Customer Reviews

The Boy Detective Fails (Punk Planet Books)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Encyclopedia Brown. The Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew. The Bobbsey Twins. And... Billy Argo?

You probably don't remember Billy from your pre-teen reading days. That's because he makes his literary debut in The Boy Detective Fails, at the age of 30. Ordinarily, one would think that being 30 years of age would make it unlikely for Billy Argo to be a "boy detective," but this isn't an ordinary book about some ordinary boy. This one is "special," if you catch my drift. The author manages to take on a genre while remaining somewhat outside of it, and brought about clichéd characters while keeping them decidedly original.

As a child, Billy Argo (along with his sister Caroline and neighbour friend Fenton) spearheaded many investigations which had baffled local authorities, much to the chagrin of the sheepish mayor - counterfeiting rings, serial arson, the occasional brutal murder, etc. Rare was the week which passed by without an appearance of the trio on the front page of the newspaper, pantomiming just how the bust went down. Yes, Billy was a criminal genius, with his child's detective kit and the unfaltering support of his two peers.

And of course, there wouldn't be much of a story if there didn't come a day when all that changes. And it does. Billy grows up and goes to college, leaving Caroline and Fenton alone in this little town to realize just how much they had relied upon the Boy Detective's brilliance. They try to solve one final case on their own...

Thus, their lives are changed forever.

With all the potential to become yet another "shocking" modern-day morality tale, author Joe Meno takes this simple tale and deliberately twists the internal logic of the book. While no fourth walls are broken, the laws of physics frequently are (when local buildings begin to vanish without a trace, and ethereal spirits haunt the psyhcologically tormented Boy Detective, for example), leading the reader into a surreal world where nothing really makes much sense - and yet familiar, as if living in a fog of metaphor.

Written in the style of a classic "child detective" story with a decidedly grown-up spin, The Boy Detective Fails will have the reader not so much trying to solve the cases as they arise, but trying to figure out what's going on below the surface of Billy's madness, and within his small world. There is a bleakness to the Boy Detective's world, a darkness which can't be avoided, however there are also little treasures to be found within. All hope is not abandoned, but instead hidden in several undisclosed locations.

Honestly, this is ultimately more satisfying than the childhood whodunnits of our youth, where the characters never age, past lessons never really remembered, and good always triumphs over bad. The world is never like that. And while the world is certainly not at all as it appears in The Boy Detective Fails, it makes no attempt to mask its absurdity from the reader.

And does "the Boy Detective" fail? That part's subjective. In the traditional sense, and to himself, he surely does. To the rest of us, though... I'm not so convinced that he has. The oft-quoted H.L. Menckin (with a line reprinted in this novel) said that genius is "the ability to prolong one's childhood." As far as that goes, it would be impossible to say that Boy Detective Billy Argo has failed in anything.

I'm not sure I've ever read anything like "the boy detective fails". When I read the first few pages I was unsure, but it quickly pulled me in. But its lure is through its charm, its creativity, its emotionality. It feels dreamlike, without being over the top. It's soft, but creepy, but warm. The world seems fuzzy, full of strangeness . The characters are lovable, interesting, intriguing and draw you through the books mysteries. It works on some serious issues, and in ways that you don't usually hear these issues approached, they kind of creep up on you, but in a good way.

I tried to describe it to a friend. I said something like "Well, if you took The Tick, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lenore, X-Files, Hardy Boys, Girl Interupted, and Catcher in the Rye and mixed it up, this book is what you get." Just go read it.

first off, i think understanding puzzles is highly necessary to understand this book. however! that does not mean you have to DECODE the puzzles. my copy is library-borrowed, so the decoder ring was a no-no, as damaging public property is bad. and yet i still followed the book very well. i also didn't find caroline's journal-entry messages until the last one; again, i still followed the book. so i'm not sure why people are pissing & moaning over the excess of puzzles.

however, you do need to have a sense of the way a puzzle works. personally, i'm very steeped in them! i love mark z danielewski's novels, i follow alternate-reality games. i have a pretty good understanding of the arc of a puzzle, the way it's set up, the timeline a solution takes. i think this is the sort of thing that makes the novel excellent. you take away from it what you put into it; your own experiences bring the characters to life. your pop-culture knowledge makes this book satirical.

the characters do come to life. they play off stereotypes without being blatant. the constant shoplifter has a heart, but she is also addicted to shoplifting. she doesn't reform overnight. the supervillains have feelings (but sometimes they're just kind of evil.) it's fun, it's sad. i liked it. i think that is all you need in a book, sometimes. this one just chooses to push it a little harder.

It takes a lot to get me to give up on a book I'm not enjoying...particularly one that I paid good money for. Once begun, I feel a sense of obligation to see it through, if only so that I can feel that my negative opinion is well informed. In the last ten years, there are only three books which I have felt compelled to abandon mid-stream: Don Delillo's Underworld, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, and now, Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails. Heck, I even checked Amazon reviews of this book while I had a copy in my hand at the book store and was reassured by its multiple favorable ratings. Guess crowd sourcing isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I can only describe what happens up to Page 200 or so since that's when I finally decided "life's too short to waste it reading a book which is torturing you." The Boy Detective Fails starts out promisingly quirky: Billy Argo is a comic book-style boy genius who, assisted by his sister and their best friend Felton, solve crimes and bust mad local criminals. The book is about what happens to Billy when he reaches adulthood -- which is nothing good. As a teenager, his beloved sister commits suicide for reasons which are unclear and Billy spends his 20s in the local looney bin. The tale settles in for the long haul with Billy as a 30 year-old.

