Funhouse plot for hard-boiled sleuth

"The Little Sleep" Paul Tremblay (Holt, 2009). $14

Your first take on Mark Genevich is that he’s a parody of a hard-boiled detective – he’s smart-mouthed, he’s sardonic, he even wears a fedora. And on Page 1, a long-legged mystery woman (“her legs go from north of Maine all the way down to the Cape”) materializes in his scruffy South Boston office in a yet-to-be-gentrified neighborhood.

But that take on Genevich lasts for only four pages – or about the length of time he manages to stay awake. He’s narcoleptic, you see, the result of a car crash that left him physically and psychologically disfigured. (The fedora, it turns out, is more than an affectation; its real purpose is to cover his scars.) Besides the narcolepsy, he also suffers periodic bouts of hallucinations and cataplexy, a waking coma that brings temporary paralysis. A more unlikely P.I. has never taken center stage in crime fiction.

But Genevich is dogged in trying to salvage self-respect from the wreckage, eking out a living mostly by tracing abandoned property and lost addresses. When beautiful Jennifer Times, daughter of the local D.A. and finalist on a nationwide talent show, comes into his office with a set of X-rated photos, supposedly of her and mailed anonymously, Genevich agrees to take the case, believing she’s been set up for blackmail.

It’s not long before he realizes Jennifer’s entire visit was a hallucination. And yet, there are those photos – very real indeed, and more than a little disturbing to the D.A., whom he ill-advisedly approaches for help.

Thus he’s drawn into something much bigger and nastier than blackmail, its tentacles reaching back more than a generation to hardscrabble lives lived on the mean streets of an older, grittier South Boston. Up against some serious bad guys and battling his own incapacitating demons, Genevich’s only backup is his tough-as-nails, heart-of-gold mother.

Told in the first person, the story unfolds through Genevich’s highly unreliable perceptions. Nothing is as it seems – or is it? The author weaves a funhouse of a plot while upending the conventions of hard-boiled crime fiction. From protagonist to setting to title (a dead-on description of the hero’s malady, but also an ironic riff on Chandler’s "The Big Sleep"), The Little Sleep is both derivative and utterly original – a debut to delight even connoisseurs of the genre.

Paul Tremblay grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Providence College, and received a graduate degree from the University of Vermont. His short fiction has twice been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. The Little Sleep is his first novel.

Kathy Leahy
Hingham Public Library Reader Services