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A Novel
by Gordon McAlpine
What becomes of a character cut from a writer's working manuscript?
On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American academic, has been thrust into the role of amateur P.I., investigating his wife's murder, which has been largely ignored by the LAPD. Grief stricken by her loss, disoriented by his ill-prepared change of occupation, the worst is yet to come, Sam discovers that, inexplicably, he has become not only unrecognizable to his former acquaintances but that all signs of his existence (including even the murder he's investigating) have been erased. Unaware that he is a discarded, fictional creation, he resumes his investigation in a world now characterized not only by his own sense of isolation but by wartime fear.
Meantime, Sam's story is interspersed with chapters from a pulp spy novel that features an L.A.-based Korean P.I. with jingoistic and anti-Japanese, post December 7th attitudes – the revised, politically and commercially viable character for whom Sumida has been excised.
Behind it all is the ambitious, 20-year-old Nisei author who has made the changes, despite the relocation of himself and his family to a Japanese internment camp. And, looming above, is his book editor in New York, who serves as both muse and manipulator to the young author—the woman with the blue pencil, a new kind of femme fatale.
"Starred Review. [McAlpine] once again ventures successfully into metafiction, jumping back and forth between two separate manuscripts while delivering a masterly critique of the mystery novel....the book works both as a conventional mystery story and as a deconstruction of the genre's ideology: whichever strand readers latch on to, the parallel stories pack a brutal punch." - Publishers Weekly
"McAlpine has skillfully melded ...the sensibilities of meta-fiction and postmodernism into a truly original crime novel" - Booklist
"Pick of the Month. Gordon McAlpine's new novel, Woman With a Blue Pencil, is a masterpiece of meta-fiction...a playful, yet responsible, work. Woman with a Blue Pencil functions equally well as critique and as driving detective novel.... I don't know the last time I read a book that made me think that much AND had that good an ending." - MysteryPeople
"Woman with a Blue Pencil is a brilliantly structured labyrinth of a novel—something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, postmodernist in its experimental bravado and yet satisfyingly well-grounded in the Los Angeles of its World War II era. 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." - Joyce Carol Oates
"The tragic treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II is illuminated in a new way in Gordon McAlpine's stylistic and effective novel investigating the erasure of identity. The novel's structure itself is a perfect metaphor for the confusion and repression of the times and how people with 'blue pencils' seek to edit the representation of historic experiences. This is a brilliant novel that you will want to read over and over again." - Naomi Hirahara, Edgar® Award–winning author of Summer of the Big Bachi
This information about Woman with a Blue Pencil was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gordon McAlpine is the author of Hammett Unwritten and numerous other novels, as well as a middle-grade trilogy, The Misadventures of Edgar and Allan Poe. Additionally, he is coauthor of the nonfiction book The Way of Baseball, Finding Stillness at 95 MPH. He has taught creative writing and literature at U.C. Irvine, U.C.L.A., and Chapman University. He lives with his wife Julie in Southern California.
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