I must say, Not Quite Dead was absolutely the weakest of John MacLachlan Gray’s three historical novels. There’s two major flaws with the book. Well, okay, before I get started on the two major flaws, I should point out there are lots of things I liked about the book, and I’d be interested in seeing more books featuring some of these characters (Inspector Shadduck in particular), but these are not the things that stuck with me about this book. So the two big things: first, the plot was complicated and slow. Complicated and slow, while fine in any number of other books, is not a quality that I look for when selecting a mystery/thriller. The complexity of the plot (or perhaps, seeming complexity) is mostly the result of having too many characters and differing points of view for a book this short to assimilate. It jumps all over the place, from Dr. Chivers to Shadduck to Finn Devlin to Charles Dickens and more. It was just too much. My second complaint is that Edgar Allan Poe, around whom most of the book revolves, is also its least interesting character (and Charles Dickens, who is far more interesting, barely matters). In this case, my aversion to novels featuring real historical figures as major characters was justified. What Gray did succeed in doing (though not until close to a hundred pages in, when Inspector Shadduck, easily the best character in this novel, finally made his appearance), was to paint the same sort of vivid picture of mid-Nineteenth Century America that he did with Victorian England in The Fiend in Human. This vision of America has tremendous potential as a setting, filled as it is with spectacular minor characters and other wonders. But that potential was not realized in Not Quite Dead.
Next is Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl.
