Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Thin Man. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1934. Originally published in abridged form in Redbook (December 1933). Reprinted many times. Film: MGM, 1945, starring William Powell & Myrna Loy. (A total of six films were made based on the characters.) TV series: NBC, 1957-59, starring Peter Lawford & Phyllis Kirk.

   Nick and Nora Charles are terrific inventions. Equals at witty repartee. Equals at powers of observation, if not detection. Equals at handling their booze.

   That’s what’s fun about the book: Nick and Nora. They’re screwball and they don’t care who knows it. But as screwball and drunk as they are, they’re still more deft than the daft coppers.

   Nick’s a retired detective. Retired since he married Nora and her rich uncle died, leaving enough for Nick and Nora to remain comfortably housed and soused from here to eternity.

   Nick wouldn’t be drug into any more detection, either, if he could help it. But help it he can’t. For a former client of his, the titular Thin Man, is a murder suspect. He’s disappeared, but leaves word with his lawyer that he wants Nick hired to find the real killer. Price is no object.

   Now Nick has no need of the Thin Man’s money. But gangster’s bullets, the cops, and the Thin Man’s ex and kids won’t leave Nick be. So he’s really got no choice but to solve the thing so he can be left alone.

   I’d remembered who ‘did it’, as this was probably the 3rd time reading it over the years. But it really doesn’t matter. The wit doesn’t grow old. And like Pound says, ‘art is news that stays news’. And this is art, for sure. At least in my book.

   A terrific, witty book. Nick and Nora are great fun to hang out with. The only thing I can’t figure is how the movie sequels got called “….The Thin Man….” (‘After…’, ‘Another…’, ‘Shadow of…’, ‘…goes home’, ‘Song of…’). Not to give anything away, but the Thin Man ain’t having any more adventures after this one.

   

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS PI Review
by Robert E. Briney

   

STANLEY ELLIN – The Dark Fantastic. John Milano #2. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1983. Berkley, paperback, 1985.

   Stanley Ellin is one of the most honored of contemporary writers of mystery fiction. Beginning with his first story in 1948, he consistently won prizes in the annual short-story contests run by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He is a three-time winner of the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America: for Best Short Story in 1954 and 1956 and for Best Novel (The Eighth Circle) in 1958. Four other stories (the most recent in 1983) and one novel have appeared on the short list of nominees for the Edgar. His novel Mirror, Mirror on the Wall ( 1972) was awarded France’s Grand Prix de Littdrature Policifte in 1975.

   He was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1969, and in 1981 received that organization’s Grand Master Award honoring his lifetime achievement in the mystery field. The point of this litany of awards is that they are all deserved. As a careful craftsman with an ear for language and a deep concern for its proper use, as an acute observer of the human condition, and as an inventive plotter with a flair for the unexpected, Ellin has maintained a consistent level of quality that makes him indeed a grand master of his art.

   A string of awards and a proven track record do not, however, guarantee that publishers will jump to accept a book with potentially controversial elements. The Dark Fantastic was rejected by several major publishing houses before being picked up by a relatively small specialty publisher. It subsequently gathered a stack of favorable reviews in the United States, sold to a major British publisher, and has become a feather in the cap of the Mysterious Press.

   The story alternates between two viewpoints: that of Charles Witter Kirwan, a retired college professor with madness eating at his brain just as cancer is eating at his body; and that of John Milano, a private detective first introduced in Star Light, Star Bright (1979), who specializes in the recovery of stolen works of art. Kirwan, reluctant landlord of an apartment building in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, plans to blow up the building with himself and his black tenants inside. Among the tenants are the family of Christine Bailey, who works as a receptionist in a Manhattan art gallery currently under investigation by Milano.

   From this tenuous connection, the paths of Kirwan and Milano are drawn inexorably together. Ultimately, Milano is the only person who has a chance to uncover Kirwan’s plot; but can he stop it in time? Ellin tightens the screws expertly. and the suspense intensifies up to the very end.

