Jeff Noon told an interviewer that he always wanted to write straight crime fiction but bizarre images and crazy scenes kept pulling him off in wild and weird ways. Thus we have, among others, the author's four Nyquist private eye novels. However, Slow Motion Ghosts is very much straight crime fiction. In many ways, a reader will be reminded of Tana French, Arnaldur Indriðason and Jo Nesbø.
The novel's opening chapter takes place on April 11, 1981, "Bloody Saturday," the day of the Brixton riot, a series of clashes between mostly black youths and the Metropolitan Police in Brixton, London. Jeff Noon's fictional Detective Inspector Harry Hobbes finds himself at the epicenter of the violent fray.
Chapter Two opens with a murder scene: four months hence, August 1981, DI Hobbes enters a semi-detached house in the affluent London suburb of Richmond to find the dead body of twenty-six-year-old Brendan Clarke. The young man's face is sliced up as if to create a gruesome, macabre mask. Hobbes discovers a record playing a song from Backstreet Harlequin by Lucas Bell, a singer Hobbes recognizes from the previous decade's glam rock era. The detective also comes across sheets of paper filled with perhaps poetry or song lyrics and the signature of Lucas Bell added to the bottom of each sheet.
As for why the bizarre murder, that's for Jeff Noon to tell. I'll make a quick shift to a key underlying theme running throughout the entire novel: What it means to be an outsider.
HARRY HOBBES
Following his initial visit to the murder scene and his first emotionally high voltage interview with a young woman very much part of Brendan Clarke's life, DI Hobbes walks down the side passage toward his flat only to find the word SCUM scrawled in red paint across the panels of the door. Who would have done such a thing? Hobbes knows everyone on the police force hates him, for his odd ways, his attitude, and most of all for what had happened to DI Jenkins in the aftermath of the Brixton riot.
Oh, yes, DI Jenkins, his onetime best friend. We're not clued in on the details of what exactly transpired until many chapters later but Harry Hobbes is now a man who stands alone, a despised outsider. And in addition to his job, his personal life is a shambles: Hobbes left his family home once any remaining love between himself and his wife had grown icy cold and his teenage son Martin ran away and remains missing.
Hobbes tells someone he judges redemption an impossibility as he's simply seen way too much human cruelty and depravity. Hearing this, his interlocutor asks the detective if he takes after his namesake, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who famously stated men and women are essentially evil and brutish. The detective's words: "It's one way of looking at it."
BRENDAN CLARKE
Turns out, Brendan Clarke was the lead singer in the rock group Monsoon Monsoon. As part of their investigation, Hobbes and another officer speak with the band's drummer.
"The drummer was in his early twenties. Jet-black hair, long on top, cropped at the side, gelled into a weird shape like something out of a science fiction movie. He wore a lilac shirt, a paisley silk scarf and close-fitting purple trousers, the bright colours set against the pallid grey of his face. He was fidgety, wound up, his eyes focused on an ever-moving dot some few feet ahead of him."
The deeper Hobbes probes, the more he comes to appreciate just how alienated from mainstream society these young people who are part of the glam rock scene. A common thread: as kids and as teenagers, they were seen as the weaklings, prime victims for bullying, beatings and humiliation. Is it any wonder they gravitated to drugs, radical fashion and a form of music that spoke to their status as outsiders?
LUCAS BELL
Lucas Bell strutted and sang as a top 1970s glam rocker, right up there with the likes of David Bowie. Bell's suicide in his twenties proved traumatic for thousands of his avid fans. There was one part of Lucas Bell's performance raised to the level of the sacred: when Bell wore his King Lost mask. But, wait, did Lucas Bell really commit suicide or was he murdered?
Guess who counts as a fanatical, obsessive Lucas Bell fan, a man who even created a fanzine dedicated to the rocker? Of course, Brendan Clarke. Hobbes speaks with a Lucas Bell fan about the Monsoon Monsoon concert the very night when Brendan Clarke was murdered. Here's what she tells the detective:
"I stayed at a friend's place in London after the gig. But I couldn't sleep. I kept having these terrible thoughts. So I got up very early and took the tube over to Brendan's house. I wanted to talk to him, that's all. I hated him for what he'd done at the gig, taking on the spirit of King Lost like that. It's not fair. It shouldn't be allowed."
What! Brendan Clarke actually wore the King Lost mask during his performance? Sacrilege!
RACE
If women and men think of their England as the proud land of white Brits, where does that leave individuals living in cities like London who are from African or Afro-Caribbean decent? Will they be forever outsiders? The novel address this sensitive topic.
WEIRD AND WEIRDER
Again, Slow Motion Ghosts is straight crime fiction, right up there with In the Woods, Jar City and The Snowman. Nevertheless, Jeff Noon does infuse generous dollops of the freaky and even the occult, things like tarot cards and references to Aleister Crowley. I echo what Tony White had to say in The Guardian:
"Slow Motion Ghosts is his first crime novel, and it’s a belter. Hobbes’s journey into the underworlds of occult obsession and police violence is rich in social and subcultural detail, and Noon’s storytelling is assured and compelling."
British author Jeff Noon, born 1957
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