Review: The Automatic Detective

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a funny premise, executed almost as well as I can imagine it. Our detective hero, Mac, is a robot created as a killer by an evil genius. By the time we meet him, though, he’s developed consciousness and sworn off evil. He drives a cab, keeps his head down, and has almost no friends while he waits to earn citizenship in this steampunk city of rotary phones and sentient robots. When the kids next door get kidnapped as part of a deep-seated conspiracy, he sets out, detective-style, to find them.

I’ve seen similar concepts burn out quickly. (See Rex Nihilo for one.) Sometimes, when the joke is in the premise, it’s easy to get lazy as you write. Martinez doesn’t fall for that, though. He’s consistently clever in his language and his juxtapositions. To take one early example, it’s deeply clever that he’s both a “Mac” – as in the Apple computer – and a “mack” which was a generic nickname for anyone who drove for a living.

Martinez is terrific with the language throughout, taking such laughs where he finds them but never overdoing them. Instead, he gives us a nice range of characters, all clearly modeled on hardboiled types, but growing out of his concept as well. There’s the 800-pound gorilla with a taste for contemporary literature; the robot who boots up with the default personality of the loyal, snappy secretary; and the honest cop who happens to resemble an exotic monkey. We get all that with humor and consistency.

There are a couple of spots that seem to strain the premise, though. The almost femme fatale, a 21-year-old beauty who’s also the best scientist in town, is odd in her taste in lovers: first there’s the four-armed low-life thug and then there’s Mac. It isn’t clear how or why she’s interested in him, and that’s a bigger elision than most of what goes on.

More troubling in the long run is that the noir aspect of things gets obscured (or even mocked) in the way the central conflict unfolds. This is almost note-perfect for the first half – and I’m deeply impressed – but then it has to make more of the ultimate bad guys. That means turning a robot/technology fantasy into an outer space alien fantasy. I get that Martinez painted himself into something of a corner – and he makes good humor out of it – but it seems an unnecessarily complicated way of filling out the plot.

In other words, this is at its best when it’s playing with atmosphere, but it needs a plot – a silly one – to keep things moving. As I got deeper into the second half, when the plot becomes more central, I found I was in something of a hurry to finish up.

So, be alert to what you’re getting. It’s hard to imagine doing this any better than Martinez does it, but, hard as he tries, he hits what seems a ceiling to this kind of project in the end.


View all my reviews