Manhattan Nocturne: A Novel - Hardcover

Harrison, Colin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517584921 ISBN 13: 9780517584927

Verlag: Crown Pub, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

As a columnist for a New York City tabloid, Porter Wren digs through the detritus of New York's most horrific murders and sensational crimes, searching for the twist that the TV reporters missed, the illuminating irony, the romantic detail that may add meaning to the relentless wreckage of human appetite and folly. He can't resist a good story - especially when an intriguing and beautiful woman is involved. Caroline Crowley, the young widow of the brilliant film director Simon Crowley, seeks out Porter in a crowded cocktail party because - as she says - she has "a little problem."
The problem is neither little nor exactly as Caroline describes it, yet it would appear Porter is the perfect man for the job: smart, curious, and willing. From the party he telephones his wife and lies about why he'll be late coming home - something he's never done before but will do again. That night, Porter finds himself in Caroline's Fifth Avenue apartment, drawn ever deeper into the life of a dangerous woman, and further into the dark heart of the city.
Who was Simon Crowley and what led to his mysterious death? What clues did he leave behind - perhaps intentionally? Who, unknown to Porter, is threatening Caroline? And how does the columnist's inquisitiveness endanger his own family? Set against the great tableau of New York City, Manhattan Nocturne masterfully portrays the collision of a man's desire and a woman's past.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Colin Harrison is the deputy editor of Harper's Magazine.

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f Bodies Electric and Break and Enter takes the classic noir novel and elevates it into a literary portrait of a soul divided. A columnist for a New York tabloid finds the precarious balance of his life threatened by a woman who comes out of the Manhattan night to lure him with a promise he can't resist--a chance to see even deeper into the dark night of the city he is compelled to know. Reading tour.

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Manhattan Nocturne

By Colin Harrison

Crown

Copyright © 1996 Colin Harrison
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780517584927
The minutes passed with a strange luxury to them.  We said nothing.  Caroline rolled three cigarettes, laid two of them on the glass coffee table, and sat back to smoke the third.  I took myself into her kitchen for a little ice and felt suddenly aware of the white starkness of the counters and cabinets and appliances.  I did not necessarily expect to see a picture of her dead husband, but there was nothing there, no phone numbers of family or friends on the refrigerator, no pencils in a jar or mail in a pile or battered cookbooks or seashells from last summer.  When I returned to the living room, only then did I realize that the entire apartment was sterile.  Like a hotel suite, though in much better taste, it had no character, no essence of its inhabitant.  When people have lived in the city a long time, their dwellings become encrusted with their personal history; this is true not only of the poor but also of the rich, maybe even particularly of the rich, who tend to be interested in documenting their own accomplishments.  I have been in many wealthy homes as a reporter; if the living rooms betray nothing but good taste and a disdain for clutter, then by compensation there is a green-trimmed den with a trophy from a club golf championship or pictures of the children on the sand in Nantucket or framed professional degrees or a photo of the occupant shaking hands with Bobby Kennedy thirty years ago.  But Caroline's apartment revealed no such personality, only expensive surfaces.  It occurred to me that the absence of historical detail was not because she had no history but because she had no history that she wanted to display.

"You're not from the city," I said when I returned.

She looked up at me, lost in her own thoughts.  "No."

There was, in her absentminded confirmation, a revelation for me.  I suppose it could be called intuition, or a lucky guess, but then again I have been banging around New York City for twenty years now, long enough to come to understand a few things, and in the case of Caroline Crowley, what I suddenly knew was that she had worked very hard for what she possessed, or rather, that what she possessed had cost her a great deal--and not just a husband.  I have often thought that the most determined people in New York City are not young lawyers trying to make partner or Wall Street traders or young black men who might have the stuff to be pro basketball players or executives' wives competing viciously on the charity circuit.  Nor are they the immigrants who arrive from desperate places--the Bangladeshi taxi driver working one hundred hours a week, the Chinese woman working in a sweatshop--such people are heroic in their grim endurance, but I think of them as survivalists.  No, I would say that the most determined people are the young women who arrive in the city from America and around the world to sell, in one way or another, their bodies: the models and strippers and actresses and dancers who know that time is running against them, that they are temporarily credentialed by youth.  I have lingered at night in the dark back rooms of the city's two or three best strip clubs--the rooms where in order to be caressed by young women, men buy bottle upon bottle of $300 champagne as if they are putting quarters into a parking meter--and I have talked with the women there and been astounded at the sums of money they intend to earn--$50,000, $100,000, $250,000 by such and such a time.  They know precisely how long they will need to work, what their operating expenses are, and so on.  They know what kind of physical condition they must be in and how to maintain it.  (Consider, for instance, the stamina necessary to dance for one man after another, sexily, in heels, in a smoky club for eight hours straight, five days a week.) Like fashion models, they live in little apartments where no one remembers the name on the lease, the rooms being passed along like links in a chain as each woman makes her money and then moves back to Seattle or Montreal or Moscow.  Likewise, the sufferings of fashion models, which are well known.  Jazz and ballet dancers don't have it any better.  (Once, visiting an orthopedist for a knee injury, I saw a lovely woman of about twenty-five hobble into the room on crutches.  She was in tremendous pain and was waved into the doctor's office.  The nurse accidentally left the reception-area door open, and I was just able to hear the woman's desperate request: "Please give me the shot."  An indistinct male voice responded.  "Please," the woman wept, "I have to dance tonight.")  Caroline Crowley was not a stripper or a model or an actress, not so far as I knew, but I could only guess that she had once brought the same sense of purpose with her when she came to New York, that she had arrived in the city to have a dialogue with fate, and that she knew, as any genuinely beautiful woman knows, that the terms of the conversation would include her face and teeth and breasts and legs.

With these thoughts I drained off my drink and then indulged another.  That made five or perhaps six or maybe even seven.  I have been drunk many times in my life and enjoyed most of those times, but never has drunkenness revealed in me some hidden streak of self-destruction; I do not drive while drunk, I do not leap from windows or pick fights in bars.  While drunk, I am incapable of the fatal gesture.  This does not mean that I don't make mistakes, only that my most disastrous errors in judgment occur when I am not drunk, when, presumably, I am lucid.  So, in that moment, when Caroline Crowley, the lonely, beautiful widow, stood before me, clutching her record of the violent destruction of her husband and seeming for all the world ready to be embraced and kissed and plunged into voluptuous copulation--the image of the homeless couple fucking feverishly outside in the cold returned to me--in that moment, I chose to remember my own sleeping wife, with her arm thrown across my empty pillow, and this gave me the further will to stand, quite unsteadily, and say, "I'm sorry your husband was killed or died or whatever happened to him, Caroline.  I imagine it was a terrible shock, and it seems to me that you're still haunted by it.  I know we've been joking around all evening, but let me say .  .  .  let me just say that if it's possible to suddenly have a certain affection for someone in only one evening, only a few hours, then I feel that way toward you, Caroline, and I am saddened to think what it must have been like to lose your husband.  Every week, just about, I talk to people who've just lost someone they love, and it always saddens me, Caroline, it always--it always reminds me that we, all of us, are--that it all--can be lost.  You are beautiful and about twenty-eight years old and should have all good things come to you.  If I were not married, I would--no, I will avoid--maybe better to .  .  .  say that perhaps you sought me out tonight because you figured that, hack tabloid columnist that I am, that I've seen an unnatural amount of human destruction and might therefore offer you some useful words...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Pub
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0517584921
• ISBN 13: 9780517584927
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 355
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: MUSIC STORE professional GmbH; 022188841282; Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de; ; Istanbulstr. 22-26; Köln; 51103; Deutschland