Gascoyne

"Meet Gascoyne, a new breed of hero, a man who spends whole weeks in his car, eats there, sleeps there, and conducts his business - wielding power, pinching pennies, and fostering corruption - by mobile phone as he somehow manages to drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic at fifty miles an hour. But he's found a new preoccupation, hunting down the killer - last seen slithering away from the crime scene in a tree-sloth costume - of his business associate and finding out how the southern California megalopolis has suddenly slipped out of his grasp." A tour de force blending of genres - Alfred Hitchcock, jungle-war novels, science fiction, mad doctor movies, Westerns, James Bond, 18th-century mock epics, Greek tragedy and hardboiled detective stories - first published in 1966, Gascoyne is a hilarious look into a future that looks remarkably like the present.