Review of Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran (2013, Faber and Faber)

Claire DeWitt is a PI working in San Francisco. When Paul Casablancas, a guitarist and Claire’s ex-boyfriend, is found dead in his home she decides to investigate. The police think that it’s a robbery gone wrong. Claire suspects that there is more to it. Grounded in the philosophy and teachings of French detective, Jacques Silette, Claire’s detective technique can be a little unusual, but it gets results. The problem is the answers can be somewhat unpalatable and like many Silettians she has a host of quirks and personal problems. Paul’s death has hit her hard and she’s also having flashbacks to another personal case from her teens when a friend disappeared in New York. To cope she’s taking increasing amounts of cocaine and whatever prescription pills she can lift other peoples’ medicine cabinets. Sometimes barely functioning she relies on her assistant, Claude, to chase clues and look after other cases, but she doesn’t give up on finding the truth.

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway is the second book in the DeWitt series following the cases of a messed up but brilliant detective. In this outing, Claire is investigating the murder of an ex-boyfriend – the one that was meant to be but she let get away. Half debilitated by drugs, grief, and the memories of a past case, she slowly seeks clues over the following months, while also dealing with a couple of other cases and personal issues. As with all detectives trained in the Silettian tradition, her pursuit is truth rather than justice, though the truth can be painful and burdensome. In DeWitt, Gran has created a wonderful, flawed, complex, anti-hero character with a self-destructive streak. While the first book in the series was a good read, I thought the second instalment was excellent, with a nice mix of philosophy, dead-pan and dark humour, and two interesting mysteries (the death of the ex-boyfriend and the disappearance of a friend many years earlier). I was hooked from the get-go and my interest never waned as Claire stumbled through her investigation. In my opinion, this multifaceted, engaging and quirky tale would be perfect for a movie treatment, or better still a TV series.

Review of City of the Dead by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

Having discovered a copy of Jacque Silette’s ‘Détection’ as a teenager, Claire DeWitt was always destined to be a private investigator. Her path to being the self-proclaimed world’s greatest detective has not been straightforward, however. A teenage friend disappeared never to be found, her Silette-trained mentor, Constance, was murdered, and she’s recovering from a major nervous breakdown. When she’s asked to take a job in New Orleans to find a missing district attorney post-Katrina, she knows she’ll be encountering more than the case. DeWitt was schooled by Constance in the city and she still has acquaintances there. She finds the city still in turmoil months after the hurricane. The DA seemingly vanished without a trace. Drawing on her copy of Détection, her dreams, I Ching dice and contacts, she starts to investigate, partly hunting for clues, partly creating noise to see what happens. It seems though that nobody really wants the truth to out.

Claire DeWitt is somewhat of an unusual private detective. She is a devotee of the philosophy and methods of French detective, Jacque Silette, author of ‘Détection’, religiously following his oblique advice, and drawing on her dreams and I Ching dice to cast light on cases. She’s headstrong, abrasive and self-assured, yet is also carrying a lot of emotional baggage and mental health vulnerabilities. Her first case after residing in a retreat after a nervous breakdown is to find out what happened to a missing district attorney in New Orleans after the Katrina floods. It is a city that holds many memories given that is where she trained under the mentorship of Silette-apprentice, Constance. The city is a still a mess and the crime rate sky high. DeWitt starts with the DA’s clients, young black men hanging around on street corners, making friends and enemies at the same time. It took me a bit of time to get into the tale as the storytelling somewhat drifts much like DeWitt’s approach to the case, at times focusing on the detective and parts of her backstory, at times exploring Silette’s philosophy, and otherwise spooling out the case and the city of New Orleans post-Katrina. At about halfway through I settled into the cadence and style and started to warm to DeWitt. The denouement was not a surprise, but this was a story about the journey not the destination.