DYDEETOWN WORLD
By F. Paul Wilson
Baen Books (1989)
Reviewed by Robert Thompson 3/8/90
Dydeetown has nothing to do with diapers. It is short for "Aphrodite Town" the red-light district in a world not too distant in the future. Sigmund Dreyer is the P.I. who acts tough but has a heart of gold. Imagine a composite of Bogart's Sam Spade and Rick Blaine from Casablanca, but take away any real sense of competence, add a lot of luck and a couple of real good connections and you get an idea of the hero.
The Femme Fatale is (literally) a clone of Jean Harlow, one of Dydeetown's working girls. Clones have no legal rights; they are property. Jean has a problem...her "boyfriend" has disappeared. She hires Dreyer to find him. Thus starts the story.
This book is composed of three parts, each story standing almost alone, but joined with threads from each prior part.
The first two stories are almost typical "pulp" detective stories, but the third is quite unusual. It is as if you took the world of Oliver Twist's orphan underground and fast forwarded it to circa 2250 A.D.
DYDEETOWN WORLD is a pretty good book for killing a few hours. It is not particularly exciting, and there is nothing really new in it, but there are some interesting 'juxtapositionings', and a rather uplifting conclusion, unusual in this genre.