The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

As a voracious reader, I go through a lot of books, periodically recouping what I can through sale or trade at used book stores. I still have a copy of author Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned, which I read three or four years ago when it came out. It’s very good, but his The Boy Detective Fails, which I decided to read after it was recommended to me by local author Bradley Sands, is way better, putting it mildly.

Boy detective Billy Argo embarks on a quest to solve the riddle of his sister Caroline’s mysterious suicide. After an extended stay at St. Vitus’ Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where his roommates include his old nemesis Count Von Golum, a giant old man named Mister Pluto and other singular characters, Billy returns to a world full of disappearing buildings and super-villains with magic scissors. Billy befriends a pair of children, Effie and Gus Mumford, paralleling his former position, with sister Caroline and a boy named Fenton (his obesity and seeming obsolescence when the boy detective re-encounters him years later blinding readers to his essential nature in fulfillment of the novel’s plot) as of one of a trio of child sleuths. Add to all this his relationship with a beautiful shoplifter named Penny Maple he feels compelled to arrest or turn in after catching her stealing a pen from an old lady's purse on the bus one day. While this novel is instantly recognizable as an unconventional work of writing, its events proceed effortlessly, without any deliberate assault on convention despite their singularity, like dreams move.

Along with Martin Millar’s Ruby and the Stone Age Diet, this book represents a growing trend in modern fiction away from pessimistic realism toward postmodern allegory, spinning beautiful fables from the wreckage of our failed culture. It has excellent timing and pace, its ending is graceful and exact. It even comes with a decoder ring and hidden codes and connect the dots cartoons and mazes in the three or four final pages. Don't miss it!