All posts tagged private detective

Hard-boiled American fiction

Definition

Hard-boiled fiction is a gritty, unsentimental subgenre of crime fiction originating in 1920s America, often published in pulp magazines like Black Mask. It features tough, cynical private detectives navigating corrupt urban landscapes. Known for rapid-fire, slangy dialogue and graphic violence, it emphasizes realistic, raw action over intellectual puzzles.

American hard-boiled fiction was distinct from traditional British mystery stories (Golden Age authors like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers) due to its emphasis on the moral ambiguity of the protagonist (cf the whiter-than-white Hercules Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey), its sordid urban settings (cf English country houses), and the high-risk, visceral experience of the detective (regularly getting beaten up, shot etc).

W.R. Burnett

W.R. Burnett is widely credited with inventing the modern gangster novel with his debut book, Little Caesar (1929). He revolutionized the crime genre by shifting the perspective to the criminal and focusing on the internal mechanics of underworld gangs, helping to define the hard-boiled crime fiction style.

  • Little Caesar by W.R. Burnett (1929) – the rise and fall of Rico, a ruthless, ambitious small-time gangster in 1920s Chicago, who rises rapidly through the criminal ranks. Initially a lieutenant in Sam Vettori’s gang, Rico takes control after a nightclub robbery goes wrong and exposes Vettori’s weakness. Backed by loyal associates like Otero, he consolidates power and becomes a major figure in the underworld. The novel’s impact comes less from deep characterisation than from its fast-paced, dialogue-driven style and its vivid, immersive portrayal of the gangster milieu.

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett is sometimes credited with creating the hard-boiled crime genre with his string of powerful novels from the early 1930s, not least The Maltese Falcon which features the iconic private eye, Sam Spade.

  • Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus individual murders. Strangely, the CO himself says the violent atmosphere of Personville has made him go ‘blood-simple’, becoming infatuated with murders and killing.
  • The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (1930) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first, the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
  • The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930) Drastically different in feel from the previous two murder-fests and told in the third person: detective Sam Spade solves the mystery of three murders surrounding a mysterious jewel-encrusted medieval statuette, and deals with the colourful trio of crooks who are prepared to kill for it: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman.
  • The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (1931) The adventures of Ned Beaumont, fixer for reformed gangster Paul Madvig, as he copes with a rival gangster, a corrupt DA, a pliant newspaper editor, and various difficult dames in the run-up to an election Paul must win.
  • The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934) A lighter, comic departure from Hammett’s earlier hard-boiled fiction, though still centring on a complex murder mystery: the story follows Nick Charles, a retired detective living a wealthy, idle life with his witty wife Nora. Nick is reluctantly pulled back into investigation when Dorothy Wynant, daughter of a former client, seeks help finding her missing father, an eccentric inventor.

James M. Cain

Other critics credit James M. Cain’s gritty crime novels from a little later in the 1930s, as the genre’s inventor, although he himself dismissed the idea. Discuss and debate into the wee small hours.

  • The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (1934) Short, blisteringly intense novella describing the affair of lowlife drifter Frank Chambers and Cora, wife of the roadside diner where he ends up getting a job. Sex, murder, in one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read.
  • Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (1936) first-person story of insurance salesman Walter Huff who gets involved with a classic femme fatale (Phyllis), leading to a sexually charged conspiracy to murder her husband for the life insurance money. A classic cynical noir revelling in greed, lust and manipulation.

Raymond Chandler

Coming at the end of this sequence of authors, Raymond Chandler defined the Los Angeles private eye aesthetic with his iconic PI, Philip Marlowe. I think reading Philip Chandler first five novels was about the purest reading pleasure I’ve ever had.

  • The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) Introducing private detective Philip Marlowe, who is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to investigate the blackmail of his daughter Carmen, but the case quickly expands into a complex web of crime involving pornography, gambling, and multiple murders.
  • Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940) Philip Marlowe returns to be hired by ex-convict Moose Malloy to find his missing girlfriend Velma, but the case quickly entangles him in a web of deception involving a stolen jade necklace, corrupt officials, and a series of murders, as Marlowe himself gets beaten, drugged, and misled.
  • The High Window by Raymond Chandler (1942) Marlowe is hired by wealthy widow Elizabeth Bright Murdock to recover a stolen rare coin, but his investigation leads into a murky world of blackmail, counterfeit schemes, and multiple murders involving her son Leslie and criminal associates, ultimately revealing both a criminal conspiracy around fake coins, and a hidden family secret.
  • The Lady in The Lake by Raymond Chandler (1944) Marlowe is hired by wealthy businessman Derace Kingsley to find his estranged wife Crystal, and his investigation—stretching from Los Angeles to a mountain town—uncovers a series of deceptions, murders, false identities, and police corruption.
  • The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (1949) Marlowe is hired by a young woman, Orfamay Quest, to find her missing brother Orrin, but his search through post‑war Los Angeles uncovers blackmail, murder, Hollywood glamour and corruption, involving a movie star, organized crime figures and hidden motives.
  • The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953) Marlowe befriends alcoholic war veteran Terry Lennox then helps him flee to Mexico after Terry is accused of murdering his wealthy wife. But this is just the start of his entanglement in a deeper conspiracy involving corruption, betrayal, and social hypocrisy.
  • Playback by Raymond Chandler (1958) Marlowe is hired by actress Claire Winter to find her missing husband, journalist Paul Marston, and his search uncovers a complex maze of deception, professional rivalries, and hidden motives across Hollywood and Los Angeles social circles.
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by Simon on March 30, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Crime, Novel
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Posted by Simon on March 30, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/30/hard-boiled-american-fiction/

Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie (1936)

‘Murder can be an art! A murderer can be an artist.’
(The deliberately provocative – and in the end fatally glib – view of the cosmopolitan exquisite, Mr Shaitana, Chapter 1)

‘He was alive – and now he is dead and, as I told him once, I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it.’
(Poirot, Chapter 8)

‘Here we are,’ continued Mrs Oliver, ‘three private individuals – all women. Let us see what we can do by putting our heads together.’
(Mrs Oliver the feminist, Chapter 12)

‘Life is a difficult business,’ continued Mrs Lorrimer. ‘You’ll know that when you come to my age. It needs infinite courage and a lot of endurance. And in the end one wonders, “Was it worth while?”‘
(Chapter 18)

Mrs Oliver said, ‘I don’t suppose for a moment you’ll tell us anything you don’t want to.’
Battle shook his head. ‘No,’ he said decidedly. ‘Cards on the table. That’s the motto for this business. I mean to play fair.’
(One meaning of the title, Chapter 19)

‘Cards on the Table’ is the 15th Hercule Poirot book and, since one of them is a collection of short stories and another was the novelisation of a play by someone else, it is the 13th Poirot novel. In the last few novels before this (‘ABC Murders’ and ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’) Christie cannily held Poirot back until we had a good sense of the setting and characters. He only appears half-way through ‘Mesopotamia’. By sharp contrast Poirot is front and centre of this novel from page 1.

