The Painted Gun - Walking Mystery Tour through San Francisco
This past March, noir enthusiasts picked up a black envelope from City Lights Bookstore and embarked on a search for a missing girl. From the Canessa Gallery and The Space Between to Chinatown back alleys, the legendary Beat poet’s bar Vesuvio, and steamier North Beach backdrops, participants tracked the missing girl and the paranoid detective who was also hot on her heels. The immersive walking tour was the local launch of Bradley Spinelli’s latest novel, The Painted Gun (Akashic Books), and was presented by City Lights Bookstore’s Subterranean SF Series.
Spinelli’s delightfully surprising crime novel follows washed-up ex-journalist David “Itchy” Crane as he searches for the missing Ashley at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco. With pitch-perfect dialogue, an exquisitely crafted plot, and a stylized, deadpan nod to classic hard-boiled writers, The Painted Gun was a perfect fit for one of our Subterranean SF events, in which participants took a similar journey to that of Spinelli’s protagonist. Throughout the walking tour, participants were told to look out for anyone carrying the book and to follow clues to spots populated with living, breathing characters featured in the novel. When the walking tour ended at City Lights, participants watched themselves follow Ashley’s path. Unbeknownst to them, they had been surveilled as they traveled through Spinelli’s imagined world incarnate. Just as the event participants realized they were being surveilled by persons unknown, so did the protagonist in The Painted Gun (a mind-bending revelation in the years before the assumption was the NSA is always watching everyone).
Spinelli, certainly a force to be reckoned with in contemporary noir fiction, transported participants into the shoes of his main character. With the help of hidden cameras set up throughout the city by filmmaker Danny Bellini, Spinelli brought the intriguing mysteries and haunting thrills of The Painted Gun to life.
Check out the video below to see what happened.
amazing!
