The Gun Seller

I just finished reading The Gun Seller, written by Hugh Laurie.  Dr. House, of all people!

This is the best book I've read this year by a large margin.  Actually, it's the best book I've read in the last six months or so.  (Look, it's February, you figure it out.)

I was told that it was a very funny book, and I'm not entirely sure if I would describe it that way.  Don't get me wrong, it is a funny book, but it is also clever, exciting, and beautifully written.  It's practically a prose poem in places, in spite of what Mr. Laurie is doing: writing a straightforward, noir-ish spy novel.

But because he is a sardonic British comedian, he wants to flip every trope, or at least call out the fact that he's making use of a trope. This has the double effect of making the book extremely funny, and forcing the reader's attention (and presumably the writer's, as well) toward the language the entire time:  "I have to pay extraordinarily close attention to every word of this delightful prose, or I might miss a joke!"

Highlights for me included:

"There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman.  It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor."

"I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are.  Given the choice, I'd usually say that the more obvious you are, the more obvious you are, but choice was one of the things I was short of at that moment.  Necessity is the mother of self-delusion."

"The guards at the door let us through with no more than a glance.  British security guards, I've noticed, always do this; unless you happen actually to work in the building they're guarding, in which case they check everything from the fillings in your teeth to your trouser turn-ups to see if you're the same person who went out to get a sandwich fifteen minutes ago.  But if you're a strange face, they'll let you straight through, because frankly, it would just be too embarrassing to put you to any trouble.  If you want a place guarded properly, hire Germans."

And, when he first meets the novel's femme fatal, "[She] pointed a pair of grey eyes at me. I say a pair.  I mean her pair.  She didn't get a pair of someone else's out from a drawer and point them at me.  She pointed her own pair of huge, pale, grey, pale, huge eyes at me.  The sort of eyes that can make a grown man talk gibberish to himself.  Get a grip for Christ's sake."

He does something like this every couple of pages, and at first it just seemed quaintly amusing, in a Roald Dahl sort of way.  But eventually, I realized that he wasn't just subverting the classical thriller novel, he was actually improving it.  We get a main character who is made more intimidating, more insightful, and more in-tune with the dangerous world he inhabits just from the simple fact that he knows a classic thriller trope when he sees one.  Even better, he often knows when he would be playing to type, and is therefore often only pretending to type.  He's been given genre superpowers.  And as a result, the prose matters in a way that it never does in a thriller.

On top of that, The Gun Seller is a legitimately exciting novel, which you should immediately buy and read.  No, I'm not joking.  Bonus points if you can read it without mentally hearing Mr. Laurie's Voice narrate.