In a True Light

It will be published in the States later this year as an Otto Penzler Book from Carroll & Graf.

"John Harvey writes the way we all wish we could write. Elegiac and eloquent, his stories filled with the blood of true character. In In A True Light he is at his very best. It's a crime story, sure, but it's also a larger story about redemption and consequences set to the beat of the human heart.ä
Michael Connelly

"John Harvey's writing is beautifully nuanced, his sense of story impeccable, his characters unforgettable. The Resnick novels formed a classic series, and with In a True Light,Harvey has broken new ground."
Jonathan Kellerman

"John Harvey's books are cool, deceptively seamless, and artfully constructed. In a True Lightis a pitch-perfect, pulp noir cocktail from a true master."
George P. Pelecanos

In a True Light is set in London, New York and Northern Tuscany at the present time and in New York's Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. A crime novel, it is also a novel about painting and painters, about identity and belonging and accepting responsibility for ourselves and others. Oh, and there's some jazz thrown in ·

The central character, Sloane, actually made his first appearance in the ninth Resnick novel, Still Waters, where he has a walk-on part as a painter/forger. Something about him intrigued me and I wanted to find out more about him. Hence In a True Light ·
 
 

Which begins like this ·
 




 
They let Sloane out of prison three days short of his sixtieth  birthday. Three years for deception, reduced on appeal to two; six months in Brixton, the remainder in Ford open prison. Naturally lean and wiry, Sloane walked out through the gates a fitter man than when he'd first walked in. Afternoons spent working in the gardens, cultivating everything from camellias to purple sprouting broccoli, cutting back random shrubbery, building dry stone walls. Evenings, he had read, sketched, exercised in his cell. Though greying at the temples, his hair was still strong and full, his eyes clear and disconcertingly blue. Strong cheekbones and lightly weathered skin. Inside, he had elected to keep himself to himself and few, fellow prisoners or guards, had tried to change his mind.
   Now he stood at the centre of Waterloo Bridge, the river running broad and free beneath him. To his left, St. Paul's and the City; to his right, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben.  The sun pale in a blue-grey sky and the air bright with the bite and promise of  spring.
   That morning he had walked along the Embankment from London Bridge, Blackfriars to Waterloo Station,  words and music to an old song by the Kinks accompanying him. Walked slowly, taking it all in. Open prison or not, prison was what it had been; what liberties they had allowed him, small and illusory.
   Sloane breathed deeply, stretched both arms wide and, the beginnings of a smile bright in his eyes, set off for the north side of the Thames.

REVIEWS & COMMENT

"It's always a gamble to desert an established series, but John Harvey has taken the high road with In a True Light, his first major crime novel without dour but popular Inspector Resnick. Sloane, a successful forger, is just out of prison, and soon swimming in a sea of double-crosses and sins from the past. A thoughtful thriller about the art world, father-daughter ties and the reality of violence, this engrossing read balances intellectual rigour with strong, realistic dialogue."
Maxim Jakubowski The Guardian

John Harvey created one of British crime fiction's greatest detectives, the Nottingham-based, Polish-descended lover of jazz, Inspector Charlie Resnick. The ten Resnick novels ÷ the last of which was published in 1998 ÷ are exceptionally well-written and plotted, and the hero himself far deeper and more interesting than is usual in crime fiction.
     All of this rich talent is on evidence on Harvey's welcome return to crime with In a True Light. Sloane, a 60-year-old forger just released from prison for his part in a scam that went wrong, receives word that a long-unseen lover from his youth is terminally ill, and needs urgently to see him.
     Jane, a famous painter, reveals that their short but passionate New York affair had, after their parting, produced a daughter, Connie, now a club singer in that city. Mother and daughter have become estranged and Jane's dying wish is that Sloane should trace Connie and effect a posthumous reconciliation.
     He eventually finds her, but feels little parental emotion. She is a sad, suspicious woman, her blues voice wasted in low-class clubs, who lives with a violent fraudster.
     At one level this is the story of Sloane's attempt to save his daughter from the criminal world in which she has become trapped. It is also a sensitive and moving study of ambivalent fatherhood, an unsparing portrait of an artist, and an atmospheric look at the bohemian New York of the late Fifties.
Marcel Berlins The Times

