Northampton writer Jedediah Berry's novel The Manual of Detection starts with the image of a man riding a bicycle while holding an unbrella. And Berry is astride a bicycle of sorts himself, jutting an umbrella into the aether—his novel's gears crank along while you aren't looking, and his umbrella drips images, drops clues. The Manual of Detection is a mystery, but not merely a mystery.

The book moves fast in some ways. A few pages in, and protagonist Charles Unwin, a clerk, has been promoted to detective—a mistake, he's sure—and begun, almost depite himself, to probe the mysteries of his employer, The Agency. The story bulges with oddities of a peculiarly pleasant sort, collisions of image and meaning all moving towards something, some kind of resolution. That it's not immediately clear what that resolution could be makes the ride all the more thrilling.

The term "literature" seems to have gained, somewhere along the way, an unfair weight of connotation. For too many readers, the largely artificial split between "popular fiction" and literature (unpopular fiction?) has placed perfectly good writers in an unassailable mountaintop fortress. Borges and Woolf seem too frighteningly esoteric to read when Stephen King is filed helpfully near the corn flakes. How that kind of split happened is a mysterious story of its own. Fortunately, writers like Berry pay little mind to such distinctions. His book might fit into the "popular" genre of mystery, but it's a literary romp that parcels out clues and motifs with dazzling abandon.

It took Berry, he says, something in the neighborhood of five years to take The Manual of Detection from conception to finished book. It's clear when you read it that so many years of attention went into its creation—the prose snaps with smart imagery, and with tableaus both wondrous and inexplicable.

This is monstrously impressive stuff, and even more so for a writer making his debut as a novelist—Berry graduated from the UMass-Amherst Creative Writing MFA program just two years ago, and works at the innovative Small Beer Press in Northampton. Berry talked about the conception and writing of his novel in a recent Advocate interview.

Advocate: What inspired your novel?

Jedediah Berry: I started the book with a handful of images that didn't really belong anywhere else, but I felt that they were of a piece somehow. I think the starting point was photography and visual art more than anything because I had these particular kind of vaguely surreal pictures in mind. If I'd been a visual artist, I probably would have just painted them and I would have been done with it. Two guys on a rowboat together, sharing an umbrella; someone with a bed and an office lamp in a clearing in the woods; just these few, strange pictures.

I started the book with those in mind, and then the main character, Charles Unwin, was partly a portrait of some kind of personal experience, but also definitely inspired by clerks in other writers' work, going back to "Bartleby the Scrivener" from Melville, and Gogol's "The Overcoat," and certainly the characters in Kafka's books who are kind of stuck in this bureaucratic system and can never find their way to the center of it. I had all those things in mind and then, once I actually started it, was surprised to find I was writing a detective novel, which really was not part of the original plan at all. I wrote the first chapter, which remains more or less as I wrote it—a lot of the book has changed since I started, but the first chapter is pretty much the same. And about halfway through that chapter a detective appears and promotes Charles Unwin, file clerk, to the rank of detective. So then I found I had to do a lot of homework.

I'd read some mystery novels, and my mom had been a big reader of the sort of cozy British mysteries. I went back to a lot of the Victorian writers. I had read some G. K. Chesterton, because I loved his book The Man Who Was Thursday, so I went back and read his Father Brown mysteries, which are a lot of fun. He's the perfect sort of bumbling, unassuming detective, the Catholic priest who you don't expect to be solving crimes and coming up with religious proverbs and things—it's strange. So I read my way up to the hard-boiled noir stuff of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. I think those are the two worlds that eventually ended up influencing the book the most. I think some of the language and some of the sensibilities are more Victorian in nature, whereas the world is very much an almost hyper-realized, self-aware noir kind of setting.

To what extent did you feel conflict between literary concerns and the second-class status people have imposed on genre fiction?

It's something that seems to be loosening all the time. I think I'm lucky to have been preceded by writers who have taken genre tropes and really reinvented them and demonstrated that this stuff has value and can be used for new and interesting things. Writers like Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon have all tackled mysteries, science fiction and fantasy and have really been faithful to the storytelling traditions that come out of those genres but have also done something which I think is undeniably literary, because it requires a deep level of inquiry that lasts.

But it certainly was on my mind. Even though the book has all the trappings of a mystery novel, writing it, I always thought I was writing something that was a fable disguised as a mystery. The characters and the settings in the book, at least for me, have a certain kind of mythic resonance that I hope ends up showing through to some extent.

Where are you originally from?

I grew up in Catskill, N. Y., and moved to New York City after college, and then came here to go to graduate school. … In some ways it's similar to this area, the river valley feel, and you've got your hilltowns. It was the land of Rip Van Winkle. As I remember it, they taught the works of Washington Irving and they taught us New York state history, but they weren't always telling us which was which, and so in my mind there still is the possibility that there's this man asleep up in the Catskill Mountains. I always loved that guy.

Why did you become a writer?

There are a lot of things. …In high school, my friends and I wrote a lot of plays together, these skits. That to me was really important, the energy surrounding those projects. But before that, my grandmother told me fairy tales when I was little. She was always telling me stories that I had thought were old stories, but which I found out later were things she was making up on the spot. She had this whole mythical universe that she was building and creating all the time. I come from a family of storytellers who are actually much better at telling a story out loud than I am. I have a boisterous storytelling uncle, and my mother can weave a tale of intrigue about the goings-on about town like nobody's business. I think all those things definitely had an influence on me.

