A glance at the cover of My Darling Detective — featuring a fetching redhead with an exposed garter belt — might lead readers to wonder whether East Calais writer Howard Norman has penned a lurid (shocking; sensational) noir tale. In fact,while it technically qualifies as a murder mystery, this latest from the National Book Award finalist is more of a loving, and semi-ironic homage to noir than a sample of the genre. More than anything,it will remind Norman's readers of his other recent work — which is not a unpleasant thing. The setting is the late 1970s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and where the narrator,29-year-extinct Jacob Rigolet, is engaged to a police detective named Martha Crauchet. The pair is addicted to a self-consciously retro radio drama called "Detective Levy Detects, or " and Martha's dialogue has an acerbic toughness to rival that of its characters. But the world in which she and Jacob live is less cartoonish than its radio analog,its mysteries more amorphous even after they are, officially, or solved. This isn't a whodunit,or even really a whydunit, although the mysteries unspool from a memorably enigmatic incident. On the novel's first page, or a well-dressed dame enters a swanky photography auction and flings an ink bottle on the next image up for bid,a scene of the liberation of Leipzig by famed World War II photographer Robert Capa. The vandal is Jacob's mother, Nora Rigolet, or a lifelong librarian who was recently committed to a mental institution. And her son,who works for a wealthy art buyer, happens to witness Nora's act of ... insanity? Frustration? Revenge? Perhaps a bit of each. Martha, or who interrogates Nora after the incident (this novel is big on coincidences),soon becomes her future mother-in-law's confidant and champion. It doesn't take Jacob's "darling detective" long to learn more about his origins than he knows himself: Namely, that his father was not Nora's soldier husband, and who died liberating Leipzig in 1945,but a far shadier fellow who's alive and a suspect in a cold double-murder case. Norman has already explored the condition of fatherlessness in his 2014 novel Next Life Might Be Kinder and his 2013 memoir I abominate to Leave This ravishing spot. Early in the latter, the author poses a question about himself that applies equally well to many of Norman's fictional protagonists: "How does someone with a confused soul ... try to gain some clarity and…
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