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The Twenty-Year Death TrilogyCreated by Ariel S. Winter"I had on my good suit, a navy blue so deep it looked black, with a pressed white shirt, a red-and-blue-striped tie, a red handkerchief, and freshly polished loafers. I'd had a shower and a shave." -- Dennis Foster calls on his client, in The Falling Star "Yeah, I'd always gotten a raw deal, and I was too pathetic to do anything about it, and I hated myself for that." -- Shem goes all Thompson on us in Police at the Funeral
A long-time New York bookseller and mystery reader himself, the author paid tribute in this audacious concept of a book, actually three novels in one, crafting a multi-part epic that jumps from the thirties to the forties to the fifties, each novel written in the style of one of that decade's most influential authors of crime fiction. The first installment, Malvineau Prison, is set in 1931 in France, is written in the style of Georges Simenon, and revolves around the efforts of Chief Inspector Pelletier to solve a murder of a man found dead in the gutter in the small provincial town of Verargent. The trail eventually leads the to the dead man's lovely but fragile daughter -- and to her bookish, twitchy American husband, Shem Rosenkrantz, a well-respected writer who's finding it hard to write. It's a pitch-perfect impersonation of Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels, right down the the dark bleary tone, the terse sketchy prose and the persistent rain. It's the second novel, though, that will really interest fans of this site. The Falling Star follows the couple to Southern California, where DENNIS FOSTER, a hard-boiled San Angeles gumshoe who's so Chandleresque he could make a purist kick a hole in a stained glass window, is hired by a film studio to keep an eye on Shem's wife, now a Hollywood starlet (Shem, meanwhile, has begun writing for the movies). Foster's the narrator (of course) and his rat-a-tat-tat style, full of wisecracks and similes goes down gimlet-smooth. For those of you in dire need of a Chandler fix, it's at least as good as a shot of Parker's Poodle Springs or Black's The Black-Eyed Blonde. The final installment, Police at the Funeral, set in 1951, follows Shem and the missus to Baltimore, and allows Shem to narrate his increasingly dark and disturbing story. How dark? How disturbing? Well, he is trying to channel Thompson, after all. A pretentious bit of literary jerking off? A clever parlour trick? A well-done photocopy lacking any originality or merit? The Twenty-Year Death was slagged as all those things, but a lot of people, including me, loved it. The sheer audacity of telling a story that sprawled over three decades and covered so much stylistic ground was enough to impress. But that Winter actually pulled it off, while managing to tell a bold, compelling and satisfying story full of love, obsession, madness and murder along the way? Well done, Mr. Winter. It is, simply, a must-read for anyone who takes their crime fiction seriously. Plus, it was a lot of fun. NOVELS
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. | Home | Detectives A-L M-Z | Film | Radio | Television | Web Comics | Comics | FAQs |
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