Home » USA » Thomas Pynchon » Shadow Ticket Given that he was eighty-eight when this book was published it had long been assumed that Bleeding Edge was going to be his final book, but then, lo and behold, this book appears and it certainly does not seem to be a work of a man who has lost his powers. It starts off seeming to be like a standard US hard-boiled detective novel. It is set in he Prohibition period, in 1932, though interestingly enough located in Milwaukee. However, it is made clear Chicago. has an influence on the local gangsters. Most of the characters seeme to have slightly odd names and that is the case with our hero, Hicks McTaggart. Hicks initially started out as a strike breaker. It was a lot of work and it was well paid. But then he started having a conscience having nearly killed a man but drew back and then drew back from strikebreaking as a career. He lookedaround at jobs in the security field and ended up working for a private detective business, called Unamalgamated Ops, aka U-Ops. The book opens with an explosion, which Hicks hears and later learns is a truck belonging to Stuffy Keegan, a known petty criminal and police informer. Inevitably Hicks gets involved. In the case. Hicks seems to have a lot of connections in the underworld and with the police, though they be do not always cooperate with him. He tracks Stuffy down and the last Hhicks sees of him is when Stuffy goes off in a submarine, yes a submarine which somehow escaped destruction at the end of World War I. and in theory belongs to the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now seems to be up to no good on the Great Lakes. We know that the rise of fascism is taking place in Europe and Germans and Italians seem to be causing a certain amount of trouble for the authorities in the USA Hicks pokes around, goes to various drinking joints and seems to lead a relatively colourful romantic life. However, the FBI are reopening in Milwaukee and they have decided to recruit our hero. He is very reluctant to join but they make him an offer he cannot refuse. Bruno Airmont is known as the Al Capone of cheese and he has a daughter Daphne, who, as heiresses are sometimes wont to do in novels. runs off with the the wrong man, specifically a clarinet player in a swing band. Daddy is not amused Hicks, while getting involved in the Stuffy Keegan situation, finds himself involved in this case. Someone does not want him involved and a Christmas elf hands him a package which only after a certain amount of time and discussion with others does he manage to discard just in time before it blows up. It is time for Hicks to move on. His moving on is not entirely voluntary as he wakes up one morning and find himself on an ocean liner heading for Europe. On board he meets two Brits, husband and wife, theQuarrenders who try to recruit him into the British Secret Service. They will be just two of the many characters who keep disappearing and then popping up again. He lands up in Budapest where, not surprisingly, he finds the political situation far more complicated than it is in the USA. Firstly, of course we are now getting the rise of fascism and of course antisemitism. This is not just the Germans but the Croatian and Hungarians who are also getting involved in various dirty deeds, anti-Semitic and others, and, of course, even the Russians are also getting involved. However, Hicks is on the lookout for Daphne and of course he gets a lot of red herrings and wild goose chases. He does track down Daphne and she is no longer with her clarinet player, but that does not ease his complications. He tells her h he is tired of romantic cases and she accuses him of sexism. Maybe you just don’t like women much. Afraid of us or something.” It is perhaps inevitable that we end up in Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) where all sorts of disreputable characters seem to end up. There are lots of things that make this another excellent read by Pynchon. Firstly, we have a host of highly colourful characters, often with improbable names, and it is not always clear whether they are good, bad or neither. Secondly, as we would expect, we have a high octane plot with people and events changing rapidly in a way sometimes neither the characters nor the reader knows exactly what is going on. Thirdly, as always, Pynchon uses a highly colourful language. I pity any translator trying to translate this into another language asPynchon uses a lot of slang, some standard US slang, some from other countries such as Germany or Hungary and inevitably some that he has clearly made up himself and which will be very difficult to put into another language. i is often not clear what is going on and if you are expecting an easy to follow a plot with an easy to follow solution to who did what to whom, then you will be in for something of a surprise.Pynchon did not do straightforward plots when he was younger and he certainly is not doing them now. But do not let this put you off as it is a wonderful read and the fast and furious action never lets up. First published in 2025 by Penguin Press
“Who isn’t? Even women are afraid of women. Scientific fact, so I hear.. What he really wants is to get back to Milwaukee and see his mother. However Bruno, Daphne, and even the clarinet player are adding complications to his life.However many of the other characters also having a complicated life. Of course, for the reader it is not always clear who is on which side, who are the bad guys, and who, if any, are the good guys.Publishing history