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A. Lee Martinez's novels proceed with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Whether it's the story of a vampire and a werewolf saving the world from Lovecraftian entities or a hapless immortal leading an army of misfit fantasy races, they tend towards the screwball side of their respective genres.
Which makes The Automatic Detective slightly surprising. It's a 1930s-1940s style hard-boiled detective novel in a setting infested with every mutant, robot, and bizarre gadget seen in a 1950s EC Science Fiction comic...yet it mostly plays it all straight. Give or take a sly poke by narrator Mack Megaton and the occasional wry observation by the rest of the off-beat cast.
Mack is the faceless creation of a currently incarcerated super-villain. He's reformed and working as a taxi-cab driver, on probation to be made a full citizen of Empire City. Then some of his very few friends get kidnapped and Mack ends up living the life of a private detective, getting deeper and deeper into the truly exotic, strange, and extremely dangerous underworld flavored by the city's unique brand of mad science.
It's treated with a refreshing lack of irony, which somehow makes such an odd genre hybrid seem proper and natural. Martinez -has- always treated his character's emotional lives quite seriously, and Mack's growing connection to and affection for the "biologicals" in his life makes for endearing stuff.
There still is on-target funny stuff...such as Mack's reaction to the whole "Oh my, the robot sees the random stain pattern as resembling a bird or a butterfly-He must have a SOUL!" bit.
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