Icelander

Detective fiction was at its height in the 1950s, when a small army of genre writers cracked out tales of murder and mystery one after another. By the end of the century, the genre had been thoroughly exhausted, which led writers like Paul Auster to reinvent it with playful, postmodern thrillers. That too became exhausted, prompting a good question: where does detective fiction go now? Dustin Long’s Icelander offers one answer. A gigantic parody of all that’s come before (even noir legend Alfred Hitchcock gets mocked, as the victim here is named Shirley MacGuffin), Icelander comes replete with footnotes, in-jokes and a detective who declines to solve the mystery. It begins with the daughter of the super-famous detective Emily Bean-Ymirson, known only as “Our Heroine.” Her friend — the aforementioned MacGuffin — has been murdered, and everyone is expecting Our Heroine to solve the case, but she resolutely declines to follow in her mother’s footsteps. That’s okay, though, because there’s plenty of people willing to steal Our Heroine’s spotlight: there’s a festival for Magnus Valison, a master novelist who has chronicled Bean’s exploits, the city is besieged by characters from Norse mythology, and there’s comic relief (as if the story needed more) from two “philosophical investigators” reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Long’s fecund imagination runs rampant, coming up with, among other things, an alternate, Internet-like library arranged not by Dewey Decimal but by an “infinite skein of interconnections” and a “two story house” where one story is written on the walls of the first floor and a second on the second. This exuberant, multifaceted attempt to chart where the genre of detective fiction might go after the noirs of the ’50s and ’60s and the postmodern fantasies of the ’80s and ’90s is a great guess and a great ride.