Sleeper Beach - Nick Harkaway

**First book spoiler warning**

This is Nick Harkaway's second book in the Titanium Noir series, so while there are no spoilers here for Sleeper Beach, it does reveal at least one significant event that took place in the first book.

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Cal Sounder, in his capacity as a Private Investigator rather than as part of the important Tonfamecasca family, is called in to look into the death of a woman on Sleeper Beach in the costal town of Shearwater. A formerly thriving town, it's now something of a backwater, but still the centre of operations for the Erskine family who practically own the town. It's not uncommon to find dead bodies on Sleeper Beach. People often come there to lie on one of the many sunbeds laid out and stay there; those suffering from what the local police pathologist calls 'spontaneous dysphoric and psychogenic cognitive atrophy', a fancy way of saying that they feeling discarded by the world and have given up on life. The dead woman Alisa Lloyd doesn't seem the type, and then there is the fact that she drowned. Or was drowned.

**Second spoiler warning for Titanium Noir Book 1. Read that book or review first. There are no spoilers below for Sleeper Beach**

Sleeper Beach and the Titanium Noir series takes place in a futuristic SF world where, Blade Runner like, one corporation holds a powerful position because of a certain life extending drug. With T7 Tonfamecasca "owns post-mortality". Cal is now part of the family, having had no choice but to take a dose or else die, becoming in the process a Titan. As such, with continuing doses, you can rewind the clock and become almost immortal, but a Titan can still be killed. There are other drawbacks, and for Cal the immediate problem as a one-dose Titan is being taken seriously as a 41 year old investigator when you have a babyface that makes you looks 20 years old or younger. With most Titans most now over 100 years old, Sounder is indeed practically a baby, but because of that easy to underestimate by the unwary.

Not that there are not too many unwary characters in Shearwater, the land and main industries all owned by the influential Erskine family. Cal is there on the request of the family matriarch and Titan Martha Erskine; she needs someone who isn't pushed in the obvious directions that point to a young member of the family as a potential murderer, the wayward Torrance. It's too easy an answer for the local police - and for some others in the family jostling for position - so she needs someone with an open mind to consider that as a possibility but probe a little deeper. Inevitably, when it comes to old influential families, there is a lot of dirt that gets dragged out into the open.

As with previous book Titanium Noir, the whole feel is familiar from classic Raymond Chandler and American post-war noir movies. There are rich, decadent families with secret vices and a tearaway younger member of the family who is either missing or in trouble and the family need their indiscretions covered up, preferably quietly and discreetly without stirring up much public interest. It never works out that way of course. The Titanium Noir series expands on that theme in more ways than one with the SF near-futuristic setting, hardboiled dialogue and ready wit, but with a different perspective in a world that has different rules and attitudes towards life and humanity. That creates some surreal moments, but in a way it still goes to deep human places. 

I'm not quite sure exactly how Nick Harkaway does it, or whether it's just my impression, but there is a wonderful seediness to the novel that fits the noir worldview perfectly. It's even in the way that Cal feels uncomfortable in his own skin and how that affects his relationship with the world around him. All the traditional noir archetypes are there of course, but elevated and highlighted in the lofty heights of the Titans set against the little people and their sad little short lives. We can feel the influence of Philip K Dick and Blade Runner there again maybe, but the dystopian feel - or indeed classic noir - extends to Cal doing hard footwork, meeting people in person and taking in his surroundings, not relying on high technology or even Google Maps.

The general wider state of the future/alternate world's political, social and technological position was of little concern in Titanium Noir and it’s not really the main area of interest here either, although we get more of a sense of the social divisions that exist and it's not difficult to relate them to the world today. "The old rich don't die, they just get bigger". And Sleeper Beach is indeed about the big people and the little people as individuals, what they do when they occupy those positions of power while all around is in decline, and the lengths they are willing to go to keep hold of it. For a work of an alternative world, it sure sounds a lot like the one we are familiar with.

In Sleeper Beach things progressively get complicated and then more complicated with new names thrown into the hat. Despite Cal regularly tallying up the current position of the investigation, you can struggle to remember the context in which some of those names first cropped up. It doesn't matter, even when it seems like there isn't much progress being made, there is always an encounter or confrontation that results in a smart-alec exchange with a witty or withering putdown, and when that won't do you can always rely on Cal to throw a Titanic punch that shakes out a few cobwebs, a few walls and a few bones.

However he does it, Nick Harkaway achieves an ideal blend of classic noir and alternative reality in Sleeper Beach and the Titanium Noir series that sheds some light on the contemporary world we live in, which means that there are some satisfying moments of recognition and relatability, but it remains dominated by that essential noirish air of world weariness and fatalism about the state of the world and the uncertainty of the direction it's heading in.

Reading notes: Sleeper Beach, A Titanium Noir novel by Nick Harkaway is published by Corsair on the 10th April 2025. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance reading eBook copy.