WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN – The Ross Forgery. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1973. Avon, paperback, 1975.

   The Ross Forgery, Hallahan’s second novel, is an unusual bibliomystery with a compelling and ingenious premise. New York typographer Edgar Ross, one of those brilliant but unsuccessful types, is approached by tycoon Emmett O’ Kane, who wants him to create a forgery of a nineteen thcentury folio by Thomas Wise. O’Kane’s stated reason: to show up a fellow collector and tycoon from Texas named Thomas Long Pickett, who has the world’s most complete collection of Wise pamphlets.

   Wise — a real person — was a famous British bibliophile who amassed one of the largest private libraries of the century; he also published, over a forty-year period, some fifty first editions of obscure works by major Victorian writers.

   It wasn’t until just before his death that those “first editions” were revealed as forgeries and Wise was unmasked as the greatest literary forger in the English language. But what O’Kane wants isn’t just a forgery; he wants a forgery of a forgery that doesn’t exist — a brand-new nineteenth-century Wisc pamphlet, created from scratch, that will be good enough to fool an expert and an expert’s scientific equipment.

   This seemingly impossible task is one that Ross, under normal circumstances, would never even have considered. But it so happens he is into the Mafia for $5000, the result of a penchant for gambling too often and not too well. So for a fee of $100,000, Ross promises O’Kane that he will somehow do the impossible.

   With the help of Michael Townsend, an English professor at St. David’s Academy for Young Men and a bibliophile of no small expertise, Ross sets out to design a “historically accurate facsimile” — a twenty-eight-page, 1881 Peppercorn Press pamphlet of “A Lodging for the Night” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

   The methods (all authentic) and machinations by which Ross and Townsend re-create the long-lost typeface and special ink and paper used in the 1880s make for fascinating reading. But that is only one aspect of this novel’s considerable appeal. Ross’ s efforts to keep the Mafia at bay and to find out what he suspects are hidden motives on O’ Kane’s part are two other major plot threads; a shadowy game of deceit and deception that includes murder is yet another thread.

   Hallahan’ s construction, which utilizes constantly shifting viewpoints and the narration of seemingly unrelated events, is both straightforward and devious — a fictional sleight of hand that, when all the components finally dovetail, reveals a stunning and violent surprise ending. The Ross Forgery is no forgery when it comes to high-quality suspense novels: It’s the real thing.

   Hallahan’s other thrillers have strong occult themes and fall outside the purview of crime fiction. Among these are The Search for Joseph Tully (1974) and The Monk (1983).

———
   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.