“Colin Harrison is trying to do for New York what Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy have done for Los Angeles: map the sinister underbelly of the city, the nexus of greed and lust and ambition that metastasizes there and its dark spawn of larceny and murder.” So wrote Michiko Kakutani in her New York Times review back in 2004 when The Havana Room was first published. Ms. Kakutani went on to write about the book in glowing terms, not something she’s usually known for.
As a big Colin Harrison fan myself, so happens I’m in complete agreement. The Havana Room is one hell of a literary crime thriller, capturing the energy of New York City in startling ways. Here are a batch of Off-Off-Broadway headliners a reader will encounter in its sizzling pages:
The Old Bill Wyeth: Our perceptive, highly intelligent, keenly analytic, articulate narrator is a 39-year old rich, successful lawyer living with his wife and son on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His prospects are bountiful, although he probably will live a conventional, predictable, even what some would consider a boring life, Bill is poised to become even more accomplished in his chosen field of law and incredibly over-the-top wealthy.
The New Bill Wyeth: Then a random spinning of Fortuna's wheel casts this stellar barrister down with a crash: Bill inadvertently causes the death of one of his six-year old son's friends. The son's rich father sues and gets Bill fired; he's forced out of his apartment; his wife Judith can't take it and leaves with son Timothy for San Francisco. Soon thereafter the divorce papers come through. All of a sudden Bill's life is anything but boring - he's a divorced man on the down-and-out skids.
Femme Fatale: Lonely, despondent, unemployed, there's one high spot in Bill's life: he dines at an old New York steakhouse (Ulysses S. Grant and Charles Dickens paid visits) where he meets and gets to know the manager of the establishment: alluring, available, sexy Allison Sparks, a gal who turns out to be a magnet for trouble. Like a ferromagnetic metal, Bill is drawn to Allison, big time. Oh, Bill, if you only knew.
Dastardly Deed: One evening at the restaurant, Allison asks Bill to stand in as real estate lawyer, his specialty, for her friend Jay Rainey. Bill knows he shouldn’t be bullied into agreeing to review contracts and offer advice under a makeshift arrangement with the clock ticking on an unreasonable deadline, but he would be given a chance to impress Allison and also prove to his wounded lawyer ego that he still has what it takes to untangle knotty legal documents. After all, he muses, how far can he fall now that he’s fallen this far? Whoa, Billy! What a blunder! You can spiral much, much further down – and you do.
Rugged Rainey: Big, burly Jay comes off as your typical NYC tough-guy but the more we learn about this well-built athlete raised on a Long Island farm, the more our hearts soften. Likewise, Bill Wyeth begins to appreciate the depth of Jay’s suffering as he goes about unraveling clues to the big man’s blood ties and past tragedies.
Down on the Farm: After all the papers are signed, Jay and Bill take a ride out to the farm that was part of the deal Bill just approved. The men encounter the unexpected: long-time farm hand Herschel is frozen in the driver's seat of a tractor. And what in the world was he trying to bury? The thick plottens.
Dangerous White Collars: The buyer of the farm, Mr. Marceno, a Chilean wine-baron, demands a meeting with Bill Wyeth - he wants to know what is under the land he now owns. He points a threatening finger in Bill's face and says if anything is less than perfect, Mr. Bill, the attorney of record, will be on the receiving end of a mammoth lawsuit.
Dangerous Gold Chains: The relatives of Herschel are upset and demand money for all the hard work over the years poor Herschel put in for the owners of that farm. And that's relatives as in big, strong, mean, dangerous men who will exert all sorts of pressure to get what they want. Are you listenin' to me, Mr. Bill Wyeth! Similar to New York City author Richard Price with novels such as Clockers, Colin Harrison has an excellent ear for the way New Yorkers from all socioeconomic strata talk. With the likes of H.J., Gabriel, Denny, and Lemont, there's the undeniable sense real people are doing real talking.
Dangerous City: New York's mighty heart pulses and pounds, making its urban presence felt on every page. In many ways, this is a tale of the multicultural, multiracial, multi-everything else metropolis, from posh private restaurants, offices and apartments to public dangers lurking, thieves on the streets, plunderers in law firms, all set to pounce on unsuspecting victims who let their guards down.
The Havana Room: The exclusive, very private room in Allison's steakhouse. Among its many secrets contained therein is Mr. Ha serving the rare Shao-tzou fish from China. Eaten the proper way, this fish can produce certain varieties of ecstasy; eaten the wrong way, it can kill you. Who would have guessed? As it transpires, this Chinese fish is a major player in the novel.
Michiko Encore: Here’s the last sentence from Ms. Kakutani’s first-rate review: "Though there's plenty of suspense in this novel, we don't keep reading because of plot pyrotechnics, but because we've come to care about what happens to poor Bill Wyeth, and because Mr. Harrison is a master of mood and atmosphere, and he gives us in these pages a noirish New York that's at once recognizable as the day-lighted city we all work in, and as frightening as the nightmare place we all dread."
New York City author Colin Harrison, Born 1960
"Squatting within the shadows of this rusting, rushing superstructure are businesses that depend upon such a marginal location, where rents are lower, squalor ignored, parking ample and unpoliced: porn shops, taxi garages, car service offices, and so on. It's a bad zone; it was here, for example that a New York City policeman, drinking for twelve hours after his shift ended, some of that time in a strip joint, ran over a pregnant Latina woman and her two children with his van going seventy miles an hour, an event which, for those who believe in such places, sent four souls to heaven and one to the front page of the tabloids." - Colin Harrison, The Havana Room
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