Shadow Ticket Group Read 2025

[Mark Kohut]

Great stuff so let's use Chandler on the detective as Lancelot-like  (as I
remember it; PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong here.)

 an objective 'professional' knight-errant...more Quixotic than Lancelot....
Works for love of it.....like heroes
is outside marriage in more ways than one..

And why 'deaf and dumb"?.....it is all in his head not ascertainable by
real world senses?...Idealistic, yes but
beyond the senses??/



On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 7:59 AM Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me> wrote:

> There are some basic similarities shared between Pynchon's detective
> novels post-ATD, presumably the genre conventions as he understands them.
> They consist of:
>
> a private detective protagonist (i.e. not police/the state) who tries to
> remain “professional” (“Trying to be professional here,” 3 IV “Hicks trying
> to stay professional,” 2 ST)
>
> is deaf and dumb (“Deaf and dumb, part of the job,” 4 IV, “Professionally
> D and D,” 36 BE, “D and D, Lino, that’s me,” 26 ST)
>
> is happy to work without immediate pay (“All on spec, eh?” 7 IV, “Not that
> I mind working on spec,” 11 BE)
>
> struggles with matrimonials (“I don’t do matrimonials, man,” 191 IV, “I
> hate matrimonials,” 127 BE, “[…] too bad that matrimonials, as you’ll
> recall, were never my line—” 4 ST)
>
>
> There are perhaps some other commonalities exclusive to Pynchon's
> detective novels but these are the ones most obvious to me.
>
> On Friday, January 9th, 2026 at 19:33, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > So, this first chapter alone seems to me most like the beginning of
> *Inherent
> > Vice *as TRP sets up
> > the private dick and the 'case"...this is obvious I know but back to
> basics.
> >
> > Q: I am not great detective novel well-read enough nor well noir
> > movie-watched enough to know this:
> > I know many, many open with the 'dame' visiting our detective and some
> kind
> > of human entanglement
> > happens that matters for the case....Is it the case that most start with
> a
> > new dame that the detective
> > has never known?
> >
> > Or why do both of Pynchon's similar mysteries start with, relatedly, a
> > woman with which the detective has some kind of history?
> > And, also,although I have to refresh the plot details, Maxine in her
> > mystery has a past entanglement emerge (but not at the beginning, right?)
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l