Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams – though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The décor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character – the protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandt – has six toes, sleeps in a grave and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons.
Sucked into the vortex of Spider’s philandering mind is a narrator – sometimes Spider’s adversary, sometimes his victim – who lies upon a bed brooding on the absence of a nameless, brown-haired woman. He, too, is protean: full of passionate longings and homicidal tendencies.
A surrealist film-noir that blends the forensic with the erotic, the seedy penny-dreadful and the lyric prose-poem, Mystery in Spiderville is one of the strangest, strongest and most arresting fictional debuts in years.
