An Honest Living: A Novel - Hardcover

Murphy, Dwyer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593489241 ISBN 13: 9780593489246

Verlag: Viking, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters . . . Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

• A Best Book of the Year from The New Yorker, LitHub, CrimeReads, and more!

A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it

After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers.

Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling, An Honest Living is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dwyer Murphy is a New York-based writer and editor. He is the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, Literary Hub's crime fiction vertical and the world's most popular destination for thriller readers. He practiced law at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York City, where he was a litigator, and served as editor of the Columbia Law Review. He was previously an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The Common, Rolling Stone, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, and other publications. 

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1.

The first time I saw Newton Reddick he was drunk outside the Poquelin Society building on East Forty-Seventh Street. He was leaning against a cart filled with dollar paperbacks, looking pretty jaunty and not at all minding the cold. The Poquelin was a private library that had been started during the Gilded Age by a gang of bank clerks who believed reading during their lunch hours would make them into Rockefellers and Carnegies. It was still a private library in 2005 and also a scholarly society dedicated to the art, science, and preservation of the book, whatever that meant. Its membership rolls included a lot of academics, rare-book dealers, and a few unfashionable, old-money eccentrics who came down from the East Seventies on the chance of finding a literary evening. Newton Reddick was one of the book dealers, or had been anyway. I was told he was mainly a collector now. "Collector" seemed to me an overly polite term but at least it conveyed the fact he wasn't making any money at it. He was living off his wife, a much younger woman with inherited wealth to whom he'd been married just under ten years. That earned him a certain pride of place among the library's members, it appeared. He was holding court outside the Poquelin, leaning against that paperback cart and waving a cigarette around in his free hand while a trio of red-faced old-timers hugged themselves against the cold and seemed to hang on his every word. His voice, a crisp tenor, bounced off the skyscrapers and carried across the street to where I was standing with a coffee from the bodega on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Seventh.

He was talking about somebody named Richardson. "The problem with Richardson," he was explaining to the others, "is the man has no sense of history, no feeling of a higher purpose. He thinks a Pulitzer makes a book worthy."

The error of that kind of thinking was obvious to the little assembly outside the Poquelin, and before stubbing out their cigarettes and going back inside, they had a few more choice words for the Richardsons of the world, the ones who can't see the forest for the trees, who wouldn't know greatness if it walked up and punched them square in the nose. They were a lively bunch, those old bookmen. On another night, under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed listening to their fool talk. It was a Tuesday in November, just before Thanksgiving. All over the city people were drinking more than they should and visiting friends. It was the season for parties and parades and little flings that didn't mean anything.

Normally I kept away from divorce work, but the case had come to me on referral. A woman calling herself Anna Reddick had shown up at my apartment the previous week, on Thursday evening, saying that she had met my friend Ulises Lima at a party. Ulises was a Venezuelan poet who sent me a lot of work. He thought it was awfully funny that I was a lawyer, not an artist or a writer or a poet like everyone else. He thought it was even funnier that I refused to work any longer at one of the big law firms in Midtown and was trying to make a go of it on my own in a careless and not very profitable way. He had sent around a good number of prospective clients for consultations. There were always people in his world who needed help and hadn't any ideas where to begin looking for it. Some had money and others would try to pay me with paintings or meals. Sometimes I took them up on it, though I didn't have an eye for that kind of thing, the visual arts, and I would have to ask someone, Ulises or another friend, to come by and appraise the thing for me. It was an endless cycle of imaginary economies, small profits, and favors done impulsively or not at all. That was fine so long as your rent was controlled. Anna Reddick came with cash in hand-ten thousand dollars. She had the bills neatly stacked and facing the same direction, the way a waitress arranges her tips at the end of a shift.

"Catch him at it," she said, "and you'll get a bonus, paid out in cash, check, wire, money order, however you'd like, your choice." It had been a lean few months, and I was in no position to turn her down. Something about the case bothered me from the start. Whatever it was, I managed to put it out of mind.

The job, as I understood it, was essentially a controlled buy, just as you might have bought some weed on the street or a box of Motorolas that had fallen from the back of a truck or a hundred other things whose provenance and ultimate destination you couldn't be sure of. Only in this case the weed was books. I had a list of five titles written for me on a note card. Any one of them would do, she said, and I didn't need to worry about actually buying them, so long as I received an offer of sale from her husband, the one she was about to divorce, and would swear to it in an affidavit. She believed he was trying to sell the books, which belonged to her. They had been passed down by her family. Her attorneys said she would need some proof to back her claim and advised her to get another lawyer involved, in order to cloak the job in privilege. That was just the kind of thing a divorce attorney would think of. Layering the secrecy until the truth was almost meaningless, so thoroughly and finally obscured you could hardly find your way back to daylight. The titles of the books were unusual. Long, ornate, and grisly. The Last Confessions of Tom Mansfield Who Corrupted and Murdered His Servant. Notes on the Investigation of Charles Mandell and of the Final Killing of Luke M. Johnston. They were legal volumes, apparently.

On the surface, it was all very sensible. A lawyer in need of books. It happens all the time.

I followed Reddick and his disciples inside and went up a narrow staircase to the third floor, where there was a banquet hall decorated with chandeliers and threadbare rugs thrown over the hardwood floors. It was debate night at the Poquelin and open to the public, though from the looks of it I was the only one who had taken them up on the offer. Seventeen old men in shirts buttoned to their chins. A few paintings on the walls and books on display. The speeches had already been delivered and the members had moved on to the drinking portion of the evening. I kept an eye on Reddick from across the room. He was long and slim and made an effort to hold himself up, propping his hands on the small of his back the way a pregnant woman does. He was sixty-three years old. His wife was in her early thirties. I suppose a part of me was bristling and judging him harshly, thinking meanly that if a man that age had been lucky enough going on ten years to hold on to a young woman of independent means, a really quite attractive woman in her own peculiar way, he ought at least to be modest and civilized about it when she finally came to her senses. He shouldn't go around selling her family's books. There was nothing worse than a shameless cuckold. Anyhow, that was the train of my thoughts as I carried a drink around the banquet hall and told the old men my story, which was meant to lure in Newton Reddick and eventually did. The story was more or less true: I told them I was a lawyer, an IP litigator. I was interested in the history of the Poquelin Society, but more immediately I was interested in buying a few books to decorate my office, preferably legal books, historical, rare.

Reddick came over with two drinks, one for each of us, and introduced himself.

"I understand you're just starting out," he said.

He gave me the drink and we touched glasses. His grip was unsteady and his smile looked like the smile of a man who naturally trusts the strangers he meets and their intentions. There was a guilelessness about him, that is, or else the whiskey had stripped him of whatever he had. We spoke for a while, in general terms, about the Poquelin and about the city. He wanted to tell me how it had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593489241
• ISBN 13: 9780593489246
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: VIKING; https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
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