Quick plot summary

Mr Shaitani, a louche, camp, upper-class sophisticate of uncertain nationality, hosts fabulous parties at his flat on Park Lane. At one of these he is introduced to Poirot and boasts that he not only has terrific collections of objets d’art and so on, he even has a collection from Poirot’s own field, of crime. In fact (he gushes on) not just cheesy objects like knives and jemmies, but of the best part of a murder, the murderers themselves.

‘I collect only the best!’
‘The best being?’ asked Poirot.
‘My dear fellow – the ones who have got away with it! The successes! The criminals who lead an agreeable life which no breath of suspicion has ever touched. Admit that is an amusing hobby!’ (Chapter 1)

Poirot sagely opines that this sounds like a dangerous kind of collection, but Mr Shaitani sails on oblivious and asks whether he’d like to come to dinner.

So chapter 2 finds Poirot arriving for dinner at Shaitani’s apartment and discovering seven other guests. Poirot realises that four of them are law and order types of one kind or another – himself, Superintendent Battle from CID, the crime fiction writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver, and a pukka traveller chappie, Colonel Race, who everyone says is something to do with the Secret Service.

‘The four murderers and the four sleuths – Scotland Yard. Secret Service. Private. Fiction. A clever idea.’ (Mrs Oliver, Chapter 8)

Which means – if Shaitani is keeping his promise to show off his collection of murderers – that one or more of the other four guests must be murderers. They are: Doctor Geoffrey Roberts, Mrs Lorrimer, Major John Despard and Miss Anne Meredith.

After they’ve all been introduced the eight guests have a nice dinner, then Shaitani suggests they split into two fours to play bridge, each in a different room. Poirot plays with the other officials until someone from the other room makes the dramatic announcement that Shaitani is dead. He doesn’t play bridge and so had been sitting over by the fire and is discovered in his armchair with a stiletto to the heart.

So they call the cops etc, then Superintendent Battle sums up the problem as he discusses it with Poirot. This is that not only did one of the four people in the bridge party murder Shaitani, but, if Shaitani has kept his boast, then some or all of them had previously murdered someone i.e. they’re dealing with not one but four murderers.

So the task is not just to investigate the puzzling murder of Shaitani, but to delve back into the past histories of the four suspects and try and find the mysterious deaths connected with them.

‘And the devil of it is we’ve got to check up on four possible murders in the past, not one.’ (Chapter 8)

So this is what Battle and Poirot proceed to do, each approaching the challenge in completely different ways which are at various points directly compared and contrasted.

Apart from this clever structure, the novel is notable for introducing the colourful character of Ariadne Oliver, an overweight middle-aged woman always fussing about her hair who happens to be a bestselling author of detective novels, as well as being a dogmatic feminist, with an entertainingly down-to-earth if not positively debunking and mocking attitude to her own works. Some commentators call her a self-portrait by Christie but that’s obviously too simplistic. She’s more like a comic caricature of the type of the popular lady novelist, and very enjoyable with it.

Cast

  • Mr Shaitana – host of numerous high society parties, ‘fond of posing as a modern Mephistopheles’, so much so that Miss Meredith tells Superintendent Battle that he won a prize at the hotel in Switzerland where she first met him, in a fancy dress competition dressed as Mephistopheles (Chapter 14)

Guests at the fatal bridge night

  1. Hercule Poirot
  2. Mrs Ariadne Oliver – one of the foremost writers of detective and other sensational stories, creator of a famous fictional detective from Finland, Sven Hjerson.’ She wrote chatty, if not particularly grammatical, articles on ‘The Tendency of the Criminal’, ‘Famous Crimes Passionnels’, ‘Murder for Love v. Murder for Gain’. She was also a vociferous feminist and when any murder of importance was occupying space in the press there was sure to be an interview with Mrs Oliver, and it was mentioned that Mrs Oliver had said, ‘Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard!’ She was an earnest believer in woman’s intuition’
  3. Superintendent Battle of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) – who we’ve met in the non-Poirot novels The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Murder, so this is by way of him crossing over from those novels into this one – ‘an exceedingly English, big burly gentleman.’ – ‘A big square wooden‐faced man moved forward. Not only did an onlooker feel that Superintendent Battle was carved out of wood ‐ he also managed to convey the impression that the wood in question was the timber out of a battleship’
  4. Colonel Race – ‘A dark, handsome, deeply bronzed man of fifty, he was usually to be found in some outpost of Empire ‐ especially if there were trouble brewing. Secret Service is a melodramatic term, but it described pretty accurately to the lay mind the nature and scope of Colonel Race’s activities’
  5. Doctor Geoffrey Roberts – ‘a cheerful, highly coloured individual of middle age. Small twinkling eyes, a touch of baldness, a tendency of embonpoint and a general air of a well‐scrubbed and disinfected medical practitioner. His manner was cheerful and confident. You felt that his diagnosis would be correct and his treatments agreeable and practical: “a little champagne in convalescence perhaps.” A man of the world!’
  6. Mrs Lorrimer – referred to as an old woman, she is 63 years old – ‘She had lovely cut features, beautifully arranged grey hair, and a clear, incisive voice’ – ‘She’s a widow. Moderately well off. Intelligent, well‐bred woman ‐ first class bridge player’
  7. Major John Despard – ‘a tall, lean, handsome man, his face slightly marred by a scar on the
    temple’
  8. Miss Anne Meredith – treated as hopelessly shy and ineffectual, Anne is 25; ‘She was of medium height and pretty. Brown curls clustered in her neck, her grey eyes were large and wide apart. Her face was powdered but not made up. Her voice was slow and rather shy’
  • Miss Burgess – Dr Roberts’ secretary, been with him 7 years
  • Rhoda Dawes – Miss Meredith’s friend, lives with her in a country cottage (Wendon Cottage) outside Wallingford
  • Mrs Astwell – the cleaner who does for them
  • Sergeant O’Connor – a copper
  • Miss Elsie Batt – late parlour‐maid to old Miss Craddock, who O’Connor takes out in order to question about Miss Meredith’s
  • Mrs Luxmore – ‘a tall, rather handsome woman’, widow of a Professor Luxmore who died in the Amazon on an expedition which included Major Despard
  • Inspector Harper – of the Devonshire police in Combeacre
  • Combeacre doctor
  • Combeacre vicar
  • Mrs Benson of Combeacre – died of drinking mislabelled poison while Anne Meredith worked for her – ‘A self‐righteous grenadier of a woman, working her companions hard and changing her servants often’
  • Doctor Davidson – the divisional surgeon attending Mrs Lorrimer
  • Stephens – ‘a big, awkward‐looking man with red hair entered’, member of the Chelsea Window Cleaners Association and key witness to the murderer
  • Sir Charles Imphrey – the Home Office analyst
  • Mr Gerald Hemmingway – a very promising young actor, hired by Poirot to trick the murderer into confessing

Is Shaitani gay?

