter ribbon as it sinks below the surf.

Thirsty yet? If so, crack open the emerald cover of The Manual of Detection & fall right in....

[Nathan Rostron · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I was reading this smart, tricky, and thoroughly beguiling detective story, I kept thinking of Paul Auster’s CITY OF GLASS. Like Auster’s main character, Quinn, Charles Unwin is a reluctant hero, a more-or-less ordinary guy who finds himself the detective on a strange case that he never wanted in the first place. For the last 20 years, Unwin has been an agency clerk to star detective Travis Sivart. One morning Unwin arrives at work to find Sivart gone and himself to be promoted to detective in his place. This is extremely unsettling to Unwin, who has no ambitions toward the gritty glamour of detectivedom, and he makes it his mission to find Sivart and get his old job back. But Unwin can’t find any answers: his former clerking colleagues won’t talk to him because of agency hierarchical protocol, and his new, detective peers look down on him with scorn. Meanwhile, things around the (unnamed) city have been getting stranger and stranger. People stumble around like zombies during the day and wake in the morning feeling like they’ve been sleepwalking all night. Unwin soon discovers that one of his boss’s old nemeses, the magician and biloquist Enoch Hoffman, may be behind it all, and he may also be the reason Sivart has disappeared. Tracing Sivart and Hoffman leads Unwin down into the city’s underworld, which since Hoffman’s arrival some years ago has been ruled by the magician’s minions from the carnival. Unwin has to wrangle with carneys, goons, and beguiling women who are never what they seem. The intrigue spirals all the way to the bottom and all the way to the top, and Unwin feels as though he’s “it” in a huge and dangerous game of hide and seek. The game has two opposing forces: the Agency (order) and the Carnival (disorder), each vying for the soul of the city.

Also as in CITY OF GLASS, Berry evokes a noirish, gothic, and wonderfully atmospheric sense of the city, but he adds something new: Unwin is extremely likable and charming as a stumblebum, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time sort of character. It seems to never stop raining, and poor Unwin’s socks stay wet for most of the book. (He rides his bicycle everywhere). Another way of saying this might be that where Auster’s post-modern take on the detective story seems ever-serious, Berry’s is still mind-bending and addictive but also funny and, well, fun. Part of the genius of the book is that Unwin has no idea what he’s doing, and his ignorance is precisely what allows him to evade his enemies. The book’s structure mirrors that of the detective bible which Unwin reluctantly learns from (you guessed it): The Manual of Detection. The novel is incredibly well written, nearly pitch-perfect, and part of the fun is that the reader has to unlock the mysteries of the story he’s reading just as Unwin tries to solve his “case.” In the end we see how everything has been intricately interlinked like a jigsaw puzzle, and we get to feel as if we’ve solved a momentous case of our own.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peculiar story, not sure if it's magical realism or just sci fi/mystery, but in any case, it's great fun, the sort of book that sticks in the mind.

[flaminia · Rating 2 out of 5]

fra sonnambuli e narcolettici, un libro che era iniziato alla grande, facendomi appassionare assai, si è concluso per me in sbadigliarella conclamata.

[Giovanni84 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una detective-story, ambientata in un mondo simile al nostro, ma con elementi fantastici.
Ritmo vivace, vari colpi di scena, molta azione ed un po' di umorismo: e sicuramente una lettura di intrattenimento appassionante, se non si è dei patiti di realismo e se si accettano certe assurdità (giustificate però dall'ambientazione onirica di parte del racconto).

Ci sono però anche alcuni difetti: in primis, i personaggi sono un po' scialbi; e poi, il finale l'ho trovato proprio deludente.
Nonostante i vari colpi di scena, e l'indubbia inventiva, c'è un non so che di banale: io già avevo intuito, nella prima parte della storia, parte dei retroscena che dovrebbero sorprendere, una volta scoperti, ed invece no.

