Ian Mond Reviews Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway (Knopf 978-0-59353-536-3, $28.00, 256pp, hc) May 2023.

In researching for this review I discovered that one of my favourite novels of 2018 was written by Nick Harkaway, and it wasn’t Gnomon. As much as I adored Gnomon (it’s the first book I reviewed for Locus), later that year, I read a thriller by a writer I’d never heard of that blew me away. The Price You Pay by Aidan Truhen is this balls-to-the-wall, exceedingly violent, and hilarious revenge story with a mur­derous antihero, Jack Price, who makes John Wick look tame. Five years later, it remains the most fun I’ve had with a book. What completely passed me by, however, was that Aidan Truhen is a pseudonym for Nick Harkaway (which, to confuse matters, is also a pseudonym). Having now made the connection, Titanium Noir, the latest Nick Harkaway novel since Gnomon, is a distillation of the “Harkaway” and “Truhen” styles. It has all the smarts, moral conundrums, and playfulness that we’ve come to expect from Harkaway’s work, but with the tighter pacing and joy for story and plot that made The Price You Pay such an adrenaline rush to read.

Like so many science fiction novels before it, Titanium Noir co-opts the aesthetics of hard-boiled crime (in cinema circles, it’s referred to as “tech-noir”). Harkaway’s Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe avatar is the wisecracking Cal Sounder, a man with a gimlet eye who knows every shady person in the city and can hold his own in a fight (especially if he fights dirty). But unlike his fictional predecessors, Sounder isn’t a raging alcoholic, and his work doesn’t revolve around missing husbands or femme fatales (although there’s a cheeky nod to the latter when Cal enters his office to find a beautiful woman waiting for him, only to realise it’s his ex). Instead, Sounder specialises in the Titans: an exclusive group of exceedingly wealthy indi­viduals who have extended their lives through a genetic therapy called T7, where each jab slows down the march of time and increases muscle and bone density. In short, they become literal giants. And standing upon the shoulders of these modern-day Gods is the gargantuan Ste­fan Tonfamecasca (“twice the size of a normal human, almost four metres high and broad in proportion”), owner of the patent on T7, with a voice that can break a person’s ribs. Sounder is not a Titan, but he did date one – Stefan’s daughter, Athena – and, as such, appreciates their psyche. So, when a Titan, Roddy Tebbit, is murdered in his apartment, Sounder is called in by the police to investigate, fully aware that it takes a Titan to kill a Titan.

While there’s a Chandleresque quality to Titanium Noir, I felt Harkaway was embracing rather than pastiching the style. That’s not to say he holds back. The novel is peppered with razor-sharp observations like “Murder rooms are like train stations at midnight, not much left to do before the last departure” and “She sounds sad, but there’s something in her eyes like gunpow­der and white alcohol,” and “Man dresses like the bass guitarist in a skiffle band, talks like a priest.” The conceit of T7 also adds a comic book flavour to the narrative. Stefan Tonfamecasca, with his strength, girth, and powerful voice, is reminiscent of Marvel’s Kingpin with a soup­çon of Black Bolt. Similarly, grotesqueries like “Doublewide,” “who grew sideways but not up,” or “Mr Streetlight,” who is “impossibly tall and thin… trailing silken threads like a spider as he walks through the suburbs,” gives the narrative a distinct X-Men vibe.

As the plot thickens, we can’t help but view the Titans, particularly Stefan, through a contemporary lens, comparing them to the bil­lionaires, such as Musk and Bezos, who strive to shape our world to their narrow image. For the Titans, this isn’t so much an aspiration as a mandatory condition for their survival – every­thing needs to grow to accommodate them. This is eloquently, poetically summarised by one of Sounder’s many contacts: “Beneath their [The Titans] feet, the fabric of the world is torn, and everything of worth flows into the cracks and drains away, leaving only them, and us, and the stained residue of good things burned in their fire.” It’s a message somewhat undermined by the fact that the city the Titans are seeking to reshape never fully came alive for me. The name places borrowing from Ancient Greece (like Othrys) is a nice touch, but it was never clear whether Chersenesos, for example, was the name of a district, the name of the city, or both.

Titanium Noir may not have the heft of a typical Harkaway novel, but that’s more than made up by a devotion to the conventions of hard-boiled crime and the Truhen-inspired pacing, tension, and twisty plot.

This review and more like it in the May 2023 issue of Locus.

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