Sara Gran's Holistic Detective Agency

Recently had occasion to recommend a detective novel to someone without any real idea of their taste and the first thing that came out of my mouth was Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. Didn't think about it till the next day what a strange one that was to take off the top of my head. I think it might have been because there's something for everybody in it. Of course, there's a lot for everybody to be turned off by too. It's traditional, but it's very weird, it's cerebral, and it's explosively violent. It's definitely not boring and Claire DeWitt is a series character who doesn't outstay her welcome - only three books (so far).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Sara Gran and I'd like you to be too. Here's something I wrote for another site way back when Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead was first released in 2011.

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Here’s a blurb from Lee Child on Sara Gran’s amazing 2006 novel Dope:

“If Raymond Chandler knew then what we know now, he might have written a book like this”

It was a classic hardboiled detective novel set in the romantic era that Chandler wrote in but had the gilt-edging stripped away with the perspective benefit of fifty years’ remove. Well, brothers and sisters, with the release of her latest, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I pose this question: could Chandler have written anything like this even with a fifty-year forward-glimpse? Answer: I doubt it.

No slight to Chandler, gawsh I love his stuff, but it’s kinda refreshing to read an American PI novel where his ghost hand is not immediately visible, hovering over the author’s. Claire DeWitt is the most bracingly original fictional sleuth I’ve seen in years, which is not to say that her influences aren’t apparent, (some Nancy Drew here, some Columbo there, a touch of Holmes, and some Sam Spade too) only that her particular cocktail of parentage has so many previously antithetical and adversarial qualities packed snugly into her frame and sounding cozy behind her first person narrative, you’re going to get dizzy trying to keep up. She’s terribly new-agey, knows the I Ching, combs through her own dream interpretations for clues and is so sharply spiritually tuned, she’d shame Dale Cooper and Dirk Gently even if they teamed up against her in an intuit-off. On the other hand she’s also an angel-dust-smoking, tattooed, gun enthusiast, hand to hand fighter and generally just kind of a badass – “I’d shot four people. I’d killed two. None were in self-defense.” (Check out Sara’s blog The Abbott Gran Medicine Show that she keeps with Megan Abbott for more on the origins of Claire DeWitt.)

She sees her vocation as a detective as nothing less than her sacred duty and moral destiny and speaks so earnestly about her desire to ‘solve mysteries’ that at first I cringed. It was like listening to my favorite band discuss openly their desire to ‘be cool’ and proven strategies toward that goal. I want my rock stars to be cool without ever addressing it, and yeah, I generally appreciate some tasteful reluctance on the part of my investigators, but Gran bids us immerse ourselves in Claire’s world, and who am I to resist? That world (this time out) is New Orleans, so regal in its ruin and exotic in its very Americanism (N.O. has always been our national funhouse compact mirror), and Claire changes its already charged atmosphere simply by entering it. She’s come to town to find a missing person who disappeared in the storm (yeah, this is 2007) and once accepted, she’s prepared to solve the case and uncover the truth regardless of who is hurt, angered or exposed by it.

She takes as a matter of course that no one really wants her to find the truth (nevermind what they say or think). She’s prepared to be unpopular because she’s committed Detection by Silette, the voice crying out of the wilderness that all elect investigators understand to be their very own guru-prophet-philosopher-L. Ron Hubbard to memory and faithfully adheres to the wisdom and guidance it provides. The origins of Silette and his near impenetrable tome are mysterious themselves and a good deal of Claire’s backstory revolves around the sisterhood she founded with two childhood friends when they discovered the book, hidden away like the object of great power from any classical myth, and decided to become detectives. Twenty years later, one of them has disappeared and Claire is estranged from her remaining former companion. Her back-story is at least as intriguing as the central, forward-moving case, but reserves resolution for a later date, and I suspect that it is this over-arcing storyline that will be the real hook for the series.

Bringing together the mystery element of Dope and the touch of the supernatural that played a more prominent role in her first two novels, Saturn's Return to New York and Come Closer, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is perhaps the most distilled essence of Granishness we’ve yet been privy to, and I can’t wait for another shot of the hard stuff.

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The DeWitt adventures Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway and The Infinite Blacktop followed and I have reason to hope there will be a fourth Claire DeWitt title someday. 

Meanwhile I've got The Book of the Most Precious Substance sitting on my shelf waiting for the right moment to surprise me with whatever the fuck its deal is.