People who know magic isn’t real look straight at a ghost and see a flapping bed sheet. They deal with an irrefutable demonstration of how things really are the way an oyster deals with a speck of grit. The truth gets coated in a hard, shiny shell that can be worn proudly. A pearl is a lie you can roll between your teeth. [loc. 488]
A writer of mysteries is summoned to a crime scene: a man is dead, apparently by suicide, in a car that's been driven off a pier. Raymond Chandler (for it is he) can't help noticing parallels to his novel The Big Sleep (in which one unresolved plot thread is 'who killed the chauffeur?'): he's also distressed to discover that the victim here is his old friend Joh Devlin, with whom he and his friend Billy Pratt had previously investigated the mysterious doings of a movie mogul, Ward Home Jr., who'd run screaming and aflame from his mansion. It is Billy (better known by his Hollywood name, Boris Karloff) who summoned 'R. T.' to the scene of this new crime, and Billy who is still suffering the aftermath of the Home House case. R.T. and Billy are old friends, and had their first encounter with the supernatural while at school together. Now they are confronted with a friend's apparent suicide, and by the appearance of a woman, soaked but alive, from the trunk of the sunken car.
This is an enjoyable and fast-paced crime novel with its heart in the pulp fiction of the period, and its brains very much on display. There are riffs on Frankenstein as well as on Chandler's work, and there are a plethora of cultural references, of which I probably noticed fewer than half. Newman's prose is suitably hard-boiled, his dialogue excellent, his hints of the supernatural enticing, and his invention -- for instance, the Sparx Brothers, who carry out a series of slapstick-inspired murders including techniques such as 'poisoned pie to the face' and (narrowly-escaped) 'death by falling safe' -- is both a delight and a marvel of balance. Comedy and supernatural horror (witchcraft, mad science, sacrifice, resurrection) blend marvellously in this novel, without it ever losing its focus on R.T. and Billy and their long friendship. I have bounced off Newman's fiction previously but this has convinced me to try it again.
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