For a modern audience conditioned to fast-paced crime thrillers, The Detective is slow going. It’s almost 600 pages but the “main” story only takes up a relatively small part of that. Most of the novel takes place in flashbacks, telling the life story of the main character.

So... fast-paced, it ain’t.

Far more than a crime thriller, though, the heart of this novel is a character study. Like the terse title tells us - this is simply a book about a detective. And he proves to be a fascinating man!

It took some time for me to get into this novel. The first six chapters plod. And there’s a style to the writing that makes it difficult for me to follow at times. I find it quite frustrating.

Then, starting with Chapter 7, something clicks. The pace picks up, the characters start to reveal themselves in interesting ways, and I develop enough familiarity with the writing style that it stops tripping me up. After Chapter 7, I couldn’t stop reading it and I finished the whole thing in two sittings.

The one complaint that I have about this book is the writing style. While it ceases to be a major impediment to me, I never really get the hang of it. I constantly feel like I’m missing something. When characters have conversations, I frequently feel like there are important things being implied (but left unsaid) that go right over my head. Characters react to each other in ways that make no sense to me; they come to resolutions or stalemates and I can’t see how they get there. It's apparent that there are certain understandings that are perfectly obvious to the characters (and, therefore, left unsaid) that I just don't see.

The characters communicate more through implication and subtext than anything overt – and their meaning isn't at all clear to me much of the time.

This may have something to do with the writing conventions of the mid-60s. That was a time when subtext in popular entertainment was huge, whereas my experience with popular entertainment hasn’t trained me to pick up on it.

Or it may just be that the author tried way too hard to be clever.

I should offer one word of warning:

While implication and subtext play a huge role in this book, there are some ways in which it’s shockingly explicit, even by today’s standards.

All in all, and despite my inability to get the hang of the writing style, I really like The Detective. ( )