Memorandum

To: J. Berry

From: Great & Mysterious Powers

Re: The Crawford Award

By the time you see this, you may or may not have slept. The phone call you received last night from Gary K. Wolfe, esteemed science fiction editor and critic (not to be confused with Gary K. Wolf, creator of Roger Rabbit), left you giddy, disorientated, and exhilarated. You were, after all, at a gas station somewhere off Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway when Mr. Wolfe informed you that you’d been named winner of the 2010 IAFA Crawford Award for your novel, The Manual of Detection. You were also parked in a 15-minute parking space—and are these, you couldn’t help wondering as they passed, those fifteen minutes?

Afterward, you went into the gas station, wandered the isles for a while, forgot what you were doing there, and left. You called your brother and mumbled incomprehensibly. You sent a text message to a friend. That text message consisted of the letter “a,” repeated perhaps two dozen times, followed by the letter “h” and several exclamation points. Minutes later, you remembered how to drive, continued onward to New York, missed every exit you were supposed to take, and regained consciousness somewhere in Chinatown. Luckily, you knew the way from Canal Street to your sister’s apartment in Brooklyn, and your sister knew the way from there to a good bar.

The second person perspective has never much appealed to you, but certainly you’ll allow us to communicate this much: that receiving the Crawford Award is one of the coolest things you can imagine happening. No wonder you can’t sleep.

Now get yourself together: the paperback’s out today and you’re giving a reading in a few hours.

•

Some additional information, now being reported by Locus:

The award committee shortlisted Deborah Biancotti’s collection A Book of Endings, Kari Sperring’s novel Living with Ghosts, and Ali Shaw’s novel The Girl With Glass Feet, and wanted to commend two other authors whose works were ineligible this year but were highly regarded: Robert V.S. Redick, whose The Red Wolf Conspiracy appeared in 2008 and whose The Ruling Sea appears in 2010, and Michal Ajvaz, whose The Other City originally appeared in Czech in 1993 but was first translated into English by Gerald Turner in 2009.

I’m thrilled and honored to be among the nominees, and deeply grateful to the members of the IAFA for this recognition.

The Manual of Detection in Paperback

The Manual of Detection will be available on Junuary 26th in Penguin Paperback edition. There’s a brand new cover for this lightweight, portable version of the novel, perfect for tucking into your briefcase or travel bag. On the inside, it’s just like the hardcover, minus one typo.

Here are some things you’ll find in this book:

• typewriters and telephones, often in pairs
• a mummy with modern-day dental work (suspicious, no?)
• a carnival in ruins
• the author’s dog (see page 79)
• one instance of the word “eldritch”
• some advice on investigative techniques including shadowing, surveillance, skulduggery, and dream detection
• somnambulists
• the answer to that most ancient of riddles: what does the pretty young lady have in her lunchbox?

Here are some nice things people have said about the book:

“This debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka…. [Berry creates] the feeling of inhabiting a strange and haunting dream, with its own persuasive logic and somnambulant pacing.”
—The New Yorker

“[Berry] defies many mystery novel conventions, but adventurous readers who stay with his strange and fabulous debut work will be handsomely rewarded…. There is nothing mysterious about the appeal of this inventive, outrageous and often amusing dream-within-a-dream.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“The plot’s bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for…. It steams along the smooth rails of Berry’s neatly constructed sentences, barreling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder.”
—London Review of Books

“Jedediah Berry has an ear well-tuned to the styles of the detective story from Holmes to Spade and can reproduce atmosphere with loving skill.”
—Michael Moorcock

“Inventive, atmospheric, and fiendishly delightful. If you’ve ever fallen under the spell of Borges, Ray Bradbury, or Angela Carter, I urge you to acquire your own copy of The Manual of Detection.”
—Kelly Link

There are many events and readings planned for the weeks ahead, in cities and townships including Brooklyn, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. All the details are available on the sidebar to the left, on this google calendar, and at BookTour. Please come out and say hello.

