I read ‘Suspects’ many years ago as a (then) relatively well versed tan of Noir cinema and the style and approach (giving back story and imagined story lines to characters from movies ) stuck with me for a long time- most notably putting George Bailey from Its a Wonderful Life and his experiences into a ‘breakdown’ context. I was not aware of the author’s second book using this technique but was intrigued to see this third volume, featuring characters from classic comedies, was available.
I have to say, I struggled with this one a bit.
The author’s knowledge of cinema is, undoubtedly, unparalleled- but the inclusion of a heightened. Version of himself into the narrative, a narrative which is fractured, at times surreal, and occasionally breaking the fourth wall, all added up to a more challenging read for me than his first book in the series.
In one of the many meta moments in the book an agent early on discusses the book, pointing out it would be an idea to put the referenced characters and their movies at the back of the book - as was the case with Suspects. On a kindle and perhaps because my knowledge of screwball comedies isn’t so strong, I confess a number of the references were lost on me. Which would be fine- if I’d found myself more immersed in the story. Unfortunately, it was a little too experimental in style to really carry me along and ultimately I found this more of an undoubtedly clever but slightly challenging read.
Those with a better knowledge of the genres will, I’m sure, have a better experience with the book.
Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the opportunity to read.

David Thomson's latest is presented as the conclusion to a 40-year trilogy, doing for screwball comedies what Suspects did for film noir and Silver Light for Westerns. Now, I've not read Silver Light, because I'm not that big on Westerns and also because I wasn't really aware it existed, but Suspects was a very controlled performance, taking a similar format to Thomson's non-fiction Biographical Dictionary Of Film and giving us a series of entries detailing the lives of key characters in the genre which, around and within what we'd seen happen to them on screen, also revealed their hitherto unsuspected connections to each other. And it was precisely because of its commitment to the bit that the few deviations - such as claiming It's A Wonderful Life for the noir canon - had such power.

Connecticut, on the other hand, is all over the shop. Which, yes, on one level is in keeping with its genre, but then it can't even quite keep to that. A writer and film buff who is at least a version of David Thomson is sort-of-kidnapped and taken to the titular state, here a vast reservation for the unsound, where Cary Grant's Dr Bone from Bringing Up Baby is running the asylum, because he has a white coat and there was a mix-up and OK, that works perfectly. Here too are characters from The Lady Eve and My Man Godfrey and so on. Thomson can more often than not catch the zing of screwball dialogue, and there's an undercurrent of how, though we delight in watching these people on screen, actually coexisting with them (especially if you can't leave) would be exhausting. And the making overt that sexual charge which censorship obliged the films to keep just below the surface, well, fine; I'm not sure what's gained by making the fairly obvious wholly so, but it's not a wholly baffling choice. So far, this is roughly what was advertised.

Except then we careen off further. The fourth wall has already been poked at with interludes in which the agent and the editor discuss the book's prospects, and whether the author is quite well, but then characters start having moments of realising they're in a novel too. Thomson (I think actual Thomson, rather than his avatar in the story, though it's debatable how much it matters) starts adding his own non-fictional sub-chapters, ranging from brief biographies of the stars who played the characters to thoughts on modern school shootings, and it's hard to say which dents the mood more. Characters stretching the definition of screwball past breaking point crop up, and where that worked with Bedford Falls in Suspects, here there are too many, drawn too widely in both time and tone - from the seventies through to the 2010s, and not even comedies. The hints of looming war make sense given the 1940 (or is it?) setting, but the passage of Goya-esque atrocities introducing an orphan called Fuck That feels a step too far. I realise that criticising modern David Thomson for digression is like complaining that a Ken Loach film was a heavy-handed miseryfest, but normally, even if you didn't end up where you thought you were going, the progression had its own logic, crafted by an undoubted erudition and way with words which make the journey more important than the destination anyway. This, though, doesn't feel like a journey so much as a series of lunges in different directions.

Still, for all that I found it a bit of a chaos, and not just in the screwball sense, it certainly wasn't dull.

(Netgalley ARC)