Gun, with Occasional Music

A mashup of the hardboiled noir detective and dystopian science fiction genres, American author Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), tracks a murder investigation conducted by a private investigator whose speech patterns and manner echo characters from novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Set in a future where the government has outlawed most forms of narrative, the plot is almost secondary to Lethem’s nightmarish speculation of what our totalitarian future could look like.

The novel takes places in California in approximately 2010 (sixteen years in the future). The government has slowly and imperceptibly turned totalitarian, with its main emphasis being the slow erosion of storytelling. News reporting has been outlawed: newspapers print only pictures without text, and radio has replaced news with foreboding instrumental music. The only people allowed to ask questions and demand answers are the cops, or public inquisitors, and the few private inquisitors that carry a license to do so.

Our protagonist is the forty-three-year-old Conrad Metcalf, who years ago left the police force because of its corruption, and who is now a tough-talking, metaphor-loving private inquisitor. We don’t know much else about his background aside from the fact that he’s been left high and dry by his former girlfriend, Delia Limetree: the two swapped sex organ nerve endings (a standard procedure for couples wanting to experiment), but then she ran off without switching back, so his penis now feels to him like a vagina. To self-medicate, Metcalf is “on the make” – literally. Like most people, he snorts “make,” a freely available, government-issued drug cocktail consisting of things like Acceptol, Avoidol, Forgettol in different combinations.



Armed with the gun of the novel’s title (a pistol that comes with a threatening violin soundtrack), Metcalf now makes his living as a detective trying to keep up his supply of karma points. If this form of the future’s secondary currency system ever runs low, the government could cryogenically freeze Metcalf until he fulfills his karmic debt to society. But his job is a hard one in a society where asking questions is viewed as rude and aggressive, where most people are numbed by their “make,” and where every time Metcalf runs into his old public inquisitor buddies, his unwillingness to cooperate costs him karma.

Recently, Metcalf has been working for Dr. Maynard Stanhurt, an Oakland urologist who suspects that his wife, Celeste, is cheating on him. Two weeks after quitting the job because the Forgettol-addicted Stanhurt asked him to beat up Celeste, Metcalf finds out that Stanhurt has been murdered in a sleazy motel room. Metcalf assumes that the police already have a suspect – not necessarily the person who actually did the crime, but someone who would be blamed for it – because that is the way things used to go when he was on the force.

He is surprised when Celeste’s roommate Pansy Greenleaf’s brother Orton Angwine shows up in his office, asking for help to avoid being the chosen suspect. There’s no upside for Metcalf if he takes the case: if he exonerates Angwine, then the inquisitors will just shift the blame to Metcalf himself; if he starts investigating, he is sure to step on some important toes. Either way, he is likely to end up frozen. Of course, he decides to take the case anyway.



As he investigates the many shady characters that could be involved with the murder, Metcalf takes us on a tour of Lethem’s weird world. One notable feature is a medical procedure that can give animals the intelligence of humans. These evolved beings are now a kind of menial underclass: cat prostitutes, bulldog parking-lot attendants, sheep housekeepers, and the like. Not only is this process used on animals, but it has also become a way for parents to abandon their children, who, exposed to the same intelligence-upgrade, become “baby-heads” – unpleasant, selfish, cynical, baby-shaped adults.

Bodies pile up: Celeste is killed, as is Dulcie, the evolved sheep that cleans Stanhurt’s old office. Metcalf encounters Morgenlander and Kornfeld, inquisitors whose interference masks a sinister operation where people put in deep-freeze are “slaved” to a neural controller and used as prostitutes or for other nefarious purposes. He also meets the gangster Phoneblum and his enforcer, an evolved kangaroo hitman named Joey Castle.

Just as Metcalf is starting to put the pieces of the case together, his karma runs out, and he is sentenced to a six-year-freeze. When he emerges, the world is even more horrible than it was before. Memory is now illegal, and drug-addled people now have electronic smartphone-like prompters to provide them with explanations of their previous lives.



Metcalf solves the case: Joey the kangaroo was the triggerman for all of the murders, but the person who hired him was Stanhunt. The urologist was so addicted to Forgettol that he didn’t realize that the “other man” his wife was seeing was actually himself, nor did he remember putting out a hit on the man who would meet Celeste in the motel room – again, himself.

Miserable in the world he sees, Metcalf decides to get himself sentenced to the deep-freeze again. He finds Joey and shoots and kills him. As he is about to be re-frozen, Metcalf lets us in on his new plan: he is going to keep starting trouble until he wakes up in a society he can live in.