We know what John Harvey gets high on jazz. But with In a True Light, his first novel since he concluded his richly praised Charlie Resnick series, it's jazz and abstract expressionism, which sounds like an Oliver Nelson album but isn't. This neo-noir thriller is set in Kentish Town and New York. Sloane, a British painter who's been more successful as a forger, gets out of prison, aged 60, to discover that he has a daughter he's never met, now living in the US. She's a jazz singer and she's been on the skids but thanks to her former lover and protector Vincent Delaney she's back singing. Delaney's downside is that he's killed one woman and brutalised another.
    Sloane has to figure out how to protect his daughter. That's the now. But really Harvey, who can evoke a mood in a phrase, a period in a paragraph, is more interested in the then: Sloane's bittersweet memories of late 1950s New York in a boho community of avant-garde poets, musicians and painters.He evokes that world so well you wonder if he would have liked simply to write a straight novel about that period and felt constrained by the requirements of the genre. He's too good a writer not to produce a thriller without the requisite thrills but parts of the plot are dealt with perfunctorily. Even so, this is beautifully written and thoroughly enjoyable. Despite some brutality and extreme violence, it's Harvey in a mellow mood.
Peter Guttridge The Observer

The central character in John Harvey's In a True Light seems at first to be a complete contrast to Harvey's memorable Charlie Resnick,whose series, Harvey has announced is at an end. Sloane is sixty-something and an unsuccessful painter. Just released from prison after serving a sentence for forging old paintings, he is trying to put his life back together when a message arrives from a former lover, a celebrated artist who is dying. His choice of action could change not only his own life but that of others he meets for the first time during a journey that involves both physical and emotional danger. Little reminders of Resnick appear here and there - the delight in jazz and good food - but Sloane is a different character in every other way. It is a satisfying book and makes clear that Harvey remains one of the masters of British crime fiction.
Susanna Yager Sunday Telegraph  

After writing a series of ten British police procedural novels generally recognised as some of the best crime fiction of the 20th century, it could be a risky business to come up with a new novel where the protagonist is an aging, convicted art forger and even riskier to set most of the book in America. But not if you are John Harvey.
    In a True Lightis as downbeat and as cool as the jazz which haunts the hero and permeates the whole novel as twin criminal plots either side of the Atlantic are played out succinctly, unemotionally and without a word wasted. Apart from the flawed, but always interesting, central character of Sloane, John Harvey has created a memorable American police duo who can stand tall among the home-grown product. Not bad for a Brit.
Mike Ripley The Birmingham Post

It has been four years since John Harvey's last novel, the tenth and last in the series featuring Charlie Resnick, made famous on television by Tom Wilkinson. Resnick's inner landscape was always as important to the books as the Nottingham setting, and equally gloomy. In this off-beat venture into the crime story, Harvey's setting moves from an equally dour Kentish Town to a bright Italy and electric Manhattan, but the story is just as firmly anchored in the almost fearsome introversion of its protagonist, Sloane.
 Sloane emerges from prison, about to turn 60, an unsuccessful American painter who found a new career in NW5 as a forger, until he was caught. Between recovering what is owed him by his dealer-partner and avoiding police pressure on him to turn grass, Sloane's future looks as bleak as the abstract expressionist works he tries to produce when he isn't forging.
 That is, until he is contacted by his one great love, a successful painter with whom he carried on an affair in 1950s New York, when he was very young and she was already moving in the heady world of Pollock, Kline and de Kooning. Now dying in Italy, she reveals Sloane fathered her daughter, from whom she has been estranged. She wants Sloane to find her in America.
 Returning to Manhattan, he revisits his youth when New York was the bohemian capital of the world and discovers his daughter, a singer with little confidence and a bad chooser of men. Her current man turns out to be very dangerous indeed, and she needs help.
 This plot may seem somewhat thin, but Harvey is more concerned with the thrills of emotional rebirth than the frisson of violence. Sloane, 40 years ago a beautiful naif, needs to recapture his missing years, and discover that successful art cannot reflect an empty soul. Harvey makes this point in many ways, not least through the jazz music which the AbEx artists idolised and which Sloane's daughter pursues, and through art itself, especially women painters, like Helen Frankenthaler and Jane Freilicher, often overlooked in histories of the time. It's a rich artistic stew. If, in the end, the thriller plot resolves itself with too much ease, that is not a major fault.
 Because this is really a novel about family. Sloane's café-owner neighbour, Dumar, comes from Mali. British police attempt to use his family against him, to bend Sloane to their will. Across three continents, the story keeps coming back to wives and children. It is as if Harvey finally answers the essential loneliness of Charlie Resnick, when Sloane grasps this lifeline late in life.
 And there is one moment when Sloane dumps everything in his bare fridge into a bowl and eats it. Put between slices of bread, it might have been one of Resnick's trademark sandwiches. You can take the story out of Nottingham, but you can't always take Nottingham out of the story. Still, to this expat American, Harvey's characters and settings never fail to convince.
Michael Carlson The Spectator

