Synopsis
With impeccable skill, Robert Coover, one of America's pioneering postmodernists, has turned the classic detective story inside-out. Here Coover is at the top of his form; and Noir is a true page-turner-wry, absurd, and desolate.
You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband's killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten's bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. "The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow" unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers' tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don't always get the joke, though most people think what's happening is pretty funny.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Coover, a brilliant reteller of tales (see his short-story collection A Child Again if you don’t believe me), isn’t the first literary novelist to deconstruct the noir, nor will he be the last. The detective story tempts every writer who’s ever tinkered with a plot, and of all the varieties of detective fiction noir has the best characters, the darkest settings, the most sex. What Coover brings to the faux-noir genre is a collection of seductive sentences about the seductive power of, well, sentences…