What's wrong with the ensuing story? Basically this: there's no story. A blizzard of one, two or three pages chapters of disconnected, bewildering, dream-like prose pushes the pages grudgingly forward. The descriptions of what Billy does or what he sees makes the reader feel as if they are watching the world through the eyes of someone who's mentally handicapped...or on drugs. The situations seem askew, delusional and unrelated with no obvious unifying plot. I kept thinking "the direction of this book is eventually going to become clear". But no, it never happened. Eventually, I got tired of wading through what amounted to a bunch of nonsense.

This book is extremely reminiscent of another book: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen. It too used the "world-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-mental-character" motif. It was just as pointless and annoying as this one.

Ah, the greats of childhood literature: the Hardy Boys, the Great Brain, Danny Dunn and others. For quick puzzles, the go to was Encyclopedia Brown, the kid who'd read the whole encyclopedia and used logic and observation to solve minor mysteries. As much as any character, I believe he serves as the template for Billy Argo, the title character in Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails.

Unlike Encyclopedia Brown, however, Billy solves some big mysteries, including ones involving murder, arson and kidnapping. More importantly, unlike Encyclopedia Brown, Billy grows up into an adulthood that is less than pleasant. Tormented by the suicide of his admiring sister, Billy spends a decade institutionalized and is later released into a halfway house of sorts. He will earn a living as a telemarketer for a wig company and spend many hours in a drug induced haze.

Mysteries and villains still abound, however, but the biggest one is the hardest to solve: why his sister died. Old adversaries unleash dastardly plans against Billy and his city, but often they are more inept than dangerous (there are exceptions, however). And into Billy's life will come a pretty shoplifter who offers Billy a chance for happiness.

The Boy Detective Fails is a strange story, often amusing and often absurd. Almost every character in the book is eccentric in some way, making the whole novel surreal. Fortunately, the oddness is never too distracting: even at its most weird, the book still grabs your attention. For those who grew up reading the types of books I mentioned above, this will be a fun, nostalgic read.

it would probably be close to this book. This book is very bizarre, but still tragic and moving. This book is basically about a former acclaimed boy detective,Billy Argo who solved serveral mysteries as a child alongside his best friend Fenton & younger sister Caroline. After Billy goes to college Caroline kills herself. Billy can't understand why this happened and tries to kill himself, unsuccessful, his parents have him institutionalized. Billy is released 10 years later and tries to adjust to the world. Billy gets a job and befriends 2 young outcasts and gets caught up in several bizarre mysteries along the way falling in love for the first time. The book is sweet, odd, and sad sometimes all at the same time. The book is unlike anything I've ever read, I can't wait to read other books by Joe Meno.

It took me a little bit to get this book. I wasn't sure if what was happening was real or if was all in the realm of a child's fantasies; solving various mysteries and appearing on the front of local newspapers. Despite my uncertainties on how to interpret some of the actions, I could not put the book down, and once I completed the book, I reread parts of it, being sure to use the decoder ring that comes with it to decipher the mesasges at the bottom of many pages.

That's right. I said "decoder ring". Each copy of the book has one, you can cut it out from the back flap. I copied mine, not wanting to mar the actual book.

This book is experimental, but familiar. I loved serial books like "The Boxcar Children" and "The Hardy Boys" when I was a young kid, and here's that architype again... but surrealistic and adult. Billy Argo is forever a youth, precocious and niave. The cases he solves sound like they were pulled from any of those cheesy serial books you read as a kid (or Scooby Do episodes you may have watched). Despite that, there is a seriously dark sinister floating above the whole thing. Some of the characters are truly unsettling.

This book is important. It is charming, mysterious, and otherworldly. It deserves the highest praise and study. I love this book and have bought copies for a couple of my own "Fenton" and "Caroline".

The angel food cake turned out pretty good too.

I found this book via McSweeney's and was not disappointed. It was beautifully rendered. I am usually disinclined to enjoy postmodern gimmicks like footnotes (ala House of Leaves)but in this case they suited the boy detective well--they provide the reader with mysteries to sort out reminescent of decoder rings and cereal box cyphers.

There is a short film on youtube that nicely protrays the first chapter of the book, if anyone is inclined to view it. It appears to be professionally made.

In short, this is the book I am giving to my grad school friends this Christmas and I know it will not disappoint!

Joe Meno is a tremendously versatile writer. The Boy Detective Fails is a phenomenal book. This is what it feels like to read a future classic. And this is what a true classic should feel like; immediate, heartrending, fascinating, and, perhaps most importantly, eminently readable.

This is, of course, assuming that you are a human being. Mr. Meno's work intimately deals with the themes of love, and finding your footing in an uncertain world. And isn't this exactly what life is about. Love. Love is at the core of this novel, and that is what makes it so beautiful.

I don't know quite how to write about this astonishing book. I'm not sure I can quite get my head around it, but I know that I like it, I know that it is perfect, and I know it makes me smile. Hey- that sounds a lot like love.

Read this. Please. Read it. You can waste your time trying to learn How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. Or you can learn a little bit about love. Open your heart to the Boy Detective, you won't regret it.

Parts of this book still escape my grasp, but I know i got the gist of it.

If anyone should start reading through this book, get really confused, and consider putting it down, DON'T!!!

The first 4/5 of the book seemed to be an incredible exploration into a mentally ill mind, somewhat ignoring the self-proclaimed story and leading the reader to believe that, like most of the elements occuring in Billy's world, the big mystery doesn't actually exist.

It was upon completion, however, that a mystery we weren't even sure existed exposed itself to be something so confounding, the entire genre of the story seems to change.

Sorry if I seem vague here, but I wanna avoid spoilers.

Also, if you're a big fan of puzzles, or the kinds of stories that lead up to a completely unexpected ending that, upon retrospect, was pretty obvious with all the clues laying around, then this is the book for you.