Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan

Of all the lousy, deadbeat private eyes in San Francisco, Mr C. Card is the most hapless. The one wearing a single sock. The one lying to his landlady for a miserable donut. The one who shot himself in the derrière during the Spanish Civil War.

It’s 1942, and what Card wants is a fresh case, a hot secretary, and Mexican sand between his toes. What he’s got is a whole bunch of nada. Even he is appalled at the way he lives. Which is why daydreaming about his glories in imaginary Babylon is such sweet poison.

But then a mysterious dame offers him a job: steal a corpse, hit paydirt. All he has to do is keep his head out of the clouds.

It’s classic Brautigan: short chapters, built around the punchline of the chapter title. It’s funny, crass, poetic, and shallow. As an undergraduate I marvelled at Brautigan’s simplicity of phrase, at the sleight-of-hand which prepared the table for his chapter-closing aces. Revenge of the Lawn was among my most treasured paperbacks. Decades later, I wonder if I’ve outgrown my hero.