Publication Date: November 15, 2024
On a beautiful spring day in New York City, writer Daniel Freund receives two surprises. First he finds a long sought after 1953 edition of The Great Gatsby free for the taking on the steps of a building right down the block. The other occurs when he brings home his treasure, begins to read it and sees the words lift off the page and start rearranging themselves. After a few moments he realizes he is being sent a message that there has been a murder.
Prompted by The Great Gatsby itself, Freund begins an investigation. Guarding the brownstone’s premises is notorious nosy neighbor Ms. Estelle Belfer, who is only too happy to share the details: a death in a locked room a few years back, deemed an open-and-shut suicide by the police. Freund eventually wrangles his way into the non-crime scene and finds there is a lot more to the story. Now, wildly curious and determined to find out what really happened (and coming home to a book becoming more noisy, insistent, and emotional), he delves deeper and deeper into the case.
Author David Finkle’s The Great Gatsby Murder Case is truly a book within a book.
I never had a desire to read The Great Gatsby on my own, having not read it in high school and not being a literary intellectual. But I enjoyed how the author had the novel The Great Gatsby spell out clues for the protagonist. It was a unique slant from other mysteries I have read.
I know it is frowned upon to compare authors with other authors. However, when I read that the words on the page were glowing and creating clues, it brought to mind the television show Ghostwriter on PBS. It was a kids show in the early 1990s.
The Great Gatsby Murder Case is an out-of-the-box cozy mystery, taking this reader out of my comfort zone, and I loved it!
David Finkle is a New York-based writer who concentrates on politics and the arts. He writes regularly on theater for New York Stage Review. He’s contributed to scores of publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Nation, The New Yorker, New York, Vogue, Mirabella, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychology Today, Saturday Review and American Theatre. He is on the weekly podcast, The Hour of Lateral Thinking. He is the author of People Tell Me Things, a story collection, The Man With the Overcoat, a novel, Humpty Trumpty Hit a Brick Wall: Donald J. Trump’s First Year in Verse, Great Dates With Some Late Greats, a story collection, and Keys to an Empty House, a novel.
