Who
Killed Jerusalem? by George Albert Brown 576 pages
How
could I resist a novel whose main characters are Ickey Jerusalem and Ded Smith?
Especially with this elevator pitch: “A rollicking murder mystery based on
William Blake’s characters & ideas updated to 1970s San Francisco.” You’re
right; I couldn’t. But what made me think that I would, all of a sudden,
understand and adore Blake since I could do neither of those things when I was
in college twenty-five years ago? What I was thinking! Unless it was the
characters’ names, the setting is one of my favorite cities and I won the book
from Bookishfirst.com.
Here's
what synopsis from Amazon:
In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco's golden-boy poet
laureate, is found dead in a locked, first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye
flight.
Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a
highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet's
death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of
Jerusalem's coterie.
Ded soon realizes that to find out what happened, he must not
only collect his usual detective's clues but also, despite his own poetically
challenged outlook, get into the dead poet's mind. Fighting his way through
blasphemous funerals, drug-induced dreams, poetry-charged love-making, offbeat
philosophical discussions, and much, much more, he begins to piece together
Jerusalem's seductive, all-encompassing metaphysics.
But by then, the attempts to kill Ded and the others have begun.
Before Ded's death-dodging luck
runs out, will he be able to solve the case, and perhaps in the process,
develop a new way of looking at the world that might allow him to replace his
unhappiness with joy?
I
loved Chapter One, in which author Brown drops us right into the middle of the
action. Ickey died a gruesome death there in the plane’s bathroom. But by Page 5, I was so lost I found myself
reading words and wondering WTH?
And
I will admit to reading every blast word of this 576-page tome and only
understanding about a fifth of it. Afterwards, I jumped on Amazon and perused
the review section. This is what I wanted the book to be, from a review by
Maddogish:
The book is loosely based on William Blake's poetry,
characters and ideas... fortunately you do not have to be familiar with any of
Blake's work to love this book. If anything it opens the world of poetry in an
accessible manner so that maybe more people will learn to love epic poetry and
romantic era classics. The book centers on the mysterious death of San
Francisco Poet Ickey Jerusalem and his wild and crazy group of cohorts. An
insurance adjuster, Ded Smith who is known as Dr. Death for his uncanny ability
to determine cause of death and solve murders, is on board the flight when
Jerusalem is found dead. He is initially asked to help the police with
interviewing the suspects as a friendly courtesy, but when it is discovered
that Ickey took out a life insurance policy a month before his death, Ded is
called in to rule if the case a suicide or murder in an official capacity.
While he investigates each of the suspects and the crime itself, he finds
himself caught up in a web of philosophy, intrigue and murder. The poet not
only collected delightfully weird friends the stand out on the page; he had
seemed to develop strange ideas on life and existence in general. I can
honestly say the author had me guessing until the end who the killer was, while
at the same time weaving so much philosophical information and poetry that I
found my self in awe of how he tied all of it together. This is a truly magical
and unique book that will take readers on an epic journey.
But
all I got was a series of headaches, a lot of re-rereading, so much that it
took almost a month for me to get through this novel. I'm going to put it back on the shelf and tackle it again in a few years. Best of luck to anyone who tries to decipher
this novel. Who Killed Jerusalem? receives 2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s
world.
