Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142227 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

From the Publisher
Why I was grabbed by Scarlett Thomas's arresting new voice
The minute I first read Scarlett Thomas's manuscript, I knew I'd found something special. DEAD CLEVER is different; it's in a traditional crime genre, but our detective heroine is 25-year-old Lily Pascale, a literature lecturer who takes no prisoners. She's utterly modern, unshockable and unashamedly clever. Then there's the mystery itself - twisting, complex and gripping. And it could only happen in the nineties. Scarlett has since followed DEAD CLEVER with two more excellent mysteries starring Lily Pascale, IN YOUR FACE and SEASIDE. She's entrancing new fans every day with her sharp writing and incredible imagination (how does she think of those plots!). Read one and find out why Scarlett Thomas is a name to watch.

Customer Reviews

the other books are better
I have to say, Dead Clever nearly put me off Scarlett Thomas, but I'm glad it didn't. The heroine, Lily Pascale, is a lecturer in crime fiction. Great idea for a crime novel. But there's no use at all made of it. You kind of wonder why Thomas gave her that job- maybe she intended to use it but changed her mind? The denouement is 100% preposterous, and really quite hard to care about. The standard stakes-upping technique of putting someone the protagonist's close to in danger is used, but you know so little about the character in question that it just feels manipulative and cheap.

Lily's return to the place she grew up is really evocative, and her 'internal landscape' is well drawn, I guess, but this book seems a bit like it's attempting to buck the genre of crime fiction by being clever, and missing all its good points.

However, Thomas's second and third Lily Pascale books are *superb*

Brilliant, cool, misunderstood
I can see why this book has a couple of bad reviews - it's a love it or hate it kind of a thing. If you are looking for a run of the mill crime novel, you won't find what you're looking for here. Dead Clever is a very cool book, an obvious spoof of both the crime and b-movie genres - it even has a mad scientist. I don't know what Scarlett Thomas intended, but from what I can make out, she seems to be very aware of the conventions she's disrupting, and has just had a right laugh writing this. It does come over as a bit first-novelly, and she was quite young when she wrote it. I'm just desperately waiting for Bright Young Things to come out. It's Scarlett Thomas's first serious non-crime book, apparently, and I've read the first couple of chapters on her website... It's FANTASTIC. Anyway, if you're looking for the best book in the Lily Pascal series, read Seaside. But if you're looking for a well written, sideways-take on the crime/horror genre, read this.

Dead Boring!
Quite ironic really considering the title of this distinctly routine piece; it wasn't dead clever to publish this and it must be wondered if Thomas regrets it now considering the outstanding Popco and The End of Mr Y rather like some actors have regretted appearing in certain films at the start of their careers. Let me put it this way, thank God I read The End of Mr Y first; if Dead Clever had been my introduction to Thomas' work it would have been my first and last. I won't bother giving yet another synopsis of the story, such as it is. Suffice to say that she does the English higher education system no favours at all: I mean can you really phone up, have a 2 minute chat and get a lectureship in a UK university and on the strength of a few weeks part time work, during which you do virtually no preparation, very little real teaching, no marking, give no tutorials and spend most of your time sleuthing around the `Devon drug scene', be rewarded by being made head of department?

Do yourselves a favour - skip this lightweight fluff and move straight on to either of the later novels. And to think some reviewers found it `brilliant'; the mind really does boggle!