In the venerable tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and dozens of successors, “Vice’’ begins when a beautiful woman arrives at the office of Doc Sportello, just south of Los Angeles. Sportello is hardly your hard-boiled detective. A weanling of the ’60s and pumped full of drugs and rock music, he is the psychedelic private eye. Standing for “location, surveillance, detection,’’ his business card reads LSD Investigations.
The woman, Shasta, a former lover of Doc’s, comes to report a plot to kidnap her new lover, a billionaire real-estate tycoon named Mickey Wolfmann. Shasta and Mickey disappear before Doc can do much about it: little more, in fact, than get himself knocked cold in a Wolfmann-owned massage parlor, get arrested for the murder of a Wolfmann bodyguard, then get quickly released and offered a job by the arresting detective to inform on the hippie-surfer community.
Known as Bigfoot, the detective is an indecipherable mix of crooked, nefarious, and conceivably angelic. The most complex of the book’s absurdly far-out characters, he has, among other things, a passion for frozen chocolate-covered bananas. He owns thousands of them: a payoff for overlooking a drug operation that processes banana skins into hallucinogenic powder.
We are only a little way into a plot best thought of as a state-of-the-art bomb that detonates, releasing dozens of bomblets that explode in turn to pierce the targets with thousands of tiny metal fragments. The reader is not just pulverized but virtually aerated. To spare my own readers, I make no attempt to put in order all the simultaneous adventures, encounters, and peculiar finds that Doc comes across. Not that I could.
