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Crown of Beaks
A crucified body wrapped like a mummy in packaging tape is found hanging from a wire attached to the roofline of both the Israeli and American pavilions on the opening day of the Venice Biennale. Initially, however, everyone assumes the figure is an example of hyperrealist sculpture. It isn’t until the third day when the rotting head attracts several hungry and overly aggressive seagulls, that officials realize they have a murder on their hands. To make matters worse, the victim is none other than the famous contemporary Italian artist, Marcello Mercato.Detective Inspector Paola Contini of Venice and Stieg Molloy of Interpol join forces to investigate a case that takes them far beyond the borders of Italy, and far beyond the confines of the artworld. The two detectives soon find themselves chasing down all sorts of bizarre clues, a severed hand in a box of chocolates, a farm overrun with demon-like animals bent on destruction, Satanic cultists, a mysterious block of ice that appears to contain the body of yet another victim, a mad scientist experimenting on humans, a secret lair, strange, robotic creatures, and all of it part of some hidden master plan to destroy the world as we know it, a plan that our detectives must uncover or, well, only God (and perhaps the author) knows what will happen next. So as you might have guessed by now, Crown of Beaks is much more than a detective novel. Yes it recreates the atmospheres of southern European and Nordic noir, and so it offers the pleasure of standard detective fiction. But it is also a postmodernist riff on the detective novel genre, which means it offers alternative viewpoints about what is happening with detectives Contini and Molloy and why. Crown of Beaks is both detective novel and metafiction and will leave both crime novel enthusiasts and genre-sceptics engrossed.
458 pages, Paperback
Published August 30, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 16, 2021
The 3rd Martiny novel I've read. 458 pages. A detective story revolving around Art History arcana, containing morsels of academic quirkiness.
Taking place in Italy, Paris, then Nordic locales, the author illustrates culture clash by offering many crime thriller-esque expressions and encounters, casting them in new light, or twisting them in odd ways. It morphs into an intensely engaging cat and mouse (and other animal) chase, complete with romantic entanglement, real-world unsettling resonance, and a touch of pulp.
We get to gallivant around Europe (which almost guarantees I'll enjoy it), riffing off every crime novel trope I've seen, then spins into body horror of the most gruesome variety, all in the service of apt satire.
Quirky scenarios, charming characters, a mature literary sensibility, Martiny is a practiced hand at manipulation and presentation of his chosen material. Full of suspense and suggestion. Imaginative, morbid, dynamic and structurally surprising. A heady blend of high and low art. A literary confection offering generous portions of entertainment and challenging puzzles. The authorial voice is confident and preternaturally enjoyable. A little too heavy on the dialogue, but not falling short of witty and astute. He ratchets up the tension, providing plenty of character interaction, plot development and chewy, snarky repartee, planting clues like breadcrumbs. An interesting inclusion of infographics and meta-commentary offsets the slide into uncanny dementia. Ironic, eerie, atmospheric all the way through. With a vividly evoked setting, dread, a sinister and persistent macabre aura, page-turning cliffhangers, and an intriguing premise underlying it all.
Martiny has done his homework. He picks key elements to inject his mystery with a mix of the familiar and the unspeakable. A few of the many motifs - masks, artificial facades, pests, biology.
That's not all. Add an enlightening discussion of avant-garde pranksters and eccentric artist maniacs to the bag. With dependable, brilliant description, he partakes of playful Noir conventions, casting his mosquito-plagued detective into a versatile role, equipped with a smart car, a femme fatale some wryly exuberant metaphors and testicularly bracing similes, veering into ridiculous hyperbole on occasion, which lends an absurdist texture to an otherwise straightforward Who-dun-it. It's fun to point out the vanity of artists, the raging egos, the pursuit of alt expression, the inherent contradictions in the industry - and Martiny knows what he's talking about. Personally, I appreciated the subtle play of juxtapositions: the mother's milk vodka, the viverrids, Artimisia's eyes and hair, the color and form manifest in set-pieces, body as art and art as living thing, and incorporation of memento mori, the variances in light and dark, how beauty contains death and death beauty. It wasn't until the end that I understood the significance of certain allusions to landscape, and weather phenomena.
