This was my first introduction to the work of Will Carver. My fellow bloggers and Squad Pod members kept telling me about how great his writing is, but I’d not taken the plunge till now. I started the book last night and finished at lunchtime today, because I was hooked from the end of the first chapter.
Abe Schwartz lives in a one-bed furnished flat. An apartment building called The Beresford. The bell rings and he’s the one opening the front door to a stranger. Before that, he’s dragging a dead body into his room, mopping up blood and asking himself, What the hell just happened?
Maybe I’m a bit weird, but a cracking beginning like that really is so darkly delicious I can’t help but read on. I was then blown away by the originality and inventiveness of the writer and the explosion of historic and popular culture references the book created in my mind.
The Beresford is an old forbidding looking building in the city. In my imagination this first conjured up the Gothic towers of the Dakota Building, where John Lennon lived and was killed back in 1981. Inside The Beresford are a number of apartments, bigger and better appointed than you would expect for the money. They even have large roll top baths. The perfect size to dismember and dissolve a body. The building is presided over by a lovely old lady called Mrs May, who starts every day the same way. By brewing a coffee while the taps run, then enjoying a bath with bubbles, followed by eggs with her cold coffee. She has a routine, and is found at the same time every day pruning the roses in the front garden. As any fan of the film The Ladykiller’s knows, you should never underestimate sweet looking, little old ladies. Of course she has time to pray each day, but to whom and for what? In fact when I first encountered Mrs May praying, I hoped there would never be a film version of the book. She knows everything that happens at the Beresford because the same thing happens over again – some people leave and some people just disappear. Occasionally they stay. For a price.
The atmosphere is strangely claustrophobic and reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby. I loved the tone of our narrator, who is quite matter of fact, and cleverly combines both horror and humour. I also loved the sense of history the author creates about this quirky building. These stories and urban myths reminded me of a documentary I’d watched about the Chelsea Hotel, again in New York, showing how each generation of residents impacted on it’s history: from the original collective of 1920’s writers; 1960’s musicians and artists like Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen; from the death of Dylan Thomas in the 1950’s to Sid Vicious killing Nancy nearly thirty years later. It’s legends are almost bigger than the hotel itself and it’s often claimed as the most haunted hotel in NYC. It’s somehow bigger than just a building, it’s almost an instant portal to the past. The Beresford is described in a similar way is as if it could only belong on old news reels or sepia photographs. Yet there it is, still standing on the sidewalk in the 21st Century. The myths about The Beresford give the place a sense of longevity – it was there before you and sure as hell will be there after you. Sid Vicious told the Associated Press that the Chelsea Hotel “…is a vortex – an artistic tornado of death and destruction and love and broken dreams”. I think second floor Beresford resident Sythe, artistic impressionist and sometime pyromaniac, would probably say the same thing.
Interspersed with the comings, and often darkly humorous, goings of the residents are sections entitled ‘What do you Want?’ We don’t know who the speaker is, although I will admit I imagined a few of these monologues in the voice of Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus from The Matrix. It’s as if we are having our world explained to us, but in a way that lifts the scales from our eyes. This is what’s really going on. These sections address beauty pageants, social media usage and even the way we buy our books. We like to think we ‘discover’ something in a bookshop, but we’re directed to it by placement, marketing, and demographic. Or perhaps by book bloggers? They know so much more about us than we think they do. Ever talked briefly about a subject at home then found an advert for the very same thing on your iPad? It’s listening. In a piece that I loved because it’s unsettling and so close to the truth, our narrator tells us:
You are being told what to watch, who to vote for, which team to support and which God to believe in. You want the truth? All of these things serve to obscure the greatest lie of all. The fruit and vegetables are placed at the front of the supermarket because the colours draw you in. Everything behind is bad for you. But you just see the colours. You buy into them. You believe them. It’s easy to do as you are told.
You are not where you think you are.
Finally, when lovely, peppy, young Christian Blair joins the residents she strikes up a friendship with Abe. Mrs May thought they might get along, just like Mrs May knows a lot of other things. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about the residents of her building. He takes her to the building’s side entrance where they get into the Art Deco lift to access other apartments and convention suites. The side where they live is just two floors with it’s own front entrance, but this is bigger, especially at the top, where apparently a couple fell to their death on the sidewalk. Abe calls this side the ‘bad side’. There’s a man who sees them and calls out. The couple break into a run for the old elevator and hope he doesn’t get there before the slow mechanism starts to move. They then burst out into the street laughing. Maybe one day the author will venture further into the other side of The Beresford? If so, I’ll be waiting – but I’ll probably stick to reading in the daylight hours.
Meet The Author
Will Carver is the bestselling author of the January Series – Girl 4 (2011), The Two (2012), The Killer Inside (2013), Dead Set (2013) – and the critically acclaimed Detective Pace series, which includes Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019) and Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020), all of which were selected as books of the year in mainstream international press. The books in this series have also been longlisted/shortlisted for the Amazon Readers Independent Voice Award, Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, Not The Booker Prize and the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award. Will spent his early years living in Germany, but returned at age eleven. He studied theatre and television at King Alfred’s Winchester, where he set up a successful theatre company. He currently runs his own fitness and nutrition business and lives in Reading with his children.
