Aside from Philip K. Dick, Pat Cadigan, Melissa Scott, and other William Gibson-wannabes of the cyberpunk inclination, you’re not usually going to the sci-fi section for a good crime novel. But if you’re in the mood for some pant-peeing hilarity with your hard-boiled fiction, then England’s Steve Aylett and The Crime Studio is what you need.

    Somewhere in the future, the world/city/borough of Beerlight is all about cops-and-robbers. You’re a cop, a crook, or just suspect, and Uzi’s and AK-47’s are now mere handguns. The anonymous narrator sits in the Delayed Reaction Bar, where the drinks and food are all pharmaceutically enhanced and a brawl could break out at any minute. And every creature barely passing as a person who comes through the door has a story about them: Brute Parker, a gun shop owner who’d shoot you as soon as sell you a firearm; Harpoon Specter, a clinically-insane yet highly successful defense attorney; Ben Stalkeye and Gerty Hundred Ram, the couple whose contrasting bad and good luck were sometimes, usually accidental or randomly, combined to hilarious successful bank heists; Henry Blince, the Chief of Police whose insatiable appetite occasionally loses him cases due to his “eating the evidence”; and Joe Solitary, a wannabe-crook who couldn’t be indicted even if you smeared the victim’s blood all over him and put the murder weapon in his hand. These are just a few of the miscreants, morons, and miraculous mistakes of procreation that grace each one-to-four-page story.

    Aylett doesn’t spend much time with character development; he doesn’t need to. His characters are quickly but clearly brought about and dizzily spun into the gas-huffing, blood-choking world of Beerlight, where they bounce around for a couple-three pages until the cement guard wall of a surprise ending brings them to an immediate stop. Not only is the pace frenetic, the atmosphere is psychedelic in a Cartoon Noir sort of way. And each story gets more and more ridiculously funny at every turn. And for extra fun, some characters keep reappearing in other stories, posthumously and otherwise. Even if you don’t want them to return, their continuity makes it even easier to follow these vicious vignettes.

    Maybe The Crime Studio is the cyberpunk antidote I’ve been looking for. It sends up the genre while having fun at its expense. And no computers, either! I haven’t checked to see if the rest of Aylett’s collection has been printed in the U.S. yet (several of his are, as of this printing- ed.), but if it’s anything like this, it would be a crime not to let such hilarity onto our fair shores. -Matthew Payne, 2001