Però è comunque un romanzo ideale da leggere quando si vuole qualcosa di poco impegnativo ma che non sia piatto.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jedediah Berry uses the stock images of the detective novel to create a Kafkaesque fable. Set in a quasi-victorian(where the steampunk label comes from)/quasi-30’s atmosphere this is an atmospheric, baroque, and endlessly readable fantasy where it could have been a dry run through of genre cleverness. The sum of the parts doesn’t quite bring it in for a totally satisfying ending but the ride is terrific. Great debut. On influences, well digested for the most part,though maybe a bit of an obvious nod to Angela Carter (her Infernal desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman a touchstone with the war of dreams and a character named Hoffman) and hints of Borges, Calvino, Jeunet/Cairo and Gilliam movies, Lethem, and Auster.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5 out of 5

          A dark, rainy city that brings to mind a 1950s noir setting - an ordinary detective agency clerk reluctant to accept a sudden promotion to "detective" - circus villains, a rumbling steam truck, remnants of a "travels-no-more" carnival - some stereotypical metaphoric film noir detective dialogue - cleverly written and becoming more surreal throughout - intricate and weirdly fantastical, reminding me of a Charlie Kaufman script - one of the best books I've read this past year and now a favorite.

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wouldn’t normally dwell on the book-as-object, but I have to say that The Manual of Detection is one of the most attractive volumes that I’ve seen in quite some time. You can’t see from the picture, but it has a laminate cover (i.e. the image is printed directly on to the cover, with no dust-jacket); and the whole package gives the impression of a book that has been designed with great care and attention. Furthermore, it has been made to resemble the fictional Manual of Detection described in the novel; opening the book is an invitation to step into its own unique world.

And the text itself makes good on that invitation; what strikes me most about The Manual of Detection is the way that Jedediah Berry has woven his fictional world together. The setting is an unnamed city in which a thousand noir stories have taken place, crimes solved by the behatted, cigar-chomping detectives of the Agency, the greatest of whom is Travis T. Sivart. Now Sivart has gone missing, and his clerk, Charles Unwin, has been promoted in his stead. Convinced that this is an error, Unwin goes upstairs to the office of Edward Lamech, Sivart’s ‘watcher’ and the author of the memo apparently granting this promotion — only to find Lamech’s dead body sitting behind the desk. Unwin sets out to find Sivart; and, of course, it all gets more complicated from there…

Berry’s creation is fascinating, and his novel transporting in the truest sense, in that it takes one out of the real world, and into a sideways reality that convinces as a functioning world within the covers of the book, even as one acknowledges that it couldn’t function if it actually existed. The Agency itself is a huge, sprawling organisation whose absurd bureaucracy is a delight to imagine: the different categories of staff are so segregated that there are underclerks in the archive who don’t even know what a detective is. And consider the thoughts it engenders in Unwin as he makes his way to Lamech’s office:

"Imagine the report he would have to write to explain his actions: the addenda and codicils, the footnotes, the footnotes to footnotes. The more Unwin fed that report, the greater would grow its demands, until stacks of paper massed into walls, corridors: a devouring labyrinth with Unwin at its center, spools of exhausted typewriter ribbon piled all around."

(Incidentally — or perhaps not — I think that quotation also demonstrates Berry’s considerable flair for writing prose.)

The Manual of Detection is set in a world where detectives’ cases get pulpish nicknames like ‘The Oldest Murdered Man’ or ‘The Man Who Stole November Twelfth’, and sound equally outlandish in synopsis; where bizarre things happen, such as Charles Unwin encountering a man who is apparently relaying Unwin’s every move down the telephone, before the following exchange takes place:

"'Were you speaking about me just then?' Unwin asked.

The man said into the receiver, 'He wants to know if I was speaking about him just then.” He listened and nodded some more, then said to Unwin, “No, I wasn’t speaking about you.'"

Yet all has a perfectly rational explanation — rational within the terms of the novel, anyway. There’s less fantastication than that comment might suggest, but a little goes a long way in this case. I’m being deliberately vague about the details, because so much of the joy of reading The Manual of Detection lies in the discovery of what happens. But I will say that the final third takes a different tack as the threads of story come together; and I feel it sits quite awkwardly with the rest (then again, I did struggle to follow the plot a bit at this point, so it could just be that).

Criticisms aside, though, what I’ll take away from The Manual of Detection is the singular experience of reading it, its distinctive feel and atmosphere — and I’ll be mightily intrigued to see what Jedediah Berry does next.

