Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

F*cking balls on the walls superb (and impossibly awesome).

Let me elaborate on the funniest, most interestingly perverted little detective novel I’ve ever read:

“I think this book ate my soul. Warren Ellis has mapped out the psychosexual underbelly of America with a foreigner’s clarity and a lunatic’s glee. Funny, inventive, and blithely appalling, this book is Dante on paint fumes.”

– Joss Whedon

“Crooked Little Vein” was the crazy little detective book that could. And I say that because I’ve read my fair share of detective novels and found myself growing more and more tired of them. Warren Ellis has written something so hilariously brilliant that I wouldn’t have put the damned thing down even if the roof caved in; I’d have just brushed it off and continued this insane adventure until the end.

Mike McGill is a private detective and a real shit magnet too (note the italics, people!). Ever since he quit his desk job at the police and moved out to New York to make it on his own, strange things have happened to him. But not lets save the superlative version of “strange” till after you’ve read the book, cos McGill is about to be handed the weirdest case in his life (and he’s had some good ones too: once a wife asked him to check whether or not her husband was cheating on her, but when he was ready to make the final bust on him, Mike discovered that the husband wasn’t cheating on his wife per say; he was having tantric sex with a Rohypnol drugged ostrich. Trust me – that’s an image that’ll stick in your head!).

The White House’s chief of staff hires Mike to find a book that’s been missing ever since the ’50’s, gives him a half million dollars in advance and sends him on his way. Mike’s quest for the mysterious book takes him across an America I’d never envisioned (but now can’t quite shake.) It’s one insane place…

The novels strength is no doubt Warren Ellis’s talent for humor and his crazed mind. This book taught me a lot about a lot of things that I could have lived my entire life in blissful ignorance off. I mean, almost every scene is of the kind that brand marks itself into your memory and won’t ever disappear.

The two main characters are well enough realized (not this authors strongest point, but who the fuck cares, right?), but the rest of the cast are complete nutter butters… The novel is only 280 pages long, but the chapters are really short and the book is as small as paperback, so you won’t use much more than a couple of hours tearing through it.

All in all I can’t say anything else than that I loved this book to pieces. I’ll probably reread it every year just for the hell of it and I can’t recommend it enough (all though there should be an age limit on this content!). “Crooked Little Vein” is endlessly entertaining, all though calling it a masterpiece is stretching it too far (sobering up now, you see) as it lacks a lot of things you normally include in that term.

But I don’t care about that. I’ll call it whatever I damned well please, cos if fiction was always this fun, no one would have invented reality TV. 8,5 /10.

Interested? Read the first chapter of “Crooked Little Vein” for free by clicking this link. Note that it only gets better as it goes ^^