Most of the time, Clay Blackburn is your average, bisexual, book scout in Berkeley, but sometimes he’s a would-be private detective—without a license, gun, or even a business card. Despite his questionable qualifications, people still come to him for help, and he inevitably comes across more than his fair share of trouble. Through it all, he’s constantly seeking the fountain of youth, the myth of paradise, the pie in the sky—The Incredible Double. Fighting his way through corporate shills, Berkeley loonies, and CEO thugs, Clay struggles to understand the secret of The Double and discover the true meaning of life. Joined by his three trusty but goofy sidekicks—best friend and lefty soldier of fortune Marvin, ex-FBI agent Bailey Dao, and smarmy but debonair Dino Centro—Clay confronts a host of bizarre characters, including drug casualty turned poet Loose Bruce, conspiracy theorist Larry Sasway, and Grace, the Tallulah Bankhead of Berkeley. Together—and sometimes not so together—they team up to foil Drugstore Wally, the CEO with an evil plan.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Owen Hill's breathless, sly, and insouciant mystery novels are full of that rare Dawn Powel-ish essence: fictional gossip.” —Jonathan Lethem, author, The Fortress of Solitude
"The mystery is real, the stakes are high; some people make it through while others . . . well, let's just say they're compromised. Here we have the essence of noir, a sense of life lived at the edges." —Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Owen Hill is the author of The Chandler Apartments and Loose Ends. He was awarded the Howard Moss Residency for poetry at Yaddo in 2005. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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More About the Author
Owen Hill was born and raised in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. He knocked around a fair bit-- baggage service at LAX, union rep, warehouse drone, janitor, "paid" political volunteer, ice cream maker--and other forms of boredom (as a poet said) advertised as poetry.
Landed in the Bay Area where he worked in several bookstores, finally settling into Moe's in Berkeley as a buyer and events coordinator.
Had written poetry since puberty but had been shy about calling himself a poet. After taking a workshop with Tom Clark at UC extension he came to believe that poetry was his calling. He has since published seven slim volumes of poetry and read his poems at various venues around the country.
His first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was written in Berkeley, in the building so named. At the time he was convalescing from a life-threatening disease in the confines of The Chandler. The novel began as a satire, poking fun at the characters that inhabit the Bay Area poetry scene. It morphed into a murder mystery and became the first of the series featuring poet detective Clay Blackburn.
Currently in good health, he is working on the fourth Clay Blackburn mystery. The second, The Incredible Double, is just out from PM Press.
Landed in the Bay Area where he worked in several bookstores, finally settling into Moe's in Berkeley as a buyer and events coordinator.
Had written poetry since puberty but had been shy about calling himself a poet. After taking a workshop with Tom Clark at UC extension he came to believe that poetry was his calling. He has since published seven slim volumes of poetry and read his poems at various venues around the country.
His first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was written in Berkeley, in the building so named. At the time he was convalescing from a life-threatening disease in the confines of The Chandler. The novel began as a satire, poking fun at the characters that inhabit the Bay Area poetry scene. It morphed into a murder mystery and became the first of the series featuring poet detective Clay Blackburn.
Currently in good health, he is working on the fourth Clay Blackburn mystery. The second, The Incredible Double, is just out from PM Press.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Garrett Caples review of Incredible Double,
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This review is from: The Incredible Double (PM Fiction) (Paperback)
Double Penetration
The Incredible Double by Owen Hill PM Press review by Garrett Caples Poet, bookseller, reading series curator at Moe's Books in Berkeley, Owen Hill is among our under-recognized literary talents. Like Kenneth Fearing before him, Hill has turned to the detective novel as a genre befitting a poet's love of phrasemaking. The Chandler Apartments (2002)--an actual building around the corner from Moe's--introduced readers to book-scout-turned-unlicensed-PI, Clay Blackburn, who returns for a new novella, The Incredible Double (PM Press, $13.95). This phrase, initially referring to sex when a man comes twice before withdrawing, accrues many significations, from doppelgangers to double agents to group sex, suggestive even of Clay's bisexuality (much meditated on, though consummated in Chandler, not here). "She was a bundle of clichés, but again, I wasn't noticing. Or maybe it's that in Berkeley we live with a different set of clichés." Here Clay announces Hill's great achievement. For Berkeley seems a recalcitrant city for noir aesthetics. Yet Hill finds what he needs; Telegraph bums become informants, anarchists gun-toting muscle, Trieste a suitably low-key clandestine rendezvous. A trip to Orinda evokes all the disdain of Marlowe's visit to Burlingame in The Big Sleep. Hill's style is tasty but not overblown: in the first paragraph, on Route 24, Clay "wagged a middle finger"--a phrase so wrong becomes more right, like the dog that "screamed" in Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." The plot--involving a Wal-Mart-like organization's attempt to penetrate the Bay with evil retail--isn't quite perfunctory, though it's more a premise for Clay to muse on his obsessions: poetry, sex, wine, espresso, etc. As it grows more fantastic, the book heads in the direction of David Meltzer's Agency Trilogy, a fine direction indeed, exceeding pulp much as Meltzer amps up pornography to where it explodes. All in all, Double is an excellent contribution to the tradition of poets' pulp fiction. For more reviews of this book--including a recent review in the Los Angeles Times--go to [...].
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