   Kirwan’s chapters are in the form of transcripts of a tape-recorded journal in which he attempts to explain the reasons for his destructive plan, while recounting the day-to-day progress toward its accomplishment. The transcripts are studded with racial invective-not mere ethnic name-calling, but the type of inventive viciousness that an educated mind can apply to the expression of its prejudices.

   These passages make uncomfortable reading, especially in view of the skill with which Ellin takes us into Kirwan’s mind and makes us understand the familial and societal roots of his attitudes. Another source of discomfort for some readers lies in the explicit descriptions of Kirwan’ s sexual victimization of Christine’s teenaged sister.

   But Ellin handles this highly charged material with assured skill and without a hint of sensationalism. The book is a serious psychological study, a detective story, an unusual love story, and an exercise in down-to-the-wire suspense: a worthy addition to the author’s already impressive body of work.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:

   

DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Cabinet of Dr. Leng. Agent Pendergast #21. Grand Central, hardcover, January 2023; paperback, September 2023.

   Previously in the Pendergast saga in Bloodless, volume twenty, FBI Special Agent Aloyious Pendergast had discovered that his apprentice and companion Constance was in fact immortal and had grown up in the madhouse and mansion of terror of serial killer and mad scientist Dr. Leng in the 19th Century.

   Now as volume twenty-one, The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, opens, Constance has discovered a one way ticket back to the 19th Century where she plans to destroy Leng and save the life of her brother and sister leaving Pendergast trying to find a way to save her while his friend Vincent D’Gosta of NYPD Homicide investigates the case of the frozen curator of the Museum of Natural History where his first adventure with Pendergast, Relic, took place twenty-two books earlier.

   Have to catch my breath after that.

   And if that hasn’t chased you off…

   The long running Pendergast saga of bestselling thrillers has been one of the great modern pulp sagas, half mystery/detective mixed with SF, horror, the Gothic tradition, monsters, immortal villains (Wilkie Collins’ Count Fosco showed up as the villain in Brimstone), and whatever else the two have chosen to throw in the mix. Pendergast is a Holmesian figure given to eccentricity and mysterious statements and perhaps the best of the series has been the two trilogies the Diogenes Trilogy and the Helen Trilogy (Diogenes is Pendergast’s dangerous and mad brother and Helen was his wife) while the work in question is the first volume in yet another trilogy so a cliffhanger is guaranteed.

   You can be certain Pendergast and D’Agosta will manage to travel back to 19th Century New York to match wits with Dr. Leng (shades of Berkeley Square and John Dickson Carr’s Fire Burn and The Devil in Velvet) and there will be thrills, melodrama, and twists enough for a French serial novel by Dumas, Sue, or, Feval (maybe all three) with a smattering of Universal Pictures Horror classics and Hammer Films.

   It is all done straight faced with absolute conviction, and whatever the flaws of the two writers, spinning a plot and creating interesting characters are not among their weaknesses. It’s all a bit like the theater of Grand Guignol where half the fun is how well they get away with all the theatrics. Mad men, serial killers, ancient monsters, mysterious Tibetian secret knowledge, and super villains haunt these pages all pitted against the eccentric and high-handed Pendergast and by now a small army of regulars who aide him.

   Pendergast is surely one of the great modern detectives however wild his detections get, modeled on Holmes, but more likely to face the kind of enemies Sexton Blake and Arsene Lupin did, and where else do you get dialogue like this bit addressed by Pendergast to D’Gosta:

   “I truly welcome your companionship here in the library as long as we speak of other things (than Constance’s disappearance). Reminiscences are either good or bad.” He reached for bottle of absinthe. “Strange as it seems, even the zombies you refer to seem almost a nostalgic interlude to me now, but first tell more about the frozen curator.”

   
   You just don’t get dialogue like that often these days. Frozen curators and nostalgic zombies just don’t haunt the pages of pulp fiction as the once did back in the good old days of The Spider, Operator # 5, and The Green Lama.

   This review is a bit tongue-in-cheek, as are the books, but the books are highly enjoyable and excellent time-killers that keep readers happily turning pages and coming back.

Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

WILLIAM MAXWELL – So Long, See You Tomorrow. Serialized in The New Yorker, Oct 1, Oct 8 1979. Knopf, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine Books, paperback, 1981. Vintage, softcover, 1996, 2011. Included in Later novels and stories: the Chateau; So long, see you tomorrow; stories and improvisations, 1957-1999, Library of America, hardcover, 2008. National Book Award winner, finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

   William Maxwell grew up in the 1910’s and 20’s in a small farming town in Illinois. With a mother dead of the Spanish Flu and his nose always stuck in a book, he had few friends.

   His one friend was a boy named Cletus. Cletus and William would play in the scaffolding of William’s unbuilt home. Until one fateful day.

   That day, Cletus’s dad murdered the man who’d been his dad’s best friend. But friend turned fiend when he started sleeping with his wife.

   Dad murdered the friend, the shot singing thru the prairie, then drowned himself in the swimming hole, tying a stone to his leg.

   William Maxwell never saw his friend Cletus again. But once.

   He saw him in high school. In Chicago.

   They locked eyes. But William turned away. And walked past.

   He never forgave himself for this act. And fifty-some-odd years later, he tried to write about it, to purge his guilt. He wrote the story. The story of Cletus and his father, his mother, and his father’s friend, his mother’s lover, and a murder.

   A murder that ripped a boy’s life asunder. That stole two fathers and a mother’s love. That left a boy alone. Without a friend to recognize him, in the halls of a Chicago high school in the 1920’s. And the guilt.

         ——————-

It’s a soft and wistful wisp of murder’s memory. It’s short and yet seems much longer. It lingers. Like life. It was good.

ANNE McCAFFREY “Weyr Search.” Novella. Dragonriders of Pern #1. First appeared in Analog SF, October 1967, Reprinted in Nebula Award Stories Three, edited by Roger Zelazny (Doubleday, hardcover, 1968), among others. Nominated for the Nebula AwarD in 1968 for Best Novella of 1967. Winner of Hugo Award that year for that category.

   The traditions and ballads of Pern glorify the dragons and their masters, but the time of crisis is past, at least for the time being, and forgetfulness has come easily, A new Weyrwoman is needed for the dragon queen about to be hatched, and dragonmen venture forth to find a suitable girl.

   Well written, but there exists too much feeling of looking on from the outside, A sequel is definitely demanded. The map is of little use.

Rating: ***½

— June 1968.
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Karol Kay Hope

   

AARON ELKINS – Fellowship of Fear. Gideon Oliver #1. Walker, hardcover, 1982. Popular Library, paperback, 1986. TV series: Quoting from Wikipedia “Gideon Oliver is a prime time television series that ran on the ABC television network between February 1989 and May 1989 as part of the ABC Mystery Movie rotation, along with B.L. Stryker, Kojak and Columbo. On the air for only five episodes, the series starred Louis Gossett Jr., and was created by Dick Wolf.”

   The early 1980s spawned a great many new mystery writers, and Aaron Elkins is one of the best of them. This first novel introduces us to Gideon Oliver, a young anthropology professor (Elkins himself teaches anthropology in northern California) who signed up for a summer teaching stint in Europe with the U.S. Overseas College. He’s recovering from the death of his beloved wife the year before and needs a break from that reality. And he’s never been to Europe.

   Oliver gets a change of pace, all right. Far from the confines of academic life, he’s cast as the main character in an international spy ring — but not until he’s been robbed, attacked, and followed all over Europe does he take it seriously. He then teams up with John Lau, a U.S. security officer, who’s not quite so naive about these matters. After being suitably impressed by Oliver’s fine investigative mind — he is a physical anthropologist, after all, and used to solving mysteries with little more than a sliver of bone and some ash for evidence — Lau teams with him and they attack the spy operation with fresh enthusiasm.

   Elkins has a good sense of contemporary character, dialogue, and plot. Gideon Oliver is a good man, and Elkins is good, too. He writes sparsely, to the point, and is cagey enough to keep us wondering until the very end.

