The Devil and the Detective - by John Goldbach (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"Goldbach's touch is light and his narrative momentum is fierce."--The Globe and Mail

Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he's drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, can't stop drinking, smoking, and philosophizing long enough to keep up. Imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton.

John Goldbach is the author of Selected Blackouts, a collection of stories.

Review Quotes

'When John Goldbach told me he had some noir he'd like me to see I told him I could sure use some decent noir, send it, and he did, and it is. Except it isn't really of course noir. It's noirtire, or satoir, where the fun is not in Take This Seriously but in the goofy edges of the detective. This detective has good goofy edges and I expect them to get goofier and better over time. Mr. Goldbach will be a fun writer to watch. Check him out." -- Padgett Powell

"The world has hitherto been divided into plotters who wrote in shoddy sentences and linguistic aesthetes who wrote beautiful sentences but couldn't make anything happen on the page, no plot. Goldbach manages to do both - a thrilling plot and beautiful language. He has raised the bar for both murder mysteries and literary writing." -- Josip Novakovich

"John Goldbach's first novel is an out-and-out romp, though a cerebral and extremely clever one ... Goldbach's prose is polished and inventive, and the book is at once a clever satire and satisfying bit of strangeness." -- Globe and Mail

About the Author