But detective work is about recognizing clues.’ĭeWitt, then, is a detective whose route to solving a mystery is one that takes her via the I Ching and playing Virgilian lots with Silette’s Detection. Novice detectives think it’s about finding clues.
‘Clues are the most misunderstood part of detection. But then again, so have most of us.’īetween them, they have forged Claire DeWitt, a detective for whom clues offer themselves up, as if from the ether. I like to think I was too, even though I had a long, bumpy road between my first bottle of fingerprint dust and my PI union card. ‘was a detective since the day she was born. The second are those that have no choice at all.’ ‘There are two kinds of detectives… The first are those that decide to be a detective. DeWitt is the product of two teachers, one a French detective called Silette whose book Detection she considers her Bible, and the other, Constance Darling, a former lover of Silette, who was killed some time before City of the Dead opens and who told DeWitt: As it’s the eponymous city of the dead, New Orleans plays a big part in City of the Dead, from the places through the food to the crime (but you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a different post-Katrina New Orleans if you’ve been following David Simon’s loving, sepia toned Treme – Gran’s New Orleans is closer to the Baltimore of The Wire, a place so hard one character’s wife leaves him to return to Detroit because there is ‘less crime’). We meet her as she is hired by a Leon Salvatore, a man who is looking to find out what happened to his uncle Vic Willing who went missing in the days after Katrina hit New Orleans. Sara Gran is a writer for whom expectations are there to be overturned.Ĭlaire DeWitt is our guide to City of the Dead, a detective, but a detective unlike any you might of met before (outside of Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, perhaps).
‘If anybody looking for that kind of story, the kind where every little thing gets tied up in the end, they best stay on the train and go right through to Texas.’ One of the characters in City of the Dead says, There is no grizzled hack, no rogue cop, no ageing rule-breaker fighting bureaucracy on the one hand and searching for some almost other worldly serial killer on the other. Now she’s back with City of the Dead, the first of a proposed crime series, and the first thing you need to know is – do not approach this the way you would approach the launch of a more typical crime series. A few years back, Come Closer, a sort of odd psychological horror novel was published to critical acclaim and she followed that with Dope, a sort of historical mystery novel set in the 40s and 50s in which (as she described in an interview with us on its release) ‘all the minor characters… the bums, the addicts, but most of all The Girls… were made major’. Sara Gran is one hell of an interesting writer.
0 kommentar(er)
