Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISsrg4gsj0 ( )

Voices After Evelyn is a film noir masterpiece set in Wisconsin. It explores a 65 year-old cold case, but the book is not trying to shed light on this stranger-than-fiction true story. Instead, author Rick Harsch focuses on the tragic aspects of the murder of Evelyn, the tragedy that befell those who knew her, the tragedy that embraced the town where the murder too place, the tragedy that follows all those connected with the case. In this respect, Harsch is giving us a Greek tragedy, complete with a chorus of voices, that allows us glimpses of what it means to be human in a small town in the Mid-West in 1955. In addition, Harsch captures the idiomatic nuance of Mid-Western speak. His use of language in fact drives the novel forward. Once you start reading Voices After Evelyn you can’t stop. ( )

Twain’s quip that truth is stranger than fiction reverberates through Rick Harsch’s new novel [Voice’s After Evelyn]. It’s about possibilities – truth is not constrained to stick to possibilities. And neither is Harsch. But dip into any of his work, and you’ll realize Harsch exists in other stratospheres.

Because truth is so often stranger, the true crime genre has exploded in today’s world of podcasts, and movies, and podcasts made into movies. But, in [Voices After Evelyn], Harsch engages in something subtler than scatter-gunning lurid violence and over-the-top, hard-to-believe-even-though-they’re-really-real personalities. This book is about the very possibilities that cannot constrain truth. Evelyn Hartley’s body is missing; still missing, some 65 years later. She disappeared one humid autumn night, from the Midwestern home where she was babysitting. A blood smear here, some panties there – none dispositively belonging to the enigmatically vanished girl. Rivers and swamps are plumbed, houses scoured. All that remains of her, as Harsch’s chorus floridly recounts, are possibilities.

The town is small enough to be changed by the vacuum left by Hartley’s disappearance, and the vacuum left without an explanation for the disappearance. Usually these are voids felt personally, individually. But in a sleepy heartland burg like this one, frozen in 1950’s Pyrex provinciality, the empty shell is a collective experience. And Harsch claws his way over that vast landscape through the eyes of those who felt it deepest – the addicts and criminals and drifters; the fringe, the usual suspects; a Denis Johnsonian cast, even if Harsch might not appreciate the comparison.

The set-up – again, all the real facts of Evelyn’s abduction? Murder? Escape? – is straight noir. And much of the book feels like a noir vamp, not Spillane or Hammett noir, but the noir of a Thomas Wolfe love child with Spillane or Hammett. Expansive and baroque on one page, like Wolfe; claustrophobic on the next, maybe like whatever resting place Evelyn’s body inhabits now. It’s confusing and complex, like a real abduction/murder investigation, replete with false leads, or voices here, and red herrings. Without a body, everything’s possible – that’s the truth, and it is strange. And wonderful.

Bottom Line: A noir vamp through a real mystery that engages the possibilities so vividly it’s hard to put down.

5 bones!!!!! ( )