The Manual of Detection

Mar 06, 2009 Nathan Rostron rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

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 i...more 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.
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Mar 13, 2009 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: weird-fiction

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 s...more 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.

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Feb 15, 2012 Abby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 takes comfort in the routine, attaching his umbrella to his bicyc...more

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Jan 29, 2013 Bettie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Bettie by: Christmas gift from Susanna

Shelves: paper-read, tbr-busting-2013, winter-20122013, fradio, fantasy, mystery-thriller, published-2009, radio-4x, doo-lally, debut

Opening: The expert detective's pursuit will go unnoticed, but not because he is unremarkable. Rather, like the suspect's shadow, he will appear as though he was meant to be there.

See where S marks this as 'weird' and 4* - right there, groovy!

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

Anyone seen it? And just where is Chapter 18?

#28 TBR Busting 2013

whacky fun!

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Aug 08, 2011 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Adam by: Michael Moorcock

Shelves: literature-fantastique, steampunkery, black-comedy, noir

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 obviou...more

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Nov 22, 2011 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

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...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Candace Burton added it

film noir. gothic fantasy. the thursday next series, the thin man movies, spenser and hawk. if you like any of these, you will likely enjoy this book as much as i did. it is splendidly and almost seamlessly written. the prose is intense and carries a depth that i don't find often in any but the most tragic of fictions--and this is no tragedy. it's not a comedy, it's definitely not a romance, but really just a good story with some decidedly whacked out elements. charles unwin, hapless clerk to th...more

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Mar 04, 2011 Deb rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery, noir, fantasy

This inventive mystery takes the old fashioned private eye story and recreates it with elements of fantasy. At the center is Charles Unwin, a clerk for 'the agency' who suddenly finds himself promoted to a detective. The detective that he once clerked for has gone missing and as Unwin encounters a series of bizarre occurances he becomes determined to track down the missing detective--for he may be the only one who can explain what's going one and help solve the case. [return]I sometimes had a ha...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Tony rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-crime-detection

Berry, Jedediah. THE MANUAL OF DETECTION. (2009). **. If you crossed some of the recessive genes of Lewis Carroll with those of Philip K. Dick, you might come up with a novelist who would write a book like this. It is set in a nameless city where it is always seems to be raining. In fact, the hero’s umbrella plays a major role in the story. The hero, Charles Unwin, works as a clerk for a detective agency. The agency is populated with lots of people who have specialized jobs, and noone can cross...more

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Mar 26, 2013 Jen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book. It has a very noir feel to it, but also managed to leave me with a smirk more often than not while reading. There’s a good balance between the mysteries the reader is meant to solve before Unwin and those the reader is meant to uncover along with him. This was great because it left me wanting to know when Unwin would figure out what I already knew just as much as I wanted to know who had pulled off certain crimes and how. There are some really cool visuals to the book...more

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May 04, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book, in both senses of the word—the current sense (great, terrific, fabulous) and the original sense (full of wonders). The wonders include an army of sleepwalkers, a barge loaded with clocks, phonograph records that play nothing but rustling noises, the theft of entire day, and many more I can’t tell you without giving too much away. Even though the library shelved it under "Mystery," it definitely qualifies as fantasy, but I can't tell you why; you'll just have to trust me...more This is a wonderful book, in both senses of the word—the current sense (great, terrific, fabulous) and the original sense (full of wonders). The wonders include an army of sleepwalkers, a barge loaded with clocks, phonograph records that play nothing but rustling noises, the theft of entire day, and many more I can’t tell you without giving too much away. Even though the library shelved it under "Mystery," it definitely qualifies as fantasy, but I can't tell you why; you'll just have to trust me.

First-time novelist Jedediah Berry has taken the clichés of the hard-boiled detective story and imbued them with a mythic quality. You’ve got the cynical, wise-cracking detective, the loyal assistant, the femme fatale (two of them, actually), the unexpected corpse, the criminal mastermind, the gritty dark streets of the city in the rain, the brooding mansion, the revelation of secrets, the showdown with the villain, even a nightclub scene. But each is taken to its extreme, and then past it into the realm of archetype.