   Elkins’s second novel, The Dark Place ( 1983), also features Oliver and is set in the Olympic National Park in Washington State. It also has the distinction of being the first mystery to involve the ongoing hunt for Sasquatch, otherwise known as Bigfoot.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

      The Gideon Oliver series

1 Fellowship of Fear (1982)
2 The Dark Place (1983)
3 Murder in the Queen’s Armes (1985)
4 Old Bones (1987)
5 Curses! (1989)
6 Icy Clutches (1990)
7 Make No Bones (1991)
8 Dead Men’s Hearts (1994)
9 Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
10 Skeleton Dance (2000)
11 Good Blood (2004)
12 Where There’s a Will (2005)
13 Unnatural Selection (2006)
14 Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
15 Uneasy Relations (2008)
16 Skull Duggery (2009)
17 Dying on the Vine (2012)
18 Switcheroo (2016)

The Amazing Colossal Belgian:
A Quartet of Christie Expansions
Part 4: Remembered Death
by Matthew R. Bradley

   

   Agatha Christie’s revisions of her Hercule Poirot stories sometimes involved expansion into novels, sometimes involved exchanging one of her many sleuths for another…and, on one occasion, both. “Yellow Iris” (The Strand Magazine, July 1937; Hartford Courant, October 10, 1937, as “Poirot Wins Again”) was first collected in The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (1939), and it later sprouted into Remembered Death (1945), originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (July 15-September 2, 1944) and then published in the U.K. under Christie’s original title, Sparkling Cyanide. Making his final appearance, as the featured detective in that novel, is Colonel Johnnie (aka Johnny) Race.

   Despite supplanting him there, Race had been Poirot’s good friend in Cards on the Table (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937), both of which were first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (May 2-June 6, 1936 and May 15-July 3, 1937, respectively). Embodied by David Niven in the 1978 feature-film version of Nile, Race actually debuted solo in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), first serialized in the London Evening News, in no fewer than fifty installments (November 29, 1923-January 28, 1924), as Anne the Adventurous. “Iris” was adapted for radio in 1937—by the author, adding the initial article “The” to the title—and 1943, and with David Suchet, in 1991, for Series 5 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

   Late at night, Poirot receives an urgent call from an unknown woman, a summons to the Jardin des Cygnes, where he is warmly greeted by “fat Luigi.” Having been directed to the “table with yellow irises,” he observes that all others bear pink tulips, and finds it set for six but currently occupied only by his friend Anthony Chapell, who is surprised to see him and mournfully reports that his “favourite girl,” Pauline Weatherby, is dancing with someone else. Soon, they are joined by her; their host, her brother-in-law and guardian, rich American businessman Barton Russell; Lola Valdez, “the South American dancer in the new show at the Metropole,” and Stephen Carter, who is “in the diplomatic service.”

   Poirot’s circumspect questions fail to reveal which of the ladies called him, while Barton says it is apt that he has taken the seat left open to honor his wife, Iris, poisoned in New York four years ago that night with the same five present. With the remains of a packet of cyanide found in her handbag, it was presumed a suicide, but Russell says he has long disbelieved it, certain she was murdered by one of those at the table. He leaves to confer with the dance band, and as they launch into the same song that was playing that night in New York, a waiter circles the table in the darkness surrounding the spotlight, filling their glasses with champagne; just as Russell returns, Pauline slumps over, dead the same way.

   Finding nothing in her handbag, Poirot announces that there is no need to have everybody searched, and has Tony flip the packet from the pocket of Carter, who said that Lola “had rather a fancy for Barton…in New York”; Russell, in turn, asserts that Iris loved him, and was killed to avoid a scandal. But the ensuing “Resurrection of Pauline” is revealed to be part of Poirot’s plan to expose Russell, who posed as a waiter in the darkness, for a failed murder. Just as in “The Theft of the Royal Ruby” (aka “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding”; 1960), Poirot had conspired with the “victim” to fake her own murder, having deduced that it was she who called, and whispered in her ear when the lights went down.

