Speculative Fiction Junkie

Jack O'Connell

I picked up Jack O'Connell's debut novel Box Nine after reading and being blown away by his most recent work, The Resurrectionist (review here). The Resurrectionist is the best book I've read so far this year, which left me with high expectations for Box Nine. And after political conventions and hurricanes I've finally managed to find some time to write this review.

O'Connell is best known as a writer of crime novels of the noir variety. I'm not an avid crime novel reader and my understanding of what a noir novel is exactly is hazy at best (I think of movies like Alphaville, one of my all time favorites). As such, I consulted the bottomless and unerring fount of wisdom known as Wikipedia. According to this entry, noir fiction is a subset of harboiled crime fiction. It is also closely related to film noir. In the absence of any specific definition of noir fiction, I'm going to proceed under the assumption that it is more or less the same as film noir.

According to Wikipedia, Film noir has proved difficult to define. The most succinct definition appears to be that noir works are characterized by the dreamlike, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. They often take place in urban settings and feature detectives and police officers as protagonists. These latter tend to be more flawed and morally ambiguous then one encounters in mainstream fiction, and the general tone of noir works is often bleak and pessimistic.

Box Nine certainly seems to fit squarely within the noir tradition in that it is at times strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. The protagonist is a drug using detective and her beat is the fictional decaying industrial city of Quinsigamond. Her temporary partner, Dr. Woo, is a linguist who has been brought on board to help track down a new drug that confers enhanced language abilities on those that take it before sending them into a homicidal rage. Meanwhile, someone starts to leave body parts at the post office where the protagonist's brother works. As the book progresses, the reader gets a detailed glimpse into the wholly engrossing Quinsigamond and the evolution of the relationships between the relatively small cast of characters.

The best part of this book is the setting of Quinsigamond. It's bleak and decaying and anyone who has ever lived in an urban area with even the hint of an industrial past will immediately recognize parts of it. The thing that draws the reader into the city is the odd characters and events that Mr. O'Connell has placed in it. Rather than making things super weird, as in Mieville or Gaiman weird, he makes them slightly weird, more or less plausibly weird. This is really effective and it makes the city a very intriguing place. As mentioned above, this book features a relatively small number of characters and they are well developed.

My only complaint about Box Nine is that I thought that many of the story threads would have benefited from further development. For example, language figures prominently in the book (the drug affects users' language abilities, Dr. Woo is a linguist, Quinsigamond contains bookstores and personal libraries), but I was left wondering what the point of this focus was since it never seemed to play a definitive role in moving the plot along. Similarly, once the protagonist's brother receives a few body parts in the mail, this thread seems to peter out. In other words, in some places it's almost as if Mr. O'Connell concentrated on the noir elements at the expense of plot development. I really enjoyed these elements but wish that the plot had been developed more.

Having said that, this was still a very enjoyable, well written book. It's quite a page turner and the picture Mr. O'Connell paints of Quinsigamond and the weirdness that happens there is reason enough to read it. But while Box Nine is good, The Resurrectionist is a masterpiece. After reading Box Nine I was left with a great appreciation for how far O'Connell has come as a writer between his first and most recent novels. I'm looking forward to reading his other three books.

Rating: 7/10

The True First

Box Nine was first published by Mysterious Press in 1992. I believe that the book is currently out of print (a real shame), but you can probably find a copy on eBay.


[This review was not based on a review copy]