The Little Sleep

E
ARLY
P
RAISE FOR
P
AUL
T
REMBLAY’S
The Little Sleep

“Well-crafted in a witty voice that doesn’t let go, Tremblay’s debut is part noir throwback, part medical mystery, part comedy, and thoroughly, wonderfully entertaining. Highly recommended.”

—
Library Journal
(starred review)

 

 

“
The Little Sleep
is one of the most engaging reads I’ve come across in a good long while. Tremblay does the near impossible by giving us a new take on the traditional PI tale. Tremblay writes in clear prose that is by turns atmospheric, haunting, and sharply humorous. The mystery is layered but always forward moving, taking us along on a unique journey that features most of the traditional elements of a PI novel, but skewed and twisted into a fresh perspective. You’ve never read a PI novel like this one before.”

—Tom P
ICCIRILLI
,
author of
The Coldest Mile
and
The Cold Spot

 

 

“If Philip K. Dick and Ross Macdonald had collaborated on a mystery novel, they might have come up with something like
The Little Sleep
. . . . I’ve never used the phrase
new noir
before, but I think I will now.
The Little Sleep
is new noir with panache. Check it out.”

—B
ILL
C
RIDER
,
author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery series

 

A
LSO BY
P
AUL
T
REMBLAY

City Pier: Above and Below
Compositions for the Young and Old

A
S
C
OEDITOR WITH
S
EAN
W
ALLACE

Bandersnatch
Fantasy
Phantom

T
HE
L
ITTLE
S
LEEP

A H
OLT
P
APERBACK

H
ENRY
H
OLT AND
C
OMPANY
    N
EW
Y
ORK

A Novel

P
AUL
T
REMBLAY

Holt Paperbacks
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com

A Holt Paperback
^®
and
^®
are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright © 2009 by Paul Tremblay

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tremblay, Paul.

The little sleep : a novel / Paul Tremblay.—1st ed.

    p.   cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8849-6

ISBN-10: 0-8050-8849-0

1. Private investigators—Fiction.  2. South Boston (Boston, Mass.)—Fiction.  3. Narcolepsy—Fiction.  4. Extortion—Fiction.  I. Title.

PS3620.R445L58 2009

813'.6—dc22

2008008855

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums.
For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 2009

Designed by Linda Kosarin

Printed in the United States of America

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For Lisa, Cole, and Emma

I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in advance, rather than by the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances.

—R
AYMOND
C
HANDLER

 

I smell smoke
that comes from a gun
named extinction.

—T
HE
P
IXIES
(
from “The Sad Punk”
)

 

T
HE
L
ITTLE
S
LEEP

It’s about two o’clock in the afternoon, early March. In South Boston that means a cold hard rain that ruins any memories of the sun. Doesn’t matter, because I’m in my office, wearing a twenty-year-old thrift-store wool suit. It’s brown but not in the brown-is-the-new-black way. My shoes are Doc Martens, black like my socks. I’m not neat and clean or shaved. I am sober but don’t feel sober.

There’s a woman sitting on the opposite side of my desk. I don’t remember her coming in, but I know who she is: Jennifer Times, a flavor-of-the-second local celebrity, singing contestant on
American Star
, daughter of the Suffolk County DA, and she might be older than my suit. Pretty and brunette, lips that are worked out, pumped up. She’s tall and her legs go from the north of Maine all the way
down to Boston, but she sits like she’s small, all compact, a closed book. She wears a white T-shirt and a knee-length skirt. She looks too spring for March, not that I care.

I wear a fedora, trying too hard to be anachronistic or iconoclastic, not sure which. It’s dark in my office. The door is closed, the blinds drawn over the bay window. Someone should turn on a light.

I say, “Shouldn’t you be in Hollywood? Not that I watch, but the little birdies tell me you’re a finalist, and the live competition starts tomorrow night.”

She says, “They sent me home to do a promotional shoot at a mall and at my old high school.” I like that she talks about her high school as if it were eons removed, instead of mere months.

“Lucky you.”

She doesn’t smile. Everything is serious. She says, “I need your help, Mr. Genevich,” and she pulls her white-gloved hands out of her lap.

I say, “I don’t trust hands that wear gloves.”

She looks at me like I chose the worst possible words, like I missed the whole point of her story, the story I haven’t heard yet. She takes off her right glove and her fingers are individually wrapped in bandages, but it’s a bad wrap job, gauze coming undone and sticking out, Christmas presents wrapped in old tissue paper.