I’ve always had a thing for detective stories.  Sherlock Holmes, The Maltese Falcon, Blade Runner, Law and Order, Tracer Bullet (yes, I just mentioned Calvin and Hobbes), these are some of the greats.  There’s something about a detective story that I like.  Maybe it’s their use of intellect to solve a problem.  Maybe it’s the fact that they use their intellect not for science, not for academia, but to solve human problems.

Maybe I just like hard-boiled narration and adventure, against gritty landscapes.  Who knows?

"The Fickle Finger of Fate" starts out like any Raymond Chandler crime thriller.  The private eye in his office gets an unexpected client through the door.  She’s a dame, a dangerous dame, and she has a case only he can solve. 

The difference is that this is Japan in the future, and the girl is made of plastic.  Fire doesn’t hurt her, but corrosives like alcohol and ether can.  Something has happened in the 21st century to make racism almost a memory, and also create a new species of human alongside the old paradigm.

Ploughman, the protagonist detective, doesn’t like "seru" cases, he doesn’t like the plastic people.  Why remains to be seen.

The narrative style is right in keeping with the detective genre, the noir-tones are all nearly pitch perfect.  It’s a style I like, so I don’t mind too much that it’s derivative.  However, if someone is going to copy a style, they should do a better job than their predecessor—if you’re going to stand on the shoulders of giants, you should end up taller.  Somehow, in the first chapter alone, this feels like a smaller story than the plots it’s emulating.

Because the tone is "nearly" perfect for a private eye narrator.  The author wastes time on unnecessary details.  He takes an entire paragraph to say the office is the size of a postage stamp.  In general, the "postage stamp" comparison is an over-used cliche.  Making it longer instead of shorter doesn’t improve that.  Then, there’s a lot of text devoted to how the narrator used to have a partner and his name was scraped off the glass window of the office.  By the end of the chapter, I’m suspecting either his partner died involved in a seru case, or backstabbed him—and that’s why the door bothers him so much.  But it’s done in such a backwards, unnecessarily detailed way that it slows down what should be a gripping scene.  There are a lot of other ways to convey the backstory, without leaving a mess for readers to decipher.  Especially if I’m right (and I’ll continue reading to find out) because it gives away a lot of the plot sooner than needed.

The second problem is the dialogue.  The narration is so strong, and so clearly emulating a great style, that such weak conversations really glaringly stand out.  It actually feels like someone else wrote it.  There aren’t proper paragraph breaks between speakers, so the detective and the dame sometimes overlap and it’s messy.  It rambles and, while certainly people in real life can be fast, rambling talkers, the fast, loose style of dialogue in this story jars against the slower, detailed narrative.  The gears don’t fit right, so the ride isn’t smooth.

The finale of the first chapter features the seru dame threatening Ploughman’s life if he doesn’t help her, and a demonstration of her invulnerability to fire.  It seems entirely contrived, like the author thought "Wow, how can I really make this scene impressive?" and shot right past the concept of "believable."  Why would she need Ploughman’s help if she can easily arrange an "accident" for him?  Someone willing to go that far can usually handle their own problems. 

While the rest of the story contains the answers, I really wanted to go watch Blade Runner after the first chapter.  The site layout is bland and reminds me of the Internet in the school library in the 1990s.  Hopefully the story improves (this is a completed novel) but we’ll see.  Right now the dialogue makes it seem like fan-fic, from someone who really likes Blade Runner and anime.

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