Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Lury_Gibson: Arthur C. Dogg
Dangerous D@ta...by lury_gibson (2001)
How much do you want to know? Every move you take, every payment you make creates data. Personal data about you. Facts that exist in a timeless present, because nothing can ever be truly erased. Maybe it seems like individual facts don't matter. They're just a set of unrelated data, right? Dream on. Someone's looking through them. Sifting. Data-mining. Putting them together, discovering your secrets. Someone like Dogg. Data Detective. The best there is. Give him someone's name and he'll sell you a life story. That's what happens. With one little fact, Dogg unravels a hidden world. What starts as an innocent investigation becomes an intimate intrigue of drugs, sex and suspicious deaths. All Dogg had to do was start looking. You could be his next client - or his next victim. That intimate little office e-mail you penned last week - you think it has disappeared? Not a chance. Welcome to the end of privacy.
-- Corgi paperback back cover blurb
Lury_gibson (est. 1999) is a collaboration. Coincidentally, one of the partners is named Gibson, because this is a cyberspace detective novel, in a sense. It is a mystery of a simple and sordid
kind, but what makes it fascinating is the methodology. The detective/PI, Arthur Dogg, is a 'data detective' who works for hire like any traditional private eye ('250 pounds for basic search, the
Home Truths Package, 500 pounds for missing persons, all other work on application') -- but he does it all over the Internet using his laptop. The book is brilliant and pertinent to our times, not a
new 'gimmick' really but a reductio ad absurdum. The premise is that Dogg is a great hacker -- not in the sense of being a computer nerd, but being experienced in breaking into data bases, tracking down information, and putting it all together. Given that he can access all of anybody's credit-card transactions, e-mail, cell-phone logs, health records, banking accounts, even police reports -- you name anything that ever gets recorded and stored electronically -- he can not only detect a crime where none was ever suspected, but deduce anything about a person without ever meeting him/her (EXCEPT to suss out motivation, the prime emphasis of the usual 'transcendental' mystery writers of today -- Dogg just doesn't care, as Joe Friday would say, 'just give me the facts'). In this case, he is hired to investigate three people who happened at one point to be living in the same flat (he gets hired by an e-mail message stating only: "Garden Flat, 81 Bryanston Road, London NW6. Check it out. -- Sam Collier [samc@rivero.co.uk]"). What he discovers, and how, is fascinating. It is all revealed in a novel narrative technique involving one page (recto) consisting of e-mail, expenditures, and other printouts of data he has discovered on the Internet followed (verso) by Dogg's conclusions and comments -- back and forth, back and forth. It works, and actually succeeds both in building suspense, defining the characters without your ever 'meeting' them, and also letting you participate in the detective process, all without any described 'action'. As a reader you become adept at spotting the clues, such as from a list of phone calls, credit-card transactions, etc. that person A did this, person B did that, and therefore they spent the night together in a hotel in Brighton. A brilliant book and highly recommended. It has not appeared in the US yet (July 2003), but it should.
Gerald Keatring is 6'2", weighs 190 lbs and has a taste for violence and strip clubs. And Arthur C. Dogg, data detective, is being paid to follow him around. He doesn't know why -- as far as Dogg's concerned, it's just another job. It's what he's paid to do: track people through their data trails.
-- Corgi paperback back cover blurb
Lury_Gibson is a collaboration between Adam Lury and Simon Gibson, two British authors who certainly know their high-tech stuff. This is the second of these rather frightening thrillers (the first was Dangerous D@ta, published in 2001). They have an unusual style -- instead of chapters they provide gobbets of stuff from the Internet (e-mail, police reports, credit ratings, etc.) on a recto page, with Dogg's commentary and analysis on the verso side, all very trim and seemingly minimal as storytelling. Yet it works very effectively. There is true detection in this, based on Dogg's analysis of the gobbledegook he finds searching and hacking through the Internet (and of course he is a superb hacker), although it is provided mostly by on-the-spot deductions based on what turned up in his on-line inquiries. (For example, I wouldn't have a clue how to analyze some of the data he comes up with, let alone know how to find it in the first place.) The premise is simply based on the fact that EVERYBODY leaves some record of their life on some computer system or other, and to those who know how to dig it up, it can be found and utilized -- hence this new form of armchair detective, Arthur C. Dogg, call him a keyboard detective. He never seems to leave his house (in fact seems to have no personal life at all except via e-mail with his clients, normally wives investigating their husband's infidelities by having Dogg track down their credit-card payments at country hotels and their e-mail records, cell-phone charges and numbers dialed, etc. -- but he does sometimes get involved against his own rules).
This book, as is the other, is a mixture of R. Austin Freeman's forensic legerdemain and Michael Crichton's high-tech thrillers. In this case, it involves DNA research where a scientist 'discovers' a gene that predisposes a person to go berserk. She hires Dogg to check out the behavior of several newly released jail prisoners who had tested positive for this DNA sequence in her genetic blood testing. Turns out she has doubts about her employer (who also tested positive when he volunteered to be a test sample), and she is right of course. He is plotting to sell her discoveries to an armament conglomerate specializing in 'battle management' so that they can suppress it (obviously any 'cure' based on gene-therapy would hurt their profits). 'Nuff said about that. Let me digress with an analogical perspective. Apparently (and I don't know this for a fact, but it's probably true), biotech companies can patent their genetic discovery, in effect blocking out research into its applications by potential rivals. Let's say some company finds the gene that predisposes one to Parkinson's Disease or Alzheimers. They can patent that, block all use of that information by anybody else, then sell it to, say, a pharmaceutical company that makes billions dispensing a drug that alleviates the symptoms but doesn't cure the disease; obviously the drug company doesn't want anybody to come up with a cure involving gene manipulation. This is not only frightening but obviously immoral -- and if this is happening, which wouldn't surprise me at all, then it should be banned by International treaty.
These Lury_Gibson books are fascinating, and they really provide true detection, although of a very strange nature. (This Blog entry is a combination of two reviews from MysteryList.)
