By Nick Mamatas
Anarchist Review of Books
What would an anarchist private eye even look like? Well, no license, for one thing. As likely to be a criminal as stop a crime as anything else. And perhaps preoccupied with poetry, the hothouse of Berkeley’s leftist scene, and hooking up with clients and criminals of any gender. That’s Clay Blackburn, the poet and book scout detective, as written by Owen Hill, the poet and book scout crime fiction specialist. (In addition to his poetry, Hill co-edited The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and co-edited the anthology Berkeley Noir which, full disclosure, includes a short story by this reviewer.)
The Giveaway collects the two published Blackburn novels, The Chandler Apartments and The Incredible Double, includes the brand-new Mayakovsky’s Bugatti, and the short story “Righteous
Kill” from Berkeley Noir. One of the great joys of the detective series is not the plots, though mystery is a plot-driven genre; it’s watching the protagonist grow, age, and change. These novels cover the twenty-first century so far. In the first novel, Blackburn is checking his email at an email station in Moe’s Books. By Bugatti, he’s joined a cat-burglary ring to lift smart watches and laptops from the techies that have spent the last twenty years colonizing. We get to see Berkeley go through its many changes—vale,
Éclair Bakery, RIP People’s Park— though its radical soul remains intact. The cat burglary ring helps fund a rad- ical bookselling space, as might some psychedelic hot sauce from the town’s latest fancy-pants chef.
Despite including three novels, The Giveaway is not overly long. This is half Blackburn, half Hill. Blackburn will solve a problem or take care of a murderer, but doesn’t bother with the authorities if he
can help it, so the lengthy denouement of so many mysteries in which every detail is carefully explained to some set of nitwit cops is missing; these mysteries wrap up very quickly. And Hill, a student of
the genre, is exploring the territory of the classic noir. The Postman Always Rings Twice and other seminal works are less than 40,000 words long, and thus so too are the Blackburn novels. It was the introduction of word processing that made genre novels so long, and influenced audience taste for longer works, and thus it is likely that Bugatti couldn’t be published alone in the 2020s, as the first two novels could be by small presses in the 2000s.
All three novels are exquisite noir, and Blackburn is an intriguing, philosophical noir protagonist. Blackburn sucks a dick in a window to throw the police off his trail. He tosses a lover out another
window. In “Righteous Kill” he and his radical friends go “Full Luigi,” to both spoil and not spoil the end even more than the title itself does. In the hardboiled tradition, there are McGuffins—Roman artifacts and coins. Blackburn even says “I know a McGuffin when I see one” to himself when he sees one! One frequent lay and good friend, Dino Centro, classes up the proceedings with his ice cream suits, international connections, moderate politics, and openness to treachery.
Like many a crime protagonist, Blackburn has his hobbies (literary gossip!) and his appetites; he loves Negronis and cooking fairly complex meals; the sleuth is no rice-and-beans, or even an Oreos-and-French fries, vegan. The tension between Blackburn’s sensual interests and his politics fuel Mayakovsky’s Bugatti in particular. Berkeley won’t be coming back from this latest round of gentrification. The real-life Omni Commons, the model for the collective space Blackburn works with in the book, had to sell to an NGO when facing a million-dollar payment. But if the Soviet poet could ride an amazing motor vehicle, can’t an anarchist poet enjoy a few middle-class consumer goods? Even if ethical, it may not be possible when living under the onslaught of the techies!
Genre fiction itself is often seen as only a guilty pleasure, and mysteries in particular as hierarchal, patriarchal copaganda. And sure, how could much of it not be? But noir was always limned with a strain of anti-capitalist critique— if the system was so great, how could one mistake lead to utter disaster for everyone around the mistake-maker? If the state is so powerful, why turn to, or into, a PI or vigilante? The Clay Blackburn story answers all these questions poetically, whimsically even. Blackburn’s
natural charm and keen observations of the world around him drive the work far more than the crime fiction plots do and anyone in the left milieu would recognize the satire of the left as coming from
inside the house; there’s no guilt in these pleasures.
