Pop Science, Sci-fi and Detective Fiction

Just a post about 3 books I recently read.

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez is a cool book. It hit a lot of buttons for me. Here it is: think about a hard-boiled detective novel set in a gritty city. The city is populated by a mix of robots (drones, autos and bots – that is, those that have low functioning programming, those that have more sophisticated programming, and those that have free will), mutants, and probably some humans (norms). The protagonist is an auto, a robot that was basically designed to be a war crime but had somehow achieved self-awareness and has free will, named Mack Megaton. Mack starts out the novel as a cab driver but quickly becomes a hard-scrabble detective who needs to find the only friends he has who had, coincidentally, been kidnapped by a low-life. In the process of finding his friends, Mack gains a girlfriend, deepens his relationship with a detective in the police force, makes friends with Jung, a hyper-evolved ape who becomes his side-kick, fights off a giant alien conspiracy, and learns a lot about himself.

Although the novel is steeped in sci-fi from the robot protagonist to an alien conspiracy, the plot of the novel is pure hard-boiled detective. Most classic hard-boiled detective novels from Dashiell Hammet to Brett Halliday, and even Sara Paretsky share a pretty formulaic plot arc. That is: the detective becomes involved in some case, usually something simple-seeming at first, then the case gets more complicated, and the detective meets one of more of the following: an attractive distraction, a side-kick or partner, an old friend/enemy, a member of an official law enforcement body, and the character that turns out to be the antagonist. After meeting the key people in the investigation, the detective will then discover that the initial case is just a small part of a broader case that touches on more important people. At this point, the detective gets warned off but doesn't listen and so faces some kind of temporarily incapacitating injury that leaves the detective more determined to follow through. Occasionally the attractive distraction and/or side-kick is injured or kidnapped instead. There is also usually an argument between real law enforcement and the detective wherein the officer threatens the detective off the case.

Martinez seems well aware of these detective fiction conventions because this novel pretty much hits them all, and even includes a good bit of tough guy jawing. One of the more interesting elements in this novel is something that I have noticed in other hard-boiled novels as well, which is the detective fighting off the attractive distraction for some reason. In this case, the detective (a robot) rejects the distraction because she is a human and he cannot feel love or attraction. There is even a funny line when Mack considers that she meets the parameters for physical beauty but he can't do anything with that information.

So, a fun read and worth picking up.

A few weeks back I mentioned Michio Kaku's pop science book Physics of the Future and I recently read another of his, Physics of the Impossible. The premise behind the book is that at many stages in history, scientists considered certain technologies impossible given their understanding of physics and existent technologies. Down the line, of course, many of these advances become possible based on advances in science or changes in our fundamental understanding of the laws of phyasics.

Kaku creates three classes of Impossibilities: that which is currently impossible but may become possible in the next century, that which may become possible within a thousand years of more, and impossibilities that violate the laws of physics. I like the division of impossibility and the openness to future advances. The book takes up a lot of sci-fi technologies such as force fields, ray guns, time travel, and the like. The book is an interesting meditation on what it means to be possible and the writing is just on the edge of a layman's understanding. Good read.

Finally, I am just going to make a small note about Mickey Spillane's The Girl Hunters. I have mentioned many times that these trashy hard-boiled detective novels are my guilty pleasure. Mickey Spillane in particular because he holds a lot of retrograde social views and his writing is often hilariously bad and over-wrought. But, he can write a mystery.

I picked this novel up to read because I had just finished The Automatic Detective and wanted a bit more detective. I read this novel a number of years ago and it is an interesting one because Mike Hammer, Spillane's perennial detective, has been off the job and off the grid for seven years. He had gone on a bender after he thought he saw Velda die. Velda had been his assistant whom he regularly sexually harassed and thought he was in love with. All of these novels are from Hammer's perspective, so who knows what Velda thought about all of this. She may have faked her own death to get away from her lecherous brute of a boss.

Anyway, Mike gets the tipoff that Velda isn't dead and that there are bigger things in the background. So Hammer cleans himself up and has basically the same adventure that I outlined above except without robots. It is a fun read if you are able to ignore a lot of Spillane's politics.

I will say though, Spillane's books are not good books. His gift was in creating a compelling (for what he is) character and in adhering to a tried-and-true formula. This isn't a knock. A lot of other authors I like have done the same thing. So this book probably isn't for everyone.

