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the complete review - fiction

The Crime Studio

by
Steve Aylett

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : a remarkable, fast-paced, and immensely clever set of cautionary tales.

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Think of Don Westlake's crime capers on caffeine overdrive, the Marx Brothers filming Crime and Punishment in a single, drunken weekend." - James Sallis, Fantasy & Science Fiction
  
  
• "The Crime Studio is a comic-noir tour-de-force in which otherwise trite hardboiler elements are the raw materials for Aylett’s cockeyed take on genre fiction. (...) The Crime Studio manages to subvert genre fiction without descending into sniggling postmodern ridicule, which may be the last brave thing left in contemporary literature." - Tim Feeney, Review of Contemporary Fiction

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Steve Aylett's first novel consists of loosely connected episodes from a place where criminal activity seems to be pretty much the only activity. The dystopian Beerlight is a place of all your worst nightmares. Crime has become everything -- even an art -- and Aylett takes the idea to some imaginative extremes. Aylett's warped vision works because it is one big joke -- and a damn well-told one.
       The episodes are all brief, a few pages each, but Aylett writes in a dense, compact style and makes a neat story out of each. His sequence of dead pan one-liners would make Raymond Chandler proud. And he even manages to string them together into actual stories.
       The characters are a fun lot. There's the conman (and lawyer) Harpoon Specter, "so adept at manipulating reality he could fall out a window and land on the roof -- if he could make a few smackers that way." There's Leon Wardial, who, as a student "had almost become English through bad illumination and lack of exercise." And any number of other sad sacks, successful (or less so) at committing crime.
       Very few of these episodes don't work. All of them are worth a few laughs, at least, and most are damn sharp.
       Recommended, for those who can stand some humour to their mysteries. And keep an eye out for Aylett, a talent to watch.

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Links:

• Orion publicity page
• Four Walls Eight Windows publicity page

• Blether
• Review of Contemporary Fiction
• SF Site
• Steven Shaviro
• The Stranger
• zone-sf.com

• The complete review's Steve Aylett page
• www.steveaylett.com - the official Steve Aylett site

• Atom
• Bigot Hall
• The Inflatable Volunteer
• Lint
• Only an Alligator
• Shamanspace
• Slaughtermatic
• Toxicology
• The Velocity Gospel

• See Index of Science Fiction and Fantasy books
• See Index of Contemporary British fiction

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About the Author:

       British author Steve Aylett was born in 1967. He has written several novels.

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