"It was two thirty in the morning, and raining. In the City, it was always two thirty in the morning and raining.
Streets away, in the Kit Kat Klub, Nat King Cole was singing. I heard him under the permanent hiss of the rain and the sizzle of water and neon. In the distance, someone was shouting. There were three gunshots in swift succession, and the someone wasn't shouting any more. A siren wailed, cutting into Nat's plaintive purr, fading out as he hit the final verse. There was more gunfire, indiscriminate this time, and a car careered down the road, throwing up a splash of gutter water that fell just short of my shoes. I couldn't see who was driving, but there was an interesting pattern of bullet dents in the vehicle's read, and the back window was white sugar, holed and dissolving. A police car, screeching like Mario Lanza trying for a note just out of this reach, came by in pursuit. The cars, bound together by a story I could only guess at, disappeared around a corner. Soon, even their noise was gone.
There are eight million stories in the City. The trick is to keep to your own, and not be distracted. All the others twine their plot lines around you like strangler's spaghetti.
Back in the world, they had warned me about going crazy. I had almost laughed at them. It wasn't so funny now it was my head in the mangle...
All I had was a name. A name that closed doors and emptied bars. A name that, spoken aloud, invoked sewn-shut lips, pulled down shades, drink-up-and-get-out looks, hastily remembered appointments and muttered warnings. Just a name. Truro Daine.
Back in the world, the name of Truro Drain had plenty of associations. Murderer, arsonist, dope peddler, pornographer, blackmailer, flamboyant thief and a lot of other things, all unhealthy. Now, he was the last of the escaped convicts. My clients wanted him found, and dragged back to his prison of permanent steel and perishable flesh.
Sounds simple, huh?
There was a catch. The prince of catches. It would floor Dempsey in the first round, keep John Wayne off the beaches of Iwo Jima. The City belonged to Daine. Not just the Mayor and the cops and the courts ... the City. Every rainwashed alley, Art Nouveau penthouse, backstreet gin joint and deserted warehouse was his personal property.
Out there in the formless dark, where the sidewalk ends, Truro Daine was waiting, a coal-eyed panther in the asphalt jungle."
From The Night Mayor by Kim Newman (1989).
When Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) came to a theater near you a few years back, it brought to mind a fantastic novel I’d read that mined the same lucid, shared dream vein called The Night Mayor. This I tracked down on a shelf in the basement -- no easy task given my haphazard organizational skills -- and gave it another read. I then gave that copy away to a friend to spread the love.
Cut to a few days ago, when the latest trip to the local broken spine yielded another copy, which I snagged for a more permanent residence. Then, as I thumbed through it, looking for favorite parts, I wound up just re-reading the whole thing again, again, and quickly concluded that you all should probably read this book, too.
OK, so tune-in and plug into this:
In the not too distant future, since movies and TV are now a thing of the past, people look to virtual reality for their entertainment, where a person can be projected into their own movie inside their own head.
But things go a bit awry when master criminal Truro Daine tries to make this unreality a reality, with himself in control of everything; and it's up to two cyber-sleuths, Susan Bishopric and Tom Tunney, to get tuned-in to his wavelength and put the kibosh on his nefarious schemes.
Kim Newman.
Author Kim Newman is a huge film buff and has written several reference books on said subject matter. The Night Mayor was his fictional debut and it’s a real treat for his fellow film fanatics.
See, Newman’s master-criminal Daine bases his cyber-kingdom on the shadowy, rain-soaked streets and neon-lights of vintage hard-boiled Hollywood noir movies of the 1940s, and it’s populated with several familiar characters, scenarios, actors and femme fatales of the same era -- Humphrey Bogart, William Powell, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Gene Tierney -- one of them being Daine in digital disguise.
Which is why the authorities bring in Tunney, an outside expert on the genre (-- a surrogate for Newman, perhaps? --) to help lead cyber-detective Bishopric smoke him out.
And with this all being based in a Matrix-style virtual reality anything goes, right? Right.
And when our heroes plug in and start tweaking things a bit, movie-genres start to get cross-pollinated -- and if you think Lon Chaney Jr. showing up and sprouting whiskers in the middle of all this was wild, just wait until you see what comes stomping out of the harbor.
Of course, knowledge of these vintage films will help your enjoyment of this book considerably, but even a cursory film fan will recognize most of the cameos, winks and nods in Newman’s book. The Science part of the equation does take a bit to slog through, but it’s well worth it to get the Fiction.
Originally posted on July 19, 2016, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
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