David Bowden’s Between the City and the City, the preeminent text on Orciny, has been banned by the establishment as dangerous and dismissed by academia as deeply flawed scholarship. However, it’s also the source of great interest to Mahalia Geary. She studies it closely until she is lured into its fictional mysteries. After Geary’s murder, the text becomes one of Borlú’s primary clues as he struggles to reconstruct Geary’s thought process and track down her killer. Despite its false premise, its subject matter is still deemed too threatening for public consumption. As it happens, banned books in Besźel and Ul Qoma are not unusual; the library of the Beszqoma Solidarity Front contains a trove of banned materials. Between the City and the City is symbolic of all knowledge considered dangerous. Entrenched power structures will always attempt to censor material that poses a threat to the status quo, whether it be a text about the legacy of racism, alternative lifestyles, or a mythical city.

Bowden’s murder weapon, a relic from the Bol Ye’an dig site, is an ancient, corroded, and apparently non-functional object. When he tries to fire at Borlú, its patchworked mechanism only clicks, and he only managed to murder Geary with it by using it to bludgeon her.