It has to take a great deal of courage for an author to end a successful series with an on-going hero; especially after rave reviews, publicity, etc. (Think Frieling and Van der Valk). But that's exactly what John Harvey has done - and deserves accolades for his bravery. Resnick was established as one of the most successful crime figures around the world. Hell, John comes up for Dagger awards, gets invited to crime conventions all over - because he appeals to all kinds of countries. And then he drops Resnick and tries a whole new tack. Which is brilliant, and totally different (save for the writing).
   Sloane is getting on 60 years old and just out of prison for art forgery. He's an ambitious, but failed painter, who agreed to fake up some minor masterpieces for a shady dealer. He's also (no surprise in Harvey's work) a jazz fan, who long ago had an affair with an older, female, painter who sends him a message as she lies dying. Sloane visits her, and her lesbian lover in Italy, and is told that he has a daughter he never knew about, who's a jazz singer mixed up with a (possibly) violent man who might be connected to the Mafia.
   So Sloane goes to New York - OK, cue jazz references - he finds his daughter, and finds that her lover is a possible serial killer who likes beating up on women. Enter New York cops Vargas (get the reference?) and Cherry (who might be gay) and along the way a sexy art-dealer. Enough of the plot...it's too fascinating to reveal. All hints of old relationships and possible incest, and the main thing is that it's brilliant: Harvey teases the reader - who's going to do what next? What is going to happen? How will this end?
  What, for me, comes over in Harvey's writing is a marvellous sense of PLACEMENT.  Whether he's writing about the Nottingham of Resnick, or New York, or North London, he establishes his characters in location and convinces the reader that he has walked down those streets. He reminds me in a more fundamental way of James Lee Burke, who has that same sense of placement, only Harvey is, in my opinion, more convincing.
  This a brave and beautiful novel by an author who's willing to take a chance, and
deliver something really good. Read it!
Angus Wells Shots

Sloane, the hero of John Harvey's new novel, is an art forger who has been let out of prison three days before his 60th birthday. He is then summoned to the deathbed, in Italy, of  the older woman with whom he had an affair in New York when he was 18 years old. She, Jane Graham, has since become an internationally famous painter, and leaves Sloane as a dying gift the news that he is the father of her daughter, Connie, of whose existence he was was until that moment completely unaware. This is the starting point for Sloane's quest for the woman who may be his daughter and who works as a singer in a New York jazz club.
 Finding Connie proves easy enough, but finding the right way to approach her is much more difficult and Harvey is at his strongest as he explores Sloane's reactions to his new emotional situation.
 Connie is living with and managed by the smooth-talking Delaney, a man whose jealousy has led him to kill at least one of his previous girlfriends.
 The crime plot of In A True Light is perfectly adequate, with all the necessary suspense and a slightly perfunctory ending, but what distinguishes the book is the way it captures the vibrancy of 1950s New York.
 Harvey's prose bubbles with the energy of the period; his alter ego as a poet is demonstrated in the subtle exactness of many images.
 I found this one-off novel much more satisfying than the chronicles of the self-consciously lugubrious Charlie Resnick. In a True Light is a step forward for one of our best crime writers. And it is beautifully written.
Simon Brett Daily Mail
 
