"Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead" is an extraordinary book: fascinating, rewarding, often upsetting but really hard to describe.

It's a book that invites the reader to look beyond the narrative and ask themselves questions about mysteries: our ability to see them, our willingness to solve them and how we continue on day by day while the truth of our own lives constantly slips through our fingers.

I entered it expecting a whodunnit mystery with some local New Orleans colour and a clever plot. Two hours into it, I had no idea what it was about. I knew what was happening but I'd started to understand that that was the answer to a different question. 

This was Noire but not as I know it. I was reading something that seemed to be the lovechild of Raymond Chandler and Jean-Paul Satre.

Claire Dewitt, a PI who makes Philip Marlowe seem like a romantic softy with a tendency to take things too literally, solves cases, sorry, mysteries, by using a kind of muscular mysticism that is stretched tight over a skeleton of existential panic with grief as its marrow.

More than a year after Katrina, Claire is investigating the disappearance and possible death of a wealthy District Attorney in New Orleans during the storm. She is guided in this by a book called "Détection" by Cillette, a French criminologist who has a very out-there view of what detection is.

For Cillette, detection is about following clues to find the truth. By following he seems to mean: giving yourself up to the flow so you can see the bigger picture. By clues, he seems to mean all the things that we don't let ourselves see but which, once seen, will change our understanding fundamentally. By truth he seems to mean... well, actually that's something he wants us to work for ourselves.

In "Détection" he tells us that a detective can most quickly solve a mystery by looking in all the places she is certain do not contain the answers:

"...because this for better or worse is exactly where the truth lies at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighbourhood of all we have tried to forget."

At the start of the novel, there is little action. There are a lot of mundane frustrations and a lot of waiting and slowly dawning awareness that Claire Dewitt is a very driven and very damaged person who is following her own agenda to hunt down the truth using methods taught to her by her now deceased mentor, Constance.

Despite the inaction, I found myself carried along by the absolute authority of the writing and the vivid descriptions of the desolation of much of post-Katrina New Orleans.

This is not the New Orleans the tourist office would like to sell and that many crime novels dress themselves in. This New Orleans is a city that has been broken and abandoned and is now being cynically abused. A city with the highest murder rate in the country and a legal system so corrupt in under-resourced that even the few people arrested for murder are mostly released after sixty days because there is no capacity to process them. This is city populated by people who have survived the equivalent of a war but a war in which their own government gave them no support. Sara Gran captures it with the precision of a documentary maker and Claire Dewitt sees it with the slow but constant anger of one who has long ago ceased to believe in happy endings.

It seems to me that one of the clues to this book is in the title (well duh!) in that it is primarily about Claire Dewitt, her history, who she is now, who she may become and about a New Orleans haunted by the dead from Claire's past, from the mystery she is investigating and from the storm and its aftermath. There is a clever and convincing plot but it provides the framework for understanding Claire in the context of this city of ghosts.

Sara Gran brings the city to life through the people Claire meets, the lost, the broken, the violent and the traumatised. One of these is an ex-colleague or hers. They had the same mentor but are no longer following the same path. He lost everything in the storm and is now trying to redeem himself and restore his faith in the possibility of goodness by volunteering to work with kids in trouble with the law. After a meeting in Claire's motel room to discuss the disappearance of the DA we get a description of him that gives a flavour of this book:

"I remembered what he used to smell like: woodsy and sweaty. I rolled over on the bed to the spot where he'd lay. He didn't smell like that any more. Now he smelled like pot and plaster dust and smoke and mould. Like sadness. Like New Orleans."

At one point, early in the book, Claire talks about the first time she and her teenage friends read "Détection". Her experience of it is eerily similar to what Sara Gran put me through.

"'Détection' was a door to another world.  A world where, even if we didn’t understand things, we were sure they could be understood. A world where people paid attention, where they listened, where they looked for clues. A world where mysteries could be solved or so we thought.

