war exchanged by the warring nations on neutral ground: “Out in Europe, the great Tragedy went rushing on […]. But here in everyday Switzerland it was the other side of the tapestry” (1026). As David Cowart points out, the war is mostly fought “off-page” (Cowart, 186). The incomprehensible horrors of the war are only presented through their side effects, and this slanted depiction of the global disaster takes up only eight pages of the vast novel. On the one hand the war is undoubtedly the central event of Against the Day; on the other hand it is largely absent from the novel whose expected climax turns out to be an anticlimax. This relative absence may seem odd, but it is part of a deliberate aesthetic strategy that isthus acts out three different detective genres in the course of the novel: He begins his career as an operative for a detective agency battling strike breakers and anarchists, on the model of the Pinkerton detectives who figured as heroes in turn-of-the-century dime novels; after a detour into the London of Edwardian detectives of the Sherlock Holmes type, he finally finds himself on the West Coast, enacting the role of hard-boiled detective. […] This insight has in its wake a broader appreciation of the logic of Pynchon’s genre-poaching throughout Against the Day: Pynchon appropriates the conventions and materials of genres that flourished in the historical moments during which the events of his story occur. (McHale, 19) McHale then extends this analysis to Pynchon’s other novels (the superhero comics