Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, just released in paperback by The Penguin Press. Part Calvino-ish fantasy, part Doyle-esque mystery, Berry’s debut novel has been lavished with praise and awards. (The New Yorker said that it “weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka.”)
Berry is an assistant editor at Small Beer Press and an admirer of umbrellas. You can read the first chapter of The Manual of Detection here, and you can hear Berry read from the book at Powell’s on Hawthorne tomorrow, Thursday 2/11, at 7:30 pm.
We caught up with him in the middle of his reading tour to talk about glögg, Gore-Tex, and the mysteries of genre.
Q: Hi! So, you’re touring right now for the paperback release of your novel, The Manual of Detection. How’s the tour going? How does this one compare to the tour you did last year for the hardcover publication? Any travel tips you want to share?
A: The main difference so far between this tour and the last is that this tour has a lot more Chicago in it. A blizzard came through and kept me there an extra twenty-four hours, so I can offer some Chicago-specific travel tips if you like.
First, visit The Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I read at the 57th Street Books branch, and it’s a very good place with very good people working in it.
Second, when you need a driver, you should call this guy Raj. Raj will drive through snowdrifts to get you where you need to go, and he’ll call in the morning to check in on you, and he understands hand signals given from second-story windows. Seriously, get in touch with me if you’d like Raj’s number.
Finally, go to Simon’s Tavern in Andersonville, and order the glögg. They mull it on the premises in big vats. Do not, however, attempt to steal any of the Valentine’s Day decorations, not even the extra sets of giant red lips they keep at the bar. The bartender will see you, and you’ll have to order more glögg in order to appease him.
Q: In a 2009 interview with Bookslut you talked about your fascination with umbrellas and clocks (among other things.) They’re both personal effects that seem to look backward to a slower, more staid and genteel age — or at least an age before digital watches and Gore-Tex. How did you think about the world of the book — its objects, buildings, weather, and moods — as you were creating it? What was that process like?
A: Gore-Tex? Never heard of it.
As for the world of the book, I was aiming for something nameless and timeless — or maybe atemporal is the better word. I thought of it as a fairy tale setting, except the stuff of the place is lifted from noir cinema, hard-boiled crime fiction, certain works of surrealist visual art, and maybe from a few Tom Waits songs. I wanted the city to feel like a world unto itself. Some impossible things happen there, but they happen according to an internal logic, and the geography of the city—from the detectives’ headquarters to the ruined carnival in the city’s fairgrounds — is a visual representation of that logic.
I grew familiar with the setting in stages, mapping it out as Charles Unwin, the novel’s protagonist, was compelled to explore it. It was a fun place to live for a few years, despite all the rain.
Q: Since The Manual of Detection came out, it’s won the Crawford Award for first fantasy novel, and been named a finalist for the Hammett Prize for excellence in crime fiction. Clearly, you’re crossing genres. Did you set out to write a novel that would “fit” into both the crime and fantasy genres, or did that develop along the way? Did you think of the book as belonging to any particular genre as you were writing it?
A: I wasn’t thinking about genre at all when I started the book, though most of what I write tends to veer into strange, non-realist territory, so I often find myself (quite happily) grouped with fantasists and science fiction writers. The crime genre elements caught me completely by surprise, then gradually took over the book. I thought a lot about the tropes of the mystery novel, about the games of hide-and-seek that are inevitably played between author and reader, and those thoughts are woven into the fabric of the book. It’s called The Manual of Detection, after all, and the protagonist has a copy of a book called The Manual of Detection, which is supposed to help him solve mysteries. My hope is that readers will enjoy the playfulness of how I’m working with these genre elements, and also trust me enough to follow those threads into some stranger, less familiar regions.
I’m thrilled, of course, that the book has gained recognition in both the fantasy and mystery communities. I hope the novel is read through the lens of each genre, because different aspects of the story may stand out with different readings. Michael Moorcock, a writer whose work I admire a great deal, reviewed the book as steampunk, which I hadn’t anticipated at all. But it was exciting and informative to see the novel placed in yet another context.
Q: You mentioned on your blog that when you hit Elliott Bay Bookstore for today’s reading, you may read something from a new project you’ve got on the go. Can you say a little more about that?
A: It’s a shuffleable story printed on a stack of index cards, inspired partly by Hamlet, about hundreds of princes, kings, queens, gravediggers, etc., all stuck in one castle together. It’s a work in progress, and I’m still not sure what form it will take in the end, but for now I’m enjoying the slightly terrifying thrill of reading it in a random order each time. If people seem interested, I’ll probably shuffle it again for my Portland reading.
Q: What are you reading right now? What are the great works of fantasy or mystery (within genres or not) that everyone must read? What book remains a mystery to you no matter how many times you read it?
A: I’ve just started Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series. A best-of anthology of his stories was published last year, and it completely blew me away—Wolfe does things with fantasy and science fiction that are revolutionary in ways that extend well beyond the genre. I’m also reading and re-reading some of Samuel Beckett’s novels—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable—to help with questions coming out of a long-term project I’m working on now.
Great works to recommend? I think everyone should read Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and Jorge Luis Borges. Also G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, a kind of metaphysical mystery. Kafka wrote some pretty great mystery novels, too. More recent: China Mieville’s The City and the City and all of Kelly Link’s stories. Also all of Joe Hill’s stories.
A book that always remains a mystery to me? I’d have to say Through the Looking-Glass. I return to it often.
Thanks, Jedediah!
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Another great Interview! I am a big fan of weird Fantastic tales. Perhaps I can make it to his Portland Reading. I love the idea of a story you can just shuffle up and read. It would take a lot of planning and careful editing, but I think that could be an amazing way to tell stories. Different each time. A surreal story would likely be easy to do, but a more linear “normal” story would be pretty difficult to keep in line with random story bits. It would certainly be a great great exercise in learning to edit on the minute level to make each card of story stand alone but still connect with other story parts.