More information on the book, including links to purchase a copy of your own, are available on The Manual of Detection page.

The Beards of Hamlet

Recently, I’ve been watching as many film versions of Hamlet as I can. Last up was Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, notable for being the first unabridged film adaptation of the play, and the last film to be shot entirely in 70mm format.

Also notable, but too often overlooked? The facial hair.

Every instance of facial hair in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is a character of its own. These beards and mustaches do a lot of strutting and fretting. They must have had a whole team of stylists just to maintain them.

Let’s examine some key beards.

Hamlet’s is a sharp, chiseled arrangement. His soul patch comes to a dagger-point. Even when Hamlet hesitates to carry out his bloody deed, his beard remains focused. It’s a beard built for revenge.

Brian Blessed is in the role of the ghost. His beard is white and full, and it glows. This is a beard that’s been to purgatory and back. It’s a ghost in its own right: a ghost beard.

His brother Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi, has a different kind of beard altogether. It’s about as neat as a beard can get. This beard wasn’t trimmed, it was carved from the stone of Jacobi’s face. This is a beard that’s trying hard to look good. Like Claudius, it has something to hide.

In one scene, Hamlet urges Queen Gertrude to act as judge in an impromptu beard-off. Here he is, showing her pictures of her two husbands.

The picture of the king reveals a beard in its prime, full and vigorous. That beard is Denmark.

Claudius’s beard appears thin and uncertain by comparison. This beard didn’t know there was going to be a beard-off.

In another scene, Polonius gives his son Laertes advice on the maintenance of his mustache.

There are other beards worth considering, but I’ll mention just two more. Billy Crystal, in the role of the gravedigger, sports an unkempt but jocular beard, as befits a man who says funny things while digging skulls out of the ground. After Yorick died, no one thought to hire another jester, so the gravedigger makes the jokes now. He doesn’t have time to shave.

Then there’s Robin Williams, as Osric. He appears toward the end, and mops the floor with everyone else’s beard. Minor part, major beard.

Some Pinkertonia

While working on The Manual of Detection, I did a good bit of research into the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. My own Agency’s logo (an open eye) and motto (“Never Sleeping”) were adapted from those of the Pinkertons, and intended in part as a nod to that outfit’s influence on the conception of my fictional mystery-solving organization. Both found their way onto the hardcover edition of the book, and that design, by Glenn O’Neill, was just voted best crime fiction cover of 2009 over on The Rap Sheet blog.

The Pinkertons have a fascinating history. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the agency, served as security to President Lincoln during the Civil War, and prevented an assassination attempt. (He wasn’t there at Ford’s Theater that other time.) The Pinkertons earned a degree of infamy during the events of the Homestead Strike of 1892. They were feared by outlaws, and were hired to track Jesse James as well as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There is, according to this wikipedia article, a federal law still on the books which prohibits Pinkerton employees from working for the United States government.

What I didn’t know until recently was that Allan Pinkerton published several collections of real-life detective stories, “transcribed from the Records” of the Pinkerton Agency. All are in the public domain, and have been made available in electronic editions at feedbooks.com. I’m looking forward to reading these, and I wish I’d known about them a few years ago. In the preface to one volume, Mr. Pinkerton writes:

If there be any incidental embellishment, it is so slight that the actors in these scenes from the drama of life would never themselves detect it; and if the incidents seem to the reader at all marvelous or improbable, I can but remind him, in the words of the old adage, that “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

Indeed. Feedbooks also has on display some of the wonderful old cover designs for those books. Of particular note—to me, at least—is the cover of The Expressman and the Detective, with its green cover and gold foil never-sleeping stare. And for reasons which anyone who’s read The Manual of Detection will understand, the title The Somnambulist and the Detectives came as a fine surprise.

The paperback design for my book is quite different—“Magritte noir,” I’ve been calling it. The paperback will be available from Penguin on January 26th, and I’ll have more to say about it soon.