Product Description

The year is 1923 and a viciously ingenious maniac is leaving a trailof corpses across New York City. It isn't ling before ace crime reporter Damon Runyan begins to see a strange pattern emerging from these apparently random slayings -each murder uncannily recreates the gruesome denouement of an Edgar Allan Poe short story. Arthur Conan doyle, in New York on a lecture tour, cannot resist the challenge of solving the murders, assisted by his friend and fellow debunker of fake spiritualists Harry Houdini. But unknown to Conan Doyle, Houdini has fallen under the spell of a mysterious and compelling beautiful widow who claims to be the incarnation of the goddess Isis. As the bodies mount up ever more horribly and the spirit of Poe himself seems to be abroad, can the two friends unravel the deadly mix of illusion and reality before Houdini himself becomes the final victim of this bizarre madness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1028858 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

A splendid historical "whodunnit"
I enjoyed this book very much. It is set in 1920s New York, and the main protagonists are real life people, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, and Damon Runyan, amongst others. Mr. Hjortsberg deals with these people sympathetically and amusingly, whilst intertwining their lives with a series of murders all linked in with famous Edgar Allan Poe stories, and Conan Doyle and Houdini's well documented differences of opinion on spiritualism and contact with the other world through mediums. This is a literate and intelligent book, and I thoroughly recommend it to lovers of modern history and classic whodunnits. We even have Poe's ghost intervening in the action! Great stuff.

a period diversion
This fairly competent detecetive story suffers somewhat from excessive name dropping, the same names in some cases that Doctorow used to far better period effect in "Ragtime". Implausible, but with a reasonable pace and an accessible style this is a mystery for those who find mystery stories unrewarding.

Too much waffle and padding
This "detective thriller" takes far too long to get going and then it's over before you know it. Hjortsberg gets bogged down setting the scene, introducing a host of historical characters (Conan Doyle, Houdini, Damon Runyon, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack Dempsey, Ring Lardner, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Meyer ......),a debate on spiritualism, and period details, often for their own sake. Finally there's very little deductive work, Conan Doyle is a bit of a bumbler - more like Watson than Holmes. The motives and psychology of the mad serial killer are poorly explained and the plot becomes wildly convoluted, implausible and melodramatic. The characters are fairly single dimensional - like vaudeville performers rather than real people. Hjortsberg should read Caleb Carr for some tips about working period details into a plot and always remember it is "background". If he's going to write social history he's got to research his facts better - for instance, in cricket, you don't "bowl a century".