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Summary
Summary
"Bold, innovative, and thrilling - The Twenty-Year Death crackles with suspense and will keep you up late." - Stephen King
THERE'S NEVER BEEN A BOOK LIKE
THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH
A breathtaking first novel written in the form of three separate crime novels, each set in a different decade and penned in the style of a different giant of the mystery genre.
1931--
The body found in the gutter in France led the police inspector to the dead man's beautiful daughter--and to her hot-tempered American husband.
1941--
A hardboiled private eye hired to keep a movie studio's leading lady happy uncovers the truth behind the brutal slaying of a Hollywood starlet.
1951--
A desperate man pursuing his last chance at redemption finds himself with blood on his hands and the police on his trail...
Three complete novels that, taken together, tell a single epic story, about an author whose life is shattered when violence and tragedy consume the people closest to him. It is an ingenious and emotionally powerful debut performance from literary detective and former bookseller Ariel S. Winter, one that establishes this talented newcomer as a storyteller of the highest caliber.
Author Notes
A long-time bookseller at The Corner Bookstore in New York City and Borders in Baltimore, Ariel S. Winter is also the author of the forthcoming children's picture book One of a Kind (Aladdin) and of the blog We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie , devoted to the rediscovery of long-forgotten children's books written by literary icons such as John Updike, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein. nbsp;His writing has appeared in The Urbanite and on McSweeney's Internet Tendency , and in 2008 he won the Free Press "Who Can Save Us Now?" short story contest. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This isn't a first novel so much as a series of three discrete but interrelated first novels, each written (with apologies from the author) in the style of a different iconic thriller writer-Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson, respectively. This is a bold, not to say supremely cheeky, conceit-and if Winter hasn't completely channeled the hard hearts and gimlet styles of these dark, departed legends, the good news is that he delivers something even better: a hell of a lot of fun. The noir triptych is nominally linked by the presence of an alcoholic (but of course!) American writer, Shem Rosenkrantz, who remains largely-if menacingly-in the background for the first two installments before emerging (in first person) center stage in the last, best story. Set in the fictitious Verargent, France, circa 1931, the first book, Malniveau Prison, revolves around the mysterious death of a prisoner-the father of one Clothilde-ma-Fleur Meprise, Rosenkrantz's beautiful wife. (Along the way, some children-and Clothilde herself-go missing.) The search for the killer leads to a mysterious psychopath with a penchant for torturing tots, as well as a coverup at the titular prison. In the second, The Falling Star, set in 1941, Rosenkrantz is a womanizing L.A. screenwriter on a self-destructive slide. His wife, now working under the name Chloe Rose, is a successful but unstable starlet who suspects she's being followed. A suitably laconic Chandlerian PI, Dennis Foster, is enlisted to help the troubled star-but is he really being set up for a homicidal fall? In the third, and arguably darkest, tale, Police at the Funeral, it's 1951 in Calvert, Md., and Rose has been institutionalized, leaving Rosenkrantz-now a remorseful has-been-roiling in the tide of his boozy dissolution. "Yeah, I'd always gotten a raw deal, and I was too pathetic to do anything about it, and I hated myself for that" pretty much sums up the self-inflicted purgatory this antihero wallows in. The stories work wonderfully well individually, but taken together create a tapestry of associations and reflections, sort of like mirrors trained on other mirrors. The whole, as they say, is greater than the sum of its parts. Along the way, Winter manages to deliver more than a few winking nods to genre tropes without ever descending into the arch or the obvious. Though there's clearly something meta (not to say postmodern) about the whole endeavor, Winter never loses touch with his genre heart; the books practically radiate grassroots passion. No, he does not entirely capture Chandler's verbal color or masterful use of metaphor (but who does). Nor does he completely conjure up Thompson's furious fusion of horror and hilarity (but who does). He comes damn close to capturing Simenon's slick, spare procedural vibe. But in the end all these comparisons are, yes, odious-because Winter has created something more than a facile feat of literary ventriloquism. He has written a truly affecting and suspenseful triple treat that transcends the formal gimmick at its heart. Agent: Chelsea Lindman, Nicholas Ellison Agency. (Aug.) Reviewed by J.I. Baker, who is the author of The Empty Glass, which Blue Rider Press will publish in July. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Hard Case Crime originals are notable for capturing the feel of pulp classics without slavish imitation which makes this first novel somewhat unusual. Winter, a literary detective and former bookseller, tells an epic tale in the form of three novels written in the style of three different crime-fiction legends. Book 1, Malniveau Prison, channels Georges Simenon as Chief Inspector Pelleter tries to deduce how a murdered prisoner escaped the prison walls. Book 2, The Falling Star, is the Chandleresque story of a private eye, Dennis Foster, who's hired to reassure a paranoid movie star and maybe take the rap for a murder. A recurring character in both books is Shem Rosenkrantz, an American writer who first seeks seclusion in France and then squanders his talents in Hollywood. In book 3, Police at the Funeral, Rosenkrantz takes over the narration with the voice of a washed-up Jim Thompson protagonist, and, as he unravels, we see how the stories are stitched together. This is audacious and astonishingly executed. Winter understands the difference between mimicry and interpretation and opts for the latter, capturing the writers' voices, not merely their vocal tics. What might seem at first like an amusing exercise for crime-fiction buffs becomes by the end immersive, exhilarating, and revelatory.