A Best-Selling Book by David Finkle

On a beautiful spring day in New York City, writer Daniel Freund finds a long-sought-after 1953 edition of The Great Gatsby, free for the taking on the steps of a brownstone down the block. But when he brings home his treasure, the words on the page begin to glow, and a hand appears out of the pages sending Daniel secret messages. Prompted by The Great Gatsby itself, Daniel begins his own investigation. Accompanied by a hardheaded retired police detective and a nosy-body neighbor, he works to unfold the pieces of this supposedly solved case. He knows a murder took place, the book told him so, so why is everyone else convinced it was suicide?

 

David Finkle on The Great Gatsby Murder Case:

How did I come up with the idea for The Great Gatsby Murder Case and then follow-up with any research? Beats me. Well, almost beats me.

There I was walking down my street one day, thinking about I don’t know what. Maybe wondering whether I’d remembered to pick up everything I needed at Gristede’s or some household notion along those lines. And that’s when suddenly—just like that—a random idea popped full-blown into my head: Why not write a mystery set on this street?

It's not that I’d ever written a  mystery before. I’ve read them, of course. I love mysteries and respect the authors like crazy. From teenagery I’ve been obsessed with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and mystery writers right up to today. As a one-time regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, I’ve even interviewed Patricia Cornwell, a terrific interviewee.

But writing one? It’s crossed my mind but never more than fleetingly, usually because, as I analyze it, mysteries are the one genre where writing isn’t ready to begin until the complete plot has been worked out down to every last detail and clue. Am I wrong about that?

When, however, that write-a-mystery thunder bolt jolted me, it didn’t come outfitted with a plot. Just the cute go-ahead-and-write-one prompt. The subsequent mental monologue started, as I recall, with a celebratory, “Why not?” and was succeeded by, “I know I’ll need a tight plot, but so what?”

I’d just published my last novel—Keys to an Empty House (Plum Bay), having to do with family, father-son stuff—and wasn’t at work on the next one.  I say “at work,” whereas I often regard writing as “at play.” Why shouldn’t writing be play, depending on the content intent?

Authors are often described as at work, but often, when I’m writing, I’m having fun. What I’m doing seems more like play than work. Mightn’t writing a mystery feel like play? I was, right then, prepared to play.

That settled within those first fast-paced seconds on the street, I was percolating. (I grew up when coffee was still brewed in percolators.) And I was still ambling—but more slowly—towards my building and second-floor apartment when something else grabbed me.  If I set the mystery on my block, why not make the detective an amateur like myself? And had I ever learned there had been a mystery on my block, and had I ever furthermore learned there’d been a murder and/or murderer on the block, how would I go about solving it?

Then, the pressing query became, “How would I learn about  the murder or murderer?” Perhaps the obvious answer is that someone on the block mentioned it to me, but one of my quirks is: I’m not generally happy with the obvious. I try to avoid it. My mind goes farther afield. What occurred to me about the origins of my murder/murderer information that wouldn’t be obvious: A book.

A book!? Yes, again out of nowhere I thought a book was clearly the thing. But what book? Millions were available to me. But one pressed forward urgently: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. Why so suddenly, so completely right? Many of us know its history. Published in 1925, some years after Fitzgerald  left Princeton—where he surely knew Jay Gatsby-Nick Carraway-Tom Buchanan types—the novel was not an immediate success. His first, This Side of Paradise, was. Nonetheless, the initial movie adaptation was 1926. (Scott and Zelda walked out of a screening.) To date there have been three more. By the 1930s, book sales faded more precipitantly but were revived in the 1950s and remain staggering today.

But more than any of that, The Great Gatsby is, in my opinion, the best American novel of the twentieth century. It’s the word-perfect obvious choice. (Here, I broke my rule and did reach for the obvious.) I figured if I settle on this one for the book in my forthcoming mystery, I get to re-read it, a pastime I indulge every couple of years.

I now hurried home, immediately sat down with the 1953 paperback edition from my collection and started perusing. Don’t you know that on the very first page the words “victim” and “detect” leaped out? What more did I need to convince me I was on the right mystery track? All I had to do next was start writing. The plot would come to me.

As would any necessary research. And now a confession: I’m not an inveterate researcher. I kept it to a minimum, which isn’t easy where a mystery is concerned. One helpful aspect: Poison wouldn’t be involved, as it so often is with Christie. Guns were. I had to find out about, for instance, Glocks and Magnums. I did. I had to check out police procedure. Luckily, there’s a precinct half a block from me, where officers are often seen walking to or from or standing around the entrance. I quizzed one or two of them. More? Part of the New York City story branches out to Dayton, Ohio, about which I know some but not all. I pegged answers by calling the Dayton Daily News.  

But enough of that. It all paid off, and now as The Great Gatsby Murder Case—with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece accounting for some of its solution—is here.

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