The setting is a generic big city. Charles Unwin is a meticulous clerk working for a large agency whose employees are locked into rigidly stratified roles. Quite by chance one day, his usual routine is interrupted by a dropped umbrella, a strange dream, and a memo promoting him to detective. Believing the latter to be some kind of mistake, Unwin spends a good chunk of the novel trying to correct it. He becomes the most unlikely of detectives, fumbling around completely out of his element, trying to imagine what a "real" detective would do, constantly afraid he'll be exposed as a fraud and demoted to under-clerk. But in the process, he discovers much more than he ever imagined, beyond the mysteries of the missing detective, the murdered watcher, the beautiful client with an assumed name, and the startling crime being planned and executed while the city sleeps. He discovers astonishing secrets about the very nature of his world.

I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say that a lot of the action of the story takes place in the mind – in memories and dreams. The prose style manages to evoke a state somewhere between waking and dreaming, so that at times the reader is never quite sure if the story will really stop upon closing the book.

Think of Walter Mitty starring in a Raymond Chandler story directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by René Magritte, and that comes close to what this novel is like. It's an unusual book, delightful, intriguing, trippy, and, as I said, wonder-full.
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Sep 10, 2011 Blake Fraina rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 liber...more 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.

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Aug 30, 2011 Joe Hunt rated it 5 of 5 stars

I feel awful, I haven't written a professional review of this book for some high class magazine

like Cosmopolitan or Vogue or whatever. (I started one, but not smart enough to finish.)

It's amazing ! One of the best books ever, lately, honestly.

(And I know the guy. I went to Poetry School with him.

I sat in a workshop, work-shopping some chapters.

Remember I had one or two suggestions that: a. didn't matter, b. he already thought about and resolved anyhow.

"Are we going to see the girl in the plaid c...more

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Aug 28, 2011 B. Lloyd rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A nameless city , a vanished travelling circus, elephants and a detective with wet socks; a maverick of a book.
Mr Charles Unwin, a clerk working at The Agency of Detection, is catapulted one morning to the elevated position of detective – one of the top operatives of the Agency, Sivart, is missing and it is up to Unwin to trace his whereabouts. He has no sooner started when another detective, Lamech is found dead at his own desk; Unwin is quickly framed for his murder, and so under pressure begi...more A nameless city , a vanished travelling circus, elephants and a detective with wet socks; a maverick of a book.
Mr Charles Unwin, a clerk working at The Agency of Detection, is catapulted one morning to the elevated position of detective – one of the top operatives of the Agency, Sivart, is missing and it is up to Unwin to trace his whereabouts. He has no sooner started when another detective, Lamech is found dead at his own desk; Unwin is quickly framed for his murder, and so under pressure begins his search into very uncertain territory, equipped with his umbrella, bicycle, wet socks and a copy of The Manual of Detection – of which the last chapter is missing.

Things take a twist for the unexpected when he finds himself communicating with Sivart through dreams; indeed there is much dreaming and sleepwalking in this rainy, urbanised landscape where radio and typewriter hold reign (television and cinema are notably absent); it is a sinister, nameless Wonderland, or Looking-Glass world gone noir, a surreal dreamland where people inhabit each other’s sleeping hours.
Unwin is led – or detects his way – through this world in a series of mildly mad episodes to re-examine Sivart’s earlier cases. He discovers errors, deception, double identities, he is misled and occasionally tricked into traps, he finds allies and enemies in unexpected quarters; - and therein lies one of the main qualities of this book : the quality of surprise, which trips up the unsuspecting reader all the way to the final pages.

Scattered throughout the dry, unsettling, near mystic narrative are entertaining eccentricities – an able female assistant who falls asleep mid-sentence and snores, a nameless man with a blonde beard who types relentlessly every time he sees Unwin, the stunning and lame Cleo Greenwood with a talent for lulling people to sleep – while the Cases themselves offer delightfully whimsical names :‘The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker’, ‘The Man who Stole November 12th’‘The Oldest Murdered Man’– but nothing is unplanned in this beguiling detective mystery.

