The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

Overview

Jonathan is a private detective in a decaying eastern European city. He is drowning in his work, his failing marriage, and the corrupt landscape that surrounds him. One day, he is approached by an elderly couple to investigate the disappearance of their daughter, who has been missing for nearly two decades. Troubled by the faded photograph of a little girl the couple presses on him—she's the same age as his own daughter—he feels compelled to find her. Then one night, as he is contemplating his troubled marriage, he encounters a young woman crouched at the foot of a stone angel on the bridge spanning the river that divides the city, a woman who suddenly jumps into the icy water below. Plunging after her, Jonathan finds himself dragged into her ghostly world of confusion, coincidence, and intrigue, and the city he thought he knew becomes strange, mysterious, and threatening.


Combining the language and imagery of film with those of an extremely gifted writer, Neil Jordan has created a haunting novel that intrigues, delights, and surprises with its precise language, sly humor, imaginative range, and narrative flair.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632864475
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	478 KB

About the Author

Neil Jordan was born in 1950 in Sligo. His first book of stories, Night in Tunisia, won the 1979 Guardian fiction prize, and his subsequent critically acclaimed novels include The Past, Sunrise with Sea Monster, Shade, and Mistaken. The films he has written and directed have won multiple awards, including an Academy Award (The Crying Game) a Golden Bear at Venice (Michael Collins) a Silver Bear at Berlin (The Butcher Boy) and several BAFTA awards (Mona Lisa, The End of the Affair). He lives in Dublin.

Editorial Reviews

…a ghost story as well as an hommage, at least in my eyes, to Arthur Schnitzler's elegant nightmares…[Jordan's] a good writer and knows how to pace a story—an uncommon gift these days—and…his earnest curiosity about the emotional pulses of his characters isn't buried in sheaves of novelistic analysis or digression. His writing is quick and supple, and even the sometimes portentous exchanges on life and love move quickly enough to avoid injuring either our patience or our credulity…Freud once wrote to Schnitzler: "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition—though actually as a result of sensitive introspection—everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons." It's undoubtedly the aspiration of most novelists to be the beneficiary of such an observation. Jordan has yet again staked his claim to be precisely that.

The New York Times Book Review - Lawrence Osborne

03/14/2016
Jordan, writer and filmmaker (The Crying Game), returns to his favorite theme—that of a missing woman—in this curious new novel. Jonathan is a detective who works for a tracing agency. When he is asked to locate Petra, the missing daughter of a rural couple in an unnamed Eastern European city, he enlists the help of Gertrude, a psychic whose Pomeranian has a luxated patella. She burns a map to guide Jonathan to Petra’s whereabouts, but the mystery of the missing woman soon becomes secondary to Jonathan’s relationship with an unnamed cellist he saves after she jumps off a bridge. Intrigued by her sad beauty, he visits her repeatedly. Are the two women connected? Jordan teases out the answer as Jonathan grapples with the infidelity of his wife, Sarah, while protests and ghosts lurk in the background. As the story unspools, Jordan shows his strengths as a writer in the terrific dialogue and atmospheric imagery. However, what starts out as spellbinding soon becomes underwhelming, never fully delivering on the strong set-up. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"While there is some interplay between Jordan’s films and novels, he has also mastered the difference between genres. His books give more emphasis to the inner lives of their characters, in prose that is both straightforward and poetic without being florid . . . [Mistaken] shines with a darkly luminous glow." - The New York Times Book Review on MISTAKEN

"Vivid . . . A dazzling demonstration of Jordan's ability to express himself in words as well as images." - Financial Times on SUNRISE WITH SEA MONSTER

"A testament to the simple but profound power of storytelling." - Booklist on SHADE

"Jordan is a writer with a beautifully absurd, dreamlike style." - The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

From the Publisher

05/01/2016
A peripatetic detective without a clue meanders through the cobbled streets of an unnamed Mitteleuropean city. Originally from Cornwall, he's more or less on a case, looking for a long-lost girl who disappeared decades ago. His wandering feet and mind, though, stray far afield from that investigation. There's his troubled family, the psychic with her pet Pomeranian, the city beautiful in its ruins, and always the Bach cello suites in the background. Jordan, a noted film director (The Crying Game) and novelist (The Past), is a master of sleight of hand, and shows his skill here. What starts off as a gritty hardboiled detective yarn very soon, and almost imperceptibly, glides into a surreal journey through the doors of perception for a stranger in a strange land. VERDICT If you've ever deliberately chosen to amble through the streets of an unfamiliar city, with no map or even Siri in hand, and no destination in mind, you'll enjoy getting lost in this beautifully rendered hallucinatory trip. [See Prepub Alert, 11/13/15.]—Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

Library Journal

2016-02-18
A private detective's pursuit of a missing young woman leads him into an obsessive relationship and undermines the life he took for granted. Identified only as Jonathan, the detective is an Englishman working in an unnamed Eastern European city. His wife works in the city, and he and their daughter have accompanied her there, and Jonathan has opened a business that tracks missing persons. Facing a marriage that's in trouble and his own homesickness, Jonathan agrees to work for an elderly couple whose daughter has been missing for years and who, they believe, has been forced to work in a local brothel. While working the case one night, he comes upon a young cellist who throws herself off a bridge. Jonathan plunges into the water and rescues her. What follows is not quite an affair, though it is certainly an obsession. But then it's almost impossible to say what anything is in this novel, which is not so much a narrative as a mood piece. Jordan, who made his name as a filmmaker (Byzantium, The Crying Game), is certainly thinking about Vertigo here. But he's also thinking of the shadowy poetry of books and films in which a foreigner is caught in an unfamiliar city, and he's attempting to use that unfamiliarity as a metaphor for the emotional fog of his protagonist's life. It's atmospheric, but it's also sodden with melancholy which, because of the narrative obliqueness, never becomes emotionally compelling. This is a novel in which the reader is apt to become as lost as the woman its hero is searching for.

Kirkus Reviews