I might never have reviewed this novel if the publicity material had not told me that the author is actually a Londoner presently living in Montgomery, Alabama. This author, an academic, is something of an expert on American fiction, especially middlebrow fiction. The nom de plume gave him the freedom to let himself go, I guess, and he did.
The protagonist and narrator of “The Crooked Man,” Agatha Dorn, is a real eccentric. Perhaps named after the famous mystery writer, she is in any case an expert on the mystery writing of the classic period, the period of Agatha Christie, and especially the writing of Gladden Green, the enormously popular woman novelist, creator of the famous detective Flambeau. Green, we are told, disappeared after being humiliated by her husband and spent eleven days in 1926 hiding out in the Pale Horse Hotel.
Dorn is a curator of prose works at London’s Neele Archive, not a library, more a research facility for scholars writing books about books and authors. About 45 years old, a lesbian without a partner, Dorn is bitter, waspish, very much given to drinking gin and water, lots of gin, less water, especially now that she has once again been passed over for promotion. A willful eccentric, Agatha wears, winter or summer, “a big gray tweed greatcoat and a red hunting hat with ear flaps,” part Sherlock Holmes, part Holden Caulfield.
Her life is miserable but brightens suddenly when a manuscript, presumably a “lost” novel by Gladden Green, written at The Pale Horse, comes into the Neele collection, Dorn recognizes it, and her career takes off. The newly found novel, “The Dog’s Ball,” is published with Dorn’s Introduction. She becomes wealthy, instantly famous, is interviewed on television, asked to speak at conferences. Life is good, but it cannot last.
Agatha’s ex-girlfriend Amy Murgatroyd, is found dead. It looks like a suicide, but perhaps not. Murgatroyd, we are told, used to clean their house in an old T-shirt, singing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in the world’s least Alabamian accent.” This death is jarring and matters get worse when real doubt arises about the authenticity of the Gladden Green manuscript. Overcome by delight at this literary find, Agatha had not really tested the ink and the paper properly.
Agatha had never been lucky; in fact she has been haunted, since childhood, by the Crooked Man, a presumably mythical killer, wearing a slouch hat, black overcoat, with the stump of one arm sticking out a sleeve. But Agatha has seen this creature, a terror from the horror movies, and now he is back.
Agatha’s boss disappears; her own life is in danger, and Spencer moves the plot in one direction and then another, as past secrets are uncovered. Throughout we are amused by Agatha’s singular voice: delightfully cranky, prickly, funny, often drunk.