The opening pages show him being very camp and bitchy in a way that sounded more like Noel Coward than Christie. A lot later Major Despard is called on to describe his rooms.

‘I don’t know that I’m much of a hand at that sort of thing,’ said Despard slowly. ‘It was a rotten sort of room, to my mind. Not a man’s room at all.’ (Chapter 15)

But it’s doubtful if Christie intended her character to be literally gay; more a ‘type’ of debased, cosmopolitan (he seems to have relatives in Syria) sensualist.

Detective methods

Poirot’s technique is very deliberately contrasted with Battle’s. Battle is all police procedural, gathering facts, sifting documents. Poirot is interested almost entirely in the suspects’ characters, in their psychology.

The importance of psychology

Early on Poirot explains:

Superintendent Battle said, ‘And I’d also like to know what you think of the psychology of these four people. You’re rather hot on that.’
Still smoothing his bridge scores, Poirot said, “You are right, psychology is very important. We know the kind of murder that has been committed, the way it was committed. If we have a person who from the psychological point of view could not have committed that particular type of murder, then we can dismiss that person from our calculations…’ (Chapter 8)

A lot later on the two detectives’ approaches are contrasted: Battle is all legwork and interviewing witnesses and suspects:

‘Well, every man to his taste. I don’t deal much in these fancy approaches. They don’t suit my style.’
‘What is your style, Superintendent?’
The superintendent met the twinkle in Poirot’s eyes with an answering twinkle in his own. ‘A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner ‐ that’s my style. No frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid – that’s my ticket.’
Poirot raised his glass. ‘To our respective methods – and may success crown our joint efforts. ‘(Chapter 10)

Whereas Poirot has mostly been thinking about the suspects’ characters:

‘So those are what you call facts, eh?’ said Battle curiously… ‘It’s an odd method of approach,’ said Battle thoughtfully. “Purely psychological.

And this is because of one of his deepest convictions, expressed in novel after novel:

‘No one can do a thing that is not dans son caractère!’ (Chapter 28)

Poirot’s egotism

‘The question is,’ he said, ‘can Hercule Poirot possibly be wrong?’
‘No one can always be right,’ said Mrs Lorrimer coldly.
‘I am,’ said Poirot. ‘Always I am right. It is so invariable that it startles me.’ (Chapter 26)

Age

Mrs Lorrimer is referred to as an ‘old woman’ when she is ‘only’ she is 63 years old.

‘Do you think this man Poirot is clever?’
‘He doesn’t look a Sherlock,’ said Rhoda. ‘I expect he has been quite good in his day. He’s gaga now, of course. He must be at least sixty.’ (Chapter 23)

‘Speech is the deadliest of revealers’

‘Gave himself away, did he? That sounds unlike him.’
Oh, my dear friend, it is impossible not to give oneself away ‐ unless one never opens one’s mouth! Speech is the deadliest of revealers.’
‘Even if people tell lies?’ asked Mrs Oliver.
‘Yes, Madame, because it can be seen at once that you tell a certain kind of lie.’ (Chapter 19)

Bookishness

Like all Christie’s books, this one draws attention to the genre of detective stories and has characters exclaim that it’s all so preposterous it could come from a book! This is  way of pre-empting readerly criticism, and also lulling you into the artificial realm of Murder Mystery World.

Superintendent Battle sighed. ‘This isn’t a detective story, Mrs Oliver,’ he said. Race said, ‘Naturally all information must be handed over to the police.’ (Chapter 8)

‘Not at all,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Least likely person. It seems to work out in real life just the same as in books.’ (Chapter 30)

Every Christie novel has to make an arch reference to Sherlock Holmes, it’s an iron law. Here is Dr Roberts, followed by Poirot himself

‘That seems to remind me of something.’
‘It reminds you of Sherlock Holmes does it not? The curious incident of the dog in the night. The dog did not howl in the night. That is the curious thing! Ah, well, I am not above stealing the tricks of others.’ (Chapter 9)

Mrs Oliver

Given how much she talks about bookishness, it’s surprising that when she introduces actual writers into her stories, they often play a relatively small part. This is an exception. For the first time the fictional author character does play quite a large role. That said her function is mostly comic.

Hair A good deal of comic business is had about her ever-changing hairstyles:

She was an agreeable woman of middle age, handsome in a rather untidy fashion, with fine eyes, substantial shoulders, and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continually experimenting. One day her appearance would be highly intellectual – a brow with the hair scraped back from it and coiled in a large bun in the neck; on another, Mrs Oliver would suddenly appear with Madonna loops, or large masses of slightly untidy curls. On this particular evening Mrs Oliver was trying out a fringe. (Chapter 2)

This hair thing then becomes a running gag:

Mrs Oliver gave a sigh and ran her hands freely through her fringe until it stood upright and gave her a wholly drunken appearance. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I rather believe now that she did it! It’s lucky it’s not in a book. They don’t really like the young and beautiful girl to have done it. All the same, I rather think she did.’ (Chapter 6)

Later:

‘My dear, how nice to see you, said Mrs Oliver, holding out a carbon‐stained hand and trying with her other hand to smooth her hair, a quite impossible proceeding. (Chapter 17)

Fiction better than life First there are jokes about how she would manage everything better in a book:

‘I should have kept him to the end,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘In a book I mean,’ she added apologetically.
‘Real life’s a bit different,’ said Battle.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Badly constructed.’ (Chapter 4)

And:

Mrs Oliver said bitterly as the door closed behind him, ‘Copy! Copy indeed! People are so unintelligent. I could invent a better murder any day than anything real. I’m never at a loss for a plot. And the people who read my books like untraceable poisons!’ (Chapter 4)

Writing is a job Christie gives several extended descriptions of how writing is a job like any other, and lets the awestruck fan, Rhoda, into some of the crushingly practical considerations involved.

