Not Quite Dead - Hardcover

Gray, John MacLachlan

 
9780312374716: Not Quite Dead
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312374712 ISBN 13: 9780312374716
Verlag: St. Martin's Press

Inhaltsangabe

On a rust-bucket cargo ship bound from Liverpool to the United States in 1848, an Irish stowaway named Devlin steals a suspicious package after witnessing it changing hands between two sea captains. All he finds is a seemingly worthless pile of papers marked “David Copperfield, Final Four Numbers, by Charles Dickens.” Devlin is determined to see if he can somehow turn events to his advantage by paying a call on Dickens’s American publisher.
            A year later, a newly admitted patient to a Baltimore hospital, a disreputable writer who goes by the name of Edgar Allan Poe, is clearly raving mad, which makes it easy to dismiss his claims to have information about the murder of an innocent woman.

Meanwhile, the eminent English novelist Charles Dickens has embarked on a tour of America, where his views are not received as he would have wished. Dickens’s growing discomfort reaches new heights of intensity when he finds himself sharing disreputable lodgings---and reluctantly collaborating with---none other than Edgar Allan Poe, who has gone into hiding after faking his own death in a desperate attempt to escape the Irish mob.

Like White Stone Day, which The Washington Post hailed as “a Dickens of a thriller,” this is a brilliantly imaginative tale in which crime and literature intersect in surprising ways.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John MacLachlan Gray is a writer-composer-performer for the stage, television, film, radio, and print. He is best known for his stage musicals. Billy Bishop Goes to War was produced on Broadway by Mike Nichols in 1980, and was the most produced show in America for four years. He has received the Governor General’s Medal, the Gordon Montador Award, a Los Angeles Critic’s Circle Award, a gold at the New York Television Festival, and a silver Hugo. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and two sons.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1
 
Here begin the memoirs of Dr. William Chivers, not to be read until the author’s demise.
 
 
I do not expect that my tale will enhance my reputation. I can but trust the fair-minded reader to take into account my years of service and my spotless moral character, up until the events of which I write.

Perhaps you have already grasped the fact that, as you read this, I myself am dead. While I cannot personally affirm this, the manuscript in your hand was secured in a sealed envelope, care of the lawyer Carville D. Bendix of Richmond, with clear instructions that it remain so until my death. Only if he followed my instructions to the letter was he to receive the balance of his fee. (Ordinarily, lawyers are paid to circumvent the law, but not in this case.)

In reporting the following I harbor two objects:

My first aim, and a public-spirited one, is to shed light on the lingering mystery over the death of Edgar Allan Poe—the author, critic, and essayist, whose fame and notoriety will resound long after my death, and yours too, dear reader, I dare say.

My second purpose is to attain an understanding for myself of the events to follow, and to place them in the context of natural law.

Since Eddie’s catastrophic reappearance in my life, one question has nettled my mind by the day, the hour, the minute: By what cause-and-effect sequence of natural events did this happen?

I say “natural” because many would resort to a metaphysical explanation, which is how the ignorant deal with the unknown. Here in the New World, a plenitude of spooks have immigrated from Europe and Africa on the backs of their believers—not to mention the all-embracing Christian hobgoblin of Original Sin, pounded into us every Sunday morning.

Having eschewed the supernatural, and having found no explanation through ratiocination, I write the following in the hope that a trickle of enlightenment might escape through the nib of my pen onto the paper before me. I write to inform myself; to notice what I see; to enlighten the part of me that thinks it thinks.

At the end of it I hope to put a period to my tale, in mind and on paper, and to lock it away like a tiresome volume of verse—penned, no doubt, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Though my name appears on the title page it seems apt that I identify myself fully. My name is (or from the reader’s point of view, was) Dr. William John Chivers. I served as resident physician at Washington College Hospital until my resignation (which occurred shortly before its bankruptcy, though I was in no way responsible), and I am an alumnus of the college as well. Putting aside my service in the Mexican War, the hospital was my life—and my home, since my wife’s passing, when I took rooms on the top floor.

