The Infinite Blacktop jumps around from Claire’s Brooklyn roots to the present in northern California and then to L.A., where she worked on a missing persons case, the Mystery of the CBSIS, in 1999, which is the case that earned her a PI license.ĭeWitt alternates between boastful and abject throughout the books as she expounds on her philosophy of solving mysteries: In the next book, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, she’s in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on the murder of an ex-boyfriend.
In the first, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, she’s in post-Katrina New Orleans, trying to solve the Case of the Green Parrot, the murder of a socialite district attorney. In each of Gran’s books DeWitt is living in a different city, and they all flash back to her childhood in Brooklyn. I was getting a reputation as a good detective but impossible to deal with. Sometimes I solved crimes, helping out other detectives when they needed it, going undercover where they couldn’t. I went from place to place, earning money when it was easy and acquiring it by other means when it wasn’t.
“Since I’d left Brooklyn I’d been traveling around the country, taking it in a little bit at a time. In recounting her history, DeWitt communicates both her skill and her penchant for getting into trouble: Prone to excessive drinking, cocaine use, and popping pills (which she steals from everyone whose medicine cabinet she has access to), DeWitt is a brilliant fuckup, an extraordinary detective with a long menu of issues. As a character, DeWitt is alternately full of bluster and a complete mess. In the primary case in the book, The Case of the Infinite Blacktop, DeWitt searches for the person who tried to kill her in a car accident in Oakland, California. In the third of Gran’s Claire DeWitt books, The Infinite Blacktop, we see DeWitt delve deeper into mysteries she’s been trying to solve for years, as well as taking on a couple of new cases. She’s jumping into an unknown world where the stuff of that mystery lives and trying to find her way back to familiar territory.
When DeWitt takes a case she’s not merely making a promise to solve a mystery. They are more like philosophy than crime fiction, though it is through crime-or more precisely, through mysteries-that Gran’s characters, especially her detective, Claire DeWitt, grapple with truths about life and our rightful place in the world.
They insist that we won’t or can’t see what’s right in front of us they take the ideas of clues and cases and turn them into existential dilemmas. Sara Gran’s books are mysteries about mysteries.
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