You work at Small Beer Press as well as being a writer, so what do you think will be the future of the novel? Is printed matter endangered like some people say?

I don't think printed matter is in danger; I think a lot is changing and there's going to be a lot of reinvention of the form. But I don't think we're going to see books disappearing any time soon. It's a really interesting time to be a part of an operation like Small Beer Press. Being small and being independent gives you the ability to be somewhat agile and adapt to these things and see where they're going. In fact, I'm really hopeful for the future of the book. I think all kinds of interesting things could come out of these changes in publishing.

How did you go from those images you mentioned to a completed work?

I gave myself a few guidelines. I knew the beginning, I knew something that happened in the middle, and I knew more or less how it ended. I wrote unitl I had no idea what I was doing anymore. Then I skipped ahead and I wrote that middle so I knew what I was working toward, and then I kind of did the same thing again to get from the middle to the end. I especially found something that's meant to resemble a mystery novel really difficult, because you have a cast of characters, all of whom have hidden motives and agendas, and keeping track of what they're all up to and what they will be doing at any particular moment and still telling a story that's engaging and interesting was really hard.

Add to that the fact that I think people read mysteries differently than they read most books, and they're questioning,"Why did the author do that thing? Is that a clue, is that a detail?" Those worries actually show up in the book a lot. I'm trying to write about those expectations that we bring to mysteries and to any work of fiction.

I don't know now that I could retrace the exact route. I went down a lot of paths that did not prove fruitful, huge abandoned sections of the book. A lot of organizing and re-organizing. I could show you charts that I graphed out, filling a notebook with that, not to mention a vast scrap pile on my computer of things that didn't make it in.

Did you find the nature of a mystery constricted you in your writing?

It constricted to some extent, in terms of point of view and in terms of how information is revealed. Pacing was a challenge, because there are things which, of course, I knew about the plot and about those secret agendas, but knowing when to withhold and when to reveal something was definitely difficult. I'm someone who can get obsessed with plot. I can think those things into the ground, and I certainly did that at times.

You've had a really great reception so far—how has that been?

So far, so good. It's nerve-wracking! I mean, aside from a few people at the UMass MFA program and a few carefully chosen readers, it's been kind of my own secret world for so many years.

Certainly these issues of genre are coming up now. It was fascinating to see the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed it as science fiction, which was great, and the Boston Globe reviewed it as a mystery—also great. I'm curious to see where it shows up next. The book has the word "manual" in the title, and just the other day I walked into a bookstore just to make sure it had made it out into the world, and there it was, in non-fiction. That's the only one I think I'll have a problem with.

Could be interesting, though, if someone tried to use it as a manual.

I would love to see what would happen if someone took the advice in this book. I think things would go very, very badly.

How do you handle the struggle between genre tropes and everyday reality?

I tried to push the genre side of things as far as it could possibly go, to the extent where I think the characters are often acting in a way that makes them seem at least half-aware of the fact that they are playing these parts. The old detective knows that he's the old detective, and the femme fatale is weary with being a femme fatale.

When you go far enough with it, they have nothing left but to go back to the small, everyday details. It's not a book which lingers for very long on the personal space. I consciously don't try to develop the personal, interior lives of the characters in any sort of obvious way. The narrator has a level of remove from them, which was important to me because it has to do with some of what the book is about in terms of privacy and knowledge and perception, what a person can know about another person and where they're wrong. Those elements, when they appear, I hope they stand out in a way. When the main character makes oatmeal with raisins, hopefully it's a detail that stands out because the rest is so far pushed into the realm of the genre story. I had a lot of fun with that. Sprinkling those things in there was a way of surprising myself at times. It kept the writing interesting.

Did unexpected things invade this made-up world?

Some of my favorite parts of the book were not planned at all—they were just things that I went with when I saw them happening, and they're often to the side of the story. Without giving too much away, because it is a mystery and all that, there's a scene when a character basically sees into the dream of someone he's close to. It wasn't something that was planned, but it allowed me this kind of moment of tenderness that I don't think I would have found otherwise. I tried to look for those kinds of opportunities the further I went into the book.

Because it is a partly invented world, it's tricky, because you're establishing certain rules, and you're spending time letting the reader in on what those rules are, and then eventually you have to break those rules to make it interesting. I actually like a lot of fiction that is inconsistent in some ways, where things don't feel real. I like it when the writer gives the reader the benefit of the doubt and says, "We're playing a game here. We know we're both involved in this process and we both know that this is a fiction, that this is a story, so let's see what kind of fun we can have with it."

Do you think you'll do another mystery?

I don't think so. Not any time soon. I mean, there are certainly things that I've learned in writing it. Certainly that issue of holding back and knowing how to keep secrets in a piece of fiction I think is really important. But if I do write a mystery, I don't think I'll do it soon. I've got some other things planned.

Anything you want to share?

There's a novel that I would love to write that's been on my mind since before I wrote this one, which would be an American historical novel that would actually be largely inspired by the Rip Van Winkle short story. It takes that story and uses it as a lens through which to view the creation of the country but infuse it with a good deal of folklore and tall tale.

At the moment, as I'm beginning to explore new territory, it feels every bit as uncertain and terrifying [as writing Manual of Detection]. It's still a blank page and there's still this looming impossibility that hangs over the whole thing. Okay, yes, I know I've done it once so I can do it again, and that's certainly helpful, but I've talked to a lot of writers who have said it never gets any less frightening or uncertain. There's probably something to be said for that. It's probably that struggle that lends something important to the process.