Occasional Hell [Mass Market Paperback]

Randall Silvis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1995

"RIVETING...COMPELLING...Silvis engages the reader from first word to last.
--Los Angeles Reader
P.I. Ernest DeWalt snooped on two-timing spouses for twenty years until a hail of bullets knocked him out of the game. Whoever heard of a sleuth with bum kidneys? Denied such staples of gumshoe life as booze, salty food, and sex, Ernest DeWalt winds up teaching literature courses in a nearly comatose college town.
It's a life that the reclusive DeWalt has nevertheless snuggled into with reasonable comfort. Too bad fate won't just let this disillusioned sleeping dog lie. Too bad a fellow faculty member--in the throes of a fling with the sexy waitress wife of a small-time rock singer--ends up with a musket ball in his brain. And too bad it's so hard to say no to the dead man's wife, when she asks DeWalt to crawl out of his shell and bring his private-eye prowess into play just one more time....
"AN EXTRAORDINARILY LITERATE MYSTERY.
--The Washington Times
"An interesting puzzle packaged in superior prose, AN OCCASIONAL HELL is an absorbing and reflective read.
--The Mystery Review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An unusually morbid detective protagonist, a verbosely stylized opening and occasional passages of vibrant prose produce mixed results in this first mystery from Silvis ( The Luckiest Man in the World ), a Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner. Before his kidneys and liver were riddled by bullets, Ernest DeWalt was a Chicago PI and successful novelist. Now a college professor in rural Pennsylvania, he survives with a soured attitude, an ever-present catheter hidden beneath his shirt, and a regimen that allows him no booze and no sex. DeWalt's reveries on love and lost promise are interrupted when a philandering colleague, Alex Catanzaro, is killed in a farmland trysting place and his widow asks the former PI for help. For years Catanzaro had had an affair with a local waitress, now missing, with no resistance from her husband, a drug-addicted rock musician, also missing. After a convoluted and mannered beginning, Silvis settles into the action, lacing his narrative with astute observations and hard truths. Though flawed, this work succeeds in leaving dark images to linger in the reader's mind.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

"RIVETING...COMPELLING...Silvis engages the reader from first word to last.
--Los Angeles Reader
P.I. Ernest DeWalt snooped on two-timing spouses for twenty years until a hail of bullets knocked him out of the game. Whoever heard of a sleuth with bum kidneys? Denied such staples of gumshoe life as booze, salty food, and sex, Ernest DeWalt winds up teaching literature courses in a nearly comatose college town.
It's a life that the reclusive DeWalt has nevertheless snuggled into with reasonable comfort. Too bad fate won't just let this disillusioned sleeping dog lie. Too bad a fellow faculty member--in the throes of a fling with the sexy waitress wife of a small-time rock singer--ends up with a musket ball in his brain. And too bad it's so hard to say no to the dead man's wife, when she asks DeWalt to crawl out of his shell and bring his private-eye prowess into play just one more time....
"AN EXTRAORDINARILY LITERATE MYSTERY.
--The Washington Times
"An interesting puzzle packaged in superior prose, AN OCCASIONAL HELL is an absorbing and reflective read.
--The Mystery Review

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Fawcett (May 31, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345387279
• ISBN-13: 978-0345387271
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,038,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars An Occasional Delight, January 5, 2005

By 

avoraciousreader (Somewhere in the Space Time Continuum) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Occasional Hell (Mass Market Paperback)

The Publishers Weekly review quoted by amazon has it about right -- An Occasional Hell is occasionally hellaciously good but overall a mixed bag. It gets four stars rather than three only because the parts that are good are SO good.

There are frequent moments of brilliant prose and observation, with lapidary precision and beauty -- and then in the next page the writing becomes over-reaching and self-indulgent. Some of the good parts:
"... he had lived a long time without the madness of sex -- not without sex itself but the wonderful terrible insane burn of desire..."
"[speaking of faculty wives] that typical hostess mentality he had grown to abhor, that shallow self-centeredness of women whose days are comprised of lunch, tennis and cocktails..."
"... a middle-aged man is hope betrayed. ... Dawn arrives too quickly, before strategy can become execution."

But then we have the too cutely self-referential:
"He was writing a story now even as he stood there, writing a story about himself thinking about himself, a story empty of epiphanies about a man staring at the juncture of sweet grass and dirty sidewalk...." Which in a way summarizes Silvis, the author, as much as DeWalt, the protagonist.

Plotwise, the first half or so builds unbearable whodunnit tension, as the facts of the case become less and less explicable and we wait some revelation to make sense of it all. But then, though there is a resolution of sorts, DeWalt does not seem to come to it by genuine evidence or Sherlockian reasoning but more the "it COULD be like this, therefore it IS" syllogism. And in the end, we are left with a cop-out, a vaguely indeterminate ending. Silvis's own prose expresses it well: "[H]e had tossed too many glass balls into the air, had started too many plates spinning. And now what was he to do..."

So ... get this one for the half which is brilliantly written, and skim over the parts less so. It's still a rewarding read. Silvis is very likely better at short fiction, and I plan to check his collections out.