Immerse yourself in his off-kilter humor, see if you can detect hidden references to Biblical pestilential plagues, the subliminal allusions to literature and religions, and embark on an adventure involving horns, milk, teeth, eyes, and tongues. In the end, it is a fascinating interplay between animal and human qualities which combine to make this more than an ordinary crime novel.
Taking place in Italy, Paris, then Nordic locales, the author illustrates culture clash by offering many crime thriller-esque expressions and encounters, casting them in new light, or twisting them in odd ways. It morphs into an intensely engaging cat and mouse (and other animal) chase, complete with romantic entanglement, real-world unsettling resonance, and a touch of pulp.
We get to gallivant around Europe (which almost guarantees I'll enjoy it), riffing off every crime novel trope I've seen, then spins into body horror of the most gruesome variety, all in the service of apt satire.
Quirky scenarios, charming characters, a mature literary sensibility, Martiny is a practiced hand at manipulation and presentation of his chosen material. Full of suspense and suggestion. Imaginative, morbid, dynamic and structurally surprising. A heady blend of high and low art. A literary confection offering generous portions of entertainment and challenging puzzles. The authorial voice is confident and preternaturally enjoyable. A little too heavy on the dialogue, but not falling short of witty and astute. He ratchets up the tension, providing plenty of character interaction, plot development and chewy, snarky repartee, planting clues like breadcrumbs. An interesting inclusion of infographics and meta-commentary offsets the slide into uncanny dementia. Ironic, eerie, atmospheric all the way through. With a vividly evoked setting, dread, a sinister and persistent macabre aura, page-turning cliffhangers, and an intriguing premise underlying it all.
Martiny has done his homework. He picks key elements to inject his mystery with a mix of the familiar and the unspeakable. A few of the many motifs - masks, artificial facades, pests, biology.
That's not all. Add an enlightening discussion of avant-garde pranksters and eccentric artist maniacs to the bag. With dependable, brilliant description, he partakes of playful Noir conventions, casting his mosquito-plagued detective into a versatile role, equipped with a smart car, a femme fatale some wryly exuberant metaphors and testicularly bracing similes, veering into ridiculous hyperbole on occasion, which lends an absurdist texture to an otherwise straightforward Who-dun-it. It's fun to point out the vanity of artists, the raging egos, the pursuit of alt expression, the inherent contradictions in the industry - and Martiny knows what he's talking about. Personally, I appreciated the subtle play of juxtapositions: the mother's milk vodka, the viverrids, Artimisia's eyes and hair, the color and form manifest in set-pieces, body as art and art as living thing, and incorporation of memento mori, the variances in light and dark, how beauty contains death and death beauty. It wasn't until the end that I understood the significance of certain allusions to landscape, and weather phenomena.
Immerse yourself in his off-kilter humor, see if you can detect hidden references to Biblical pestilential plagues, the subliminal allusions to literature and religions, and embark on an adventure involving horns, milk, teeth, eyes, and tongues. In the end, it is a fascinating interplay between animal and human qualities which combine to make this more than an ordinary crime novel.
June 20, 2021
Crown of Beaks is essentially a mystery novel and on that level it certainly delivers yet it is so much more. Without giving any spoilers we also get a glimpse into the author’s psyche and his reasoning behind his quest to write a murder mystery. The novel is set in the art world and there are a series of gruesome murders that are highly unique and quite bizarre. An Interpol detective who specializes in art is called in to investigate with the Italian police. The body count grows as the mystery deepens and you find yourself on a page turning adventure that is hard to put down. Overall it is a highly entertaining read that will keep you guessing and an ending that will leave you breathless. I can still picture the murder scenes in my mind.
