Heir Apparent

by James Terry

A compelling and compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel that follows a hard-drinking PI accused of a murder he didn’t commit--or did he?

Eddie King wakes up one morning with a splitting headache to find two cops in his room, who begin questioning him about the murder of a man named Walter Morris, a writer of pulp detective novels. Thus begins this novel about a Chandleresque detective accused of a murder he didn’t commit. In the process of seeking answers, he is shocked to discover that all of the deceased writer’s novels are based on his own cases. Further investigation leads him to the writer’s widow, a sensual older woman with whom he begins an impassioned affair. Smartly disguised as a textured and playful homage to the hardboiled American noir, Heir Apparent is also a sophisticated literary game with roots in Greek mythology. Its numerous levels and surprising twists will keep the reader guessing until the very end.

Heir Apparent takes the reader on a strange journey through cavernous libraries, sleazy hotels, and soulless suburbia with a detective who in the end may be nothing more than a figment of the dead writer’s imagination. For fans of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Heir Apparent is a brilliantly original detective novel from a smart, talented voice.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 12, 2019

Reviews

[Melisende · Rating 4 out of 5]

"... everything was exactly as it had been at some other time, in some other life .."

A truly well crafted mystery with shades of Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" forming the backbone of the narrative, but instead of ancient Greece, this is set in modern times, where the main character seems to have stepped off the pages of a Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler novel.

There is so much going on in the periphery that it seems, at first like, like white noise. Then the clues start dropping, discreetly, unobtrusively, unnoticed. The characters begin to shape and conform, and the plot takes on the resonance of the classic Greek tragedy. The further we traverse the pages, the more the path twists and turns, sending us hither and thither, before, like an ancient oracle, the story is revealed.

A true page-turner ... wherein even our narrator, cannot tear himself away from the very pages of the story being laid bare before his own eyes. And thus the narrative comes full circle.

[Nicholas George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book begins like a hard-boiled, noir-ish 40s detective novel, and quickly tantalizes the reader with an irresistible premise: Private eye Eddie King discovers that the man he is accused of killing is a writer of detective novels, all of which feature a main character named Eddie King, and a story based on one of his actual cases. What follows is a twisty and engrossing tale that fluctuates between a hallucinatory dream and a revelation-after-revelation pulp novel. As complications piled up I gave up hope of seeing everything neatly resolved with a logical ending, and I was certainly right about that. This book is open to any number of explanations, and that kind of uncertainty always seems like a cop-out to me, but in this one it strangely works.

[ReaderOnTheStorm · Rating 1 out of 5]

The synopsis for this book sounded interesting, a PI finds out a dead author's novels mirror the PI's past cases. It is supposed to be an old-style noir detective story. But, detective stories of old had grit and more important, they had action.

I got two-thirds of the way into this before I gave up. Lots of descriptive prose, but very little action Not much in the way of investigation, either.. Nothing really sparked, nor kept my interest. It was a slow-going slog, like wading through waist-deep molasses in mid-winter. I gave up. I got so bored, I lost all interest in finding out how it all gets (or doesn't get) resolved in the end.