Shadow Ticket

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press (ISBN: 9781594206108) 2025.

Summary: Private detective Hop McTaggart hunts down a missing cheese heiress, from Milwaukee to Europe, in a series of madcap capers.

Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker, has tried to settle down into a more sedate life as a private detective, working for Unamalgamated Ops in Milwaukee. Instead of bashing heads, he gets the goods on wayward spouses. He has a colorful bunch of “associates”, from mobsters to Nazis. He frequents speakeasys and bowling alleys. Then, along comes the request to track down a missing cheese heiress, Daphne Airmont. Her father, Bruno, is the “Al Capone of cheese” but as the cheese wars heat up, he’s skipped town on a sub, taking him to Europe.

After avoiding a car-bombing and wanting to evade the local authorities investigating a murder he didn’t commit, Hicks decides to take the case. Daphne is following her lover Hap Wingdale, a clarinetist, to join his swing band. But Hicks is one step behind. He lands in Chicago to find she’s off to New York. He heads to New York to find she’s on a boat to Europe. After a night out, he wakes up to find himself on another ship.

Pynchon is just warming up. Hicks gets involved in a series of escapades with Interpol agents and spies, traveling from Belgrade to Budapest, hunting down Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmont’s right hand man, strikes up a relationship with Terike, a woman motorcyclist, and finally finds Daphne in a club in Budapest. I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.

All this is set with the 1930’s as backdrop–Communism appealing to workers and radicals, Europe trying to recover from the great war only to face and in some cases welcome) the rise of Hitler. Some reviewers try to draw parallels to the present day. I’m not so sure that Pynchon isn’t just playing with us. But I do see various figures trying to grab for money or love before it all goes to hell.

One of the challenges of the book is the dialogue, the “argot” as it were of this particular type of underworld. And scenes shift rapidly as various characters move in and out of the narrative.

I’ve not read Pynchon before, so I had no idea of what to expect. Vineland sits on my “to read” pile. We’ll see if I keep reading Pynchon after that. I’ll leave it to others to recommend what’s best to read of Pynchon’s. But I suspect that, despite the achievement of publishing this at 88, this is not his best. But at least he’s alive and writing!