It has been compared to Kafka – I would add there is an Orwellian theme of watchers and the watched, only in this case the reader is taken down another path, one that diverts as much as it distracts, with an imagery that recalls Rendez-vous BelleVille and Dr Parnassus.
Does the resolution of a bizarre set of puzzles help lift the soggy atmosphere, free Unwin from his predicament and his damp socks, and most importantly, does it stop raining ? No spoilers here – but it is certainly worth reading to find out. All in all an absorbing, intriguing if at times disquieting read, meticulously planned and very entertaining with a colourful flourish at the end.
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Apr 01, 2010 John rated it 2 of 5 stars

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. On...more
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.
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Mar 07, 2010 Deborah rated it 5 of 5 stars

I went to Booksmith on Haight Street to get my dad a birthday gift. I was drawn to this book and immediately decided to get it for him, and to borrow it after he read it. The author's name sounded familiar, but I saw that it was his first novel, so I kind of shrugged and forgot about it. A few months later, the Bard e-news letter came and in it was an announcement that Jedediah Berry, class of '99, would be giving a reading on campus from his first novel, The Manual of Detection. All of a sudden...more I went to Booksmith on Haight Street to get my dad a birthday gift. I was drawn to this book and immediately decided to get it for him, and to borrow it after he read it. The author's name sounded familiar, but I saw that it was his first novel, so I kind of shrugged and forgot about it. A few months later, the Bard e-news letter came and in it was an announcement that Jedediah Berry, class of '99, would be giving a reading on campus from his first novel, The Manual of Detection. All of a sudden, it clicked into place: this was Jed, who was in every one of my fiction writing workshops at Bard until he graduated. Jed, who lived down the hall from me in Manor Annex my sophomore year. Jed, who also came from fantasy/sci-fi and was turned on by Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Italo Calvino and company. We had the same adviser and fiction-writing prof, Brad Morrow. And we had lost touch for 11 years. I immediately facebooked him and discovered that he'd be in San Francisco for some readings soon. So we met up again at 9th St. Film Center, where Tanya was curating a hybrid media arts show in which my brother had a video installation piece. Jed ended up coming to Zeitgeist with a bunch of us after that, and he and Jesse discovered they had mutual friends in Northampton. It started raining at Zeitgeist, and Jed pulled out an umbrella. We were all impressed. Does anyone in San Francisco carry and umbrella? The next evening, we saw Jed read downtown. Then we all ate Thai food. A guy named Ed and his friend Emily joined us. Ed just translated a book that Jed's small press is publishing. He was a lecteur in France just like I was. The universe shrank even further when we discovered that Ed's ex girlfriend had sat on my senior project board at Bard. Unsurprisingly, I ran into Ed a couple of weeks later while going down the escalator in the Milbrae BART station, though he lives in San Jose and I live in San Francisco. His friend Emily and I are convinced that we know each other from somewhere, but we can't figure out from where.
All the synchronicity fit strangely well with The Manual of Detection, which was a delightful read (loved the treatment of the female characters and the ending). I could tell that Jed and I had continued reading similar things over the years. What a joy to reconnect with an old friend who has written and published a great book! (less)

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Dec 30, 2009 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 promo...more

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Nov 08, 2009 David Hebblethwaite rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Matthew Preston rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: labyrinths

This book was an impulse buy a few months ago; since then it has sat forgotten on my kindle. I bought it because it looked to be that mixture of fun and light intellectualism that is perfect for an easy read. And when I stumbled across it again, hungover and traveling, that was exactly what it proved to be. Sure, its cod-hardboiled detective schtick could have been done better. Sure it's order vs chaos theme was hardly original and its treatment of it even less so (an anarchic circus? Please!)....more