[C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I've never written a review of a book by someone I know (hi Jeb!)

I hate reading reviews of analogy ("If Voxtrot teamed up with Paul Simon, they'd have formed Vampire Weekend!") but have a weakness for writing them. So if I was asked to write a short blurb for the back of the paper-back edition, I might say that if Kafka wrote the movie Chinatown, replacing J.J. Gittes with Sam Lowrie from "Brazil," it might read like "The Manual of Detection."

Of course, the problem with those sort of review is they never actually encapsulate a work, and "manual does a good job of skirting easy categorization. It's gum-shoe noir, only not as brutal or serious. It's weird-fiction, but not nearly as far along the "weird" spectrum as one might expect from an author who is an assistant editor at Small Beer Press. There's a bit of Gorey's phantasmagoria, but with a strong current of paranoia and social commentary.

Berry does a great job creating both an engaging plot and tone from the very start. Plot wise, the story manages to riff off all the classics aspects of the noir genre without sounding either derivative or overly self-conscious, and manages to throw in enough twists to keep you on your toes without coming across as manipulative. The setting is a wonderfully dark take on noir-era New York reflected through a warped mirror -- everyone wears hats and trench-coats in the never-ending rain, as the reluctant detective Unwin traces clues through fun-house versions of the Museum of Natural History, Central Park, Grand Central Station, an crumbling carnival, and eventually dreams.

One thing I really liked about "Manual" is that although there is certainly a dark tone to the book, it retains the light, entertaining feel of genre fiction, which is a nice change from most weird-fic, which tends to skew towards heavy and disturbingly violent. I love both Mieville and Lake, but it was great to read a book that I just enjoyed the entire time without ever shuddering and feeling slightly nauseated.

"Manual" got mentioned in both the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker last week, and while both were very positive, they both seemed to get this book strangely wrong. The Book Review said the end tried to hard to set up the sequel, which I didn't see at all -- I felt there was merely regeneration, a return of essential balance between forces, rather than a tease at a sequel (since I can, for once actually ask the author -- Jeb, what did you have in mind). Then The New Yorker was "disappointed when the plot turned out to be a 9/11 analogy," which is just crazy. The plot does have a dark paranoia and distrust of authority that is relevant in our post 9/11 Patriot Act world, but paranoia and distrust of authority is hardly specific enough to make it a "9/11 analogy."

I was going to tell everyone to read this book because I knew Jed back in college, but its nice to know I can tell everyone to read the book because I think its great.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Kindle suggested I'd like this and it was right.

This is a delicious story of Mr. Charles Unwin, a "clerk" in "The Agency" for twenty years who has had the privilege of writing up some of the cases of the Agency's most famous detective with the palindromic name of Travis Sivart. "The Oldest Murdered Man" and "The Three Deaths of Captain Baker" and "The Man Who Stole November Twelfth" are his crowning achievements.

But when the famous detective Sivart goes missing and Unwin is mysteriously promoted to "Detective" (despite having no training whatsoever) and the man who promoted him (his "Watcher) is found murdered at his desk, Unwin jumps in with all the precision that his clerkly career has taught him.

This novel feels like a cross between a 1940's noir-detective film and a Terry Gilliam movie. There is a carnival of evil freaks, giant goonish henchmen who drive a giant steam powered truck, a criminal bar under the cemetery where the poker ante is information.

All in all, great fun and well written. I'm going to look for more books from this author.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 Extra:
Travis Sivart, 'the detective's detective' has gone missing. Raymond Chandler meets Kafka in this surreal tale of skulduggery and somnambulism.

Somewhere in an unnamed, rainy city, Charles Unwin, a lowly but efficient clerk in a big detective agency, finds his world turned upside down when his detective boss, Travis Sivart, disappears.

Unwin is suddenly promoted to the role - and forced out into the field for the first time in his life. Unprepared and untrained, armed only with his trusty umbrella and The Manual of Detection, he sets out on his first mission: to find out what happened to his boss.

Unwin begins a frantic search while all around him, Sivart's closed cases have sprung open again...

