Nevermore

William Hjortsberg

This one was sitting on the stack for quite a while. When your last novel gets turned into a cult film starring Mickey Rourke, and your next novel is picked up by Atlantic Monthly Press, a reader expects that there's been some kind of major shift in tone, style, or some other indefinable literary quality that would make a hoity-toity press like Atlantic Monthly sit up and take notice.

Thankfully, nothing of the sort has occurred. Hjortsberg, best known for Falling Angel (the book that gave us that cinematic classic Angel Heart), turns in his seventh novel, and his first in a decade, give or take. It is 1923, in New York, and Arthur Conan Doyle is on his way to the city to begin a speaking tour in support of spiritualism. While he's in town, he wants to hook up with his old friend and renowned skeptic Harry Houdini. By coincidence, there's a serial killer at work in the city, and his murders are staged to match Edgar Allan Poe stories.

It's a classic Hjortsberg vintage-New-York romp with a high-powered cast of characters, a relatively low but sensational body count, and enough suspense to keep the pages turning. The revelation of the mystery is fumbled a bit (and in an odd way it reminded me of an Agatha Christie cozy... fancy that!), but the ending, which is just plain gratuitous, is pulled off with such wonderful panache that you've forgotten the whodunit bit within a page or so. Expect a movie version of this at some point; it begs for a screen treatment. Until then, however, it's just as well worth your time as any of Hjortsberg's other novels.