A numbers game

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/04/2025 (350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cory Doctorow has long had his fingers firmly on the proverbial pulse, and recently the Toronto-born science fiction writer’s insights (let’s not call them predictions) caused him a small furor. His 2019 story Radicalized, about domestic terrorists targeting American health-care executives who had denied their loved ones’ health insurance claims, gained renewed interest at the end of 2024 with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York.

But the recent Martin Hench novels are a departure for Doctorow. These page-turning adventures would be shelved in the crime fiction section rather than sci-fi, and Hench is not only a lot older (being born in the late 1950s), he’s also not a hacktivist like many Doctorow characters. Rather, Hench is a for-hire investigator, albeit as a forensic accountant rather than a gumshoe.

Hench’s specialty is spreadsheets, not legwork, yet he seems to get jumped by goons at about the same frequency as Sam Spade. It seems that when one follows the money, one often finds violence in the bargain.

The most interesting thing about this series (which includes 2023’s Red Team Blues and 2024’s The Bezzle) isn’t Doctorow’s emphasis on financial crimes in the technology sector — although the spotlight on white collar crime is a refreshing change of pace from the genre’s usual focus on the lowest economic rungs of society.

No, where this series breaks new ground is in the upending of the genre convention of “the big score.” Ongoing stories in the adventure, thriller and mystery genres, especially those dating back to the pulp fiction days, tended to feature the hero always falling just short of the kind of windfall that would set them up financially, just so that yet another story could be written about the world’s greatest detective who can never pay the electric bill.

Doctorow subverted this trope quite spectacularly by starting the series with the story of Hench’s last and most lucrative case. At the close of Red Team Blues, he allowed his hero to reap the financial rewards, and since then the series has since been jumping around in time, with Hench as the present-day narrator, apparently relating each story to a rapt listener over drinks. The Bezzle took place around the Dot Com boom of the early 2000s, and Picks and Shovels is set in the first few years of the 1980s.

It’s an interesting time in computing, marked by the Apple II creating a new market for the personal computer (the titular picks and shovels allude to the San Francisco “gold rush” of tech companies springing up), and the first ever spreadsheet program — 1979’s VisiCalc (for the computer history nerds). The latter figures in the story, since Hench immediately sees how he can use spreadsheet tools to uncover a financial crime and criminal conspiracy.

And he gets embroiled in a nasty one. A rabbi, a priest and a Mormon bishop who wandered out of the set-up to a joke to start a computing company are using their congregations as sales networks. It turns out to be a predatory business model, locking customers into an inferior product line by making it intentionally incompatible with mainstream software and hardware and padding their prices.

This is sleazy but probably not criminal. But when some of this company’s own employees start a competing venture specializing in freeing the trapped customer base, hiring Hench for some of the financials, it comes out that the mob is a silent partner in the god-fearing tech company — and the story takes a dark turn.

Doctorow hasn’t been following a whodunit structure in this series, with the culprit only being exposed at the climax of each story. These books follow the less common “howcatchem” approach, where about a third of the way into the book, the wrongdoers are known, and the question is how the hero will survive their machinations and get the better of them.

With the historical setting, it may seem that Doctorow is taking a break from the depressing news of today, in which corporations seem to get richer and consumers more exploited by the day. This is a novel about bad people doing bad things, but it may also work as escapism because it’s so removed from our everyday lives in 2025.

But even with the separation of more than four decades, Picks and Shovels resonates with contemporary concerns, in part because there’s always pollination from the ideas Doctorow writes about in his non-fiction. A recent focus of his has been switching costs, where social media companies make it difficult to move to a new platform without losing all of photos, connections and writings, and so the user grudgingly maintains an account at an ever-worsening platform. It’s an idea that gets integrated into the novel, despite the setting being in the ‘80s.

It’s not an anachronism — Doctorow clearly wants to demonstrate that there is nothing new under the sun, and almost every lousy thing companies, billionaires and other gilded criminals do today they have also done in the past, as soon as it became technologically possible to do so. It’s depressing, but thought-provoking.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.