Down the rabbit hole
Revisiting a thrilling book-within-a-book for January doldrums

You’d think the winter holidays with schools out and virtually no business transacted from Thanksgiving through the first week of January would be a turkey shoot for publishers and a book-buying frenzy for even the vaguely bookish. 

It’s not. 

Kids’ picture books reckon to be the primary winter publishing thrust. And the weighty biographies of the long dead probably get wrapped for grandfathers and grouchy uncles who fulminate against fiction should you have the bad luck to be invited for daytime dinner. So for this new year, I’ve picked a book in my library from years ago that I remembered viscerally and had the immense pleasure of re-reading recently.

Sometimes, it’s mind-cleansing to see how long you can hold your breath swimming underwater, or to peer over the ledge of a skyscraper and wonder what you’d be thinking on the way down if you jumped. “Woman With a Blue Pencil” by Gordon McAlpine is an unexpected test of wonderment and mind-sluicing invented for taking that theoretical leap in the safety of your reading chair. 

“Woman With a Blue Pencil” is not a horrifying book, it’s neither creepy nor distressing or about cops or lost children. “Woman With a Blue Pencil” is a trip down the rabbit hole – a fall through darkness with harshly lit scenes of inevitability on the way down to what you know will be an unlovely landing. And isn’t suspense what we read fiction for?

“Woman With a Blue Pencil” is a short, unpretentious paperback by Seventh Street Books with a pulpy cover. I pulled a dusty copy out of my library for this first Murder Ink of 2024, because publishers don’t want to compete with holiday shopping, and I have no January releases. I remembered McAlpine’s book from 2015, certainly for its unique and masterfully drawn drama and, frankly, for the respectful 187 pages.  

And so that’s the pedigree for “Woman With a Blue Pencil.” I’ll try now to explain what makes this book so compelling. 

Sam Sumida was born in Long Beach, Calif., a year after his parents emigrated from Nagasaki, Japan. Sam is now an adult, and he’s sitting in the Rialto Movie House in downtown Los Angeles. He is watching Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” starring Humphrey Bogart, with the hope that he will sharpen his fledgling ability as a private investigator.

Somebody had put a .22 slug in the head of Sumida’s wife 11 months earlier and dumped her body in the harbor at San Pedro – stupefying a racially indifferent LAPD. Sumida possesses a PhD in Oriental Art History and taught as a part-time instructor in three local colleges. Defeated to the core, he’s given up his teaching positions to devote his time to investigating Kyoko’s murder. 

The date was Dec. 6, 1941. The movie and Sam’s life were interrupted by news from Pearl Harbor. 

Cut now to Maxine Wakefield, Associate Editor, Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., who writes on Dec. 10, 1941, to novelist Takumi Sato in Los Angeles that due to the tragic events at Pearl Harbor, she would of course not be able to publish his novel. “Now, even if you were to change your protagonist’s nationality, I believe current events dictate that your new Korean or Chinese hero be far more American/apple pie than your discarded character, the grieving Nisei academic, Sam Sumida … you might even position your new Oriental hero against Japanese Fifth Columnists. Yes! Patriotism will sell in the coming period.”

And so, Jimmy Park instead of Sam Sumida is the new and now Korean PI in William Thorne’s “The Orchid and the Secret Agent.” 

Maxine is pleased with Sato’s typescript of a grand, jingoistic detective story under the Thorne pseudonym. And character Sam Sumida is blue-penciled out of his own story, but not hardly out of his real life, where he hovers alone and unrecognized as a fictional character cut from his history and future.

Disoriented? Of course you are, it’s a rabbit hole. “Woman With a Blue Pencil” is a book written about a book written about a book about a real man who gets cut from a fictional narrative and loses his identity but not his real life. Phew!

You better read that again – no, you better read “Woman With a Blue Pencil” by Gordon McAlpine. Celebrated American novelist Joyce Carol Oates is quoted as saying “Gordon McAlpine has imagined a totally unique work of ‘mystery’ fiction – one that Kafka, Borges and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated.” 

You’ll have to order the book from Maria’s Bookshop. Give them a call, keep your $15 in town, and Maria’s will give you a 15% discount if it’s not consumed in special shipping. ?