Read by Toby Jones

Abridged by Eileen Horne

Produced by Clive Brill

Made for BBC Radio 4 Extra by Pacificus Productions.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pzvjb

[tunalizade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kapıyı aralayıp içeriği girdiğinizde uyuyan kişinin yanına oturup aklınızdan geçenleri kişinin arkasını sıvazlarken anlatırken birden size doğru dönen yatan kişinin aslında siz olduğunu gördüğünüzde, işte o zaman garip bir rüya yahut vücudunuzdan çıkan ter yoğunluğuna bağlı olarak kabus olarak nitelendirebilirsiniz bu durumu. Tabii bu haliyle gerçekleşenin düş olduğunu anlamak çok da zor değil, neticede aksinizi görmek gerçekliği bir anda yok eder, peki ortalıkta sizden başka siz yoksa her an için uyanık olduğunuzun nasıl farkına varırsınız?

Bazen de uyanıp aklınıza oturan görüntülerin rüya esnasında mı yoksa uyumadan önce mi gerçekleştiğini çözemeyiz, bu acaba kendi hayal ürünümüz olabilir mi?

Hafiyenin El Kitabı, tam anlamıyla bu konuya değinmese de olay örgüsünün ardında bu olayın bulunduğu bir kitap.

Kitabın başkarakteri, titiz, işini iyi yapan Charles Unwin, efsane dedektif Sivart’ın katibi. Sivart şimdiye kadar çözülmez denen tüm olayları çözmüş, işinde mükemmelliği konuşturmuş vs. Ortadan kaybolmasıyla karakterimiz Unwin terfi sayesinde katiplikten dedektifliğe geçiş yapar. Tabii o kadar dikkatli ve titizdir ki severek yaptığı işini doğru şekilde yapmıyorum mu acaba diye de aklından geçirmiyor değildir.

Olay neredeyse yağmurun hiç durmadığı bir kentte geçer geçmesine de Unwin’in kitapta ya da kısacası gelecekte aklımızın bir köşesine kazınacağını ve benzer bir olgu gördüğümüzde/duyduğumuzda üzerine muhabbetler açmamızı sağlayacak özelliği bahsi geçen iklim şartlarında bile ulaşım aracı olarak kullandığı bisikleti ve kuru kalmasını sağlayan şemsiyesi.
Terfiden sonra elinden düşürmediği şemsiyesi ve çevirdiği her pedalla şimdiye kadar mükemmel haliyle kabul edilmiş ve çözülmüş gibi görünen olayların aslında hiç de göründüğü gibi olmadığını keşfeden karakterimiz, Sivart’ı aramak için çıktığı yolculukta haddinden çok yorulacağının da farkına varıyor. Neticede koskoca bir kurum ve alakasız sonuçlar. İşin içine bir de hayal dünyası, düş dedektifliği, uyurgezerlik ve gerçeğin hangisi olduğu konusunda karar verememe girince ortaya okunası bir kitap çıkıyor. Ona bu dedektifçilik oyunundan çok daha fazlası olan durumda yardımcı olacak tek nesne ise bizim de aynı zamanda okuduğumuz Hafiyenin El Kitabı.

Pimpirikli bir kişinin acayip düzen içerisinde süregelen hayatının örüldüğü bir ipliğin kaçtığını bir düşünün, çorap söküğü muhabbetleri ve arapsaçına dönen bir olay. İçinden çıkılmaz bir kaos ortamı. Tabii doğru ipliği doğru zamanda tutmanın da getirileri yok değil.

Jedediah Berry’nin ilk kitabı olan bu eser Siren Yayınları’ndan Algan Sezgintüredi çevirisiyle çıkmış, 2009 yılında Dashiell Hammett ve 2010 yılında William L. Crawford Ödülü’nü almış.

[Blake Fraina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Manual of Detection reads like the bastard love-child of Dashiell Hammett and Terry Gilliam. First time novelist Jedediah Berry stirs all the tropes of a hard-boiled detective story with surrealistic fantasy elements to create a delightfully eccentric concoction that goes down easy despite the serious message at its core.

