The Manual of Detection, Jedeiah Baker, Berry,Penguin Paperbacks,2009
“There is always an Agency, always a Carnival to belong to. The problem is belonging for too long to either of them.” The Manual of Detection, p 227
The night I finished The Manual of Detection I dreamed about the book.
The Agency, where Charles Unwin works, usually as a clerk, is linear and right-angled. It reminds him of a tomb.
“He became suddenly aware of a spatial concurrence. His new office, at the middle of the east side of the twenty-ninth floor, was situated directly above his old desk on the fourteenth and directly below Lamech’s office on the thrity-sixth. If a hole were drilled vertically down the building, a penny pushed off Lamech’s desk would, on its descent toward Unwin’s desk twenty-two floors below, fall straight through Room 2919.” (p34)
It is actually a labyrinth.
Unwin is promoted to Detective and assigned to find a missing detective, Travis T Sivart, whose name is a palindrome. I thought this meant there would be many palindromes in the book, but there are not. Travis Sivart’s name contains its own mirror image for a reason.
“At home he went about in socks. That way he could avoid disturbing the neighbors and also indulge in the occasional shoeless swoop across the room, as when one is preparing a breakfast of oatmeal and the oatmeal wants raisins and brown sugar which are stored in the cupboard at the other end of the room To glide with stock-swaddled feet over a world of glossy planes, that would be a wondrous thing! But Unwin’s apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and the frolicsome.” (p 33)
Emily Dopple’s last name reminds us of the word “double.” The password she and Unwin use is, “The devil’s in the details, and doubly in the bubbly.”
In the search for Travis Sivart, Unwin visits the Forty Winks bar, which is at the foot of the cemetery and has a bartender who is also the gravedigger. He also visits the Cat&Tonic nightclub.
“It may be a crime/but I know that you’re mine/ in my dream of your dream of me.” (p187)
In The Manual of Detection, sleepwalkers steal alarm clocks. A giantess presides over an archive of dreams recorded on phonograph records. Charles Unwin rides his bicycle to the Central Terminal every morning to buy a coffee, but he is really waiting for the woman in the plaid coat, with eyes like silver mirrors.
It rains almost all the time in the unnamed city where Unwin works. He has fixed his umbrella to the handlebars of his bicycle to shelter him from the rain, but sometimes he must take the umbrella with him.
Caligari runs the carnival of sleepwalkers. His adversary is the overseer of the Agency. His partner and betrayer is Enoch Hoffman. Cleopatra Greenwood is working for herself, and someone else, someone hidden. And Unwin? All he wants to do is find Sivart, but that will not be easy.