UNNATURAL INQUIRER, by SIMON GREEN

I'm enjoying the NIGHTSIDE series so much I'm posting twice on this. John Taylor, the classic noir PI of the seductive and grotesque NIGHTSIDE, enjoys himself greatly in his capers and isn't afraid of the NIGHTSIDE'S evil. GREEN has so much fun that the exposition often gets in the way of the plot, but it really doesn't matter.

In one scene Taylor is waiting for a train and comments, "The platform was crowded, as usual. Half a dozen members of the Tribe of the Gay Barbarians, standing around looking tough with their leathers and long swords, complete with shaved legs, nipple piercings, and heavy face make-up. A silverback gorilla wore an exquisitely cut formal suit, complete with top hat, a cane,and a monocle screwed firmly into one eye. A Gray alien wearing fishnet stockings and suspenders, passing out tracts. And a very polite Chinese demon, sipping hot steaming blood from a thermos. The usual crowd."

It's a typical throwaway line which has nothing to do with the plot, but which I'll chortle over forever. Enjoy. With or without a thermos of hot steaming blood.

SOMETHING FROM THE NIGHTSIDE, Simon R. Green

I first encountered Simon Green and his hero john Taylor in the SF Anthology MEAN STREETS, which I purchased for the Jim Butcher/Dresden files story THE WARRIOR. I loved the tale of the deranged and horrifying Nightside of London, where every sin, degradation, vice and desire can be found, and where dwells every monster, demon, and things not yet classified. And someone's graffiti "has misspelled Chthulhu, as usual." A street gang of punks wearing fake demon horns is actually a real band of demons masquerading as a street gang, but they're probably on day release. Humans can have sex with machines, a dead nun will show off her stigmata and an angel trapped inside a pentacle burns forever.

We know we're in for real horror when Taylor says he's seen a werewolf skinned and eaten by the Salvation Army sisters, whose motto is "Save them all and let God sort them out." Taylor's ambiguous friends include Razor Eddie, who rescues him from nightmares he's sent Taylor's way, and Death Boy, forever young, with his symbiotic race car which can handle any marauder and outrun anything.

John Taylor can find things, anything, by using his third eye, his "private eye." Why did no one come up with that joke before? Probably because there are few traditionally trench-coated PI's treading the mean streets of hell itself. This book starts, of course, with a beautiful dame coming into his seedy office, needing him to find her daughter. He'll charge her triple, and then wish it were more, to return to the Nightside he left five years before. I expect great things of this writer.

...Which, with a little more Googling, I find is like saying I think we'll see more of this Stephen King guy. Green has published at least forty novels in multiple different series. He's one of the most prolific SF authors ever.