Brimming with box office brio and blossoming into one of the biggest critical and financial hits of the year, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is opening up new audiences to Thomas Pynchon, on whose novel, Vineland, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is based.
Hot on its cinematic release comes the publication of his latest book, SHADOW TICKET, a detective novel set in 1932 Milwaukee, during the Great Depression.
Former strikebreaker turned private dick Hicks McTaggart is tasked with locating Daphne, a runaway heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune. Private eyes of the 1930s were emerging from an era of labour unrest and entering one of spousal infidelity, encouraged if not enabled by Prohibition and McTaggart saw it as a ticket on a gravy train.
Most cases were simple according to the hard-boiled dick academy, but this gig, focused on a fugitive Gorgonzola grantee, a legatee who has legged it, plunges this private dick into international intrigue entangling him with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal and outlaw motorcyclists.
It’s a mixed bag of Fascists, Commies, Limeys, Bikies, Charlatans and Big Bands in a trans Atlantic, intercontinental and spectral plane shenanigans, with a finale with a gumshoe vowing never to go hungry again.
Pynchon has scored a wider audience through the movie adaptations of his books and movies, with their mass impact on the zeitgeist, especially in the Golden Age of Hollywood studios, impact very heavily in SHADOW TICKET.
Check out this piece of narrative and snippet of dialogue: Hicks angles his head, hoping his eyeballs are lubricated enough to flash highlights of warning, in case she plans on rolling any further up that particular stretch of scenic highway offers her a smoke from his last pack of duty free, which she tucks into a crease of her gown and switches from one her own cork tips, bending in towards him carefully, an intimate of flame at many levels…knowing how many sorts of light will work with a given makeup job, how long to remain lit up before ignition and withdrawal, how deep to inhale, so forth. Flashing him another look, and this time, what a look,. Remarking in a reasonable tone, “Whoever’s alley this may or may not be, don’t be expecting any easy spares.”
A perfect narrative for Bogie and Bacall, or even Fred and Ginger, if we could time travel back to the Tinsel Town of the Thirties, because, as it transpires, McTaggart is a regular twinkle toes. These days one might hope, perhaps, for a Joaquin and Lady Gaga reunion, with its musical interludes and left of centre lyrics.
Pynchon English can take some getting into and SHADOW TICKET is no exception, but the Pynchon prose, sometimes inscrutable and even indecipherable in its idiosyncrasy is strangely gripping nevertheless, reading, and re reading, pays off. In skewed Sam Spades.
Get the jump on Paul Thomas Anderson and read SHADOW TICKET before he maybe makes it into a movie. Or maybe Baz Luhrmann will beat him to the punch.
SHADOW TICKET by Thomas Pynchon is published by Jonathan Cape.
