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California is one of the most fascinating place to me. Never been there, closest I ever traveled to was Las Vegas, which was enlightening in its own right, but California holds a special mystique to me. It seems to be heaven and hell at the same time. A sprawling, byzantine and schizophrenic state where unlikely destinies collide and dreams are broken by the thousands. S.W Lauden's novel BAD CITIZEN CORPORATION is an elegy to everything California advertises: the bankruptcy of the American Dream and the good people trying to survive the aftermath. It's a dark and sophisticated hardboiled mystery that will methodically win you over.
Greg Salem is an aging Californian punk rock icon turned law enforcement officer. Although he has lost his taste for music, he is very much attached to his old life and still occasionally performs with his band. Greg has to perform in one of these legacy gigs after a particularly rough day at work, after being involved in a shooting that will require an investigation. It goes, as you might expect, horribly wrong. A spectator calls him out, people start fighting, but it's not the worst part. Somewhere in the ongoing chaos, shooters emerge and his friend and musician Ricky gets himself shot. What the hell happened exactly? Was a robbery supposed to happen on the night of the show? Greg has nothing left to do with his time but to find out.
Now, the first thing that grabbed me about BAD CITIZEN CORPORATION is S.W Lauden's writing. It is unconventional and understated in a way that makes it simple to read, yet emotionally more complex than it seems. There is very little exposition and flashback scenes, almost everything that has to be known about Greg has to be drawn from present tense and action scenes. It's a very Hemingway-esque writing philosophy, which is something I dig. Lauden's cool and detached writing style kept me on my toes, I didn't trust any character until the very end because Lauden played it so close to the vest using distance and understatement.
BAD CITIZEN COPORATION's main calling card though is its gigantic, byzantine plot that makes the most out of its gorgeous and complex setting. It's where the novel gets really atypical. Traditional mystery are a game of signifiers. Everybody gives clues about something and you have to piece up the hidden story from there. S.W Lauden understands that structure very well and deliberately fucks with it, throwing in bizarre, suspicious behaviors that would point guilt towards several characters only to reveal they were things you had to take at face value. It threw me off my game many times as I kept finding plausible explanations for Ricky's death that ended up being wrong. I suppose it was a bit intrusive, but I liked it anyway as a pure cerebral exercise.
I've enjoyed BAD CITIZEN CORPORATION very much. It drew me in as deep as binge watching several seasons of a great television show because of its deceptive emotional complexity and its multilayered plot. S.W Lauden definitely is an original thinker, but he is influenced by the likes of Ross MacDonald, Gerald Petievich and even Hemingway. BAD CITIZEN CORPORATION is more of a cerebral pleasure than an adrenaline rush or an all-out emotional experience, but it is a sneaky and sophisticated mystery that will please even the most die-hard fans of the genre will enjoy. Hilary Davidson finally has some competition for best mystery writer in the business!
