Neverwhere is Everywhere

Just came back from my weekly trip to my local branch of the Chicago Public Library to see a display announcing the latest "One Book, One Chicago" title. It's Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

I was floored.

The "One Book, One Chicago" program is a city wide reading program to encourage the discussion of good literature. I think there are these types of programs in many large cities throughout the country now. Apparently the first one was in Seattle. The one in Chicago started ten years ago. Previous titles made up an interesting blend of "great works" and contemporary fiction. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Night by Elie Wiesel, The Ox-Bow Incident, Pride and Prejudice, A Raisin in the Sun, Go Tell it On the Mountain, The Interpreter of Maladies, The House on Mango Street and even --oh yes-- The Long Good-bye.

Crime fiction finally made its mark in 2008, but this is the first fantasy novel to appear. I was even amazed that Chandler made it among the other important and literary works that have been selected. But not so much surprised as I was by this choice. To have a rather popular and modern fantasy novel like this appear in the "One Book, On Chicago" program bodes good things for the future of what I thought was just another Great Works of Literature arts program in Chicago.

There are booklets that are printed up to accompany each announced title (see photo illustration upper left).  The booklet includes author info, cultural events related to the book, reading group notes and questions, and lists of reading groups and their assigned discussion dates at each of the 79 branches of the library (ours is the third largest metropolitan library system in the US, by the way). Inside I read a letter from Neil Gaiman explaining that part of the book's origin was associated with our fine city. He says:

It was a quarter of a century ago, about 1986. I had recently read a book set in Chicago called Free, Live Free by Gene Wolfe (he’s local to you; the Washington Post has said Gene Wolfe may be the best living writer America has) and I had started thinking too much about cities.

What I had started to think about was that some cities were also characters. Chicago was, in Free, Live Free. It was drawn in such a way that it had become almost magical, and was as much of a character in the book as any of the more human people who walked around in it.

For the complete text of Gaiman's letter go here.  Although I knew about the TV series that I thought was the basis for the book I had no clue about the Chicago tie-in to Neverwhere.

I loved this book. Neverwhere is a powerful work of imaginative fiction that has all the bells and whistles of a rip roaring read. It was the second book by Gaiman I had read. Good Omens was the first and completely different in tone being a collaboration with Terry Pratchett. Neverwhere made me a fan of Gaiman's work for life. It's incredibly exciting that so many people in the city will now be reading this book and talking about it in the months ahead as spring approaches our slowly thawing and melting city.

The list of the titles chosen since the inception of "One Book, One Chicago" in 2001 can be found here.

Sinners Never Die (1944) - A.E. Martin

Australian writer Archibald Edward Martin is an underrated and forgotten mystery writer of the 1940s who deserves some notice. He was championed by Anthony Boucher in his reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle when Martin's books first started appearing in the US. Only recently has his work been reissued, but only in Australia and only the first three books. I wish some enterprising publisher would recognize A E. Martin's unique place in the development of detective fiction and get the rest of his work back in print.

Among Martin's many unusual jobs prior to writing to crime fiction were his involvement in the documentary movie exhibition business as well as a touring vaudeville show. Nearly all of his books feature plots that somehow involve show business be it a touring carnival, a vaudeville troupe or an amateur theater company. In the case of Sinners Never Die the story features a traveling sleight-of-hand artist who also does a mind reading act with spook show gimmickry as an added theatrical bonus.

Set in turn of the century Australia Sinners Never Die is narrated by Harry Ford, a very unlikable fellow who is the town postmaster. He busies himself with opening people’s mail and blackmailing those he doesn’t like. As there are very few people he does like he is very busy with his hobby. The complex story involves the disappearance of a young man during a flood, the apparent accidental shooting of a hateful blind man and Ford’s blackmailing of the blind man’s widow and her lover when he convinces them he knows that they actually poisoned the man prior to the shooting. The arrival of a mind reader/conjurer sets Ford on edge when at one of the preview shows he learns that the mind reader has somehow managed to learn everyone’s secrets –- including Ford's criminal hobby.


Although this first book is not truly a detective novel the criminal aspects of the plot more than make up for the lack of clue hunting, examination of physical evidence, and interrogation. What is most interesting here is the despicable nature of the narrator and the sudden turn of events that makes this villainous man turn into something of a do-gooder. The reader is never quite sure if his snooping and blackmailing is self-serving or for the benefit of the town. Is he merely toying with the townspeople or is he trying to root out evil? When Harry starts to get a taste of what it is to be a victim, the novel takes on an even deeper dimension about the nature of crime and the criminal's means to an end.

Martin went on to write other books all of them just as rich in detail and character as this one. Sinners Never Die foreshadows the unreliable narrator who would become almost cliché in the modern suspense novel we now have. Writers like Ruth Rendell and Patrick MacGrath used them effectively in their early works of the late 1970s and 1980s. As I was reading Martin's book I was also reminded of the nasty characters in the unhappy, corrupt small towns that provide the creepy settings in the books of Minette Walters (her first four books only) and Caroline Graham. Here is a book that was far ahead of its time.


A.E. Martin's Crime & Detective Fiction  (U.S. titles & dates unless otherwise noted)
Sinners Never Die (1944)
The Misplaced Corpse (1944 - Australia only)
The Outsiders (1945) (orig published as Common People)
Death in the Limelight (1946)
The Curious Crime (1952)
The Bridal Bed Murders (1953)
The Hive of Glass w/ his son Jim Martin (1962 - Australia only) Published posthumously, crime interest is marginal