Last night I could not sleep and so post-midnight I got up and went down to the bookcase of library books and picked out a mystery for mystery Sunday.  I chose Krapp’s Last Cassette by Anne Argula.  It was a great choice in terms of how much I loved it, but not such a great choice in terms of keeping me up until three a.m. I’ve got to stick to boring tomes for sleepless nights instead of choosing anything by Argula.  Her novels are compelling, crazy, twisted, and really, really funny. In Krapp’s Last Cassette I had no idea what was coming next, but with the fantastically menopausal-but-that’s-not-going-to-stop-me Private Eye Quinn, I enjoyed the ride with all its hard lefts, dark alleys, late night tailing, and boozy interludes of relative peace.

Argula manages to infiltrate a classic P.I. story with questions of philosophy (what is reality), happiness (what is reality, again) and aging sexual needs (one more time, the question of what is reality). Quinn is an independent thinker and very willing to share her thoughts and her paranoias, as well as her blind spots. She is a fascinating lead in a story that not only includes the above-mentioned metaphysical issues but also provides classic moves of detection: plenty of clues, false leads, and bizarre witnesses.

I loved the rock and roll of this book, loved the P.I., and loved the references to Beckett (who wrote “Krapp’s Last Tape” and is quoted at the beginning of the book and whose spirit of reality-questioning is mainlined throughout the book). I will never, ever make sense of the plot but who cares?  Reality is what you make of it.  There were two previous Quinn mysteries — in the first one, Homicide My Own, Quinn solves the mystery of her very alive partner’s murder in his previous life — and they are all good, well worth the sacrifice of one night’s sleep.