   Poirot tells Russell, “I do not know…whether you killed your wife in the same way, or whether her suicide suggested the idea of this crime to you,” presumably to cover up his misappropriation of funds under his stewardship. Pauline elects not to prosecute Barton, who also dropped the half-empty packet into Carter’s pocket, and is advised by Poirot to “go quickly [but] be careful in the future.” Christie incorporates the lyrics to two original songs: “I’ve Forgotten You” (set to music for ITV’s Suchet adaptation), performed by a hypnotic black girl at Barton’s behest, and “There’s Nothing Like Love for Making You Miserable,” which ends the story as Tony and Pauline happily dance off to “Our Tune.”

   Sparkling Cyanide was adapted for television as 1983 and 2003 telefilms and “Meurtre au champagne [Champagne Murder],” a 2013 Series 2 episode of the French Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie [The Little Murders of…]; for BBC Radio 4 in 2012; and in the Japanese manga album Chimunīzu-kan no himitsu (The Secret of Chimneys, 2006). The novel’s rough analogs are Barton Russell/George Barton, Iris/Rosemary, Pauline/Iris Marle, and Carter/rising M.P. Stephen Farraday. At the Luxembourg restaurant, one year after Rosemary’s death, they are joined by Lady Alexandra Farraday; George’s secretary, Ruth Lessing; and Anthony Browne, who has a “shadowy past and…suspicious present.”

   Two couples sit at adjacent tables: Pedro Morales and his girlfriend, Christine Shannon, and Gerald Tollington and his fiancée, Patricia Brice-Woodworth. But before that fateful second dinner party, which begins halfway through the book, Christie devotes chapters to each of the six, explaining their backstories, relationships with Rosemary and/or motives to kill her. When their mother died, 17-year-old Iris went to live with her married sister, who’d inherited a fortune from her godfather, Viola’s failed suitor “Uncle” Paul Bennett; a week before Rosemary died, Iris had interrupted her—recovering from the flu to which her depression was attributed—writing Iris a letter, revealing that it would then go to her.

   George suggests that Iris, who inherits on her 21st birthday or marriage, remain living at Elvaston Square and that her paternal aunt, Lucilla Drake (impoverished by the financial claims of black-sheep son Victor), join them to chaperon her in society. Six months later, in a trunk in the attic, Iris discovers Rosemary’s unsent letter to “Leopard,” the lover with whom she planned to go away. Iris believes that he must be either Farraday—said to be a possible future Prime Minister, whose influential in-laws, Lord and Lady Kidderminster, grudgingly let Sandra marry beneath her station—or globe-trotting Browne, unseen since Rosemary’s death, who abruptly reappears only one week after Iris had found that letter.

   Tony cultivates Iris, and George, after cautioning her that “nobody seems to know much about the fellow,” begins behaving oddly, buying Little Priors, the Sussex summer house near the Farradays’ Fairhaven. At last, he admits receiving anonymous letters saying that Rosemary was murdered, and if so, it must have been by someone at the table. We learn of Victor planting—or nurturing?—in Ruth’s mind that George should have wed her, not Rosemary; of Browne’s dismay when Rosemary reveals that Victor had outed him as ex-con Tony Morelli, a dangerous secret; and of Stephen’s horror when Rosemary suggested that she and “Leopard” divorce their spouses and marry each other, destroying his career.

   While intuiting that Rosemary had a lover, George was uncertain who, and now hopes to ask Race, invited to that first dinner yet unable to attend, his advice about the letters. He tells Sandra that—on a “nerve specialist’s” advice—he is arranging the second to get Iris, never the same since, back onto the metaphoric horse, but admitting her knowledge of the affair to Stephen, she says, correctly, “I think it’s a trap.” Shortly before they are to leave Sussex, Tony surprises Iris by asking her, for reasons she must take on trust, to “come up to London and marry me without telling anybody,” but scoffs at the notion of Rosemary’s being murdered; Tony also sees the arrival of Race, obliquely noting that they “had met.”

