Book description
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.
John Hartley Williams has published nine poetry collections,
including
Spending Time with Walter
and, most recently,
Blues
(2004). He co-edited
Teach Yourself Writing Poetry
and won the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1983. He teaches
English at the Free University of Berlin, where he has been since 1976.