‘I always think I’ve finished and then when I count up I find I’ve only written thirty thousand words instead of sixty thousand and so then I have to throw in another murder and get the heroine kidnapped again. It’s all very boring.’ (Chapter 17)

Compounding it with wonderfully irreverent descriptions of her own work:

‘I mean would it bother you awfully if I sent one of your books to you; would you sign it for me?’
Mrs Oliver laughed.
‘Oh, I can do better than that for you.’
She opened a cupboard at the far end of the room.
‘Which would you like? I rather fancy The Affair of the Second Goldfish myself. It’s not quite such frightful tripe as the rest.’ (Chapter 18)

‘Frightful tripe’, that’s a phrase worth remembering when reading Christie.

Feminist Then there are Christie’s gentle mocking of Mrs Oliver’s feminist over-reach, how she sees it as her job to continually claim that women are much superior to men in every department – claims which often sound more like the more egotistical boasting about her own superiority than the broader cause. Thus when Battle says:

‘It’s odd, but a criminal gives himself away every time by that.’
‘Man is an unoriginal animal,’ said Hercule Poirot.
‘Women,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘are capable of infinite variation. I should never commit the same type of murder twice running.’ (Chapter 8)

Allied with the usual criticisms of men:

‘And Major Despard?’ asked Anne.
‘Pah!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘He’s a man! I never worry about men. Men can look after themselves. Do it remarkably well if you ask me.’ (Chapter 12)

At one point, very amusingly:

Mrs Oliver put on her ‘how like a man’ expression. (Chapter 13)

Middle-aged At other moments she is used to describe a middle-aged, fairly weighty woman’s point of view:

Mrs Oliver extricated herself from the driving seat of her little two‐seater with some difficulty. To begin with, the makers of modern motor cars assume that only a pair of sylphlike knees will ever be under the steering wheel. It is also the fashion to sit low. That being so, for a middle‐aged woman of generous proportions it requires a good deal of superhuman wriggling to get out from under the steering wheel. (Chapter 10)

More comically:

Anne led the way to a little group of deck and basket chairs, all rather dilapidated. Mrs Oliver chose the strongest looking with some care, having had various unfortunate experiences with flimsy summer furniture. (Chapter 12)

So mostly she’s a broadly comic character, as in another debunking rhodomontade against her own profession.

‘What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up. Somebody is going to tell something ‐ and then they’re killed first! That always goes down well. It comes in all my books ‐ camouflaged different ways of course. And people like untraceable poisons, and idiotic police inspectors and girls tied up in cellars with sewer gas or water pouring in, such a troublesome way of killing anyone really, and a hero who can dispose of anything from three to seven villains single‐handed. I’ve written thirty‐two books by now ‐ and of course they’re all exactly the same really, as Monsieur Poirot seems to have noticed ‐ but nobody else has; and I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done. They seem to read detective stories a good deal in Finland. I suppose it’s the long winters with no daylight. In Bulgaria and Rumania they don’t seem to read at all. I’d have done better to have made him a Bulgarian.’ (Chapter 8)

Black and white

Referring to someone as a ‘white man’ during the heyday of the British Empire in the 1920s and ’30s indicated that they had been to public school and were thus a gentleman, played with a straight bat (cricketing term), played the game (public school term) and were a ‘pukka sahib’, a Hindi expression used in British India which literally means ‘genuine master’. Thus Colonel Race does some background checking on Major Despard and concludes, from all accounts of him serving out East:

‘I’d lay long odds against its being Despard who did the dirty work the other evening. He’s a white man, Battle.’
‘Incapable of murder, you mean?’ (Chapter 17)

And:

‘Shaitana may have heard some garbled rumour of Professor Luxmore’s death, but I don’t believe there’s more to it than that. Despard’s a white man, and I don’t believe he’s ever been a murderer. That’s my opinion. And I know something of men.’

As an outsider, Poirot is allowed to mock this entire attitude:

‘Yes, a woman knows. But I never showed him that I knew. We were Major Despard and Mrs Luxmore to each other right up to the end. We were both determined to play the game.’ She was silent, lost in admiration of that noble attitude.
‘True,’ murmured Poirot. ‘One must play the cricket. As one of your poets so finely says, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not cricket more.”‘
‘Honour,’ corrected Mrs Luxmore with a slight frown.
‘Of course ‐ of course ‐ honour. “Loved I not honour more.”‘ (Chapter 20)

And compared to whiteness, are a few comments about Black people which, for these characters at this period, included Arabs. Says Major Despard, who’s travelled to far-flung countries:

‘I never forget a face – even a black face, and that’s a lot more than most people can say.’ (Chapter 15)

While later on, Miss Elsie Batt the parlour-maid, laments that Mrs Craddock died of typhoid in Egypt seeing as she bought a load of lovely dresses specially for the trip but:

She added with a sigh, ‘I wonder what they did with all that lovely lot of clothes? They’re blacks out there, so they couldn’t wear them.’ (Chapter 16)

Tall

  • [Mr Shaitani] was tall and thin; his face was long and melancholy; his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black…
  • Major Despard was a tall, lean, handsome man, his face slightly marred by a scar on the temple.
  • [Miss Dawes] was tall, dark, and vigorous looking.
  • Sergeant O’Connor… was an extremely handsome man. Tall, erect, broad‐shouldered, it was less the regularity of his features than the roguish and daredevil spark in his eye which made him so irresistible to the fair sex.
  • Mrs Luxmore… ‘a tall, rather handsome woman, was standing by the mantelpiece’
  • Doctor Davidson the divisional surgeon shook hands. He was a tall melancholy man.

Woman hater

I don’t think I’ve come across the expression ‘woman hater’ so many times as I have in Christie’s fiction. Why was she so fond of using it?

‘Your friend is a woman hater? He wants to make us suffer? But you must not allow that…’ (Mrs Luxmore, Chapter 20)

Credit

‘Cards on the Table’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1936 by the Collins Crime Club.

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by Simon on August 11, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Detective stories, Feminism, Novel
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Posted by Simon on August 11, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/cards-on-the-table-agatha-christie/

Virtual Light by William Gibson (1993)

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande. (Virtual Light, page 182)

The Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s prose

Gibson is a science fiction author but incorporates a good deal of noir, pulp, thriller and other genre tropes as well as, occasionally, rising to genuinely ‘literary’ complexity of psychological affect. I just read Michael Crichton’s debut novel, The Andromeda Strain, and that has a very straightforward plot, a thriller mapped out across five days, written in extremely clear and lucid prose, written so a 9-year-old could understand it. There are occasional demanding passages describing scientific theories around biology, extra-terrestrial life and so on, but these also are written with the clarity of a school textbook. Clarity is the aim.

