Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1-250-86584-7, $27.99, 216pp, hc) April 2023.

The first thing to be said about Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues is that it’s SF only in the sense that it deals with razor-edge technologies like cryp­tocurrencies, blockchains, secure enclaves, and other issues that Doctorow clearly understands far better than I do. As with midcareer William Gib­son (and some of Doctorow’s own earlier novels), the line between contemporary fiction and near-term speculation is so permeable that the future might as well have happened last Tuesday. In terms of genre, Red Team Blues firmly positions itself in the tradition of hardboiled detective stories and is apparently the first of a series featuring the cynical but super competent loner Martin Hench. But while Hench may share some mean streets with Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, or Spenser, he’s also an unusual choice for a hardboiled hero: a 67-year-old forensic accountant and Silicon Valley veteran who specializes in tracking down information and money through the labyrinthine trickery available in the crypto era. He also lives in a luxurious tour bus that once belonged to a rock star and, unlike those private eyes who go all soft-hearted when it’s time to charge fees, he makes sure he collects the payouts that keep him wealthy.

When an old friend who has developed a new kind of cryptocurrency manages to lose security keys that could be worth billions of dollars – and which have made him the target of powerful and lethal forces – Hench reluctantly agrees to take the case, and soon finds himself a target as well. Combining his accounting wizardry with some very old-fashioned street-level gumshoe work, he discovers a brutal triple murder, one of whose victims make him the target of a yet another powerful nemesis. Fortunately (and predictably), he’s able to enlist the aid of loyal friends – all bril­liant women – including a retired Silicon Valley executive, a groundbreaking economist, and the young wife of the cryptocurrency client. While his elaborate efforts to protect himself and clear his name involve some shady near-blackmail and even a brief period of homelessness, for the most part he avoids the sort of tough-guy confronta­tions that might have characterized his literary forbears, but that don’t make much sense for a 67-year-old. In other words, Red Team Blues seems fresh not only because of its unusual choice of an older protagonist, but because it treats his age with credibility and respect.

Along the way, of course, we gain a good deal of perspective on the world Hench inhabits. In many ways, Doctorow is about as far as you could get from an old-school SF writer like Asimov, but they have one thing in common: both are master explainers, and both love peppering their fiction with insights which can be as compelling as the story itself. Only a few pages into Hench’s meeting with his beleaguered client, we get quick lessons on the importance of proof of work in block­chains, the enormous carbon costs of cryptocur­rencies, and why any device like an iPhone with a secure enclave ‘‘is a device that treats its owner as the enemy,’’ to be continually outsmarted. For that matter, when Hench whips together a steak meal for himself, he virtually gives us the recipe, like Parker’s Spenser, and when he briefly finds himself ‘‘slumming it’’ in ‘‘the vast, invisible coun­try of San Francisco’s homeless camps,’’ we learn a bit about the economics of that culture. None of this slows down Doctorow’s efficient and twisty plot, which does full justice to the noir tradition. Supposedly the next volumes will take us back to earlier stages of Hench’s career, and he’s an inter­esting and complex enough character, with some equally interesting pals, that I’d be delighted to follow along and see where he came from.

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

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