Book Review of Death of the Detective

I read this book when was first published, and am happy to see it reissued in both paper and electronic format. Upon re-reading it from the perspective of an older person I better appreciate its considerable depth and scope. I was a student of the author around the time the book was first published and nominated for the National Book Award, a fact I should mention though I don’t think it prejudices my review of the book.

The story and subplots all succeed individually and as they’re interwoven. The reader gets a vivid vision of the city of Chicago in the late 1950’s, a city I’ve never visited or seen except from the window of a plane.  It is partly this vision that weaves or binds the many elements into a rich tapestry. Imagine an intricate and detailed pen and ink drawing of an apartment building with the wall cut away, hundreds of people going about their daily lives in their homes, a spaghetti-like complex of highways jammed with vehicles, planes in the sky, people on the streets, the details of which can only be seen with a magnifying glass, and also seeing the entire picture, sort of like some of the drawings of Peter Aschwanden. The picture is both microcosmic and macrocosmic.

A particular scene of many that might come to mind describes the detective Magnuson walking through alleys that many years earlier he had used to walk to and from work. There apparently are or were all these wide alleys in Chicago which serve as unofficial pedestrian arteries. On either side are the backyards of homes, so there’s this whole insular world of families and neighbors and passers-by that is unseen by visitors, known only to Chicagoans. The descriptions of scenes and characters in this book are extraordinary, Dickensian as other reviewers have said.

This is a book to be read again and again. When I read it as a young man, I couldn’t grasp it in its totality, but particular chapters I would read numerous times, enthralled with the large cast of secondary characters, including gangsters, small time punks, a young man in search of his roots, working class people enjoying themselves at a Polish American picnic, and more, too much to tell about here, all the good and the bad in human nature personified. The chapters concerning the main character Magnuson did not so much interest me then as they do now, and his evolution—or his disintegration, depending on how you look at it—stands out for me upon reading the book now.

Some reviewers have thought the prose to be overwrought or florid in places, and there might be something in that. It did seem to me that in some spots the author might have been reaching some in trying to define and convey the thoughts and feelings and memories of Magnuson. He is a somewhat uncommunicative character who keeps much to himself, who is both famous and unknown, a pillar of the city and yet alien to it, whose mystery I can only partly solve.

There’s so much I want to say about this book,  but every word I don’t write puts you the reader of this review one word closer to reading the book instead of reading this. The Death of the Detective is enthralling from cover to cover any which way you read it. It’s probably more in the literary than detective genres, but it’s both. Download a free sample from an online retailer and see if it doesn’t pull you in and leave you wanting to read more.