Proving that there is life after Resnick, John Harvey's latest, In a True Light, centres around Sloane, a British painter jailed for art forgery. Released at 60, he's out and looking for the daughter he never knew he had. The action's split between Kentish Town and New York, where daughter Connie is involved with Vincent Delaney, a man suspected of murder. A well-judged and sharply drawn novel that combines Harvey's well-known love of jazz with an excursion into the art world of the 1950s and Î60s.
Jim Driver Time Out

This is Harvey's first novel away from Nottingham-based supercop Resnick, the centrepiece of ten exemplary policiers that demonstrated to anyone who cares about crime fiction exactly how the business should be done. Central figure here is Sloane, emotionally bruised, skilled sixtyish art forger, just out of jail after doing time for faking minor masterpieces by Vuillard, sold by a crooked dealer, still sitting comfortably on the proceeds. Awaiting the ex-con is a letter from Jane Graham, once famous American artist with whom he had a passionate affair in his youth. Soon after they parted she gave birth to their daughter Connie, an embittered jazz singer still seeking a career in New York. He finds her trapped in a violent relationship with Vince Delaney, a wheeler-dealer the police believe is a serial killer. The body of his last mistress has just been discovered and Connie could be the next victim. What's to be done and who's going to do it? Harvey tells his tale with skill and assurance, but inexplicably ÷ and uncharacteristically ÷ fumbles the finale. A woman detective ÷ well characterised and, for most of the time, a major player ÷ is abruptly ·and, I would have thought, needlessly) sidelined. The final shootout is almost by happenstance. Characters are drawn in and out of focus, not by the demands of the plot, but as though the author has intermittently lost interest.
 What the book does best is explain the painful process of making art ÷ not only pictures but jazz. Harvey well understands both worlds and his account of how creativity finds its form and being are close up and immediate. There's also a gamy and properly gaudy portrait of the art scene in Fifties and Sixties New York (with guest appearance by Jackson Pollock) which reeks of hot sheets and cold hearts. Harvey's merits as a writer are never in doubt, but here he's heading in new directions and sometimes he stumbles. What's on offer, though, is original, authentic and exciting.
Philip Oakes Literary Review
 
  After penning ten best-selling Resnick novels in our city, John Harvey kicked the dust of Nottingham off his feet and hightailed it down to the Smoke, Luckily for him  ÷ and us ÷ he didn't leave his talent behind. For there is no doubt that his latest crime thriller In a True Light shows him at his scintillating best.
     Painted on an international canvas, it tells the story of a failed painter turned art forger, Sloane, who on release from Ford open prison, gets a summons to go to Italy, to the bedside of the one true love of his life, a dying American artist he hasn't seen for twenty years.
     What she has to tell him sends him jetting off to New York, where the two first met in the heady 1950s, when abstract art was brewing up in a mixture of booze, sex and raw talent.
In the Big Apple he is drawn into a hoodlum world where big bucks are ruthlessly pursued and human life is cheap.
     Harvey's tale is laconic and bleak and is told in a staccato style that fits the breathless storyline well. The action moves fluidly from Europe to the US and back and, thankfully, Harvey seems to have a handle on the the American scenes that (rarely in a British writer) is neither grotesquely inaccurate nor a mere pastiche or wobblyvision TV cop series.
     Harvey has caught the transatlantic tide at its full and caught a seedy if exciting type of life on both sides of the Pond ÷ which should do wonders for his sales both here and there.
     Nottingham's loss is the world's gain!
Malcolm Pain Nottingham Evening Post Weekend

The drama moves back and forth from NY to London to Italy as the large cast flawlessly hits its marks right up to the final curtain. Well-plotted, this is a relationship-driven story marked with the kind of ambiguities you'd expect from a mature talent and perspective like Harvey's.
Booknews from The Poisoned Pen, September 2001 

