Customer Reviews

The Incredible Double (PM Fiction)

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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 [...].