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Books

Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker

Part crime-thriller, part doomed love story, Jordan’s The Drowned Detective is an enthralling novel — which would also make a very good film

12 March 2016

9:00 AM

12 March 2016

9:00 AM

The Drowned Detective Neil Jordan

Bloomsbury, pp.264, £16.9, ISBN: 9781408865149

The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and (which is not always the same thing) a pleasure to read. After that, it gets more complicated.

The book defies tidy categorisation. Set in a nameless eastern European country, it opens in the literary territory of the crime thriller, with private investigators on the trail of a government minister on the way to visit his rubber-clad mistress.

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