Get Poor Slow is about Australian literary critic Ray Saint, an alcoholic with an addiction to pain pills, and disliked by almost everyone who knows him or knows of him. All those details work against him when a young publishing assistant turns up dead and he was the last one to see her alive. He ends up on a mission to prove to everyone he didn’t do it – and because he was intoxicated and blacked out at the time of the murder, he’s got to prove it to himself as well. The whole book is a retro pastiche of Raymond Chandler-esque crime novels, filled with sardonic humour and starring an anti-hero protagonist. What gives the novel an extra edge is that this story of an unlikable critic is written by an actual literary critic, David Free. One hopes that piece of trivia is the only similarity.
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