   George recaps Rosemary’s death, just as in “Yellow Iris,” and admits buying Little Priors because he suspected that her lover was either Stephen or Tony; the latter’s name rings a bell with Race, who wonders what motivated the letters and agrees that, while everybody had a motive, George would be unlikely to rake it all up if he did it. Secretive about his plan, George asks Race, formerly of M.I.5, to attend, yet is warned, “These melodramatic ideas out of books don’t work.” So it seems as Christie takes a hard left and George, who had Ruth deputize Buenos Aires agent Alexander Ogilvie to pay off for embezzler Victor, keels over after toasting, “To Rosemary, for remembrance,” this time sans resurrection…

   Race saw nothing suspicious from his table some distance away, and compares notes with Chief Inspector Kemp (who had worked under Superintendent Battle, another second-tier sleuth in Cards on the Table), agreeing that this confirms George’s suspicions. Iris enters as Race interviews Lucilla, announcing her plan to marry Tony, then privately shows him Rosemary’s letter, certain now that “Leopard” was Stephen and she a suicide. Race’s old friend Mrs. Rees-Talbot is the new employer of Barton’s ex-parlourmaid, Betty Archdale, who reports overhearing Tony warn Rosemary she could be disfigured or “bumped off” if she spoke of “Morelli,” a convicted saboteur whom Race realizes is an undercover agent.

   Reading of George’s death, actress Chloe Elizabeth West visits Kemp, saying she’d been hired by him to fill the empty seat—coiffed, dressed, and made up like Rosemary—until a call from someone cancelled it; confronted by Kemp about their affair, Stephen insists Sandra knew nothing. A scared Iris tells Tony that in the aftermath, she found planted in her handbag, and ditched under the table, an empty cyanide packet, and he convinces her to fess up to Kemp. After two failed attempts on Iris’s life, both revealed to be the work of Ruth, Tony identifies her as the true target of the second murder, intended to be taken as another suicide, but through a mix-up, George drank from Iris’s glass instead and died.

   “Pedro” was Victor, who posed as a waiter while ostensibly making a phone call, and had conspired with Ruth, knowing that if Iris died unwed, her money would go to ever-pliable Lucilla. Christie’s acorn-into-oak job is superb, with the additional suspects and motives well drawn, as are secondary characters such as Lucilla, whose willful self-delusion about Victor is at once amusing and tragic. My only criticism is with the novel’s structure, as it moves backward and forward so often, before and after Rosemay’s death, as to leave this reader (and summarizer) occasionally uncertain as to where he was in that time sequence, a minor quibble in a work that I thoroughly enjoyed, however much I missed Papa Poirot.

         — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

      Editions cited:

“Yellow Iris” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: William Morrow (2013)

Remembered Death: Pocket (1947)

Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

MALCOM BRALY – Shake Him Til He Rattles. Gold Medal k1311, paperback original, 1963 (cover art by Harry Bennett). Belmont, paperback, 1971. Stark House Press, softcover, 2006 [published together with It’s Cold Out There].

   Hip saxophone player loves his grass. Sick narco cop wants his ass. Tis the story of the cat and mouse between narco and hipster. Spoiler Alert: The hipster wins.

   Pros: Told in legit Sixties beat lingo.

   Cons: The story is too pat and neat and clean and happy for this noir fan. But hey, nice to see a Gold Medal with a happy ending now and then I guess.
   

ROBERT SILVERBERG “Hawksbill Station”. Novella. First appeared in Galaxy SF, August 1967. Reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1968, edited by Terry Carr & Donald A. Wollheim (Ace, paperback, 1967). First collected in The Reality Trip and Other Implausibilities (Ballantine, paperback, 1973). Expanded to the novel of the same title (Doubleday, hardcover, 1968). Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1968 for Best Novella of 1967.