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Oct 14, 2012 Cornelia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Charles Unwin ist Schreiber in einer Detektivagentur und in seinem Job ein sehr gewissenhafter Mann. Jahrelang arbeitete er die Fälle seines Detektiv Travis Sivart auf und verfasste darüber Berichte, während dieser den Ruhm für die Lösungen bei „den drei Morden des Colonel Baker“, „dem ältesten Mordopfer der Welt“ und natürlich „dem Mann, der den zwölften November stahl“ einheimste.
Doch als Sivart spurlos verschwindet, wird Unwin überraschend zum Detektiv befördert und die „Frau im karierten Man...more Charles Unwin ist Schreiber in einer Detektivagentur und in seinem Job ein sehr gewissenhafter Mann. Jahrelang arbeitete er die Fälle seines Detektiv Travis Sivart auf und verfasste darüber Berichte, während dieser den Ruhm für die Lösungen bei „den drei Morden des Colonel Baker“, „dem ältesten Mordopfer der Welt“ und natürlich „dem Mann, der den zwölften November stahl“ einheimste.
Doch als Sivart spurlos verschwindet, wird Unwin überraschend zum Detektiv befördert und die „Frau im karierten Mantel“ nimmt seinen Platz in der Agentur ein. Für Unwin steht fest: Er ist kein Detektiv. Er will einfach nur Sivart finden und seinen alten Job wieder. Und natürlich herausfinden, wer die Frau im karierten Mantel ist, die er seit einer Woche wartend am Bahnsteig beobachtet.
Unwin begibt sich auf die Suche nach dem verschollenen Detektiv und stapft in ein Netz aus komplizierten Lügen, geheimen Machenschaften und skrupellosen Bösewichten, die nicht einmal bei den Träumen der Menschen Halt machen. Unwin muss sich bald eingestehen, dass die Zeit seiner erholsamen Nächte endgültig vorbei ist. Denn Schlafen ist so ziemlich das Gefährlichste, das man tun könnte, wenn man nicht weiß, wer dich in deinem Traum verfolgen könnte.

Berry schafft es zielsicher, Charles Unwin von der ersten bis zur letzten Seite zu porträtieren, in einer Art, die sowohl äußerst menschlich, aber auch herrlich tief greifend ist. Nach dieser Lektüre habe ich das Gefühl, nicht nur Unwin ist aus seinem Traum erwacht, sondern auch ich. Unwirklich, bizarr, man wusste beim Lesen nie ganz ob man nun wach oder träumend war, aber genau das macht den Reiz dieses Buches aus. Die Ungewissheit, dass das allwissende Auge der Agentur (das ist ihr Markenzeichen) auf einem ruhte, etwas in der Hinterhand hielt und Unwin scheitern würde.
Der Plot ist zwar gradlinig (Suche nach Sivart), aber die Hinweise drehen und wenden sich, Berry lockt einen in Fallen und deckt immer wieder Details auf, die anscheinend nichtig, aber nicht unwichtig waren. So werde ich wohl nie wieder orangerote Blätter und Ahornflieger betrachten können, ohne an Sivart in der Badewanne zu denken, der mit seiner Zigarre im Mund raunte: „Charlie, Sie streichen in Ihren Berichten all die guten Stellen raus!“.
Die vielen authentisch wirkenden Figuren überzeugen und schaffen es Unwin (und mit ihm den Leser) in eine melancholische, triste Welt zu ziehen, in der nicht nur die beständigen Regenwolken nach ein bisschen Sonnenlicht schreien. Dazu präsentiert Berry ein absolut bestechendes Konzept. Das Handbuch der Detektive ist aufgebaut wie sein Gegenstück im Roman. Kapitel für Kapitel eignet sich Unwin die Kenntnisse seines neuen Berufes an und der Leser mit ihm.

Fazit: Sei auf der Hut vor deinen Träumen! Sie führen dich an Orte, die man nicht betreten sollte, und verwickeln dich in Geschichten, von denen man lieber nicht hören möchte – dafür aber definitiv lesen! Ein wirklich überzeugendes Buch, das selbst nach der letzten Seite einen noch zum Nachdenken anregt, wie sehr wir Menschen durch unsere Träume beeinflussbar sind und wie unerklärlich dieser Part in unseren Unterbewusstsein doch ist.(less)

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Sep 19, 2011 Tonya rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of Jasper Fforde

Shelves: mystery, fiction-novels

Charles Unwin is a Clerk, that is the sum total of who he is. He is mostly happy with this except that he is the Clerk to the most successful Detective in The Agency and the villians just aren't as interesting as they used to be. Now there's been an error made and Unwin's detective is missing, presumed dead, and Unwin has been promoted from Clerk to Detective. There's nothing for Unwin to do but correct this error and take his righful place back on the 14th floor with the other Clerks.

