Struggling with an overstretched budget on the police force, Charlie Resnick worries about a series of murders and a visiting star writer who has been receiving poison pen letters. 15,000 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Up to now, Harvey hasn't set his Nottingham copper Charlie Resnick on a false step as the jazz-loving, culinarily adept, love-crossed inspector and his disparate colleagues have probed their way through the urban demimonde of industrial northern England. But Harvey lurches into cozy territory this time, as Nottingham hosts a mystery convention. On the scene are a successful American hard-boiled authoress and a prissy English grande dame of letters with a diminishing readership. Both have devoted underlings. As the American writer receives threatening letters in the mail, a knife-wielding prostitute has carved up a series of johns, the last one fatally. Harvey abandons noir narrative angles for noir lore, dropping the names of real-life novelists and movie stars and offering some behind-the-scenes views of mystery conventions. Although he nabs both the writer of the letters and the perpetrator of the fatal stabbing, the divorced and lonely Resnick doesn't find anyone to fill the empty spot in his romantic life. This tale, following Cold Light (1994), stands on its own, but it's the weakest entry in a series that has thus far delivered nothing less than definitive procedural fiction undershot with telling social realism.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Perhaps what's so jarring about this latest Charlie Resnick novel is the way artifice intrudes on reality. The Resnick series has always been distinguished by the unrelenting dailiness of its vision of cops and criminals; we see the squalor, the pathos, the loneliness, even occasionally the tenderness that constitute their lives, but we see these qualities in ordinary ways, mundane detail building upon mundane detail until the gray reality of it all overwhelms us. That happens here, too, as always, but the main subject--potential murder at a crime writers' convention--seems so, well . . . writerly that we recoil in surprise, as if we'd been served a dainty bite of caviar in a joint renowned for its fish and chips. Resnick, who doesn't read mysteries, recoils, too, much more comfortable with the other case on his plate--finding a missing whore with a penchant for stabbing her johns--but he's forced to tag along at the writers' convention, making friends in spite of himself with the Sue Grafton^-like author whose life has been threatened. Just as Resnick gradually overcomes his prejudices against crime writers, so we gradually overcome our own prejudices against crime novels about crime writers. Even writers and conventiongoers, we realize, have their own gray reality, their own loneliness to confront, and Harvey does the confronting with his signature series of glancing blows, bruising in their cumulative effect. "What happens, most of the time anyway, whatever it is someone's done, somehow you come to understand." Resnick is right again, even when the something someone has done is write about writers. Bill Ott
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More About the Author
JOHN HARVEY is the author of eleven Charlie Resnick novels and the Frank Elder series, and is a recipient of the Silver Dagger Award, the Barry Award, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement, among other honors.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lackluster Effort in the Series,
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Living Proof (Paperback)
This entry is a little more gimmicky and doesn't quite work as well as its predecessors in the Charlie Resnick series. It centers around a real-life mystery book and film convention in Nottingham, as an American writer of a lesbian series is attacked by feminists and receives threatening letters. Meanwhile, a number of men have been apparently attacked by the prostitute they picked up. Too much attention is given to the convention, which seems kind of hokey somehow, and the prostitute murders aren't particularly satisfying.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great British police procedural...fantastic characters!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Living Proof: A Charlie Resnick Novel (Hardcover)
The Charlie Resnick mystery series by John Harvey ranks, in my opinion, with John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee and Robert Parker's Spenser. I normallydo not like British novels, but have completely been taken with Harvey's characters, especially Charlie Resnick. These books are very realistic from a police standpoint, but are even more so in showing the character's strengths and weaknesses. I have enjoyed all of Harvey's Resnick books (Cold Light, Living Proof, Cutting Edge, Lonely Hearts and one other that I forget at the moment). I highly recommend this series.
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