Hicks McTaggart

Created by Thomas Pynchon
(1937-)

Given my lukewarm reaction (good fun, but not great) to American literary titan Thomas Pynchon‘s first foray into the Shamus Game, 2009’s Inherent Vice, I’m going to hold back my opinion on Shadow Ticket (2025), his second PI novel.

At least for a little while.

Wouldn’t want to anger the Pynchonistas.

Again.

To his credit, Pynchon’s not sticking with a mere sequel — he’s cooked up a completely different character and a brand new setting, although he’s still plumbing the past, and filling it to the brim with characters, sub-plots and digressions.

Last time it was the tail end of the sixties; a lazy, hazy, crazy trip into California sunshine and its murky shadows.

Suffice it to say it’s a whole different mindset vibe going on in  Milwaukee in 1932. The Great Depression is dragging on, and the economy is still circling the drain, but Repeal is looming and a whole battered nation is looking forward to popping the cork. Meanwhile HICKS McTAGGART, a former strikebreaker turned private investigator with his own detective agency, Unamalgamated Ops, is working a new case.

All he has to do is bring back a wandering daughter, Daphne Airmont, heiress to a family fortune (they’re big names in Wisconsin cheese), who’s apparently wandered off. Her father has a lot of clout — he’s referred to as the “Al Capone of Cheese” — and he wants her back. He worries she’s eloped with a clarinet player in a local band.

Or has she?

She eventually pops up in Europe, with Hicks right behind her, although more by wild coincidence and  cosmic WTF? than anything — it’s that kind of book. Of course, a missing heiress is the least of his problems.

“The assignment goes awry,” the New York Times says, “when he lands in Hungary alongside Nazis, Soviet spooks, British counterspies and a host of other chaos agents who are reshaping McTaggart’s mission — actually, the entire world order — in ways he never could have predicted.”

But we could. It’s Pynchon…

UNDER OATH

• “For a while, all this is perfectly enjoyable — Elmore Leonard meets Stan Lee, a kind of Technicolor noir… At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all.”
  — Kathryn Schulz (September 29, 2025, The New Yorker)

NOVELS

• Shadow Ticket (2025) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.