The Patchwork Girl

The Patchwork Girl is a murder mystery set on the Moon, where the views are magnificent, the atmosphere is nonexistent and the justice system has discovered an admirably efficient way of combining capital punishment with the spare-parts industry.

Gil Hamilton is an agent of the ARM—the United Nations police force charged with controlling dangerous technology and various other things humanity was clever enough to invent but not sensible enough to manage. He is also known as “Gil the Arm,” partly because this is an occupational abbreviation and partly because, despite having lost an arm in a mining accident, he can still reach out with an invisible psychic version of it. This is extremely useful for a detective, although presumably rather awkward when filling in official descriptions of distinguishing features.

Gil is on the Moon attending a conference on lunar law when Chris Penzler, the Fourth Speaker for the Asteroids, receives a near-fatal blast from a laser. The shot came through the window of his quarters from the lunar surface, where only one person is known to have been at the relevant time: Naomi Mitchison, a beautiful tourist, an old flame of Gil’s and therefore exactly the sort of suspect capable of turning a straightforward investigation into several chapters of professional difficulty.

The evidence points neatly towards Naomi, which naturally convinces Gil that something is wrong. Unfortunately, lunar justice is not designed for leisurely reflection. Criminals can be sentenced to the organ banks, where they repay society by being dismantled into medically useful components. It is a stern but economical system in which rehabilitation has been replaced by recycling and even the most hardened offender may eventually become a respectable citizen’s kidney.

Gil must therefore determine what actually happened before Naomi becomes the “patchwork girl” of the title. His investigation takes him through lunar politics, conflicting legal systems and the peculiar physics of committing a crime in low gravity. On Earth, a detective follows footprints; on the Moon, he must account for pressure suits, airlocks, vacuum, trajectories and the inconvenient fact that footprints can remain available for a very long time. Littering is discouraged, but evidence preservation is excellent.

Larry Niven combines a traditional puzzle mystery with the carefully constructed science fiction of his Known Space universe. The technology does not merely decorate the scenery with flashing lights—it creates the crime, shapes the evidence and supplies several entirely new ways for human beings to behave badly. Beneath the detective story lies an unsettling argument about punishment, population control, personal freedom and what happens when a society becomes so practical that morality begins to resemble stock management.

This is one of Niven’s Gil Hamilton stories and can be read independently, although readers familiar with Known Space will recognise its institutions and obsessions. It is compact, clever and pleasingly hard-edged: Raymond Chandler relocated to the Moon, given a phantom arm and instructed to finish the case before the suspect is separated into labelled containers.

Published in 1980, The Patchwork Girl is an entertaining mixture of science fiction, crime and speculative social satire. It is ideal for readers who like locked-room mysteries but feel the room would benefit from being surrounded by vacuum, or who have always suspected that organ-donor policy could be made considerably more sinister with only a few administrative adjustments.

This copy is in Good condition, showing the normal signs of having passed through human hands while remaining reassuringly complete. No organs, limbs or pages are known to have been removed for reuse elsewhere. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where imperfect books are kept intact and nobody is broken up for spare parts, however overdue the payment may be.

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