Moment of Doubt

by Jim Nisbet

A Moment of Doubt is at turns hilarious, thrilling, and obscene. Jim Nisbet’s novella is ripped from the zeitgeist of the ’80s, and set in a sex-drenched San Francisco, where the computer becomes the protagonist’s co-conspirator and both writer and machine seem to threaten the written word itself. The City as whore provides a backdrop oozing with drugs, poets and danger. Nisbet has written a madcap meditation on the angst of a writer caught in a world where the rent is due, new technology offers up illicit ways to produce the latest bestseller, and the detective and other characters of the imagination might just sidle up to the bar and buy you a drink in real life. The world of A Moment of Doubt is the world of phone sex, bars and bordellos, AIDS, and the lure of hacking. Coming up against the rules of the game—the detective genre itself—has never been such a nasty and gender-defying challenge. An interview with Jim Nisbet, who is “Still too little read in the United States, it's a joy for us that Nisbet has been recognized here...” Le Mouvement des Idées

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published eleven novels, including the acclaimed Lethal Injection. He has also published five volumes of poetry. His novel, Dark Companion, was shorted-listed for the 2006 Hammett Prize. Various of his works have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Russian and Romanian.

Aside from reading and performing his own work for some forty-five years, Nisbet has written and seen produced a modest handful of one-act plays and monologues, including Valentine, Note from Earth, WonderEndz™ SmackVision™ and Alas, Poor Yorick, and himself directed the original productions of most of these works.

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I really liked it. The writing is fantastic, it's fast paced and evenly matched with utter brutality and what I can only call guy-lit romance. I don't think there's a word in existence for that particular combo of 'love' and lust. It's extremely dark and also extremely funny. It has plenty of humor based on sex and toilets. I am quite sure all men will love it. So a great book.

That said, I'm curious as to what other women will think of it. It was quite spectacularly male. After reading it I felt a bit like I do in the female toilet at Berkey's bar where the room is plastered with pictures of cocks from porn magazines, in some man's poor attempt to please the females of his species (the men at Berkey's genuinely enjoy their toilet decor I'm told). Or like I've watched every episode of the A-team ever and all at once. Or that I found it tucked away in my boyfriend's hidden porn stash, read it, and decided to put it back. Nothing bad about the book, just that few books make me feel like a "female reader", and this was one of them. Almost sent me running to Jane Austen, but I read Octavia Butler instead.

(and apologies for the very binary idea of male and female in this review! Of course this will not hold true for everyone, the strength of my feelings has forced me to momentarily forget the complex nuances of gender)

[Alec · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating meta-commentary on detective fiction, writing, creating, and just about everything else. The central metaphor couldn’t have handled another page, and the interview at the back was a treat.

Anytime you see Jim Thompson, Point Blank and The Friends of Eddie Coyle in the same place you know you’ve made it.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novella is a fascinating bit of meta-fiction and also a pretty hilarious tale of a writer who hacks into a publisher's database and then the printer's network and starts churning out and distributing books. At the end is an interview with Nisbet and he talks about how this book came about after the first two Windrow novels - The Damned Don't Die and Ulysses' Dog:

. . . I shared a suspicion of the detective novel, I wrote A Moment of Doubt. All three, note, might be construed as "Martin Windrow" novels. In fact, I was very disgusted by detective writing. It was too easy, it was too dumb, it was too cliched. The first one I wrote twisted the cliches, the second one I wrote just pulled them out by the roots, and the third one gave it implants and extensions. Bottom line, A Moment of Doubt says, "I can't do this genre." . . . It's that writer guy going nuts writing detective fiction. Going way nuts. And while he was going way nuts, I was having way fun. All of a sudden stuff was available to me that hadn't been available - satire, pornography, obscenity, social issues - fun!

[G.D. Bowlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nisbet's mystery writing protagonist's paranoia, perversion, and surreal visions all ring as fearfully true today as they did when the book was written in 1985. Strap in and let A MOMENT OF DOUBT take you into the bizarre world of the pulp fiction writer, where reality and fantasy are never far apart. Nisbet is always phenomenal and this is no different.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

My fourth and easily least favorite Nisbet book. This one is all over the place and just read like an author wanting to see how much bs and pornography he could get away with. Dumb premise. Surprised this was even published.