Hardboiled Crime Club
Patrick makes John Harvey's In a True Light his new Pick. (To September's comments), Patrick adds 'This a mature and accomplished novel by one of the finest literary stylists working today. Harvey has always written poetic and atmospheric prose, and his complex, finely-crafted characters struggle along, like all of us, to find insight and meaning.' I recommend its history of NY's art scene and its insights into creativity to fans of art mysteries. And of course, Harvey writes, 'the novel finds room for several forays into jazz' like Monk at the Five Spot with John Coltrane.
Booknews from The Poisoned Pen, October 2001  

Books: Painting a mature portrait of a crime novel
JOHN Harvey's series featuring DI Charlie Resnick, adapted for television in the early 1990s, featured a pre-Full Monty Tom Wilkinson in the leading role as the cop with the penchant for jazz and exotic sandwich fillings. With Resnick, a modern day Robin Hood with a dash of Hammet, Harvey put Nottingham on the crime map in ten novels that were pensive, downbeat, and impeccably plotted.
   Unlike the Resnick books, In A True Light features a man who has committed crime
rather than fought it. At 18, handsome Londoner Sloane had a love affair with a  promising 29-year-old painter called Jane Graham; she went to Paris and New York, became part of the movement which produced Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning, achieved fame and wealth, while he puttered away, heartsick, in Deptford and Kentish Town. Sloane's passion is abstract art, and he wants nothing more than to do his own work, but starving nobly in a garret while your peers achieve renown is much less romantic as your hair goes grey. While working as a
porter in an auction house he is approached by Parsons, a smooth but dodgy art dealer.
Parsons thinks a little Vuillard copy might sell and, mostly for the challenge, Sloane obliges. Money rolls in and his conscience doesn't bother him too much, but when things go wrong Sloane ends up inside for three years, refusing to shop his accomplice. Released three days short of his 60th birthday, he returns to his shambolic studio flat to find a letter from Jane, asking him to come and see her before she dies. He travels to her bedside in Pisa. Her bombshell is that they have a daughter, Connie, a singer in New York, and Jane makes Sloane promise to seek her out.
   Meanwhile, in New York, a man called Vincent Delaney is spying on his singer girlfriend, who is about to leave him for someone less vicious. Delaney owns pieces of clubs and bars around the city, and has an obsessive nature. A few blocks away in midtown Manhattan, a cop called Catherine Vargas sips coffee in the 10th precinct house, looking at her watch, waiting for the first homicide of the shift.
   This is a multiple perspective novel; we follow the actions of Sloane, Connie, Delaney and Vargas separately until they meet up in the final stretch, and the way Harvey leads us through the narrative is filmic, each chapter, each scene, instantly visual.
   This book echoes themes from his earlier writing in the careful detailing of colour, music, and food. Paintings, in particular, are described with great attention: 'A large canvas, exhilarating, clusters of orange, magenta and blue, tumbling through white space, one over another, the edges indistinct, slippery, moving, the eye caught up, sent scuttling: each slab of colour in harmony, in collision, filaments of paint that spring up, spray out, finally drip and
dribble and trickle down between.'
   Harvey writes with a distinctive prose style, syncopated like jazz, looping words
together like beat poetry set to muted sax, bass and piano. You really want to drag
out your old Dansette and put on Thelonius Monk or Charlie Mingus LPs while you read because the rhythm of the words and the places being described are so musically resonant.
    'The trio were easing their way along Green Dolphin Street, drums and bass reined in, the pianist giving it some attack with his right hand but not so much as to threaten anyone's appetite.'
   In other passages, the writing is more spare, allowing for great moments of tension, and of reflection.
   Most crime novels are constructed to a template aficionados can identify with ease. Harvey has been over the obstacle course frequently enough to do it blindfold and at speed, and this book moves at a fast lick so that, although the ultimate denouement is not unguessable, he propels the reader into the end game with enough action and built-up suspense to make
the pulse flutter quite deliciously. And it's interesting to read a crime novel in which the main protagonist is a mature man coming to terms with his past; Rankin does it, and in the US, Robert B Parker's Spencer, or Lawrence Block's Scudder have aged with their creators.
   In A True Light is being promoted as a stand-alone novel, but Sloane is a character whose
personality could plausibly endure further exploits in the art world.
Susie McGuire Sunday Herald