By the time we realised we were wrong, that we had misunderstood everything, it was too late, Cillette had already branded us. For better or worse, we were not the same girls any more."

I realise that I often retreat to crime books and mystery books because they create a mythical world where cause and effect are not only understood but result in some kind of accountability. Real life, mine at least, is rarely like that. In "Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead" I'm invited to think about why that is.

This is a book about finding the truth and I found myself fascinated by the insights that appeared like nuggets of gold as I sifted through the narrative.  I liked Constance's advice to a young Claire:

"Never be afraid to learn from the ether," Constance told me. "That's where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it and mounts it in a book."

Or Frank, an ex-soldier who, when Claire shares with him what really happened to the missing DA, says:

"The thing about the truth", Frank said after a while, "It's never just what you want it to be is it?"

The dialogue in this book is beautifully done, capturing patterns of speech without patronising them. The passage below, in which a young, uneducated boy describes his experience of reading "Détection", is a great example of this and also reflects how I felt about "Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead" after finishing it:

"I mean, honest, it don't make no sense to me", he said "And it's hard but I, I don't know, I kinda like it anyway. Like there's this one little thing he says, it's kinda like my favourite, he says something like, if you hold on to a mystery you're never gonna to succeed. You gotta let it go through your fingers and then it come to ya and it tell you everything. I don't know I like it."

Sara Gran is now on my Must-Read-Everything-They-Write list. There are two more Claire Dewitt novels and a number of standalone books waiting for me.

You can learn more about her and her books here

My enjoyment of "Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead" was greatly enhanced by the nuanced narration delivered by Carol Monda. I'll be looking out for books she has narrated. You can hear a sample of her work by clicking on the SoundCloud link below.

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I'm two hours into this book and I have no idea what it's about. I know what's happening but I'm not sure that that's answering the same question (actually, that's the book talking).

This is Noire but not as I know it.

This is the lovechild of Raymond Chandler and Jean-Paul Satre.

Claire Dewitt, who makes Philip Marlowe seem like a romantic softy with a tendency to take things too literally, solves cases, sorry, mysteries, by using a kind of muscular mysticism that is stretched tight over a skeleton of existential panic with grief as its marrow.

More than a year after Katrina, Claire, a PI, is investigating the disappearance and possible death of a wealthy man in New Orleans during the storm. She is guided in this by a book called "Détection" by Cillette, a French criminologist who has a very out-there view of what detection is.

There is little action and what there is involves many mundane frustrations and a lot of waiting.

Yet I'm carried along by the absolute authority of the writing and the vivid descriptions of the desolation of much of post-Katrina New Orleans.

At one point Claire talks about the first time she and her teenage friends read "Détection". Her experience of it is eerily similar to what Sara Gran is putting me through.

"'Détection' was a door to another world.  A world where, even if we didn’t understand things, we were sure they could be understood. A world where people paid attention, where they listened, where they looked for clues. A world where mysteries could be solved or so we thought.

 

By the time we realised we were wrong, that we had misunderstood everything, it was too late, Cillette had already branded us. For better or worse, we were not the same girls any more."

This book creeped me out.  That coming from someone who lives on a steady diet of horror.

If you love horror, you have to read this one.

Randomly picked this up on a $2 shelf at a great local bookstore. Aside from Sherlock I don't read a lot of mysteries, but the summary on the back caught my interest:

Claire DeWitt believes she is the world’s greatest PI, even if few agree with her. A one-time teen detective in Brooklyn, she is a follower of the esoteric French detective Jacques Silette, whose mysterious handbook Détection inspired Claire’s unusual practices. Claire also has deep roots in New Orleans, where she was mentored by Silette’s student the brilliant Constance Darling—until Darling was murdered. When a respected DA goes missing she returns to the hurricane-ravaged city to find out why. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is a knockout start to a bracingly original new series.

