HAMMETT UNWRITTEN: A NOVEL

Book ID/图书代码： 10820013B60789

English Summary/英文概要： What becomes of a character cut from a writer’s working manuscript? A merely metaphysical question for a critic or scholar -- but far more than that for the character himself! At the heart of Gordon McAlpine’s novel, Woman with a Blue Pencil is Sam Sumida, a first-generation, Japanese-American academic who’s been thrust into the role of amateur P.I when the L.A.P.D. largely ignores the investigation of his young wife’s murder. On the eve of the attack at Pearl Harbor, grief stricken by his wife’s loss and disoriented by his ill-prepared change of occupation, the worst is yet to come.

In what seems the blink of an eye, Sumida discovers that, inexplicably, he has become not only unrecognizable to his former acquaintances but that all signs of his existence (including even the murder he’s investigating) have been erased -- as if he’s been excised from the past. Unaware that he is a Foreign Rights Guide / Spitzer Agency / Spring 2017 Page 21 discarded, fictional creation, he inhabits a world now characterized not only by his strange isolation but also by wartime fear and prejudice. When he encounters L.A.P.D. homicide detective Henry Czernicek, who months before headed the half-hearted effort to solve the murder of Sumida’s wife, and when Sumida learns that Czernicek not only recognizes him but has experienced a strange dislocation of his own, Sumida assumes he has found a companion – unaware that both the original hero (Sumida) and villain (Czernicek) have been cut from a revised, alternate work.

Meantime, Sumida’s story is interspersed with chapters from a pulp novel that revolves around an L.A. based Korean P.I. whose assignment and actions are grounded in jingoistic, racist, post December 7th attitudes – this is the revised, politically viable wartime novel from which Sumida and Czernicek have been excised. Behind it all is an ambitious, 21 year-old Nisei author who has made the commercially pragmatic, post-Pearl Harbor revisions to his work – this despite the author’s own persecution and relocation to a Japanese internment camp. And, looming above is the book editor in New York, who serves the young writer both as muse and manipulator, the woman with a blue pencil, a new kind of femme fatale.

Woman with a Blue Pencil is a powerful and fiercely imaginative mash-up of Raymond Chandler with Sax Rhomer, as orchestrated by Jorge Luis Borges. The novel is rich with high wire, literary gamesmanship that addresses not only the fanciful question of what might become of characters that are edited out of a narrative but also the attendant question of how the “editing” of our own identities shapes us all. Additionally, Woman With a Blue Pencil indicts the continually shifting sands of bigotry and hatred, a topic as much for our own times as for the historical period of the novel, all while providing the page-turning pleasures of an intriguing murder mystery and a femme fatale unlike any you’ve met before.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： "《哈米特的番外篇》是达希尔•哈米特一部尚未公布的第二部大师佳作 — — 这部作品是这位美国侦探小说家的另一部作品......从某种程度上讲，真实性从未得以验证，只是含糊其辞地回答了为何哈米特从未写过另一本书...... 为他笔下的那些硬汉侦探的第二个场景赢得了受众群的肯定。"— — 粘贴杂志

Awards/获奖情况：Nominated for an Edgar Award.

“McAlpine’s creative talent is rare and this novel is an exceptional literary treat.” - Shelf Awareness STARRED review

“A masterpiece of metafiction….I don’t know the last time I read a book that made me think that much AND had that good of an ending.” - MysteryPeople PICK OF THE MONTH

“A masterly critique of the mystery novel…McAlpine’s greatest accomplishment is that the book works both as a conventional mystery story and as a deconstruction of the genre’s ideology: whichever strand readers latch on to, the parallel stories pack a brutal punch.” - Publishers Weekly BOXED, STARRED review

“Woman with a Blue Pencil is a brilliantly structured labyrinth of a novel—something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, postmodernist in its experimental bravado and yet satisfyingly well-grounded in the Los Angeles of its World War II era. Gordon McAlpine has imagined a totally unique work of ’mystery’ fiction—one that Kafka, Borges, and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated.”—JOYCE CAROL OATES

“Not like any other murder mystery now in print…. Intricate. Unique…a definite work of art.”- Suspense Magazine

“Hard-boiled fiction fans could use more books like [McAlpine’s]: novels that work on multiple levels, and take the genre to such strange and fascinating places.”- Paste Magazine

“A truly original crime novel.” - Booklist mystery.”- Reviewing the Evidence

About the Author/作者介绍： Gordon McAlpine has been described by Publisher’s Weekly as “a gifted stylist, with clean, clear and muscular prose.” A native Californian, he attended the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine and is the author of several novels, including Hammett Unwritten (written as Owen Fitzstephen), an anthology of short crime fiction called Orange County Noir, a nonfiction work (with Shawn Green) called The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH, and the middle-grade adventure-mystery trilogy titled The Misadventures of Edgar and Allan Poe.

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Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

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