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He takes bytes out of crime

BY KRISTINA LINDGREN | Los Angeles Times

May 4, 2008

THE AUTOMATIC DETECTIVE, by A. Lee Martinez. Tor Books, 318 pp., $14.95 paper.

Think "Blade Runner" meets "The Maltese Falcon," with all the wisecracking and alien plot points of "Men in Black," and you have an inkling of what A. Lee Martinez delivers in his hugely fun new novel, "The Automatic Detective."

In this homage to sci-fi, crime noir and pulp, we meet Mack Megaton, a 716-pound killing machine with a bowler hat and a sentimental streak. He's trying to stay out of trouble until he qualifies for "citizenship" in a place where scaly, slimy mutant "biologicals" mingle with "bots" and "norms" (humans) amid radioactive debris on land and in the sky.

When neighbors vanish, the otherwise unsociable Mack abandons his cabbie job to look for them. Their disappearance, he learns, is at the center of the weirdness bubbling up in Empire City. But this hard-boiled bot needs help, which is where a rich, curvaceous blonde comes in. (She's also a brainiac with plenty of gadgets.) Fellow taxi driver Jung (a gorilla who likes to read Edgar Rice Burroughs) and rat-like detective Sanchez pitch in. Even our hero's foes have grudging respect for him: "Mack, you got some ball bearings on you, I'll give you that," a mutant kingpin tells him.

This romp is all visuals. Can't you just hear Ahnuld the governator mouthing: "It only hurts when I compute" or "Damn, some days I wish I'd been made a toaster"? Here's hoping Martinez brings Mack back for an encore.