Dreaming of Babylon, by Richard Brautigan (Delta, 1978).
Yes, that Richard Brautigan, he of Trout Fishing in America and The Hawkline Monster fame—and one of many “literary authors” who have taken a shot at penning crime and detective novels during their careers. Said lineup also includes Thomas Berger, who followed his acclaimed western parody, Little Big Man, with a screwball twist on private investigator fiction titled Who Is Teddy Villanova? Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon was released originally in hardcover in early 1977 (by Delacorte Press), around the same time as Berger’s book. I procured and read paperback editions of both in 1978. They now sit together on my office shelves. The fact that I’ve never since considered revisiting either may indicate my level of satisfaction with their stories.
Similar to Russell Wren, the protagonist in Berger’s yarn, Brautigan’s C. Card is an impecunious dick, a Spanish Civil War veteran who has escaped service in World War II only because he was “shot in the ass” during that earlier conflict. The year is 1942, and Card has no car and has been forced to relinquish his office in downtown San Francisco, working instead (when he can find work at all) from “the pay phone in the front hall of the cheap apartment building I was living in on Nob Hill where I was two months behind in my rent.” He also let go of his secretary, whom he’d tried to seduce, without success.
Card is so down on his luck, he can’t even afford bullets for his gun. Which could be a problem, because he’s set to meet the first client he has had in three months, and they want him to bring his firearm. Preferably loaded. So Card goes searching among his friends for spare bullets, all the while trying not to get sidetracked by fantasies of living a wonderful life in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon.
Yes, this is an odd story. Bear with me here.
It seems that years ago Card experienced a head injury, which has caused him to periodically—and not always on convenient occasions—drift off into delusions of spending his days in Babylon. There he is the best private detective around, enjoying a gorgeous woman named Nana-dirat as his secretary and lover. “His life in Babylon,” explains the anonymous blogger at Biisbooks, “is the polar opposite of his life in the real world; no wonder he can’t stop dreaming about it.” But those hallucinations may make it difficult for Card to complete the mission given him by his new client, a beautiful, beer-drinking blonde who wants him to steal a body from the local morgue.
Reviews of Brautigan’s tale have been mixed. Scott Alderberg describes it in Do Some Damage as “a pleasurable and amusing read, just the playful thing I was looking for, an escape from the usual P.I. tropes that can become at times, let’s face it, a little wearying.” However, in their 1985 study, Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights, Robert A. Baker and Michael T. Nietzel called Dreaming of Babylon “as weak an effort from a major writer as one is likely to encounter. As parody, as humor, as any statement, the book fails.”
I don’t know. While paging through this book in order to write about it here, I finally found myself wanting to re-read the thing!
As for the novel’s cover illustration, credit belongs to California artist Craig Nelson, who—according to his Web site—is better known for painting record jackets as well as posters for films such as John Wayne’s The Cowboys (1972) and Paul Newman’s Slapshot (1977).
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