Anyone familiar with the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin,"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety," will probably appreciate the story of Charles Unwin, a fastidious and rule-abiding office clerk, who is unwittingly thrust into a web of intrigue when the celebrated detective he works for goes missing. While investigating the sudden disappearance, Unwin stumbles on a nefarious plot to gain control over the minds of the citizens by infiltrating their dreams. It’s the ultimate invasion of privacy and its origins are as surprising as they are sinister. I can’t help but wonder if the Patriot Act was high on Berry’s mind when the idea for this book was conceived. But despite how dire that sounds, this is hardly a heavy, preachy affair. It's full of quirky humour and unexpected twists, not to mention a host of oddball characters.

Along the way, we meet the cigar-chomping detective Sivart, a pair of [formerly] conjoined twin thugs, an addled museum guard, some very sorry looking elephants, a psychic giantess, an army of sleepwalkers, a villainous ventriloquist, plus three ladies straight out of a classic noir – Emily, the plucky, can-do assistant, Cleo Greenwood, the honey-voiced femme fatale, and the mysterious "woman in the plaid coat." Throw in about ten thousand purloined alarm clocks and a "Travels-no-More" carnival and you’ve got a story with some seriously weird atmospherics, a unique cast, a bit of mystery and a lot of fun.

This novel is a delight from start to finish.

I should mention that I didn’t actually read this one, but listened to the unabridged edition audio book. This was my first experience with an audio book and what a wonderful surprise! Pete Larkin did a terrific job creating voices for each of the characters – he even had me laughing out loud at some points. Plus it was broken up into short enough sections that stopping it and coming back to it later was never a problem. I enjoyed it so much in fact, that I’ve visited the Highbridge Audio website several times to shop their catalogue and can report that they have a varied and excellent selection.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been doing a lot of revisiting old favorites while counting down the days until my novel GEORGE & LIZZIE comes out, and rereading Jedediah Berry’s THE MANUAL OF DETECTION (Penguin, 2009) was a great pleasure. It's one of those peculiar and intriguing novels that are showing up with rather more frequency these days than they used to be. Describing it isn't easy. Berry’s novel is neither this nor that: the plot is not straightforward (to say the least); the setting is surreal yet oddly familiar, the characters are types (detective, girl Friday, villain) but so individualized that they’re difficult to forget. When you’re talking about books like Berry’s, you find yourself mostly resorting to making comparisons with better-known titles and authors. It’s also true that with books that push against the boundaries of any particular genre (be it literary fiction, fantasy, or mysteries), readers tend to either love them or hate them. I certainly don’t love them all, but I sure enjoyed this one, enormously, both times I've read it. Berry’s novel is an amalgam of all of the above – literary fiction, fantasy, and mystery; its pages echo with tributes to the writing of Borges, of Calvino, of some of Paul Auster’s works, and of Kafka. And yet, for all it may resemble, THE MANUAL OF DETECTION is entirely original. In an unknown, somewhat eerie city, in a building known only (and ominously) as The Agency, Charles Unwin, a finicky, committed-to-following-his-daily-routine man, works for a famous detective named Sivart, writing up Sivart’s cases from the notes he’s made. Then one day everything is thrown into disarray – Watcher Lamech, Sivart’s boss, is murdered, Sivart has disappeared, and Unwin is unwillingly promoted to detective from his lowly position as a clerk (a job he looks forward to every day). The only way he can get his beloved clerkship back is to find Sivart, and while trying to do so, Unwin uncovers the existence of a dastardly plot to take over the world by an organization bent on infiltrating people’s dreams. Can a simple clerk find his famous boss, prevent the worst from taking place, and retain his integrity and what sanity he has? Into a mix that includes a cast of truly evil thugs, an attractive assistant with more than assisting on her mind, a puzzling woman in a plaid coat, and a ventriloquist who’s up to no good (among other one-of-a-kind characters), there’s also a carnival that no longer travels and many thousands of stolen alarm clocks. Try THE MANUAL OF DETECTION. It’s great fun and a marvelous achievement.

[Nik Maack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two thirds of the way through, I lost all interest in the book. I can't even say why, exactly. Reading it became a chore. The plot seemed entirely artificial, the characters wooden, the whole thing too contrived and "clever" for its own good.

