Country: U.K
Genre: Hardboiled/Satire
Pages: 277
The guy next to me began frantically scrubbing his crotch with the glove. I decided to keep my eyes on the screen. It was obvious to me by this point that I was never ever going to have sex again, and I just needed to get through this until the lights came up and I could find someone to question.
CROOKED LITTLE VEIN landed on my desk at work, from the firm swing of a coworker who also gave me the proverbial "Dude, you gotta read this." I was a little skeptical at first, because my coworker isn't exactly into hardboiled/noir, so I doubted him despite his good intention. Well, I shouldn't have. Maybe CROOKED LITTLE VEIN isn't an award winner, but it's a good, original novel. A little background might help you understand this bad boy if you decide to give it a chance. Warren Ellis is first and foremost a comic book writer. His agent was pushing him to write a novel, so he hammered the first ten thousand words of an extreme satire of America and the hardboiled genre, thinking she would leave him alone after that. The word "satire" might make the purist in you wince, but let me reassure you. This novel is actually funny. Very funny, in fact.
P.I Michael McGill's business is a little low. The novel opens, he wakes up to find a rat pissing in his coffee mug. But his luck is turning as men in suits invade his office and the heroine-addicted White House chief of staff walks in with a mission he deems tailor made for Mike. He needs to find the constitution. The REAL constitution that the founding father wrote to steer the American people towards the light in the darkest hour. That's only chapter one. Mike accepts the investigation due to the sheer amount of money the chief of staff drops to convince him and embarks on the strangest journey of his life through the American underbelly. Over the course of his adventure he will find love, excess and sex. A lot of sex. In every possible way you can imagine doing it wrong.
The satirical treatment of the American Way of Life given by Warren Ellis is hilarious. Because it's not judgmental and most important, it's not one bit mean. It's based on a logical fallacy he willingly commits himself in reducing every angle of desire to one thing. Fucking *. Mike and his sidekick Trix are running into waves of perverts and windows trying to get their hands on the constitutions. It's being traded amongst powerful people and that said powerful people are letting their desire go loose when the world doesn't look at them. That often means fucking. And Ellis portrays it as such a good-natured act sometimes, I couldn't help but to crack up loud. My favorite scene was when a bunch of homosexual party animals are dealing with Mike to inject brine into his testicles to get the information he wants. Then they proceed to call him out for being a pussy when he doesn't accept right away. The scene where he puts his pants back on afterwards is gold.
There we go, Mike. An inch over your nuts, you clever bastard you. Cold zipper metal where it really really should never be. Lift up your ass, buy a little wiggle room...
Of course, 277 pages of maximum-overdrive satire and full of over-the-top characters who surrendered to their darker impulses, some things will get lost in the way. Michael McGill is a forgettable protagonist, despite the use of first person narration, you often lose the sense of who he is in front of that continuous Vaudeville spectacle. There's a lot of low brow humor, which won't be everybody's cup of tea and it kinds of dulls the senses after a while. You have to have the stomach for it. Nonetheless, I can see CROOKED LITTLE VEIN having a tremendous success with a younger demographic (let's say 17 to 25). Become a cult classic even. The Lynchian dreamlike logic and the Mark Leyner inspired absurdity, wrapped up as a hardboiled novel, is a very seducing package. CROOKED LITTLE VEIN is a lot of fun, if a little unfocused, like a booze soaked night. To me, it was a nice break from the bleak atmospheres and the bloodbaths I'm used to. Whenever you need a change of pace in your reading, this is a book you want to give a chance to.
THREE STARS
*Or almost, really. It's not 100%, but fucking is the predominant thing here.
