Woman with a Blue Pencil

Starred review from September 28, 2015
McAlpine (Hammett Unwritten as Owen Fitzstephen) once again ventures successfully into metafiction, jumping back and forth between two separate manuscripts while delivering a masterly critique of the mystery novel. Author Takumi Sato must revise the manuscript of his novel about a Japanese-American academic, Sam Sumida, who turns detective after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. One version of Sato’s novel is a jingoistic tale of American heroism in which all Japanese characters are villains; the other focuses on Sam Sumida, a character who’s no longer allowed to exist, either in the novel or in the United States. Between chapters, readers see the interjections of Maxime Wakefield, Sato’s editor, who urges him to excise any critiques of America, and any mentions of homosexuality and racism, even as Sato himself, as a second-generation Japanese immigrant, is forced to move to an internment camp. McAlpine’s greatest accomplishment is that the book works both as a conventional mystery story and as a deconstruction of the genre’s ideology: whichever strand readers latch on to, the parallel stories pack a brutal punch. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip Spitzer Literary Agency.

October 1, 2015
Japanese American art historian Sam Sumida reluctantly concludes that he must become a private eye. His unfaithful wife has been murdered, and the LAPD doesn't seem much interested in finding her killer. So, on the evening of December 6, 1941, Sumida goes to see The Maltese Falcon to pick up pointers from Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade. But then, after Pearl Harbor, strange things begin to happen: acquaintances claim they don't know him; his Echo Park home is occupied by a stranger. Concrete evidence of his existence has disappeared. Sam tries to soldier on, unaware that he is a fictional character discarded by a young Nisei writer in an internment camp whose Manhattan book editor tells him that Americans in the postPearl Harbor era won't countenance a Japanese protagonist. Soon, Sam is menaced by a spectral Korean American private eye who, like every American, loathes all things Japanese. McAlpine has skillfully melded the mood of rage at Japanese treachery and bits of Hammett-era noir with the sensibilities of metafiction and postmodernism into a truly original crime novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)