What happened? I was in awe with the opening, enjoying the dreamy quality of the book. But at some critical juncture it all began to feel muddy and convoluted and pointless.

By the end, I was skimming. Barely taking in the words. Which is odd given how enraptured I was at the start.

I don't know how to explain it, except it just felt like the book was not building to something so much as tripping along. And eventually I just lost faith in the text and stopped listening, even as I continued to read.

Go figure.

[Sesana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as much fun as I wanted it to be. I think I liked the idea far more than the execution. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that main character Unwin is so incredibly passive for so much of the book. He does little on his own initiative, and is just pushed from one thing to the next. At least he isn't obnoxious, even if he is a bit boring. The supporting characters have all the quirks and interest in the story, but they feel a bit flat, too. This may be partially intentional. It feels like Berry is doing a take on old pulp novels, which are not generally known for their depth of characterization. I wish I had liked this more.

[MaggyGray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ein Wühltischfund. Und eine Perle.

Es ist nicht ganz so leicht, die ganzen Figuren und Verwicklungen und Erzählebenen, die in diesem Buch bunt durcheinandergewürfelt werden, auseinander zu halten, aber das Durchhalten bis zum Schluss ist die Mühe auf jeden Fall wert.
Die Geschichte ist kafkaesk und surreal, eine Mischung, die ich persönlich sehr gerne mag, und die Dialoge! Das Sahnehäubchen! Diese Geschichte stelle ich mir als Hörspiel bzw. -buch sehr interessant vor.

[Chantelle Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Theatre Bizarre, The Library At Mount Char, or The Night Circus, this tale will take you on a maze of adventures, all the while making you wonder if it's real or just a dream. I'm not exactly sure what I've just read, but I'd be willing to go back + read it again just to be sure!

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unique? Idiosyncratic? Eccentric? Odd? Mysterious? Unusual? Strange? Peculiar? Bizarre? Quirky? Fun?

Yes.

Here is a selection of (only) positive comments from GR reviews:

“really just a good story with some decidedly whacked out elements” Candace Burton
“takes the old fashioned private eye story and recreates it with elements of fantasy” Deb
“a delightfully eccentric concoction that goes down easily” Blake Fraina
“every sentence is well-written” Joe Hunt
“The humor is silly and light, but the suspense is edgy and intense.” Catie

If you like Monty Python, you will like The Manual of Detection. Some people think it is Kafkaesque. Is Monty Python like Kafka? And is Unwin Alice and the archives Wonderland? We all live in a yellow submarine?

Forty percent of GR readers rated the book a four. Twice as many thought it was a five as a two. Three percent thought it was a one and three times as many thought it was a two. What percentage of readers thought it was a three? Write your answer on a piece of typing paper using lemon juice. See if you can read it using a CFL bulb. Try the same thing using an LED. Which gave the right answer? Show your work.

Now for something completely different: What is steampunk? Forgive me for asking, but I am a geezer and don’t know these things. Please don’t depend on someone else telling me. I am depending on you!

And now for something completely different. On Non sequiturs: It may be that P does not follow O except on the occasions you are going backwards. Do not assume that there is critical thinking going on here. Or that things are as they seem.

And now for something completely different:

A woman nearby shouted up at an apartment building, arguing with no one Unwin could see or hear – there was a disagreement, it seemed, about who was to blame for ruining the pot roast.

If this book was half its length, I would probably give it four stars. I think it is too long. Maybe it would be a good graphic novel with significant cuts. I think running the same kind of humor over and over is a bit much for one book. And then it gets so serious at the end.

Maybe I just should have spread out my reading. As it was I had the impression that remembering details of the story was an important aspect in appreciating the work. Since my ability to retain details is limited, I felt like I needed to read the book over just a few days. But at the end I was still unable to resurrect the details.

For that, I give it three stars with some apologies to the author. It doesn’t seem quite right to give fewer stars for being funny too long… but it just wore on me. Sorry, Jedediah Berry.

N.B. Rated PG. Charles Unwin must be in some way quite a magnetic fellow. At least he attracted several women in a relatively short period of time. Maybe this was actually him dreaming?