This New Orleans is a city that has been broken and abandoned and is now being cynically abused. This is not the New Orleans the tourist office would like to sell and that many crime novels dress themselves in. There are a lot of mundane frustrations and a lot of waiting and slowly dawning awareness that Claire Dewitt is a very driven and very damaged person who is following her own agenda to hunt down the truth using methods taught to her by her now deceased mentor, Constance.ĭespite the inaction, I found myself carried along by the absolute authority of the writing and the vivid descriptions of the desolation of much of post-Katrina New Orleans. “…because this for better or worse is exactly where the truth lies at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighbourhood of all we have tried to forget.”Īt the start of the novel, there is little action. In “Détection” he tells us that a detective can most quickly solve a mystery by looking in all the places she is certain do not contain the answers: By truth he seems to mean… well, actually that’s something he wants us to work for ourselves. By clues, he seems to mean all the things that we don’t let ourselves see but which, once seen, will change our understanding fundamentally. By following he seems to mean: giving yourself up to the flow so you can see the bigger picture.

She is guided in this by a book called “Détection” by Cillette, a French criminologist who has a very out-there view of what detection is.įor Cillette, detection is about following clues to find the truth.

More than a year after Katrina, Claire is investigating the disappearance and possible death of a wealthy District Attorney in New Orleans during the storm. I was reading something that seemed to be the lovechild of Raymond Chandler and Jean-Paul Satre.Ĭlaire Dewitt, a PI who makes Philip Marlowe seem like a romantic softy with a tendency to take things too literally, solves cases, sorry, mysteries, by using a kind of muscular mysticism that is stretched tight over a skeleton of existential panic with grief as its marrow. I knew what was happening but I’d started to understand that that was the answer to a different question.

Two hours into it, I had no idea what it was about. I entered it expecting a whodunnit mystery with some local New Orleans colour and a clever plot. It’s a book that invites the reader to look beyond the narrative and ask themselves questions about mysteries: our ability to see them, our willingness to solve them and how we continue on day by day while the truth of our own lives constantly slips through our fingers. “Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead” is an extraordinary book: fascinating, rewarding, often upsetting but really hard to describe.

Claire dewitt novels