Post by kitty on Mar 14, 2012 17:32:53 GMT -5
Nevermore
William Hjortsber's novel (not to be confused with Kelly Kreagh's YA horror tale) is a murder mystery wrapped around an actual meeting between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle. Hjortsber has carefully researched this story. He has learned an awful lot about 1920s New York and no one could claim he wears his learning lightly. The opening of the novel bogs down again and again as irrelevant details of time and place are thrown in to demonstrate how thoroughly the era has been studied. Unfortunately, this information is seldom incorporated smoothly into the story. Writers sometimes joke about "As you know, Jim," conversations where one character tells another stuff that they obviously both already know, simply in order to convey this information to the reader. Yet here Arthur Conan Doyle actually starts one comment with, "Well, as you all must know…" Such clunky intrusions of background mean that, despite the superfluous detail, there is little real feel for the period coming through. It's also unfortunate that there are occasional mistakes. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus – surely quite a well-known landmark even to Americans – is described as a fountain, which it is not and never has been. Cigarettes are referred to as coffin nails, which is unlikely in the 1920s, when they were often advertised as a healthy diet aid.
Hjortsber is a successful screenwriter and this novel reads as if it is a film script that didn't make it to the screen. If it were a script, the vast amounts of historical detail would be covered with a few sweeping shots of New York in 1923. We could then cut straight to the plot, which – once it gets going – is quite entertaining. It's a mix of ghost story, historical novel and detective thriller. Again, the mix of genres would probably work better on film than on the printed page. The plot has a murderer who is re-enacting murders from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Conan Doyle (a famous believer in ghosts) keeps seeing the spirit of Poe. In a film, the ghost would be very effective because we would actually see it. On paper, it doesn't quite work. Poe doesn't give Conan Doyle any information and, indeed, does not contribute to the plot at all. He just appears every now and then, expresses confusion about where he is, and then fades away again.
In fairness to Poe, he's not that much insubstantial than the characters of Houdini and Conan Doyle. The details of the two famous men and their lives are again a tribute to Hjortsber's research skills, but they do not have any inner lives to explore. Houdini is arrogant. We know this because the author repeatedly tells us so, but the reasons for his arrogance are not clear. Conan Doyle is superstitious, apparently in part because he is desperate to re-establish contact with close family who have died. But there's no sense of a man whose grief has driven him to the point where he is a sucker for every sham spiritualist he meets. In real life, this is a man who claimed that a faked photograph taken by two young girls was proof of actual physical fairies at the bottom of their garden. (The fact that the fairies were identical to the illustrations in a children's book completely passed him by.) In the novel, the picture is further confused by not only the presence of Poe's ghost but that of an apparently genuine spiritualist who seems to be a succubus who seduces Houdini and eventually bears his child. Confused? You might well be, but all this is happening in a sub-plot. The main plot (re-enacting the murders in Poe's stories – remember?) makes more sense and is quite fun. The idea of a murderer dressing up as a gorilla to re-enact 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' or building a pendulum axe for 'The Pit and the Pendulum' is deliciously ridiculous and almost justifies the rest of it.
If this book ever makes it to its natural home on the screen, it could well be a five star movie. Unfortunately, it only just scrapes in as a three star novel.
(REVIEW BY TOM)
William Hjortsber's novel (not to be confused with Kelly Kreagh's YA horror tale) is a murder mystery wrapped around an actual meeting between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle. Hjortsber has carefully researched this story. He has learned an awful lot about 1920s New York and no one could claim he wears his learning lightly. The opening of the novel bogs down again and again as irrelevant details of time and place are thrown in to demonstrate how thoroughly the era has been studied. Unfortunately, this information is seldom incorporated smoothly into the story. Writers sometimes joke about "As you know, Jim," conversations where one character tells another stuff that they obviously both already know, simply in order to convey this information to the reader. Yet here Arthur Conan Doyle actually starts one comment with, "Well, as you all must know…" Such clunky intrusions of background mean that, despite the superfluous detail, there is little real feel for the period coming through. It's also unfortunate that there are occasional mistakes. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus – surely quite a well-known landmark even to Americans – is described as a fountain, which it is not and never has been. Cigarettes are referred to as coffin nails, which is unlikely in the 1920s, when they were often advertised as a healthy diet aid.
Hjortsber is a successful screenwriter and this novel reads as if it is a film script that didn't make it to the screen. If it were a script, the vast amounts of historical detail would be covered with a few sweeping shots of New York in 1923. We could then cut straight to the plot, which – once it gets going – is quite entertaining. It's a mix of ghost story, historical novel and detective thriller. Again, the mix of genres would probably work better on film than on the printed page. The plot has a murderer who is re-enacting murders from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Conan Doyle (a famous believer in ghosts) keeps seeing the spirit of Poe. In a film, the ghost would be very effective because we would actually see it. On paper, it doesn't quite work. Poe doesn't give Conan Doyle any information and, indeed, does not contribute to the plot at all. He just appears every now and then, expresses confusion about where he is, and then fades away again.
In fairness to Poe, he's not that much insubstantial than the characters of Houdini and Conan Doyle. The details of the two famous men and their lives are again a tribute to Hjortsber's research skills, but they do not have any inner lives to explore. Houdini is arrogant. We know this because the author repeatedly tells us so, but the reasons for his arrogance are not clear. Conan Doyle is superstitious, apparently in part because he is desperate to re-establish contact with close family who have died. But there's no sense of a man whose grief has driven him to the point where he is a sucker for every sham spiritualist he meets. In real life, this is a man who claimed that a faked photograph taken by two young girls was proof of actual physical fairies at the bottom of their garden. (The fact that the fairies were identical to the illustrations in a children's book completely passed him by.) In the novel, the picture is further confused by not only the presence of Poe's ghost but that of an apparently genuine spiritualist who seems to be a succubus who seduces Houdini and eventually bears his child. Confused? You might well be, but all this is happening in a sub-plot. The main plot (re-enacting the murders in Poe's stories – remember?) makes more sense and is quite fun. The idea of a murderer dressing up as a gorilla to re-enact 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' or building a pendulum axe for 'The Pit and the Pendulum' is deliciously ridiculous and almost justifies the rest of it.
If this book ever makes it to its natural home on the screen, it could well be a five star movie. Unfortunately, it only just scrapes in as a three star novel.
(REVIEW BY TOM)