Manhattan Nocturne [Hardcover]

Colin Harrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 1996

The author of 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this full-bore detective tale of scandal and mayhem in the Big Apple, Colin Harrison whips up noir for the 90s, complete with a jaded newspaperman protagonist, a mysterious femme fatale, exhaustive travelogues of the meat-grinder labyrinth of Manhattan, and an elusive jade figurine. Harrison weds a literary sensibility to this tangled tale, but the pleasures of the novel come mainly from the conventional elements of all detective fiction: the assembling of apparently disconnected pieces into a coherent puzzle.

From Publishers Weekly

If it weren't for the miles of dangerous videotape that snake through this marvelous story, binding its participants to each other and to their ever more elaborate lies, Harrison's latest (after Bodies Electric) could take place in the Manhattan of 40 years ago. The nostalgia is so palpable that the opening scenes conjure images of a jaded reporter sidling through the city's midnight shadows, intent on getting "the story." Porter Wren (returning from earlier Harrison novels) is a columnist for a New York daily tabloid, happily married with two kids and a terrifying mortgage, when he's approached at a swank party by a woman who in earlier parlance would have been called a "dame." She's Caroline Crowley, widow of hot young filmmaker Simon Crowley. Not even Wren's native cynicism cues him to Caroline's real intentions until he has compromised himself and his family's safety. Crowley was found mysteriously dead in a Lower East Side lot; more than a year later, his murder remains unsolved, but that doesn't seem to be foremost on Caroline's mind. Her current predicament concerns the monstrous billionaire who owns Wren's paper, and who believes a mystery video that has been turning up repeatedly in his office must be coming from her. All Caroline asks is that Wren find the original video, which has nothing to do with Simon's death?maybe. But as Wren was advised years earlier by a washed-up journalist, "It's all one story." Harrison shows the truth of this maxim as he deftly connects dozens of far-flung characters?a pair of sad, dotty lawyers in Queens, a spurned lover who shot his fiancee, a nanny in Wren's service?and as many Manhattan locales into a breathtaking collage. His prose brims with the anguish and joy, the guilt and regret and recklessness, of hundreds of the city's voices. He proves that it is all one story?and one that will keep readers enthralled. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 355 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (September 3, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517584921
• ISBN-13: 978-0517584927
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,410,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Thriller, Warts and All, March 23, 2001

By 

Falco Gingrich - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manhattan Nocturne (Hardcover)

Colin Harrison is an enigma. He writes some of the best thrillers out there, but he has a real tendency to frustrate me as a reader even while I'm marveling over the brilliance of his work. Harrison is an absolutely spectacular writer, and his gifts are especially well suited to his particular niche: the thriller in which the ordinary man finds himself in dangerous and threatening situations. One of the things I like about Harrison's thrillers (with the exception of his most recent and most disappointing book, "Afterburn,") is that his heroes tend to find themselves dragged down into desperate struggles because of their own human frailty than because of some madman terrorist bent on revenge or a serial killer in the process of "becoming."

In "Manhattan Nocturne," the protagonist, struggling under the prodigious name Porter Wren, is a newspaper columnist who falls for a seductive beauty, who wants his help in recovering a lost videotape made by her dead film director husband. Meanwhile, a powerful media magnate wants the same tape, and threatens to expose Wren if he doesn't find the tape for his (the magnate's) purposes. The plot leans a bit toward the needlessly rococo at times, and I felt the ending piled it on a bit too thick, but it still gripping, page-turning, and utterly pleasurable to read.

This is a novel with tension, drama, interesting and three-dimensional characters, and genuine energy. But like Harrison's inexplicably out-of-print masterpiece "Bodies Electric" (very possibly the best thriller I've ever read), "Manhattan Nocturne" gets bogged down a bit under the weight of the author's detailed sexual ruminations. I am not a prude, but I find myself thinking "enough already" pretty quickly. However, I will say in defense of these protracted sex scenes that they are relevant to the plot and to the nature of his protagonist(s). Harrison seems genuinely interested in how identity is linked to sexuality, a worthwhile subject, and because his protagonists tend to fall down their slippery slopes owning to their sexual desire short-circuiting their common sense, the pornographic fantasias always come across as guiltily relevant. Do we need to know the details of every position Harrison's mind can conjure? Probably not. From an over-heard bit of conversation in one of the first scenes, we get the sense that this is a novel fueled by the fear of impotence (indeed, the protagonist confesses, at one point, that a familial history of prostate problems leaves him feeling that his sexual days are always numbered), so we must remember at all times that this is a pre-Viagra thriller.

One of the other reviewers complains that Harrison goes on and on about things that have nothing to do with the plot, but Harrison's writing is strong enough that I'd read a novel he wrote about taking out the garbage. His dissertations on moral issues, poverty, New York culture, sexuality, etc. are all at the heart of what makes Harrison a superior writer. "Manhattan Nocturne" is not a flawless novel, but it is without doubt a superior novel and a must-read for anyone who expects more from their thrillers than the paper-thin characters, the by-the-numbers plotting and the clunky writing that we find scattered all over the best-seller lists.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic writer with rare writing talents, August 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Manhattan Nocturne (Hardcover)

Beautiful prose-style writing! This is the only novel I have found so far that could be compared to "Gold Coast" by Nelson Demile. Wonderful narrative way of writing, a technique only could be created by a real talented writer. Every sentence is well written and worthy of being perused carefully and slowly. Once I've read about 1/3 part of it, I just couldn't wait to grap his other works to be ready in line to continue. Don't treat this book with anything of any genre, just appreciate it as a wonderfully constructed story. Fantastic characters, Porter Wren is especially an unique one, created by a most talented writer. If you failed to enjoy and/or appreciate this writer's "Dark Humor" as well as his wonderful and smooth writing skill, then you might have to admit that you are not a mature enough "thinking reader."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't try to be too much, April 25, 1999

By 

Dominic Buschi - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manhattan Nocturne (Paperback)

This book definitely tries to be too much: A bit of Thriller, some Psychologoy, Philosophy, Literature, etc. And this is unfortunate, as Harrison definitely is a good writer: Porter Wren, Hobbs and Cynthia are good characters and the description of New York is great.

The plot is a bit a mess, but sometimes the narrative is strong enough to cover it up and it has enough drive to keep you going.

If the editor had done a better job and shortened this book by 80 to 100 pages - very often Porter Wren is just rambling on about stuff, nothing to do with the story and not very insightful -, it could have been a slick yuppie thriller!

If it's sitting in your bookcase (as in my case), read it. If not, don't bother to hunt it down.