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WRITERS who pay homage to their literary deities by imitating their idiosyncratic voices and distinctive styles usually end up looking like kids playing dress-up in their parents' clothes. Which makes the stunt Ariel S. Winter pulls off in "The Twenty-Year Death" - three loosely linked but self-contained novels set in consecutive decades and written in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson -all the more extraordinary. The overarching design of this ambitious undertaking doesn't come completely into focus until the final novel, but the first strokes are drawn in "Malniveau Prison" when Winter casually introduces two secondary characters - the hot-tempered, hard-drinking American author Shem Rosenkrantz and his delicate, much younger French wife, Clotilde-ma-Fleur, the daughter of a murder victim. The couple will become increasingly prominent as the meta-story develops. Set in a small town in France in 1931, the novel is written in a contemplative narrative voice that keenly evokes Simenon and features a watchful detective with the discreet air of Inspector Maigret. A torrential spring rain predictably greets Chief Inspector Pelleter of the Central Police when he arrives in town at the request of an incarcerated killer who informs him that inmates have been mysteriously disappearing from the local prison. When one of these missing prisoners is found murdered, Pelleter slips into the Maigret role of the unknown and feared stranger whose very presence delivers an implicit threat to the community, which would prefer to keep its secrets to itself. The crimes in this story are more lurid than anything Maigret ever faced, and resolving them requires more physical action than metaphysical reflection. But aside from the occasional clunker ("His schedule was shot; tomorrow was going to be a nightmare"), the tone of bleak desolation is remarkably faithful to its illustrious model - an achievement that proves more elusive in the second novel. "The Falling Star," set in Hollywood in 1941, owes its cynical perspective to the novel's alienated narrator, a hard-boiled private eye cast in the mold of Raymond Chandler's archetypal noir hero, Philip Marlowe. An honorable man in a dishonorable profession, Dennis Foster has a personal code of ethics that distinguishes him from unsavory clients like the movie mogul who hires him to keep tabs on an unstable star - that same fragile French beauty, now known as Chloë Rose, first glimpsed in "Malniveau Prison." "Silly me," Foster says when he's discouraged from taking his baby-sitting duties too seriously. "Always trying to do the right thing." Winter, a first-time novelist whose genre savvy must owe something to his background as a bookseller, has a fine eye for the technical precision of Chandler's descriptive prose (trained here on the artificiality of life on a movie back lot), as well as the haphazard nature of his plotting. But Winter's characters - a rogues' gallery of hard men, sexy dames, secretly gay matinee idols, nomographers and dope dealers - are merely sleazy rather than steeped in moral rot. And while Foster talks tough, he lacks the bitter eloquence of Chandler's postwar knight, fighting his lonely battles in a world that has lost its values. Back on high ground in the final installment, "Police at the Funeral," Winter channels Jim Thompson in the harrowing first-person narrative of a desperate man driven to violence as he slips deeper into madness. Shem Rosenkrantz, the belligerent American author who first appeared in "Malniveau Prison" and dropped a few career notches as a hack screenwriter in "The Falling Star," sinks even lower here. With his movie-star wife confined to a private clinic after a nervous breakdown, this deadbeat louse is living off the earnings of the prostitute he's been pimping out to the mobster who holds his gambling debts. This unhealthy situation becomes even more dire when Shem learns that his long estranged but only recently deceased first wife has left her considerable fortune to their grown son, who despises his father. Hounded by his gangland creditors and crazy with fear, Shem loses what's left of his mind in an alcoholic fantasy about murdering his way out of his troubles. "Killing someone was a whole lot like writing," he reasons as he puts his insane plan into action, "a creative endeavor" that gets his juices flowing and leaves him with "the high of a good writing session." Thompson might have admired that wicked grace note. All three novels are beautifully built and sturdy enough to stand on their own. But there's something seductive, even a little sinister, about Winter's grand conceptual design of recurring faces and interlocking themes - like some glittering spider web that catches the eye of an admiring fly. Killing is 'a creative endeavor' that yields 'the high of a good writing session.' Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
This debut crime novel comprises three sequential novels (set in 1931, 1941, and 1951) revolving around the American writer Rosenkrantz and his beautiful, troubled wife Clothilde and written in the noir styles of Georges Simenon (1903-89), Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), and Jim Thompson (1906-77). It is a major accomplishment for this first-time author to effect three stylistic forms. But Winter does an extraordinary job. In Malniveau Prison, bleakness and despair- pervade a grim prison in the French town of Verargent as numerous prisoners are murdered, including Clothilde's father. This precipitates a breakdown presaging her mental fragility in the subsequent stories. Falling Star is set in San Angelo (Los Angeles-, probably), where Clothilde (Chloe) is starring in a movie, Rosenkrantz is the screenwriter having an affair with Clothilde's costar, and Foster is the investigator who solves the murder of the costar. The final novel, Police at the Funeral, is the most impressive and disturbing. Rosenkrantz leads a dissipated existence and Clothilde is in permanent psychiatric care. After accidently killing his son, Rosenkrantz commits multiple murders to conceal this act. Rosenkrantz's internal narration in which he justifies yet despairs over his actions, is compulsive reading. VERDICT- A brilliant evocation of three distinct masters of bleak noir fiction, handled deftly with panache.-Seamus Scanlon, Ctr. for Worker Education, CUNY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.