Manhattan Nocturne
by Colin Harrison
Metropolis by night. Here, the effervescent music of champagne flutes; there, the grisly remains of just another inner-city killing. Spy a glamorous seductress slink into the room; watch a goon palooka take out a loser's kneecaps down a side alley. Feel the silk dresses and the street grit between your fingers and try as hard as you can to keep the two separate in your mind. For if your dazzling dream Gotham and your nightmares of the Big Poison Apple should chance to merge, you will find yourself lost in the world of Manhattan Nocturne.
Former Philadelphian and current Harper's editor Colin Harrison's third novel aims to imbue a contemporary New York crime story with the vaporous yet hard-edged aura of classic film noir. But like one of that genre's landmarks The Big Sleep, Manhattan Nocturne's evocative atmospherics and intriguing characters often push plotting and pacing to the margin.
Thus, for all its accomplished style and breathless emotion, Harrison's often gorgeously written volume comes to its close like many much weaker thrillers: there is so much plot pasted into the last fifty pages that what was a lushly sensuous book suddenly feels more like a mechanical contraption than a novel.
The story involves three complexly tangled plot strands—perhaps so trickily knotted because their confluence is a bit forced. New York tabloid columnist Porter Wren, the book's narrator and protagonist, is very early drawn into an extramarital affair with a simultaneously alluring and opaque mystery woman, Caroline Crowley; Crowley, coincidentally—or perhaps not so coincidentally—is the recent widow of a hot, hip movie director; and finally, Crowley has had a secretly videotaped sexual encounter with Hobbs, the corpulent and impotent Australian tycoon who owns Wren's newspaper and is clearly fashioned after the relatively svelter Rupert Murdoch. Plus there's another videotape floating around featuring the killing of a black police officer by a white assailant, a year-old unsolved crime for which the tape provides a solution.
Unfortunately, these plot elements do not so much dovetail as crash like clumsy pigeons midair. Nonetheless, there are so many genuinely compelling aspects to Manhattan Nocturne that the book is well worth reading. While not completely successful as a whole, there are extended flashes of brilliance.
Harrison excels at characterization, with even minor figures feeling fleshed out and alive. Take the flinty but ultra-efficient newspaper librarian, Mrs. Wood, whose keystrokes and databases go much further than shoe leather in doing Wren's investigative research. Even though she never receives a byline, Wood is memorably etched as self-confident and duly proud in just a few pages of equally confident prose.
Then there is Lenora, the housekeeper/nanny for Wren, his wife Lisa, and their two small children. A household crisis in which Lenora is discovered packing a pistol in her purse later leads to an important plot turn. While offending her employers' liberal sensibilities, Lenora is pulled off as a rather righteous and sensible woman by Harrison, her desire for self-protection and the protection of her toddler charges overwhelming the rules of urban etiquette and armament.
Lisa, the surgeon-wife whose income is the financial mainstay of the Wren household, is also nicely rendered. A trusting but not naive partner to the wayward, pliable Porter. The pattern here is clear: Harrison does a hell of a job with his female characters. A better job, in fact, than virtually any male thriller writer out there. The women in male-written thrillers tend to be all about sex or imperilment and that's far from the case here.
In fact, the character who is Harrison's masterstroke—the best character in any of his books—is Caroline Crowley. Tremendously ambiguous, sultry, sinful and ultimately incredibly sad, Crowley is a character complex enough in her motivations and desires to appear in the finest literary novel. She seems like somebody out of Fitzgerald. Ultimately—and problematically—she proves more fascinating than the protagonist himself and the reader, left with Wren, is also left with a rather hollow feeling.
As in his second book, the more cohesive though less complex Bodies Electric, Harrison shows himself to be utterly smitten with New York City. This is lucky for the readers, however disjunctive such moments are, when Harrison bursts into one of his occasional urban rhapsodies, his romanticism is infectious: "...she could gaze down on the crowds moving along the wet ribbon of Broadway, the booksellers miserable in the drizzle, look down on the clots of taxis stopping and moving, stopping and moving, the heavy centeredness of it, the old buildings, the grime, and know for the first time she could remember, she might describe herself as happy."
The most peculiar element in Manhattan Nocturne is a bizarre, but, again, compelling rabbit-hole journey that Wren takes into an underground subway tunnel, where he meets a destitute old professor who lives there amidst a colony of eccentric homeless. Oddly, some very similar—although more logical—scenes occur in perhaps the year's best New York thriller, Peter Blauner's The Intruder, published a few months back.
Finally, one more minor character who appears a couple times in Manhattan Nocturne deserves notice. Harrison paints real-life New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a fearsome, tough-as-nails commander, presenting him as a much stronger personality than the non-New York news media ever have. Colin Harrison graces New York with his honor, and graces Hizzoner with a pulp-fiction makeover.