January 13, 2021
Oh boy, I entertained such high hopes for this one. I found a synopsis online and immediately thought: Butor, Gadda, Perec, oh my! I don't know why I violated my dictum about expectations for a book ultimately aspiring to a genre that produces vastly more duds than jewels. Crown of Beaks fails as a detective novel despite its inventive plot. It is larded with these literary meta-references that are ostensibly designed to make the protagonist, Stieg Molloy--a quality gumshoe name--the kind of hero readers of this stuff crave. We are all trying to solve the ghastly crime of contemporary American literature together, and there's nothing quite like invoking the names of our patron saints to speed us on our way. But this is a most minor overreach: far worse is the grasping at Chandler and Hammett for that mid-30s hard-nosed dialogue, peppered with casual racism and misogyny, which in those fine writers' prose is gritty and enthralling. Here, it just struck me as stilted and borrowed. Virtually every page is freighted with some unfortunate mixed metaphor or another, and there is this reoccurring trope about Italians speaking English like Mario that we all thought was richly humorous in middle school. Don't get me started about the way Molloy thinks about and interacts with women, because this detail is better suppressed in favor of deconstructing some of the other meta-gymnastics of the book.
Long sequences of action that are really quite interesting are occasionally interrupted by these interleaved author's notes that try for the "dear reader" effect and at some point in effecting this delicate tracery of old-school style--like Fielding's essays in Tom Jones--it turns into one of those falsely modest trumpetings of authorial virtue that leave the reader feeling deflated and in some ways vaguely angry. Let me be clear when I say I LOVE METAFICTION. But this is the author knowing that he is being tiresome and doing it anyway.
I don't know how to be fair and honest without sounding mean. I respect Mr. Martiny for not tossing off one of those 120 page jeux d'esprit that so many people excuse for a real book, when you can read it in an hour and the prose feels like something generated by a machine learning algorithm. CoB isn't that, and if its 458 page heft doesn't convince you, the obvious care taken in generating the plot and structure of this book should. Sometimes the writing is even very good; at other times it is cringe-inducing--which the author seems to know from saying as much in the first of the interludes, but dismisses this as a constraint of the genre, or some such--and most of the humor, for me, fell entirely flat.
(PS: I feel bad about including this as either a postscript or a parenthetical, so I am making it both to unburden myself. I couldn't help but think that in some multiverse or another this is one of the novels Gilbert Sorrentino read while dreaming up that superlative work of comedic literary genius, Mulligan Stew. Time has folded back on itself like an aliased signal and Crown of Beaks really came out in 1920. Or, just as (un)likely, Tony Lamont finally pulled off what all his surly and recalcitrant characters did to him in turn, and has appeared on the scene of our crime to finally finish that book he's always wanted to write.)
Plot: 3
Prose: 2.5
Characterization: 2
Dialogue: 1
Meta: 3.5
Overall: 2
Long sequences of action that are really quite interesting are occasionally interrupted by these interleaved author's notes that try for the "dear reader" effect and at some point in effecting this delicate tracery of old-school style--like Fielding's essays in Tom Jones--it turns into one of those falsely modest trumpetings of authorial virtue that leave the reader feeling deflated and in some ways vaguely angry. Let me be clear when I say I LOVE METAFICTION. But this is the author knowing that he is being tiresome and doing it anyway.
I don't know how to be fair and honest without sounding mean. I respect Mr. Martiny for not tossing off one of those 120 page jeux d'esprit that so many people excuse for a real book, when you can read it in an hour and the prose feels like something generated by a machine learning algorithm. CoB isn't that, and if its 458 page heft doesn't convince you, the obvious care taken in generating the plot and structure of this book should. Sometimes the writing is even very good; at other times it is cringe-inducing--which the author seems to know from saying as much in the first of the interludes, but dismisses this as a constraint of the genre, or some such--and most of the humor, for me, fell entirely flat.
(PS: I feel bad about including this as either a postscript or a parenthetical, so I am making it both to unburden myself. I couldn't help but think that in some multiverse or another this is one of the novels Gilbert Sorrentino read while dreaming up that superlative work of comedic literary genius, Mulligan Stew. Time has folded back on itself like an aliased signal and Crown of Beaks really came out in 1920. Or, just as (un)likely, Tony Lamont finally pulled off what all his surly and recalcitrant characters did to him in turn, and has appeared on the scene of our crime to finally finish that book he's always wanted to write.)
Plot: 3
Prose: 2.5
Characterization: 2
Dialogue: 1
Meta: 3.5
Overall: 2
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews