MURPHY MURPHY AND THE CASE OF THE COMMISSION ON CLICHES

Hirshland’s Hollywood mystery novel serves up insider intrigue and rhetorical wordplay in equal measure.

In this sequel to Murphy Murphy and the Case of Serious Crisis (2020), readers are reunited with unorthodox sleuth Murphy Murphy, a detective who heads the Department of Redundancy Department. The previous novel introduced Murphy Murphy to the rock band Serious Crisis and eventually took him to Hollywood, where a movie studio provided him and his girlfriend, Charlie Carlucci, with a posh Malibu Beach Inn apartment—Murphy Murphy serves as the technical adviser on a movie about Serious Crisis, starring a niche, cult actor named Matthew Laurance. The movie also stars real-life actors Domhnall Gleeson and Brie Larson, who plays Charlie (“This is so surreal,” Charlie enthuses at one point to Murphy. “Your life, OUR life, being made into a movie”). While working on the set, Murphy Murphy is approached by Adalindis Katterwomp, current head of the “world-renowned” Commission on Cliches, established through the Government in Sunshine Act in 1976. The Commission has a problem: Its sacred text (“our Talmud, our Dead Sea Scrolls”) has disappeared, and Katterwomp would like Murphy Murphy to investigate. As our hero juggles this new case, his personal relationships, and his movie-consultant duties, the hyperbolic antics steadily accumulate—and the set personnel and cast of the Serious Crisis movie begin to look increasingly suspicious to the Clouseau-like sleuth. 

The narrative conceit of this book is the same as its predecessor’s: Instead of being wary of cliches and redundancy in its prose, the book luxuriates in them with irony and humor. This new Murphy Murphy adventure is deliberately filled with what, in any other book, would simply be identified as bad, lazy writing: Chapter titles include “The Calm Before the Storm,” “Let’s Get This Show on the Road,” and “Time and Tide Wait for No Man.” Both the band name “Serious Crisis” and the hero’s moniker are redundancies; such language-based gags fill the book (“The idea of being stood up in a standup comedy club tickled her funny bone”), and although the novelist Jasper Fforde has parlayed this sort of formal playfulness into a successful career, the humor can wear thin fairly quickly. In this book, readers get nearly 400 pages of such grammatical infelicities as “relative silence,” “audible sigh,” “a chance encounter,” and so on, ad infinitum. When a character asks Murphy Murphy, “Do you always speak in cliches?” he, of course, answers, “That, my good man, goes without saying.” Fortunately, Hirshland provides a bit more than arid word games—the book’s amusing tone of deadpan, knowing cynicism about the world of Hollywood moviemaking runs throughout the narrative. Comic posturing is the book’s raison d’être—all the characters are one-dimensional, and the central mystery is fairly thin. Still, this acidic portrait of the movie world is entertaining enough to compensate.

A self-consciously clever Hollywood mystery in which the crimes—and cliches—pile up.