It does not hide the inner core. Which is confusion. Though the narrative doesn't so much end as stop, it reflects the unsettling comic inventiveness that distinguishes this uneven collection of 14 tales, not to mention the movies Coen makes with his brother Joel. More than half the stories, however, are mere exercises, much like such Coen brothers films as Barton Fink, Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing , in which caricatures are put through the paces of stock situations, usually noir tempered with satire. Many are detective or caper stories of some sort that either strain for effect or lean too heavily on genre conceits, thereby weakening their discomfiting, humorous originality.
Handiwork takes undue precedence.
But the Sam Spade simulacrum becomes the object of revenge, a patsy of sexual blackmail by an Asian temptress. In A Fever in the Blood , a PI in a scrape gets an ear bitten off, hallucinates in the hospital, suffers psychosomatic deafness in the other ear, consults a therapist who only pretends to listen, and takes on a blind client who suspects his wife of adultery. None of the pieces are synthesized into a satisfying whole. Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator is a script, set in 1947, in which a hard-boiled dick comes across a dame and a will. Most of the stories are set in and around Minneapolis, Coen's hometown.