Though as mentioned I am far from superstitious, as happens with anyone whose life takes an unexpected direction, looking back I am surprised by the absence of anything like a premonition. Seated in my armchair, smoking my pipe, scowling at the latest issue of the Scientific American, from my point of view there was nothing unusual whatsoever about the arrival of an emergency patient.

It was Election Day in Baltimore, when white male citizens over the age of twenty-one exercised their franchise with their fists. Inevitably, injuries accrued.

As well, city hospitals such as ours were almost always located in the poor neighborhoods near the docks, whose residents occupy the underside of the city—creatures of sea and land, creatures with claws and teeth. From Washington College Hospital, a short stroll down the hill brought you to Lombard Street, an area notorious for beatings, knifings, garroting, and other popular pastimes of inner-city life.

Therefore, it was scarcely an unusual occurrence that, by mid-afternoon on Election Day, a citizen might find himself transported to Washington College Hospital with a concussion, sans his money and watch. In this context, the carriage was spot on schedule, and as I watched the vehicle ascend Washington Hill in a steady grist of rain I actually laughed to myself—snorted rather—as though someone had just told me an old, tired joke.

Whoever the patient was, he was hard up and without family or friends, otherwise he would surely have been nursed at home. Nobody went to Washington College Hospital willingly. Once you encounter the term hospital gangrene, by mouth or in print, it tends to stay with you.

In all fairness to my institution, the patient would have been no better off at home. It was the state of medical care that, whichever building you occupied, if you broke a leg and it festered, you would probably die. If you contracted a bad cold or a kidney stone, you might well die. If you were pregnant, there was an excellent chance that you, the child, or both of you would die.

Or more often than not, a person would die with no warning at all: your aunt might experience an earache one evening while at her knitting, and by morning would be discovered dead, having slept late.

People died all the time. In the streets, taverns, and gambling halls, it was not a rare thing for a man, in mid-stride or mid-shout or mid-piss, to drop dead in his tracks. From an early age, pedestrians were taught to distinguish between a sleeping man and a dead man in the street (the sleeping man will cross his ankles).

In short, death was easier to achieve than life, and in America that was enough for devout Protestants to apply the work ethic. Your aunt did not become sick, she began to fail. Death was capitulation, and thoughts of death self-defeating, like the expectation of losing at a sport. Though the popular veneration of death approached obscenity in its public expression, the dead themselves were privately despised. People approached hospitals as they might a house filled with vampires, and I have seen even Baptists cross themselves upon entering.

Doctors, on the other hand, tend to view death as akin to the force of gravity: to be resisted or delayed wherever possible, but sooner or later, everyone fails.
 
. . . the mad race run

Up to the end, the golden goal

Attained and found to be a hole!—Ambrose Bierce
 
 
 
 
As resident physician, my private rooms were situated on the top floor of the right tower, its pointed roof directly over my head like a dunce’s cap. It made for a tiresome stair-climb but afforded a majestic view of the landmarks of the city—General Washington, Nelson-like on his sixty-foot column; the towers of the great Catholic church; the masts of clippers in the harbor.

Perhaps I relit my pipe, or stoked my blazing fire against what would surely be a cold, dank evening—unseasonably so for October, unhealthily wet, the barometer falling and a squall on the way.

Having painted this cozy domestic picture of myself, it seems odd to disclose that for some time I had been thinking about taking my own life. By mentioning this I do not wish to cast myself in a tragic light. I was not in a state of romantic mourning, nor did I despair for the human race. I swear that the incentive arose from pure laziness, the urge to be done with the tiresome work of breathing.

When it came to the act of suicide, however, my deep laziness proved also a blessing, for if I lacked the motive to live, neither was I prepared to take the initiative and bring about my death.

As a consequence, I adopted a pattern of behavior in which I...

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Verlag
St. Martin's Press
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312374712
ISBN 13 
9780312374716
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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