The debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, pays homage to the noir genre while reinventing it.
Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters ... Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite. It’s a landscape of reeking garbage, of salty rain sweeping off the ocean, of Midtown towers that look 'ghostly like a mountain range,' ... For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly. For those who demand a straightforward mystery without any humor, romance and ambience, well, forget it, Jake, it’s literature.
...one of many delightfully meta passages in Dwyer Murphy’s debut crime/literary novel, An Honest Living. Murphy has earned this self-reflexivity. Editor in chief of the website CrimeReads, he knows not just where the bodies are buried but how readers want them to be discovered ... An Honest Living is filled with noir tropes: mistaken identities; forged manuscripts; fenced goods; coffee at diners and bodegas and train stations; a city whose 'small, dying shops' and 'ghostly vistas' are about to be rezoned and spun into staggering wealth, if only you can jam your snout into the trough ... As Murphy well knows, the crime novel is anything but efficient. I can rarely remember the ending of a good detective novel, but I can almost always remember its texture, the feeling it evoked and the atmosphere it placed me within ... An Honest Living resolves some of its plot mysteries but not all of them. It introduces us to various worlds-within-worlds—the antiquarian book trade; big city law firms — but refuses to neatly tie them all together. The novel concludes, no spoiler here, with this sentence: 'I closed my eyes and in the wind was a trace of salt.' This is the way a good noir ends: not with a plot but with a vibe.
Important work ... Its characters come to life, transcending politics, breaking through preconceptions and stereotypes, speaking clearly and lucidly about their uniquely human experiences ... The book is filled with stories of immigrant parents who can’t make sense of their American children, but there are also shimmering moments of revelation and reconciliation.