This novel...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Catie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery-thriller-noir, read-in-2011, fantasy

I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while. It’s easily the most visually striking book that I own, but still I managed to avoid picking it up. This is one that’s hard to classify – or maybe I just don’t have much experience with the “genre.” It’s part surrealist dream caper, part hardboiled detective novel, with a dash of witty humor and some commentary on extremism just for good measure. So yeah, this book has a lot going on, but it all somehow fits together with total precision.

The unwit...more I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while. It’s easily the most visually striking book that I own, but still I managed to avoid picking it up. This is one that’s hard to classify – or maybe I just don’t have much experience with the “genre.” It’s part surrealist dream caper, part hardboiled detective novel, with a dash of witty humor and some commentary on extremism just for good measure. So yeah, this book has a lot going on, but it all somehow fits together with total precision.

The unwitting hero is Charles Unwin, a clerk of the mysterious “Agency.” He has spent the past twenty years keeping meticulous records for the Agency’s star detective, the palindromically named (no, that’s not a real word) Travis T. Sivart. Due to the Agency’s rigorous staff segregation rules, Unwin and Sivart have never met. When Sivart seems to be losing his passion for the job, Unwin likewise contemplates leaving. Until he notices a lonely woman in a plaid raincoat at the train station, Sivart goes missing, and he is inexplicably and suddenly promoted to detective. Unwilling to accept that the promotion is not in error, he sets out to find Detective Sivart and restore him to the role.

The writing is tight and neat; there are no wasted words here. Everything in this book seems crucial, like a clue that you have to keep track of. And yet, the world that he creates is completely expansive and enveloping. Even the cover design (one of the most representative covers I’ve ever come across) and the chapter layout and headings support the surreal ambience of this book. I literally felt like I was holding the Manual of Detection. The humor is silly and light, but the suspense is edgy and intense. The eerie dream visuals are so vivid and totally unsettling.

The one thing that held me back from giving this one five stars at first was the lack of emotional connection. I didn’t quite see what the point of all of this was…until the ending, when he hit me with the big reveal. I totally had that chills/tingly sinuses/watery eyes/shortness of breath thing going on. He totally got me. So, here you go…five stars.
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Sep 13, 2010 Benjamin added it

Shelves: audiobook

I want to be clear that I’m not making fun of people who do this, but almost every Goodreads review I’ve read of this book contains some description-by-simile: it's like Kafka; it's like Kafka and Auster collaborating; it's like Kafka's lovechild with Chesterton, writing his own bedtime story; it's like Kafka and Chesterton ejaculated into the skull of Lewis Carroll and made Lethem (early-mid Lethem) drink it; it's like Kafka possessed Neil Gaiman who then wrote the story with a typewriter of ca...more I want to be clear that I’m not making fun of people who do this, but almost every Goodreads review I’ve read of this book contains some description-by-simile: it's like Kafka; it's like Kafka and Auster collaborating; it's like Kafka's lovechild with Chesterton, writing his own bedtime story; it's like Kafka and Chesterton ejaculated into the skull of Lewis Carroll and made Lethem (early-mid Lethem) drink it; it's like Kafka possessed Neil Gaiman who then wrote the story with a typewriter of cats tuned to the key of a language spoken only by the blind men of Shambhala; it’s like Chandler, but, you know, less Chandleresque.

There are many reasons why this book accretes comparisons to other writers and works*; but perhaps the most important is that it actually seems like a mixing of a number of genres and archetypes. Like any good Campbellian hero, the clerk Charles Unwin refuses the call to adventure--a promotion to detective status; but if you squint, he seems to have a Gogolian profile, as if he’s wandered out of “The Nose” or “The Overcoat”: the fastidious and, at first, unimaginative pencil pusher, in over his head. Unwin clerks for the Chandleresque Travis T. Sivart, who has the standard gold-heart of the noir detective, getting caught up with women and trying to do the right thing--“Down these mean streets,” etc., etc. Unwin’s case file titles--"The Three Deaths of Captain Baker”--smell Doylish to me (cf., “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”), but maybe that’s just because Doyle gave us the cue for cute titles. The forgetful informant may be Borges’s Funes the memorious turned inside out. The metaphysical city has a Chestertonian dreaminess to it, keeping in mind the subtitle to The Man Who Was Thursday: “A Nightmare.” (I kept half-expecting for the steam-car driving Rook twins--described as incredibly hot and clay-faced--to turn out to be kiln-fired, steam-driven automatons and to come apart, much like the Marquis’s mask comes apart in Chesterton’s book.) Oh, and there’s shades of Kafka, here, as well. Calvino? Kobo Abe? Oh, and one more: the biloquist Enoch Hoffman seems like a take on the character of Carwin the Biloquist, the half-villainous character from Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or The Transformation (1798), one of the earliest American novels.

