Manhattan Night

"The tapes were a private thing, like an internal dialogue." Simon Crowley, the infamous, wild-child movie director, "made them for his own purposes. People gave him tapes, too, when they thought they had a good one." This new American auteur made award-winning feature films, but it was his videotaped "diaries" that held images so profound that they could destroy more than a few lives, and many people would stop at nothing to get at them.

"Manhattan Night," the re-release of the 1996 novel "Manhattan Nocturne" by Colin Harrison, is a classic noir, complete with a brooding writer (on a mission to solve a mysterious crime), a corrupt media tycoon, a self-indulgent artist, a devoted wife and a blond femme fatale. Marked as a New York Times Notable Book at its first printing, Picador has brought back this gritty-city ode to narcissistic, 20th Century machismo in trade paperback to coincide with the recent premiere of a film adaptation staring Academy Award-winner Adrien Brody.

Our narrator and protagonist is Porter Wren, a crime columnist for a widely read New York tabloid. In spite of the notoriety he's carved for himself in his profession, he's still a bit of a starry-eyed name dropper, enamored by the celebrities he sees at his new publisher's swanky party. But it's the well-built widow of Simon Crowley, Caroline, that ultimately seduces him, in spite of his perfect wife and two young children.

Simon's body was found moldering in the middle of a walled-up construction site and no one can figure out how it got there. Caroline needs help from Porter that all ties back to her husband's secret videotape collection, and she possesses police files and crime scene photos of her husband's death that are absolute gold to someone in the journalist's exploitative position. For once, "the story" is not as important as this woman's heavy moving breasts that are barely contained in the silky material of her gown, "the color of the flesh of a peach."

Like Simon's dilapidated and decaying corpus, secrets will be unearthed and roads will be travelled from which these characters can never return.

This novel so closely follows the conventions of the noir that it almost has a black and white flicker. Though it's not as colloquial as the pulp fiction of the 1940s, the prose draws in the reader. What distinguishes this novel from the great crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain is not so much the difference in mores that half a century can bring but the tendency to deviate into "literary" tangents, plot-halting descriptions and indulgent, internal musings. That's not to say that this material is uninteresting. It's steeped in steamy sex and lurid violence that are compelling if not cringe-worthy in their attitudes toward women.

"Manhattan Night"
By Colin Harrison
Picador
Fiction | $16.00
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