Death of the Detective by Mark Smith
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A killer calling himself The Deathmaker is on the loose, pursued by Arnold Magnuson, a grief-stricken detective on the verge of a mental breakdown. Magnuson’s dogged investigation to find the killer, and himself, takes him deep into urban Chicago, laying bare the corrupt city and its seething soul in all its macabre, heartbreaking, and violent complexity. It’s a sprawling, utterly compelling story, widely regarded as a stunning literary achievement and perhaps the best detective novel ever written.
The Death of the Detective is one of my very favorite “lost” 20th-century American classics, an encyclopedic urban crime panorama that embraces both vernacular and highbrow dialects, tragedy, melodrama and farce, putting it in the very exclusive company of Thomas Berger, Thomas Pynchon, and The Wire. — Jonathan Lethem, New York Times bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude.
Books by Mark Smith
Death of the Detective
A National Book Award Finalist! An epic, Dickensian novel about a detective and the killer he stalks...and who stalks him...through Chicago, laying bare the city and its seething soul in all its complexity. Widely regarded as a stunning literary achievement and perhaps the best detective novel ever written.
Reviews For Death of the Detective
Remarkable for both its ambition and its accomplishment, [it] reads as though it were written by a resurrected Charles Dickens, one chilled by a hundred years of graveyard brooding. . .every page is a pleasure to read.
A masterpiece, one of the best books of its decade . . . raises Dicken's benign ghost to remind us again that we're all connected, all both innocent and guilty.
"The Death of the Detective" is a disturbing, challenging, sometimes demented novel, but it is a gloriously ambitious one. It won’t be to every taste, but it clearly doesn’t expect to be.
Mark Smith is a writer who, like Thomas Wolfe, has a gift: the magical ability to transmute familiar and trivial elements of live into images of distinction, rarity and fascination
A deeply disturbing, intriguing, and involving novel that attempts something all-encompassing and damn well pulls it off...a meticulously well-layered, moment-by-moment account of madness, murder, the Mafia and guilt
