Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Published by Knopf on May 16, 2023

A hard-boiled crime solver is a standard ingredient in noir fiction. That role in Titanium Noir is played by Cal Sounder. He works in a private capacity to help the police or shady characters investigate crimes. Some of the shady characters are Titans. Not titans of industry, necessarily, although they generally need substantial wealth to become Titans. They are characters who resemble the Titans of Greek mythology.

Titans extend their lifespans with an expensive drug called T7. The drug rejuvenates by reverting cells to their pre-puberty state, then fast forwards the body to adulthood while adding muscle mass and bone density. Each dose adds to a Titan’s size but the treatment creates a risk of memory loss. By the fourth dose, Titans labor to breathe.

Cal visits a crime scene where Roddy Tebbit appears to have shot himself in the head. Roddy is a one-dose Titan, seven-foot-eight and 91 years old despite resembling a hale man of 50. Giles Gatton, the police chief, invites Cal to investigate because Titan deaths tend to be political and the cops want to avoid publicity. On the other hand, Titans often hire Cal because they don’t think the police take their deaths seriously.

Cal doesn’t believe the death is a suicide. When he asks how Roddy, a scientist who doesn’t come from money, could have become a Titan, the answers seem false. Roddy’s past is elusive. He was involved with a woman who works in the kind of club where women entertain without clothing. After Cal wins a cage fight for a chance to interview the woman, she’s killed in an assassination that nearly takes out Cal.

Faced with more questions than answers, Cal suspects that Roddy left behind a secret. Those suspicions are confirmed when two competing Titans — a four-dose giant named Stefan Tonfamecasca and a big guy known as Doublewide — insist that Roddy find the secret and bring it to them. The secret turns out to be stored in a strange place. Cal isn’t sure that either of the Titans should have it — at least not before he reviews the information that Roddy took such trouble to protect.

Nick Harkaway relies on the sarcastic prose and dark atmosphere of noir to tell the story. Substitute underworld figures who are shagging each other’s wives for Titans who extend their lives with T7 and you’d come up with a similar plot. Cal is sort of dating a woman named Athena, whose one-dose mother has a backstory that becomes critical to the plot. Like stories from Greek mythology, family drama informs the story.

Harkaway exploits the classic noir theme of the wealthy versus the rest of us, the privileged class versus the servant class, to make the story relatable to those of us who aren’t privileged. Big guys bullying smaller guys is another theme, with the smaller guy (Cal) managing to use wits to defeat brute force. All of this is entertaining even if the noir sometimes seems forced. Marrying the future to the 1940s (Cal even calls himself a gumshoe) is a contrivance that always seems on the verge of collapsing into silliness. I give Harkaway credit for pulling it off, all the way to an ironic and surprising finish.

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