(Un)usual suspects

Ettore Gnocchi is murdered at his own dinner party, apparently poisoned, stabbed and shot. In classic Agatha Christie fashion, we have a sequestered cast of suspects, the dinner guests, each of whom might have had a motive. And we have Solomon Hunter, Hercule Poirot without a moustache, to bring the killer to justice. Now read on...

It is all a put-up job, of course, a mere excuse for the detective to undergo an intensive course in postmodernism, so each chapter is headed with PoMo gobbets and takes the form of an interview with a theorist/dinner guest/ suspect who dishes up slabs of literary theory as answers. Arthur Berger doubtless has good lawyers who can piously assert the book's fictivity. Yet there is an irony in the ease with which the work lends itself to a realistic reading as a roman à clef . Slavomir Propp? Alain Fess? Hmm. If real PoMo personalities are anything like the strutting egos here, the writs could all too easily hit the fan.

It must be said the gobbets are very good, the result being like the film Waterloo in which the wit and wisdom of the Duke of Wellington's life are fired off in a wildly epigrammatic day. And the whole idea is an excellent conceit. Pity, then, the result is not a very good whodunnit. The characters are formless and dull. It is hard to care who killed Umberto - oops! - Ettore Gnocchi. Dialogue is largely monologue. The plot is entirely devoid of tension and, inevitably, the detection is a total cop-out, all cloak and dagger signifying nothing. Perhaps PoMo simply does not produce good crime novels. After all, detective fiction tends to be a celebration of the rationality and inductive reasoning that post-modernism regards as its target for subversion. The dissolution of certainties is all very well, but successful whodunnits require a simplistic notion of identity and agency leading to a neat solution that you can slip the cuffs on.

Such is not the view of Mark Taylor. He too begins with mystery stories (Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and Paul Auster's City of Glass ) wallowing in numinosities and puzzles without solutions, in which the problem is the notion of reality itself. So Potter's hero sits in a hospital bed, apparently writing a detective story, whose hero visits a bar called Skinscapes. The writer suffers from psoriasis, a skin disease. This is clearly the reality, the former fiction. Yet as the plot progresses, the two merge. Characters turn up as hospital visitors, lines from one reality recur in another, in the club the band plays "I've Got You Under My Skin".

Hiding is a strange kind of book, a pseudo-palimpsest in which different fonts and colours criss-cross the page, shadowy figures are projected behind the words, illustrations depict only themselves and the text is littered with puny, punishing puns. It is a masterpiece of the designer's art in which every resource is used to prevent a sequential, focused reading, so "hide" can be Potterishly about skin as revelation as much as concealment. Perhaps this is expressed in the opalescent outer jacket that self-destructs before you reach the end of the first essay and reveals a pseudo-jacket underneath. The multiple texts heckle the reader in a way that some will find stimulating, others downright irritating. Perhaps the dividing line is simply between those who need reading glasses and those who do not. While the book comes with a preface entitled "How to read this book", it is, alas, without a guide as to how to read the preface. "To read this book right, you have to read it wrong," it tells us.

Beneath the nonsense, this is an insightful compilation of light but accomplished essays of a soft-core philosophic and poetic tone. Topics are plucked from a set to which we are well accustomed - the body, skin, tattooing, fashion, postmodern architecture, virtual reality - and deny oppositional thought in an orthodoxly post-modernist way. Taylor's conclusions are thus conventionally revisionist in that there is no distinction to be made between representation and reality, literal and metaphorical self and other, past and present. The trick lies in taking these neutralisations as fixed points that are then thrown over the territory to make it effectively disappear. "To err amidst shifty interfaces that know no end is to live an irreducible enigma: nothing is hiding."

The charm of these pieces lies in a compositional technique of free association that enables Taylor to wander in a single essay from pyramids to Alexander Graham Bell's interest in the telepathic possibility of telephones and his own pyramidal kites, the works of Poe, the Hegelian notion of the pyramidal nature of the sign, Bataille's association of pyramids and labyrinths, death and birth, the hotels of Los Angeles and the subversive architecture of Bernard Tschumi. The whole is spun together with PoMo haikus such as "Only silence remains. In this silence nothing seems real, because the real is undeniably nothing." Many of the facts may turn out to be fictions, but they are fascinating fictions, and their factuality is not the issue.

One question remains. The preface claims Taylor is real. But if we take Berger seriously, and check the cast list of The Singing Detective , he may turn out to be another Potter creation.

Nigel Barley is assistant keeper, department of ethnography, British Museum.