we only really went to the Hollywood neighborhood library, a bizarre building that family friends later turned into a bakery. I read somewhere around a hundred Hardy boys books from there, until the Franklin W. Dixons really started sucking and fourth grade me branched out (around #128, Day of the Dinosaur) my suspension of disbelief began to waver. it is odd, getting back into detective fiction over twenty years later, finally reading the classics that were getting ripped off by pulps, and the juvenile distillations thereof. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something with Poe inventing the form, the detective being a uniquely American creation, beholden to nothing but a code of ethics and a quest for the truth, damn the torpedoes. I did read Agatha Christie in middle school, and watched more than my fair share of Poirot and her other detectives, all safely removed from danger, as they puzzle out the parlour room, but I've always preferred the American PI, someone with a cousin of a death wish. Lethem understands being this sort of literary inheritor, a low-fat imitation of the real McCoy, who lives life just as vividly but can't read people as quickly, who is fooled and manipulated and hoodwinked against his own best interest, how the difference between a man and a true detective is that a detective just can't stay home, it's an Ahab of sorts, a mental illness is often an addiction to narrative, an unease with ambiguity, a refusal to let sleeping dogs lie.
there's a film, long in gestation, that is supposedly due out this year, but they've set it back a half century, and Bruce Willis is supposed to be the most charismatic character, so expectations are below sea level.
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