Gibson by contrast, is noted for the cool, streetwise, technologically savvy and drug-wired prose style which he invented for his so-called Sprawl trilogy – being Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

All three of those novels concern ‘street’ people, hustlers, living among the shanties and hi-tech canyons of a futuristic society, living lives full of violence and drugs, and in all three these hustlers are slowly introduced to the higher levels of society, to the professional middle classes, then to billionaires, and so take us on a journey of discovery to uncover the real workings of their post-war society (the Sprawl trilogy is set 50 or 60 years in the future, after World War III).

Another feature of all three Sprawl novels is you’re never really sure what is going on – even when I reached the semi-apocalyptic endings of all three novels, I wasn’t completely sure what had just happened. Since I felt the same about his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which also rises to a kind of visionary apocalyptic climax, I concluded that this is a consistent element of Gibson’s approach: that key aspects of the narrative are kept mysterious, giving you the feeling of something ungraspable, just out of reach.

This is one way in which his books might be said to be ‘literary’, in a way the utterly obvious and unmysterious Crichton never is. Everything is explained in Crichton; big important things are not explained, in Gibson.

The Bridge trilogy

Virtual Light is the first of what developed into a new set of three novels, the Bridge Trilogy. How are the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies different? Well, the Sprawl stories were set about fifty years in the future, in around 2035 (they were written in the 1980s), after World War III, when everyone has access to advanced digital technology, and hackers make a living ‘jacking into’ cyberspace in order to carry out hit and run raids against the vast data icebergs of the future corporations which run everything.

The Bridge Trilogy is set in the future, but not so far into the future nor in so different a society. To be precise, it is set only ten years or so after the first novel was published – in what was then the ‘future’ of 2006.

There have still been society-changing events: a mega earthquake (which seems to be named Little Grande) has divided California into NoCal and SoCal (first mentioned page 8) resulting in a steady stream of new volcanoes up in Washington state (p.32). The President is a black woman (p.9), the air is toxic from all the polluting vehicles, skin cancer is a problem, everyone wears a lot of suntan cream (p.14) (see a full list of characteristics of the Bridge world, below).

Why is it called the Bridge trilogy? Because a central feature is the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, broken during the earthquake, which has been transformed by homeless survivors into a huge, futuristic shantytown. For some of the old-timers who ‘colonised’ it, like Skinner, it’s a place to end their days, but for others like the fresh young heroine of the book, Chevette, it’s all they’ve ever known.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the [concrete] slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams. (p.122)

Given that the trilogy is named after the bridge, it’s notable that the bridge, as such, doesn’t feature that much in the plot, although it is woven in as a key setting, being the temporary home of Chevette and featuring the scene where a bounty hunter comes looking for her there.

The word ‘bridge’ possibly also has a metaphorical sense in that the entire trilogy is a ‘bridge’ from the present (well, the 1990s when Gibson wrote them) to the hyper-digital future envisioned in the Sprawl trilogy of the 2030s and ’40s.

All manner of cool references are slipped into the text about this cool future, which combines a maximum of stoner, drug, derelict street savvy with the highly-armed, gun expertise of Judge Dredd. Thus there is a lot of talk about Glock machine guns, knives, flick-knives, stunguns, SWAT stun grenades and many more weapons. This is meant to be a semi-dystopian future but a) the fact that it is set in what is now our past and b) its obsession with guns, just reinforces my sense of what a screwed-up, hyper-violent society America is, now.

The cool gun expertise alternates with cool references to a new designer drug, ‘dancer’.

Seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and therefore were both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic. (p.9)

From the get-go Gibson is master of a street savvy, whip-smart, post-Beat prose. Here’s a paragraph from the first page:

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. (page 1)

A lot is going on here, but to pick three obvious points:

  1. It’s poetic prose, designed to be savoured and reread for its sound alone.
  2. ‘The sewage flats’? This is the one and only time they’re mentioned in the book so they take their place alongside hundreds of other details which are thrown away, unexplained, and from which the reader uses their imagination to construct the functioning and appearance of this futureworld (see the list below).
  3. ‘lodged in the lens of night’ is a self-consciously poetic and imaginative image. The book is full of them. It is a self-consciously stylish book, on all levels (in its prose style and setting and characters and plot).

Cops

However, having said all this about Gibson’s zippy prose style and slick future-vision, the reader quite quickly realises the novel is about a cop, Berry Rydell, who’s become a kind of private security guard. An American novel about a cop-turned private detective? Actually this is a very old trope, going back to the noir novels of the 1930s and 40s, to Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler…

And then, as the novel progresses, we watch as this tough private eye rescues the attractive young woman from the bad guys and whisks her off to safety while he tries to figure out the Right Thing To Do.

Hmmm, in this elementary respect, the basic plot structure of Virtual Light seems far from experimental or new – it is, to some extent, a cyberspace update of film noir tropes and characters and plot.

So: we learn that Berry Rydell, born 1983 (p.14) is an ex-cop from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was cashiered out of the service after shooting to pieces a drug-addled maniac who was holding his wife and kids hostage and demanding to speak to the president. He’s managed to get a job with a private security firm named IntenSecure in Los Angeles, alongside a ripe collection of freaks and allergy monkeys… Here’s a plot summary:

Plot summary

Berry Rydell is fired from the Tennessee police force for shooting a hostage-taker, the demented Kenneth Turvey.

Rydell is in his twenties looks like Tommy Lee Jones (p.81) i.e. ruggedly handsome.

The notoriety Rydell wins from shooting Turvey and being sacked leads to him briefly being taken up by the sexy presenter of a TV show, Cops With Problems, Karen Mendelson (p.16) who flies Rydell out to LA and up to her swank penthouse apartment for a few weeks of expense account living and wild sex, before a new and better story comes along, she dumps him and has him escorted from the apartment by security guards who work for IntenSecurity Corporation, a ‘rentacop’ outfit.

That’s what gives Rydell the idea of applying for a job there. He gets one driving a vast 6-wheel ‘Hotspur Hussar’ around the houses of the rich up in Benedict Canyon who’ve paid for security checks (to be precise, he is employed in ‘the residential armed-response branch’ of the IntenSecurity Corporation p.48), alongside a skinny streak of piss named Sublett, who grew up in a trailer park dominated by his born-again Christian mother, watching old movies and harangued all day by TV evangelists.

One evening Rydell and Sublett follow instructions beamed from ‘the Death Star’, the nickname they give to the Southern Californian Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite (p.11).

