Death in Trieste by Jason

If I say this book is more like Good Night, Hem than like Upside Dawn, does that help anyone place it? How about if I say that's not just because Athos makes a few appearances here?

(Athos is turning into the glue of Jason's later career, the character who turns up everywhere and has met everyone. See The Last Musketeer for his initial appearance, if you're confused. Not that will necessarily make you less confused, but it's a good place to start.)

Death in Trieste is a book with three long stories. They are not formally connected, though David Bowie - in one of his most glam '70s incarnations - is a character in two of them. They are somewhat typical Jason stories: laconic, allusive, but also deeply genre stories, told through gesture and implication, with blank-faced characters we're often supposed to recognize - usually as "the vampire" or "the secret agent" or Rasputin, but in one story here as "Annie Lennox circa 1985" and other pop-music figures. (Jason's drawing style makes the latter somewhat more difficult: they're all anthropomorphic animals with big blank eyes and fairly standard faces for their "type - I'm not sure who most of the musical characters in the story "Sweet Dreams" are meant to be.)

"The Magritte Affair" leads off. It's set in contemporary Paris, where a group of criminals place specially-made Magritte knockoffs in the homes of random people, which turns them into Surrealists, complete with black suits and bowler hats. (This oddly reminded me of the Monty Python sketch where an alien blancmange turns tennis players into Scotsmen.) The usual wisecracking detective duo - a man and a woman - track down the ringleader of the gang and foil the plot, just before Surrealism completely takes over the world.

The title story is in the middle, and it's a very Jasonian mix of genre tropes and characters - a bewildering mix of characters across Europe in the '20s (including a time-traveling David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, Nosferatu, and the oracular skull of Rasputin) are involved in several intersecting plots mostly involving Dadaism, the theater, and a rampaging vampire. Athos shows up here, wandering through some of the later scenes, and influences events but has no dialogue.

Last is "Sweet Dreams," in which several New Wave bands are actually superheroes led by Avalon, a Dr. X-ish wheelchair-bound presumably-psychic. They battle mummies, living suits of armor, and other menaces, but are helpless against a giant meteor that has been diverted by unknown forces and will strike Earth with devastating force right after the end of the story. (A space mission by "Starman" - the same Bowie as in the previous story - was unsuccessful in shifting the meteor.)

Jason has done some other kinds of books over the past decade - the travelogue On the Camino, for example - but this book is firmly in the mainstream of his work. I find the joys and strengths of that work really clear in the reading, but difficult to nail down when writing about it. No one else is like Jason; he mixes high and low culture fluidly, telling what should be junky stories with the chill of high culture and a detachment that makes them fascinating and distinct. You might have to deeply enjoy both high and low culture to really appreciate Jason: for me, that's no handicap, but it might be for some readers.