Overall, I thought it was pretty damn good. It takes place in the years following Hurricane Katrina, and it's very honest about the horrors of being in New Orleans during and directly after the storm, which I think is massively important- especially because people seem to be forgetting how hellish it was. Here's a pretty intense passage from the book of a teenager talking about the storm: 

"So I go down to the water. I go down and it's a fucking mess down there. I mean, really a mess, because garbage and shit is washing up from everywhere. And it's hot, and people is acting crazy, screaming and crying. And there's -- fuck. There's bodies everywhere. I hadn't thought -- I mean, I thought I'd go down there and it'd be like some sailor shit, pulling people out of the ocean. But it was --- people was crying, people was hungry, people was all sunburned, being on their roofs for days. People was looking through the dead people looking for their kids and shit. It was like when in church, when they talk about hell? Like it being hot and dead people all over and shit? Like your worst nightmare, but it ain't a dream anymore. That's what it was like."

It doesn't say anywhere in the book that she interviewed real-life people, but when you read the dialogue, it's so... real. I hope she did. 

The story has elements of the supernatural/metaphysical, but it's not at all cliché; there are references to Daoism ("The clue that can be named is not the eternal clue... The mystery that can be named is not the eternal mystery."), the I-Ching (which Claire consults when she's feeling stuck) and visions brought on by psychedelic substances. Détection, which is basically Claire's Bible, offers strange and mystifying passages: 

"The mystery is not solved by the use of fingerprints or suspects or the identification of weapons," Silette wrote. "These things serve only to trigger the detective's memory. The detective and the client, the victim and the criminal-- all already know the solution to the mystery. They need only to remember it, and recognize it when it appears." 

And of course New Orleans itself offers up supernatural imagery almost automatically. I really love the way Sara Gran was thinking outside the box when she wrote this book, but I think that the supernatural/metaphysical aspects could have been made a little more... solid. I don't really know how to put it- they're obviously vital to the story and yet I don't feel like they are explained well enough or connected often enough in a satisfying way. 

It has a somewhat dreamy quality- the story is punctuated by short flash backs, once brought on while smoking a laced blunt with a street kid- and bits and pieces of Détection float through her mind and through the chapters. It's a very dark, melancholy sort of dreaminess, which I think helps the reader feel like they're actually there, walking through 'the City of the Dead'.

I thought the author did an excellent job of painting a picture of New Orleans without going overboard with the visual details- what she does describe serves to demonstrate how bleak and hopeless life in New Orleans is for many people. The street kids, the other detectives she talks to, and her memories of Constance are vivid in my mind, though I have trouble picturing Claire herself- I feel like her current physical appearance isn't really described, but I guess that doesn't really matter that much.

At first I had a hard time getting interested in the main mystery (the missing DA) but when I got about halfway through, things got more interesting. What really got my attention though, was the mystery of Claire herself. There are hints at Claire's past- a childhood friend gone missing, flashbacks of her strange parents and her training with Constance- that I'm dying to learn more about. I'm guessing the investigations into those mysteries are going to be woven throughout the series.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book enough to recommend it to anyone who cares for mysteries, social justice, or the city of New Orleans. I appreciate its honesty and I love Claire's attitude- she's gritty and clever but she has vulnerable moments and she's not unrealistically witty. Claire is hardened by her experiences but still has empathy. She can see through the rough exterior cultivated by the kids she is questioning and imagine what they would have been like had they not been brought up in the streets. And she seems to get along with them. They're all outcasts, all have tough exteriors, all have insecurities and mysteries of their own. She seems like a tough broad that could actually exist. 

In summation:
favorite things- the way Claire interacts with the unfortunate youths she meets and the way she treats homeless people like equals; the metaphysical aspects; it made me want to learn more about New Orleans; it has an important message; and I loved the ending!
not so favorite things- it could be kind of scatterbrained at times in general and especially with the metaphysical stuff and I didn't get into the main mystery right away... but that's it.

I wasn't sure I'd get all that into this one but after finishing it, I'm actually really excited to read the other books in this series! 

xoLuna