The Crime Studio

The gleeful noir mayhem continues in slacker satirist Steve Aylett's collection The Crime Studio (actually his first book, but released in America after Slaughtermatic, Toxicology, and Atom). The writing in The Crime Studio is slightly less fevered than we're used to from Aylett, and the hyper-Chandlerian metaphors aren't pushed so far that they're humorous for the wrong reason; but the stories are just as punk-rock fast and short (few of the 27 interrelated stories are longer than five pages, and some are shorter). The Crime Studio is packaged as science fiction, but little in the book fits that genre, unless the label refers to the fantastically cartoony ultraviolence or the surreal improbability of Aylett's imaginary city. --Cynthia Ward