   Governments of the 21st Century have found Hawksbill Station, located two billions years in Earth’s past, an excellent spot for deported political agitators. Jim Barrett, with greatest seniority, is the acknowledged king whose kingdom is going completely insane. A crisis seems to form with the new arrival of Lew Hahn, who is strangely different.

   The ending is a letdown from what goes before, is perhaps too simple in comparison with the masterful construction that precedes. It could be the background for a much longer story.

Rating: ****

— June 1968.
Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

RICHARD WRIGHT – The Man Who Lived Underground. Library of America, hardcover, 2021. [Previously unpublished novel from the 1940s. Its only publication in Wright’s lifetime was in Accent, Spring 1942. and then only in drastically condensed form; it was later included as such in the posthumous short story collection Eight Men (1961).] Harper, softcover, 2022.

   Black dude gets off work, heading home to his pregnant wife, minding his own business, gets stopped by the cops. Who accuse him of murder.

   He’s innocent, but the cops’ll hear nothing of it. They give him the third degree, smack him around til he cannot see, then make him sign a confession.

   He escapes custody, leaping into manhole, hiding in the sewers.

   While in the sewers, he finds that he’s able to break into basements and get what he needs to survive. And more.

   One basement yields a workman’s lunch box with thick pork chop sandwiches and a nice juicy apple. A radio. And a toolbox. Another is the basement of a jewelry store, he pockets a bunch of diamonds and golden rings. Another is a butcher shop where he takes a cleaver. Another has a safe full of cash and coin.

   He takes the plunder back to an unused storage basement in a Black church, listening to the hymns, to all the guilt and sighs and cries of the parish as they pray forgiveness for a crime they never done.

   What is the meaning of all this plunder, he wonders. The cash has no use for him as he hides out beneath the city. He has all he needs. He wallpapers his dwelling with hundred dollar bills using glue from the tool chest. He hangs the rings on nails he plants in the wall. The diamonds he stamps in the floor, like stars in the sky. In reverse.

   Suddenly he realizes that, despite his indignation at being accused of a crime he never committed, we’re all guilty. And the sooner we realize that we’re all guilty, and lay down our arms, our guns, our cleavers, our pride, our defenses, our petty larcenies, our pretense, the sooner this world can be won.

   The sooner this world can be one.

   So, after a time, he decides to come back up for air. To test his way in the world again.

By this time, the cops have forgotten all about him, having found the actual murderer. But he can’t leave well enough alone. He has to convince the cops that he IS guilty. Perhaps not of that crime but of others. Of taking the jewelry, the rings and the money.

   The cops don’t understand him. They figure he’s gone mad. But just the same, can they leave such a madman loose? Or shall he be condemned?

         ———–

   The best thing I’ve read in an awfully long time. Enjoyed it a heckuva lot more than Native Son. It reads like a cross of Cozzens’s Castaway and Kafka’s Trial, with a dash of “The Grand Inquisitor” at the end. It’s realistic enough to be realism, and in fact was based on an actual series of crimes committed underground via a sewer network. But the power of the thing comes from the fact that while it sounds in reality, it sounds equally in allegory. And you (as well as the protagonist) have a sneaking suspicion that something of terrific theological meaning is right at the cusp. This is where Kafka and the Grand Inquisitor come in. Nothing is stated in any express way and no conclusions are reached. But ambiguity yields a power and responsibility split with the reader. You’re left figuring. Forevermore.

   The edition I read also had an enlightening essay about the composition of the piece by Wright called “Memories of my Grandmother”. He talks about how, in his work, there are two sections. The first section is BEFORE his character is ‘broken’ and the second section is AFTER they’re broken. Something happens in a novel, perhaps a crime, that rifts the character from their ordinary life. They think they know what life is all about. And then something happens. And they are thrown from their life into a new ambiguity where none of their prior truths hold true.

    The character becomes supple in the writer’s hands, like Gumby, and the author can do anything with them at this point. All meaning becomes unhinged and ready to be rehung however you like in a world turned upside down. It’s the best thing I’ve read describing the effectiveness of the crime novel in communicating the experience of absurdity in a world gone noir.

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