not really a PI solves crimes with network of friends

Robert Sheckley was known primarily for his comic SF short stories. He wrote a few SF novels, but even at the short lengths of SF novels of his time, he had trouble constructing a novel-length story. This is not SF, despite a passing reference to Barsoom, and a dream sequence that suggests some possible cosmic background. It is, as the title accurately suggests, a pastiche of the classic detective novel, a la Chandler. As with his SF novels, it's primarily a sequence of scenes, some quite funny. My favorite is probably the taxi driver who drives with a large dog that really really doesn't like passengers with guns. There's a fair amount of info dumps of his travel experiences, in Ibiza and Paris. In fact, there's a bit too much Paris. At times I felt Sheckley was filling a page by looking at a street map and just writing down routes through Paris. There's a lot of double crossing and running around, but it all resolves reasonably coherently, for a Sheckley novel.

It is very sloppily edited though. In the first few pages, in the detective's office, a visitor sits "back in my client chair." Two short paragraphs later, he is asked to take a seat. At several other points, whole sentences are repeated a paragraph or two later.

Sheckley wrote two more in this series. I enjoyed this enough to seek them out, but this is not undiscovered classic. ( )