I’m sure you could continue this exercise and substitute your own literary history; but I’m not at all claiming here that Berry fails to be imaginative--I'm just saying that he’s playing a different game than we might expect. The seeming shades of others and allusions are not bugs (das Ungeziefer), but features: with so many stories going on beneath the hood, it’s not always clear where the story is going--and even more importantly, it’s not always clear how we’re supposed to feel about it. We want Unwin to win, since who doesn’t identify with hapless fools, am I right? But what counts as winning when it’s not even clear what the sides are here? I think the very multiplicity here also helps Berry avoid letting this story become a meta-consideration on any one particular genre; in other words, this isn’t The Big Lebowski or Inherent Vice, with their reconsiderations of California noir. Berry isn’t too concerned here, I think, with any one genre or author, but is more concerned with something like our reading experience.

Now, that said, I also want to say that I think this is a very good book, and here's an anecdote as proof: I listened to this from the library, but due to some error, a couple pages were missing from my copy and I didn't want to go on without reading them; so, first, I turned to Google books and Amazon, but neither had all the missing pages; so I wrote my friend Chris an email, telling him that he might have to call me up and read me the missing pages; then I rode my bike to the not-so-local Borders and read the missing pages there. So, that's some indication of how I felt about this book: I didn't want to miss any of it. So it must be good.

N.B. I’m almost sure I had drinks with Jed in college once (was he friends with Andy Small?), but I haven’t yet friended him on Facebook or Goodreads, so you know I think I can be honest here.

*Not least of which: a) it’s fun to make crazy comparisons and satisfying, too. (I would argue that these comparisons satisfy our impulse for pattern recognizing); b) many famous hard-boiled detectives describe their world in an idiom of analogy and simile, cf., Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: “The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men” (The Big Sleep). In fact, in Berry’s book, the hard-boiled detective Sivart speaks in such similes often.(less)

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Jun 17, 2010 Sharakael rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: detectives, unique-fantasy

This was a very interesting read. Most of it started out as a standard PI novel; a reluctant detective, a case that seemed impossible to solve (to the main character) but which he'd need to solve if he wanted everything to go back to normal, and an ongoing feeling that everyone else but the main character knew what was going on. 1/3 to the end of the novel, things started to shift, and suddenly it entered the unusual area where people could and would walk around in dreams doing their investigati...more

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Apr 09, 2010 Sistermagpie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, mysteries, novels

Um, wow. What a book unlike any other. It definitely lived up to the recommendation I first read for it, which pointed out that in the Internet/cell phone age, a lot of the things that made up a certain kind of detective fiction fell away. You no longer really had the lone detective meeting up with mysterious people.

MoD is one of those worlds that blends fantasy and reality in surprising ways. The caper being solved has details that are almost whimsical, but they're always grounded in a grim, p...more

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Feb 23, 2010 Kerfe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

How could I resist any book with a large eye in the center of both front and back covers?

Something's rotten in Denmark--or in the Agency as clerk Unwin discovers, as he reluctantly assumes the role of Detective. Closed cases are becoming unsolved and open into corpses, lost and found, alive again, or newly dead. Sleepers are both awake and dreaming. Unreliable witnesses and mysterious adventures provide clues, real and false. Identities are fluid. Where will it end? When did it begin?

