I finished Blood on the Saddle by Rafael Reig Friday night and I'm really thinking I need to do a piece on Serpent's Tail press this winter. Their books have consistently impressed me as hard to define or "genre-ize". (Although the wonderful Cathi Unsworth mystery The Not Knowing which I reviewed this summer for Bookslut was clearly a noir mystery - just a very unorthodox noir mystery.) Blood is about Charlie Clot, a private investigaor in a futuristic Madrid that is stuck with three very different cases: one missing daughter sought by her father, one cheating wife, suspected by her husband, and one vanished character from a very famous series of Westerns who is desperately needed by her now writers-blocked and alcholic author.

Yes - that last one is a missing character.

In Clot's Madrid, Franco died, the communists won and the Americans invaded. The world has run out of oil so everyone rides bikes and there is a sinister corporate entity doing medical research by stealing the heads of magician's assistants at the wrong moment of their "split the assistant in half" act. The poor women never get put back together, although it does seem to take their lower halves a lot longer to die then you would think. Also, and oddest of all, characters can be lured from books by promises of fame, fortune, love or whatever else by their readers. In some cases they just take a wrong turn and end up in our world (a la Jasper Fforde a bit) and it is up to the authors to track them down and persuade them to go back where they belong.

All in all this makes for one different book - one really different book and while I can't say it was compulsive reading, it was a book that I did not stray far from. In other words, no pulling an all nighter but I did get it read in less than a week. The story is so different, so exceedingly original, that it's pretty hard to resist. In the end, poor Charlie is foreced to finish the incomplete western, the Blood on the Saddle of the title, so that everyone can get back to where they belong. He ends up happily ever after and a fair spot better off from all of his adventures but this is a cynical mystery to be sure so don't expect a lot of wine and roses. Still it has conspiracies, severed heads that talk and a cowboy. Honestly, how could anyone expect me to have resisted it?

Must see what else I have lurking about from Serpents Tail - just in case I get bored or something while I'm waiting at the checkout line tomorrow......