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The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry, Penguin Press, 278 pages, $28.50

First-time author Jedediah Berry has already been compared to Borges, Kafka, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Ray Bradbury, Paul Auster and Angela Carter, and all of these are in the right range. But the writer I kept thinking of as I read Berry's strange and wonderful The Manual of Detection was Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and, more to the point, Dirk Gently, Zen “hero” of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul , with just a soupçon of Haruki Murakami and a dash of Mervyn Peake.

Berry nods to most of these writers, and borrows tropes, themes and character types as well – a hero who's in over his head, a tough-talking detective, a perky, indispensable assistant, cryptic clues, shadowy organizations, a mysterious femme fatale, scary bad guys, corpses – though he adds improbable coincidences, nonsensical crimes and baffling plot developments to make up a blend uniquely his own.

Our hero is Charles Unwin, who for 14 years has been a clerk at “the Agency,” a massive investigative bureaucracy – private or government, it's hard to say – at the centre of the unnamed, cold and rain-drenched city. There, for all that time, he has proudly chronicled and filed the cases of legendary detective Travis Sivart.

But one day, a day that begins badly when a puzzling dream causes him to burn his oatmeal, pick the wrong tie and nearly forget his wristwatch, Unwin discovers that he has been promoted to detective, a job for which he has no skills and no ambitions. Worse, he is replacing Sivart, and worse yet, while trying to protest this unwelcome development in his life, he stumbles upon the murdered body of his new boss.

There is only one thing to do: Find Sivart. Using his intimate knowledge of the great detective's cases, Unwin sets out on a journey through the dark, wet city that takes him to a museum, a down-and-out circus, a seedy bar, a decrepit hotel, a cocktail lounge, the Agency's deepest and darkest archives and, most troubling, into the dreams of other characters.

He comes across people he doesn't quite trust but whom he can't ignore: Detective Pith, who tells him of his promotion and gives him a copy of the Manual of Detection; Mr. Lamech, his Watcher, unfortunately strangled; Vera Truesdale, who wishes to hire him to investigate the odd happenings in her hotel room, and who proves in fact to be someone else entirely; his assistant, Emily Doppel, eager and hardworking, but subject to “unpredictable bouts of deep sleep”; Municipal Museum attendant Edwin Moore, who points out the mummy's gold tooth; Edgar Zlatari, caretaker of the cemetery and bartender of the adjacent Forty Winks; Jasper and Josiah Rook, separated Siamese twins with a penchant for evil.

He soon realizes there is even more trouble afoot: Sivart's most famous cases – and hence Unwin's most satisfying jobs of reporting and filing – have been incorrectly solved. The ancient mummy at the centre of The Oldest Murdered Man has modern dental work. The person at the centre of The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker is still alive. And as for The Man Who Stole November Twelfth ... well, don't ask, but the case does seem to be related to the current theft of all the alarm clocks in the city. And why is Unwin's Manual missing the crucial Chapter 18?

Now it must be said that the solutions to the several mysteries, when they arrive, do everything a proper resolution ought to. The loose ends are tied up, the truth revealed, the bad guys foiled and the good guys triumphant. But the getting there involves layers of deceit and betrayal, crimes within crimes, and dreams within dreams within dreams, and probably even more within dreams, but never mind. There are points where you wonder what the hell is going on, or at least I did, and other points where you just want everyone to get on with it.

And for all the absurd situations and oddball characters, the book is oddly humourless. I don't demand laughs, but it must be said that a somewhat lighter touch might have made it all go down more easily.

But these are cavils, and this is, after all, a first novel. The Manual of Detection is a wonderfully clever, ambitious and intelligent piece of work. Whatever Jedediah Berry does next, I'm in for it.

H.J. Kirchhoff is the assistant books editor for The Globe and Mail.