But it’s a hoax; someone has hacked into the system in order to make Rydell think a robbery and hostage situation is taking place at some luxury home. So Rydell rams the huge truck through the house’s security gate, across the Japanese garden and through the living room wall, and is staggering into the house with his machine gun when… an LAPD helicopter descends over the wreckage and arrests him; the children were off with their father somewhere; there was no hostage situation; the wife was having kinky sex (PVC and handcuffs) with the Polish gardener. As a result she sues IntenSecurity for physical and emotional damages, and they suspend Rydell from all duties: it’s another screw-up.

Cut to San Francisco. Here Chevette-Marie Washington (p.120), who long ago escaped from a juvenile detention centre outside Beaverton (p.125), is a bicycle courier. After making a drop (or ‘pull a tag’ as they seem to call it) at the Hotel Morrisey, she bumps into a drunk in the elevator who takes her up to a party hosted by someone called Cody Harwood, where she spends 15 minutes feeling seriously out of place, gets hit on a by a slimeball with a wet cigar then, on the way out, pushed up against the slimeball by the dense crowd while his attention is distracted talking to a hooker, something is sticking out his pocket and so, on impulse, Chevette nicks it, and is out the apartment door and over to a service elevator, down to the car park, unlocks her bike and is off into the city within minutes…

This turns out to be the core of the plot. Without realising it, Chevette has stolen a very expensive pair of sunglasses. Why? Because they are Virtual Light shades, see below.

Chevette lives high up on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, with a broken-down old man named Skinner in a shack he’s built high up amid the cabling. In the years since the earthquake, thousands of homeless people have constructed a shanty town in the sky, building home-made apartments which have slowly crept up the struts and along the cables of the old bridge till it looks like a giant crustacean, covered with Gothic excrescences.

Skinner is regularly visited by Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist who is writing a study of how the bridge was colonised and so interviews Skinner because he was one of the ‘pioneers’ of its settlement. T, this being a handy prompt for a series of flashbacks or retellings from Skinner of how it all happened. Yamazaki is not, however, an impressive or powerful figure; when we see Yamazaki from Chevette’s viewpoint, he is ‘the Japanese nerd… the college boy or social worker’ who always looks lost.

LA Back in Los Angeles, Rydell – having been suspended from work by IntenSecurity – is told by his immediate boss Juanito Hernandez about a job opportunity, working for a freelance security operative, Lucius Warbaby, up in San Francisco. Rydell needs a job so he flies economy up to Frisco sitting next to a sweet old lady who goes on about having to arrange for her husband’s brain, which is in cryogenic storage, to be moved to a better facility. The wacky old future, eh.

Rydell is met at the airport by huge black Lucius Warbaby and his gofer, Freddie (both described on page 80). Freddie’s loud shirt is covered with images of guns, Warbaby has a brace on one leg and walks with a cane. He is the size of a refrigerator but stylish and dignified.

San Francisco Chevette works for Allied Couriers. She’s called in for a grilling by her boss, Bunny Malatesta (p.94) who asks why she checked in to Hotel Morrissey security (on the job where she strayed into the party) but never checked out. The hotel is following it up because the heat is on about the missing shades. In fact, Bunny tells her, the heat is turned up because the owner of the shades has been murdered.

In the next scene Rydell is with Warbaby when he meets two SF homicide cops who are investigating the self-same murder, of Hans Rutger Blix (p.102). The cops are Russians, Svobodov and Orlonsky. Warbaby is a big man but precise and punctilious and polite; he has beautiful handwriting (p.163). He reminds me a bit of the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon.

Chevette’s courier colleague, a beautiful black man named Samuel Saladin DuPree (p.129), or Sammy Sal, gets her to admit to stealing the shades. She shows them to him and he explains that the shades are Virtual Light sunglasses (p.113). They interact directly with the optical nerve without needing actual light. Sammy explains they’re fairly common among professionals, like a hologram.

In fact Warbaby has a pair which he uses when he takes Freddie and Rydell to the crime scene – the hotel room where Blix was murdered – and further explains that the VL shades have ‘drivers’ in the lenses and frames which affect the optic nerves directly (p.120).

Freddie takes Rydell shopping to ‘Container City’, comprised of loads of derelict cargo ships and their containers with stairways strung up and between them, very trash futuristic, maybe like the final scene in the movie I, Robot.

A character named Loveless, a hired thug, arrives at Skinner’s shack on the Bridge with a gun. Chevette is up on the roof with Sammy. Loveless doesn’t see Sammy but orders Chevette to climb down and back into Skinner’s shack. He handcuffs Skinner and Yamazaki with funky futuristic handcuffs made of flexible plastic which tighten if you struggle against them.

Loveless has come looking for the stolen shades. Chevette lies and tells him they’re in the pannier of her bicycle so he forces her down ladders towards the rigged-up lift which takes them down to road level. Here Chevette cleverly arranges for the bike’s electric defence mechanism to give Loveless an electric.

Sammy has silently followed them both down to street level and now bops Loveless on the head but not hard enough. He just has time to hand Chevette back the shades (he’d been holding them up on the roof when Loveless appeared in Skinner’s apartment) before a dazed Loveless staggers back to his feet and pumps Sammy full of lead – Sammy simply disappearing backwards between the cables off the bridge and falling to his death. Shocked, Chevette just turns and runs.

Meanwhile, Warbaby and Freddie arrive with Rydell at the base of the bridge and send him onto it to find Chevette, they being scared by exaggerated stories of its voodoo, cannibalistic inhabitants.

To ensure drama, a heavy rainstorm comes on and in the thick of it Rydell stumbles across Chevette standing in the rain. He tails her as she staggers along the bridge in the rainstorm and comes across her one-time boyfriend, Lowell, and his ghoulish sidekick Cody, sitting atop a container.

Rydell tails the three as they head off to a bar, humorously named Cognitive Dissidence. Rydell goes into the warm fug of the bar after them, taking a place at the bar and ordering a beer while he ponders what to do next. But into this bar suddenly arrives one of the two Russian homicide cops Warbaby had introduced him to soon after he arrived in SF, coming in huge and silent and with a drawn gun. He orders Chevette to come with him but then…all the lights go out.

In the darkness the fat lady who operates a dancing hologram which is a feature of the bar, makes it dance all round the Russian’s head, giving Rydell long enough to make it across the bar, scoop up Chevette and carry her kicking and screaming to the stairs out of the place. Unfortunately, he runs straight into the other Russian waiting at the top of the stairs who stops them. Rydell and Chevette are both disarmed and handcuffed and forced to trudge under the watchful guns of the Russians to the San Francisco end of the bridge.

