screwedI want to bawl like a drunken aunt. I wanna grind my teeth to stumps and punch the wall, but I don’t and the effort of containing it starts me shaking all over. For a moment I think I might actually be having a heart attack then the moment passes and I collapse onto a chair beside the Korean guy.

He drapes his spindly arm around my shoulder and says: ‘My Son.’

And I think: Wow. Is this guy going to surprise me by playing into his stereotype and delivering a nugget of wisdom?

‘I never see a man shake after taking a dump before.’ He pats me on the back. ‘That must have been a hell of a dump. Hollowed you right out. I think maybe I’ll wait here a few minutes, let the extractor fan do its work.’

Clever but not very wise. I pluck my five dollars from his cup and go back outside into my life.

William Faulkner advises us — at least according to an epigram I recall from a long-ago textbook’s endpapers — to “read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.” So for every Parallel Stories or Olive Kitteridge or Life After Life that I read, I chew through one or two or a dozen crime novels as a palate cleanser. Andrew Vachss, Patricia Cornwell, Charlie Huston, Kathy Reichs: each iterating over the violent criminal fiasco full of complications. Some authors, like Patricia Highsmith or Donald Westlake, can fashion art — high or otherwise — out of the genre. Others, say Elmore Leonard or Joe Lansdale, have a pitch-perfect ear for entertaining dialogue and plot in their works. Then there are authors like J.A. Konrath or Jim Butcher who infuse their fiascos with comedy and melodrama. Dramatic tension comes from conflict, and the basest form of conflict is violence, and from there an author can go in a lot of directions.

Eoin Colfer is, as far as I understand his career, best known for a couple of works. Most popularly, he’s the author of the Artemis Fowl series of novels. I know very little about these, except that the novels are considered exemplars of “young adult” fiction, with their fantasy settings, fast-paced plots, and character ensembles orbiting the titular anti-hero. Colfer was also chosen by Douglas Adams’ estate to write the sixth novel in the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy,” which I’ve also not read. I might assume, though, that Colfer’s work there is in line with the rest of the series, full of wink-wink narration, deadpan wordplay humor, improbable plot points and each character having their own distinguishing oddness. With Screwed, it seems to me that Colfer wears his (self-)influences on his sleeve, as the novel is bascially a criminal fiasco strained through a Douglas Adams filter by way of Quentin Tarantino. This could be appealing, especially if you’re a fan of any of those artists, or the films of Simon Pegg, perhaps.

I’ve also not read the prequel to Screwed, 2011’s Plugged, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem. As with most episodic series, there’s not a lot of continuity to worry about (if you’ve read one Kathy Reichs book, for example, you’ve read them all). Colfer establishes his ensemble of weirdos and the lead character’s vaguely convoluted past pretty quickly in the first chapters. Everything from there is a pinball-machine rhythm of their motifs: Irish PTSD-suffering tough guy, amnesiac shut-in love-doll gun-moll, wisecracking Jewish doctor con-man, Twitter-addicted svengali psychaiatrist, blacksploitation movie casting-call kick-ass lady detective, etc., etc. And those are the “good guys” in the story. The “bad guys” — gold-digging viper step-grandmother and whiskey-headed aunt (I have to say, while no one in the book is exactly saintly, the women in Screwed are particularly ill-portrayed characters), washed up New Jersey mobsters, Sin City-reject corrupt detectives — all have similar single-chord refrains, with the added common note of wanting the narrator, Daniel McAvoy, dead. Nowhere is there much depth or subtlety to be found, but neither is there much demand for such in this kind of story.

The character we get to know the most is PTSD-case Daniel, and with this narrator, Colfer pokes one of the ongoing sore spots I have with much contemporary crime fiction. So many detective stories are told in first person with a narrative voice that is artlessly banal in its descriptions and its humor. Remember the guy in your undergraduate creative writing course, the guy who wore a fedora, the guy who mentioned the “Calvin N. Hobbson” building in his short story and was (solely) amused by his own cleverness? The narrative voice in much low-end crime fiction reads like that: conversational, enamored with puns, always confusing clever for funny. Colfer gives Daniel that kind of voice, the kind that creates cringe-worthy neologisms — “copedy,” (police comedy) for example — and always follows them with, “which is not a word but should be,” a phrase that is eventually given an acronym that looks like a typo when it shows up. I understand that the genre conventions favor common cultural shorthand over well-crafted sentences and a talky style over any kind of challenging voice, but I find it a bad sign for a book when I just want the narrator to give it a rest for a while. This is especially egregious in a book that name-checks Elmore Leonard on page one and the more than clever TV show Terriers several times throughout.

Mixing criminal violence and comedy is hard without falling into farce, which is why so many stories that try actually just jump into the farcical out of the gate. Screwed feels like a book that wants to walk that wire, but that goal is frustrated by a narrative voice too full of itself and a plot that piles on one improbable coincidence after another (here’s the dirty cops making a snuff film! here’s the sudden appearance of the long-lost sexy grandmother! here’s the returning ex-con husband but no, not really!). There are too many wacky hijinks to treat it as a serious crime fiasco, but those same hijinks are usually too explicitly violent to be funny. Clever but not very wise, indeed.