Sci Fi: A Yellowthread Street Mystery by William Marshall

Publisher & Edition Details

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Year: 1981

Edition: First Edition

Printing: First Printing

Condition

• Boards: Clean
• Dust Jacket: unclipped, protected, vibrant, undamaged
• Binding: Sound / Tight
• Pages: Clean
• Other Notes: 

Plot & Features

Setting: Hong Bay, a fictional district in 1970s/80s Hong Kong, teeming with chaotic energy, eccentric characters, and a cultural collision of East meets West. The setting is part of what makes the Yellowthread Street series so distinctive — it’s a surreal, noir-ish backdrop laced with absurdity and existential humour.

Detective / Lead: The Yellowthread Street Police Unit, featuring a quirky ensemble cast:

• Senior Inspector Harry Feiffer – ethnically European, culturally Chinese, and perpetually exasperated.

• Detective Christopher O’Yee – a half-Chinese, half-Irish detective with a volatile temper.

• Droll support cast – including Inspectors Auden and Spencer, who rarely help but always complicate things.

Feiffer and his team are not your average crime-solvers — their methods teeter between unorthodox and outright surreal.

Series: Book 8 in the Yellowthread Street series. Each novel stands alone but shares the same cast and setting. Sci Fi is one of the more unconventional entries, dipping into metafiction and satire.

Blurb / Summary

There’s a man in a spacesuit with a gun in Hong Bay… and he’s not here for Comic-Con.

A would-be science fiction writer dressed in a homemade space suit is found dead in the middle of traffic. His manuscripts suggest interplanetary motives, but the detectives of Yellowthread Street are more interested in Earth-bound answers — if only the case weren’t spiralling into absurdity.

Mixing classic crime elements with tongue-in-cheek parody, Sci Fi pokes fun at pulp tropes while spinning a genuinely intriguing mystery. Expect red herrings, genre satire, and moments of laugh-out-loud lunacy.

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