Here Warbaby and Freddie, who commissioned the Russian heavies, are waiting for them. They unhandcuff Rydell and are beginning to explain what’s going on when there is another dramatic surprise: one of Chevette’s friends who we’d been very briefly introduced to a bit earlier, a big bear of a man incongruously named Nigel, seeing Chevette taken away at gunpoint, now attacks everyone on a heavyweight bike, ramming the Russian with the gun, grabbing him and banging his head against the hood of Rydell’s car.

As the others set about dealing with this Nigel, Rydell drags Chevette into his Patriot 4 x 4, kick starts it and they skid off, Warbaby raising his cane which turns out to be a concealed gun and shooting out the Patriot’s rear window, but then they’ve turned a corner and are escaping!

Chevette directs Rydell to Haight Street, where they drop the Patriot (which is promptly stolen) and hide out in a tattoo parlour, pretending to take their time in the waiting room deciding on a joint tattoo, while they calm down.

When they eventually leave the tattoo parlour, in a striking coincidence, who should stop and ask the way but the nice old lady Rydell had chatted to on the plane up here, Mrs Danica Elliott, who has hired a big white camper van to drive back to LA in. She asks Rydell if he can drive since she is completely lost. So he and Chevette get in and drive nice and slow out of town. Eventually they’re so tired they hand the driving back to Mrs Elliott and go to sleep in the bed in the back of the camper.

BUT – when they wake up the camper is stationary and Mrs Elliott is gone and who else but Loveless, the hired killer, is waiting for them! I had a sinking feeling that he might have murdered the old lady (one gets sick of all the murder and carnage in American novels) and so was relieved to discover she was herself an IntenSecurity operative put in place to tail and watch Rydell.

Loveless now proceeds to explain The PLOT. The Virtual Light shades Chevette stole contain the blueprint for the comprehensive rebuilding of shattered San Francisco by foreign investors. These are based in Costa Rica (which has been mentioned a number of times as the location for stored data in the same way Switzerland is for huge foreign bank accounts in our day).

The rebuilding project has to be handled carefully because the local Americans might object, but the core issue is that big corporations want to buy up the land the new city is going to be built on. So if the plans get out, all sorts of other actors (for example, the state) might buy it up instead. Thus the precise plans must be kept secret because inconceivably vast fortunes stand to be made or lost.

And it all comes down to possession of the shades. Blix was a courier tasked with delivering them to the right person in San Francisco, but instead let himself be distracted, getting drunk at that party and then stupidly losing them (when Chevette picked his pocket). Loveless had been tasked with shadowing Blix and when the latter lost the shades was only too happy to murder him, not just killing him but slitting his throat and pulling his tongue out to make it look like some South American drug killing.

While Loveless is talking he gets thirsty and orders Chevette to get him a drink from the camper’s fridge, nice and slow. Out of his sight, Chevette slips into Loveless’s drink an entire stash of the designer drug dancer, and hands it to him. Thus, as Loveless carries on explaining The Plot to Rydell and Chevette, he starts to sweat and hallucinate, and ends up firing his pistol manically. Rydell and Chevette throw themselves out the doors, and hide while Loveless runs off shooting wildly. Then they jump back into the camper and make off at speed.

Rydell and Chevette stop to get directions from an old-timer at a derelict Shell gas station. Rydell had used a phone they picked up in their adventures to ring the only person he trusts, Sublett, who we met back at the start of the story – only to discover Sublett has quit his job at IntenSecurity and gone home to his mother’s trailer on a wacky Christian base camp. Looking at the map Rydell realises it’s fairly close by, so Rydell and Chevette drive there and bluff their way in by pretending to be extreme born-again Christians.

There follows extended satire about TV evangelists, in this instance a fictional one named the Reverend Fallon. This actually feels quite old now, very 1980s. No-one cares about TV evangelists any more, compared to the power of the internet, social media, Facebook, the Russians and President Trump.

Rydell devises A Cunning Plan. First he calls Chevette’s ex, Lowell, and puts the frighteners on him to get him to give them access to the digital online place known as ‘the Republic of Desire’. Then he ascertains that one of Sublett’s nerdy friends in the born-again caravan park, Buddy, has a set of eyephones. He pays Buddy to use them, then Chevette watches as Rydell puts them on and dials into early cyberspace.

Rydell has got details of how to dial into the Republic of Desire and here, in cyberspace, sees three weird figures, a woman made of TV shows, a man mountain and a kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex with human hands. These three entities instantly access Rydell’s records and read everything about his life and history, are bored and are leaving the call when Rydell asks them whether any of them lives in San Francisco and likes it the way it is. This gets their attention and Rydell goes on to explain how the plans stored on the Virtual Light sunglasses reveal how San Francisco is going to be handed over to foreign developers and changed out of all recognition. That gets the three digital warriors’ attention.

Together they cook up a plan which dominates the last thirty pages of the novel, which feels like a scam or heist in the style of Ocean’s 11.

Chevette dresses as a courier and enters Century City II, the luxury condo where Rydell had briefly lived with top lawyer Karen Mendelson when they had their brief affair. Soon as Karen Mendelson opens her apartment door, Sublett pushes her and Chevette back into her apartment.

Meanwhile Rydell has recruited the three hackers in the Republic of Desire to help him. The man mountain figure refers to himself as the God-Eater, but they could be anyone, anywhere, Rydell reflects ruefully. Rydell makes his way to Century City II, where he’s arranged to meet Warbaby at 3pm. He watches Warbaby and Freddie and the two Russian hoods (the Bad Guys) arrive in two separate cars, then enter the mall. He follows them up inside, then phones the three hackers in the Republic of Desire again. The narrative explains that they decided to ‘help’ because they don’t want to see San Francisco over-developed and also it presented a new technical challenge, which amuses them.

What happens is: the hackers take control of SF police in order to fly armed drones into the mall which tell Warbaby, Freddie and the Russians to get on their faces. This is because the system has been hacked to identify them of being terrorists planning to blow up the entire mall.

But where’s their hired goon, Loveless? Seeing he hasn’t come along with Warbaby, Rydall guesses he must have gone straight to Karen’s apartment. Rydell dashes up there and arrives just in time, just at the split second Loveless emerges from hiding and raises his little gun to Chevette’s temple planning to take her hostage or just to shoot her. And that’s the moment Rydell hits him with the capsicum spray he carries round with him like mace gas only much worse.