 

Hard Boiled Detectives

The first detective stories I remember reading are Encyclopedia Brown and a series about boy detectives call The Three Investigators.  Anyone who has read Encyclopedia Brown remembers that it all centered around a nerdy boy who annoyed everyone and found objects misplaced by adults.  The stakes were low and the only really interesting thing about them is the opportunity the reader is afforded to solve the problem based on clues in the stories.  I was never able to do this.
The other series, The Three Investigators, was for a slightly older reader and I devoured it.  I don't remember many of the mysteries the three solved or any other plot points, but I do remember the interaction of the boy detectives and the dangers they would sometimes face.  The stakes were higher in these stories as the mysteries often involved the adults in their lives and in the town they lived.  The boys were never injured, but they faced the possibility of it.  I continued reading mysteries and detective fiction, but these were my first forays into the genre.  I ran through a patch of Sherlock Holmes in my twenties, finding the literary character to be far more interesting than the watered down representations I had seen elsewhere.
My interest in detective fiction peaked when I enrolled in a special topics course called "Crime and Punishment" that focused on crime and detective fiction (not on the Dostoyevsky novel).
This class opened a new world to me in detective fiction.  We started with songs and old accounts from the Newgate Calendar, something like the first true-crime accounts.  This is worth looking into if you are unfamiliar with it.  The thing that stuck with me the most was our section on "hard-boiled" detectives.
These novels were rougher around the edges and were much darker.  The detectives did not always win the day by using their brains, but had to use cunning, deception, and muscle to get their way.  The hard-boiled detective was an even more ambiguous character than Holmes.  These detectives were often private eyes, which freed them from the constraints that law enforcement officials would be bound to.  This meant that they were also often outlaws, or at least operated in a "para-" legal, if not "extra-" legal sense.
These novels paralleled literary naturalism in the sense that they tried to depict a gritty, realistic world.  The detectives were hard because they were forced to be by human nature.

This is all a long introduction to provide context for a recent book I read.  Brett Halliday is one of the mystery authors I most like.  His work, along with John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Dashiell Hammett, and others tend to feature a single detective.  The pulpy narratives can be fairly formulaic and the writing is sometimes terrible.  In this novel, Murder is My Business, Halliday's detective Mike Shayne picks up a case from a mother concerned that her son has fallen in with a bad element and may have been killed.  The story features a mayoral race in El Paso, TX, war profiteering, Nazi sympathizers, troubled border crossings, negative stereotypes of Mexicans and immigrants in general, and an overly-circuitous plot to smuggle silver across the border into America.

Back cover artwork for Murder is My Business

The story itself is most interesting for Shayne's actions and attitude.  He attempts to remain aloof from the legal battles that surround him, though he has a personal relationship with many of the involved parties and has a favored outcome.  He enters into the case without a clear motivation besides making money, and even that is uncertain because he is not sure who will ultimately pay him.  Eventually, Shayne will extort money form one of the central figures and mayoral candidate, only to double-cross him immediately and turn him over to the police anyway.
Shayne, like many of the hard-boiled detectives, plays criminals against the police for his own benefit.  Also like many hard-boiled detectives, he has a code of ethics that doesn't necessarily align with the law or with those around him, but is rock solid.  This can be a troubling aspect of these novels because this code can sometimes lead a detective to help someone against their own interests, but it can just as easily lead them to hurting or killing someone, or using illegal means to help the police to arrest someone.  These novels have both a distrust of police for their potential ineptitude and corruption, but also because they are unwilling or unable to go "far enough."  In more than one of these novels, the featured detective will violently coerce confessions from the bad guy to "help" the police make the case against them.  The novels tend not to present any moral ambiguity about this because there is rarely doubt that the detective is wrong.  However, in a real world where hunches are generally wrong and where personal prejudices often masquerade as deduction, this scenario looks more grim and definitely more suspect.
Before this gets too long, I will leave off with some more optimistic notes.  While in that special topics course, we read another author who has become another favorite of mine: Sara Paretsky.  Paretsky adopts many hard-boiled detective tropes but bends their politics a bit by introducing a woman detective.  VI Warshawski is as smart and tough as the other detectives and gets into the same sort of trouble that they do.  Her moral compass tends to read a bit more true and she also tends to be more sympathetic as a character.
I have recently purchased Paretsky's newest novel Shell Game, that I am sure will make an appearance in this blog at some point.