Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

Having read and blogged Gun Machine, Ryan reminded me that we also owned Warren Ellis's other novel Crooked Little Vein. Actually it occurs to me that for all that I read voraciously, Ryan and I haven't read many of the same books. It's an oddness. We tracked down Crooked Little Vein for Ryan soon after it came out. He read it and liked it, but I never got around to reading it myself until now.

I expected Crooked Little Vein to feel similar to Gun Machine and it did, to an extent. It's another hard boiled detective novel. Michael McGill is a private detective with incredibly bad luck. He keeps walking into the random, embarrassing and bizarre. When a creepy government type turns up and offers McGill half a million dollars to find an antique book, McGill soon finds himself wandering into every impossible den of depravity and sexual deviancy.

So, if I was mildly shocked by the amount of foul language in Gun Machine, Crooked Little Vein was on a whole different level. It was one awful uncomfortable situation after another. Generally, I would find such a thing gratuitous and it would annoy me, but Ellis found a way to write a story that made all the awful oddly necessary. That's a skill, a very weird and very specialized skill, but a skill none the less.

I think there are two things that make this novel work. First, the search for the missing book is really pretty engaging. The book is an alternate version of the Constitution written in secret by the founding fathers with ability to make anyone who reads it more moral and innocent. What it comes down to is thought control which raises some ethical issues later in the story. Second, Michael McGill is just a really likeable character. He's this strangely normal guy who keeps finding himself in all these bizarre situations. His reactions are genuine and somehow show him it be a really good guy in the midst of it all.

So, I will never ever admit to my students that this book exists. It's that far off the deep end in so many ways. That being said, I enjoyed reading it so much that I finished it in a single afternoon.