Review: The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth

Genre: Crime noir and horror crossover.

Originally published: 2015.

Have you read this book? Do you agree or disagree with my review of it?

It was the title of this book that first caught my attention. Then I spotted the cover art, which was enough to make me pick it up and read the blurb, which in turn was enough to make me buy the book.

Thomas Fool is the senior of Hell's three Information Men, a small group of detectives whose job mostly seems to be to be aware of - but not investigate - every atrocity committed in Hell, mostly by demons against humans. Every now and then they do receive a case their overseers, a group of demons called The Bureaucracy, want them to pay more attention to. A mutilated body is found that has had its soul completely removed - there usually remain some vestiges of it after death - and this is deemed worthy of investigation. Soon the bodies are piling up, bearing signs of ever more frenzied attacks, and Fool has to divide his time between the investigation and acting as a liaison and guide for a group of angels who have come to negotiate with Hell on various issues, including who gets to be Elevated: to leave Hell and ascend into Heaven.

There is nothing new about Hell as a kind of bureaucracy. Neither is Hell as a place of violence and horror a new idea, although each author presents it in a slightly different way. Even the idea that Hell should be a place where people have some hope, but not enough of it, has been around for a long time, because while no hope is a terrible thing, realists know that a glimmer of hope that keeps being thwarted is even worse. Unsworth has taken these three ideas of Hell and stitched them together into an image of what modern Hell might be like if it existed.

At the beginning of the story Fool doesn't really know what he is doing, as he has had no official training and only has an ancient handbook to rely on, so he blunders on, cluelessly searching for something to help move the investigation forward. But he soon begins gain confidence and to collect actual clues and then to follow a bloody trail that leads him into an unexpected direction — only it isn't as unexpected as all that, and in fact I suspected from early on - and knew with increasing certainty as the denouement drew closer - who/what he was looking for.

Unsworth's Hell is a terrible place, and I am sure it is supposed to be viscerally terrifying, but one can only read so much about grotesqueries, tortures and rot and about blood, guts, and excrement before it begins to get repetitive, even if the means of expelling them change and become more inventive and violent as the story winds on. Some of this seems to have no particular bearing on the plot, and to be included only because Why not?

The narrative escalates gradually into an orgy of violence and horror, and on the way it brings up searching questions about free will, hope, justice, salvation and the difference between good and evil that give one a pause for thought. It is well written and while the horrors stop being effective after a while, it is still interesting enough to keep one reading and would make an excellent Halloween read.

I am looking forward to reading the sequel, The Devil's Evidence, if only to see what Unsworth's ideas about Heaven are like.

---

Three more books for you if you like reading about hell as a bureaucracy - albeit none of them as detailed - as the above:

Terry Pratchett's Eric. Funny fantasy.
C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. Satirical and dark.
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard. Funny urban fantasy that is even darker than The Devil's Detective.

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

Search This Blog