"The unknow...more

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Jul 01, 2009 Gabriel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kafka's post-hoc adoption by the Existentialists is a real mystery, because his fiction is not simply an exemplar of mauvaise foi, as the anthologies would have it, but a parody of it, and a parody of its parody. Kafka acknowledges that the waiter acts his part, and that he has no choice but to act his part, but also that he does not choose to act his part, even as he chooses to "be" a waiter, and cannot choose anyhow. The social sciences have, unwittingly, been playing the devil's advocate to S...more Kafka's post-hoc adoption by the Existentialists is a real mystery, because his fiction is not simply an exemplar of mauvaise foi, as the anthologies would have it, but a parody of it, and a parody of its parody. Kafka acknowledges that the waiter acts his part, and that he has no choice but to act his part, but also that he does not choose to act his part, even as he chooses to "be" a waiter, and cannot choose anyhow. The social sciences have, unwittingly, been playing the devil's advocate to Sartre and the gang all along.

Berry's Unwin (all of Berry's names are references to other works, from which he draws an astonishing amount of this novel while still crafting something entirely original; this one, of course, is Borges) is Sartre's waiter, and not Kafka's K. Berry has taken more from Chesterton than from Borges or Kafka, for all that the jacket-copy would have you believe. The Man Who Was Thursday (along with a certain Father Brown-ian cast to some of the characters, including Unwin) fathered this novel. Hammett, Borges, Christie, Kafka, Doyle, etc. are second cousins, at best.

The main difference between Chesterton's novel and Berry's can be explained, however, by those second cousins' influences. As much as a boy is like his father, he still talks like his contemporaries, and in the process learns to think like them, too. So, while Chesterton is content to leave things up to his God, Berry must explain them. Unwin is, throughout the novel, in process of trying to "figure it out," and succeeds, to whatever extent he is capable. As John Irwin has pointed out, the solution to the mystery is never in any sense a solution-- looking at Poe's original "tale of ratiocination," Irwin says that, although we know how the orangutan killed Madame L'Espanaye, even how it had become predisposed to do such a thing, the real mystery, the real "why" about the Murders in the Rue Morgue is a much larger and more impenetrable mystery, one that is never "solved." Berry acknowledges as much.

Somehow, then, this novel is Horatio Alger as played by K, with Kafka's lowly clerk realizing his bad faith and taking charge of his freedom, but without really changing his station. He doesn't solve the mystery (he finds Sivart, sure, but he cannot ask the "why?" because he can't answer it), the master criminal is not apprehended, and although Unwin is, in some sense, changed, we find him giving himself the same occupation all over again, like Hammett's Flitcraft: same cat, different pjs.

Sartre's waiter strives to be first a waiter; in this he escapes being merely an object, circumventing his mauvaise foi. But it is not a self-help commandment-- "be" the waiter and you will be set free. One is merely a waiter, or a man trapped in a waiter's body. Unwin spends the novel trying to be a detective while searching for a way to return to being a clerk, which he has never truly stopped being. He is finally set free by being allowed to go back to being a clerk, not because he has solved the case, but because the world has turned around him. This is where I spy the depth of Chesterton's influence on this novel: we live in a world without meaning to us, but with meaning nonetheless. (less)

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Nov 23, 2012 Lori rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012challenge, mysteries

Fascinating and surreal, this book put me in mind of the movie Dark City which is a mixture of noir and dream time in which things are not what they seem at first glance.

Charles Unwin, a clerk of the detective agency where he works, inexplicably gets promoted to detective when his detective, Severt(sp?) disappears off the grid. Unwin finds himself thrust into a surreal landscape of several crimes which he'd thought solved but due to some of his own conceits (such as his leaving out the more inte...more

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Jun 14, 2009 Peter rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had a bit of trouble getting into the Manual of Detection. I felt like I was in a Magritte painting where things are strange and precise, and but cold and lifeless. The main character barely shows any humanity until 3 or 4 chapters in when he waves to some school children. The murder of a colleague discovered earlier creates only a bout of self-absorption.

Around page 96, however, the book picked up for me so that I had trouble putting it down. The protagonist develops and his character flaws...more

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Sep 22, 2010 Mason Jones rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was quite a lot of fun. It took only about the first 15 pages or so to hook me in, since I'm a sucker for surrealist mysteries. Charles Unwin, a clerk at the Agency, is suddenly and mysteriously promoted to be a detective, which is unheard of. Convinced it's a mistake, his first case is to discover what happened to his detective whom he's replacing. Meanwhile, we're introduced to his detective's enemies, including the dream-walking Enoch Hoffman and his cronies at the Travels-No-More c...more

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