Epilogue

Then – The Payoff. The cops arrest the five baddies, Warbaby, Freddie, the two Russian hoods and Loveless. Then a whole fleet of Karen Mendelson’s lawyer friends arrive, including the legendary lawyer Wellington Ma, and these media operators immediately see the TV potential of the story and so sign up Chevette and Sublett to tell their stories. While Chevette had been in the apartment with Karen she’d shown her how to play the Virtual Shades, so Karen has seen the development scams which were planned and is able to retell it to her lawyers and the cops. Rydell et al are in the clear, and a good TV show will be made about it all, and the baddies will be brought down. Rydell et al will be arrested but the head lawyer from Cops in Trouble tells him they’ll get bail within the hour and then they can start working on the documentary and then the made-for-TV movie.

In other words – despite the futuristic sci-fi trappings – this feels, in the end, like an American crime caper: the goody is a cop with a heart of the gold, the young girl assistant has nice ‘tits’ (as Rydell puts it, more than once) the baddies are crooked property developers, foreigners and blacks – and everything will be sorted out by shit-hot LA TV lawyers.

Ultimately, feels more like an episode of LA Law than genuine science fiction.

Features of Gibson’s futureworld of 2006

  • the President is a woman named Millband (p.17) and is black! (p.183)
  • there’s a vaccination against AIDS (p.18) seems you need certificates of vaccination to show partners before having sex (p.21), the origin of the vaccine is just one individual, J.D. Shapely, who was found to host a benign version of HIV which eradicated the malign version (see below)
  • cops wear air-conditioned helmets with plastic visors
  • ‘gyms’ offer injections of Brazilian fetal matter and having your skeleton ‘reinforced’
  • Italy is no longer a unified state, people come from parts of ‘what used to be Italy’ (p.40) (cf Canada, below)
  • Chevette’s motorbike has a recognition loop you slip your hand into to unlock it (p.44)
  • swimwear is designed to keep off dangerous UV rays and to keep out the dangerous poisons in the sea
  • the ozone hole is a problem (p.46)
  • a virus has destroyed palm trees (maybe all trees) (p.50), later identified as ‘some Mexican virus’ (p.273)
  • five dollar coins, suggesting inflation (p.58)
  • Thomasson is a generic name Gibson’s invented for pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape (p.61)
  • the big nations of the world (Russia, Canada, Brazil) have fragmented into numerous mini-states (p.71), Canada has broken up into five states (p.242)
  • the Cease Upon The Midnight movement and other self-help euthanasia groups prefer peaceful suicide to having your brain put in a cryogenic store (p.79)
  • it’s been illegal to manufacture cigarettes in the US since 2000 (p.101)
  • the Sword of the Pig movement (p.108)
  • after the earthquake there seem to have been waves of disease or ‘plagues’, which Gibson lists on page 117
  • New Zealand appears to have been occupied by Japanese armed forces who have to suppress resistance movements (p.190)
  • much is made throughout the book of posters and image of AIDS survivor J.D. Shapely dotted around San Francisco and, at one point, Yamazaki channel surfs to a BBC documentary which gives an extremely thorough biography of Shapely (pages 190 to 192). Shapely was a gay prostitute who ended up in prison where they discovered he had AIDS but it didn’t kill him; in him HIV had mutated to a strain which was a) benign b) ate the original virulent strain. Thus a vaccine was made from his version and was administered to everyone in the world.

Funky phrases

So rich in slang and neologisms, American writers.

  • inner trivia banks (p.14)
  • telepresence rig (p.15)
  • Thiobuscaline (3,5-dimethoxy-4-butylthiophenethylamine) – a lesser-known psychedelic drug (p.16)
  • bunny down (p.75)

Conclusion

My opening comments reflected my memories of the Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s place in science fiction. As I read on into this novel I came to realise it is far less a science fiction book than a techno update of the long lineage of noir cop crime thrillers; that Gibson’s hard-nosed cop with a heart of gold has more in common with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, or Deckard in the movie Blade Runner or John McClane in the Die Hard franchise than with more standard science fiction; i.e. that Rydell is an avatar of a very familiar type, the tall, handsome, strong cop or ex-cop, rough around the edges, prepared to bend the rules, but basically a good guy.

Similarly, although Chevette is a ballsy, street girl, an urchin, a reform school runaway, she, also, has a heart of gold and has to be rescued by Sir Galahad, thus fulfilling a thousand-year old stereotype. And – sigh – she, of course, starts to fall for him.

  • She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell… she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. (p.261)
  • She was starting to really like him… (p.276)

Rydell reminds me most of Lee Child’s creation, Jack Reacher, another knight errant who combines physical prowess with basic moral rectitude (although, admittedly, Reacher didn’t make his debut till 1997, four years after this novel was published).

They all supply the reader with the same basic pleasure, which is they’re rule-breakers and naughty boys who are, at heart, good boys really. No matter how much they bend or break the law, it’s always in a good cause. And they all combine a bunch of characteristics most men wish they had – size and strength and physical prowess, expertise with guns, all kinds of practical know-how with cars and gadgets – and their basic decency wins over even the most initially independent or resistant of women.

To quote a seventy-year-old tagline, ‘Men want to be him; women want to be with him’ (James Bond memes)

In other words, the setting of the Bridge trilogy is novel and creative, and the hundreds of details Gibson works into the novel certainly convey a great fullness and plausibility to his fictional world. But the basic narrative structure is very, very old.

Nothing dates as fast as the future

One last thought: setting the novel closer to the present day, paradoxically makes it more dated. In the far future (well, the 2030s when Neuromancer is set) anything goes. But if you set something in the near future, you have to be more measured and realistic with your predictions and chances increase that whatever you predict will be wrong.

Thus some of the baddies in the book, like Warbaby, get their information via faxes; computers are used a bit but nowhere near as much as they turned out to; there are one or two remote phones but not many – in other words Gibson did not accurately predict the full impact of the great transformative agents of our time, the internet, increasingly lightweight personal computers, and mobile phones.

And his cultural references feel dated, as well. As in the Sprawl novels, many things have a strong Japanese flavour i.e. the inclusion of the Japanese character Yamazaki and repeated references to a catastrophic earthquake that’s taken place in Tokyo. But in the years since 1993, Japan has slipped out of the cool cultural and economic position Gibson gives it:

Japan’s economy has struggled with deflation since its bubble economy peaked in 1989. (Investopedia)

Japan has, since the turn of the century, in terms of culture and economy and products and even art, increasingly been replaced by China.

Also Gibson’s pop culture references have aged. The entire concept of rock music, which is referenced throughout the novel, seems old now. The character Sublett has an obsession with the movies of David Cronenberg, which might have marked him off as at the cutting edge of pop avant-garde in 1993, but not now, in 2020.

Credit

Virtual Light by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

William Gibson reviews

  • William Gibson reviews
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by Simon on April 12, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/virtual-light-william-gibson/