Desolation Jones

[sawyl]

Once again, the weather is rainy and horrible. I'm going to spend what remains of the afternoon doing the only things I can under the circumstance: staying in, reading, painting my toenails and listening to the radio. But before I get stuck in to all that, here are a few thoughts on Desolation Jones by Warren Ellis.

Michael Jones, former MI6 agent and sole survivor of the Desolation Test, has been dumped in the same city as every other screwed up, ruined spook: Los Angeles. In his capacity as a private detective, Jones is called in to investigate the theft of a reel of nazi pornography, filmed in the bunker in the last days of the war. He swiftly determines that the culprits are former army intelligence guys, recently arrived in LA, who are moonlighting as porno producers. As the case becomes more tangled, Jones begins to realise that the film is a mere detail: the real story concerns his client, the dissipated Colonel Nigh, and his three daughters.

Desolation Jones is a weird and wonderful detective story, with more than a few hints of Raymond Chandler. Jones is an interesting lead character, but he's no someone you can identify with — his big scary reputation is down to the fact that he's incapable of caring about anyone and that he's willingness to do the sorts of things that no one else will.

The art work, by J.H. Williams III, is impressive. He switches easily from a woozy flashback style to precise and detailed for the main plot to stark simplicity for the violence. He also works wonders with the layout, on one occasion tracking a red line through a series of images from it's initial incarnation as a centre line to a reflection in Jones' goggles to line on a map to a kerb line and back to a centre line. Stunning.