Howard Engel's Memory Book, or What happens when a writer loses his ability to read?

(The graphically brilliant
and thematically relevant cover
of the Canadian edition of
Memory Book)

The Crime Writers of Canada announced the winners of the Arthur Ellis Awards this week, an honor my landsman Howard Shrier has won twice in the past. This year's awards inaugurated a Grand Master category, and the first winner is the author of what must be one of the most unusual crime novels ever published. In honor of the award here's a post I put up some years ago about Memory Book, by grandmaster Howard Engel.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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This was the first crime novel I can remember that comes with an afterword by a neurologist. That neurologist, Oliver Sacks, writes of his acquaintance with Howard Engel, which came about because of Engel's alexia sine agraphia, a condition in which the sufferer loses the ability to read but not to write -- a difficult affliction to bear for a novelist.

Sacks tells us about some of the surprising ways Engel overcame this condition and resumed his writing career. The first product of this resumption was Memory Book, the eleventh novel featuring private eye Benny Cooperman, and the first in which Benny must, like his creator, overcome alexia sine agraphia. (Engel's condition was the result of a mild stroke. Cooperman's was the result of -- but you'll have to read the book to find out.)

Confined to a rehabilitation hospital as he is, Cooperman must, like Alan Grant in Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, solve a mystery from his sick bed. Cooperman is alive to the world of the hospital, to the personalities of his fellow patients, his nurses and his doctors.

The mystery Cooperman must solve is how he wound up in the condition in which he finds himself. This leads him back into the case that had brought him from his home town of Grantham, Ontario, to Toronto, where he was hospitalized. He must solve these dual mysteries as he struggles with neurological conditions that leave him constantly tired and unable to retain names and words. His discoveries of his own slowly returning cognitive abilities as he chases down the people who put him where he is add an intriguing dimension highly unusual in crime novels to say the least. Handicapped detectives have been around for almost a hundred years, if not longer, but I don't know of any others who have shared an affliction with their creator.

I also found myself wondering if Engel's cognitive struggles accounted for my one quibble with the novel's style. In at least two places, long stretches of dialogue are uninterrupted by reaction on Cooperman's part. In at least one of these, the lack of reaction was obtrusive. Is this a quirk of Engel's style unrelated to his condition? I'll tell you after I've read more of his books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Howard Engel
Canadian crime fiction

Books to read on an island: The campaign for Vanda

Ever wonder what books you'd want should you find yourself on an antipodean island? Vanda Symon has gone you one better: She lives on an antipodean island, and, while an existence amid all that lamb and kiwi fruit strikes me as tantalizingly close to paradise, Vanda has a complaint: Too few books.

Vanda, herself a crime novelist, has asked me to recommend crime books that might be hard for her to find otherwise. She's been a charming correspondent and the winner of a Detectives Beyond Borders contest, so how could I refuse? I'll begin with an offering from my own native country: three Canadian crime novelists whose work I've read and enjoyed recently. Then I'll ask you for some suggestions.

Giles Blunt portrays small-city humor and hopelessness as well as any American or Swede you’d care to name, though with sensitivity to local sounds and sights. Take him to a city, and he does just as well, keeping the action moving fast at all times. Even when his characters sit still, they are never really at rest. As a bonus, his novel The Delicate Storm offers an unusually detailed first-person look at a tumultuous period in recent Canadian history. (Read more about Giles Blunt here and here.)

Howard Engel's Memory Book recounts its protagonist's struggles both to solve a murder and to overcome a neurological condition that has robbed him of his ability to read. Think that's easy? Engel's Benny Cooperman can't read what he has written, and he can't follow street signs, read reports or make much sense of the visual world. Then reflect that Engel himself struggled with the affliction, alexia sine agraphia, while writing the book. The novel comes with an afterword by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. If possible, get the Canadian edition from Penguin for its ingenious cover, which brilliantly captures Cooperman's puzzling, frustrating predicament. (Read more about Howard Engel here.)

John McFetridge is a guy you'll have heard from and read about on this blog in recent days. His satirical edge and sympathetic view of his city and protagonists bring his novels to rich, vivid life. Read Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Dirty Sweet, and see why people will one day talk about McFetridge's Toronto the way they talk about Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. (Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with John McFetridge here.)

Won't you help? What other crime books should Vanda Symon be reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Good things from across the border, Part I

I thank the reader who brought to my attention Penguin's covers for the new Canadian editions of Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman mysteries. The one to your right is worth a comment even before I begin reading it.

Note the wheelchair, the thought balloon and the title's backwards B. These are, presumably, references to an affliction shared by Cooperman and Engel. Like his protagonist, Engel suffered from alexia sine agraphia, a condition in which the sufferer can write but not read. (In Engel's case, the condition resulted from a stroke. I don't know the protagonist's circumstances.) This obviously must have been a terrible blow for an author to overcome, and I believe the cover design captures that beautifully.

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who has written with much understanding about any number of strange neurological conditions, wrote an afterword to this book, which leads me to suspect that the cover's hints at mental and physical struggles accurately reflect the book's contents.

Next: Toronto is widely known for the numerous movies filmed there but set in other cities. In the coming days, I'll be discussing a crime novel that makes Toronto so cool that producers may soon want to start shooting movies in other cities and pretending they're Toronto instead of the other way around.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Howard Engel
Canadian crime fiction