August 02, 2005

The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L. Carter

I can't not make the pun: this is great noir. It's an obvious joke because the setting of the novel is in wealthy black America; it's not a joke, because that setting is as treacherous as the best film noir ones ever were. The exact paranoia is that the hero knows that some of the people around him are betraying him, indeed that almost any of them might, and not only does he not know who, but because his life and wealth arises from social connections he has to pretend he trusts everyone.

Not that the hero pulls this off, since in the first place he's a reasonably fallible mortal and can't fake trust that well; and in the second place the plot has as many wills and graveyards and assassins as silver could put on celluloid.

It isn't In the Time of Our Singing, which is more complicated in psychology and prose (but pushes the assassinations farther offstage).

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So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.).
And thus wrote others:
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