The Boy Detective

Download or read book The Boy Detective written by Roger Rosenblatt and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

Download or read book The Boy Detective Fails written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “charming” and melancholic novel, a former child sleuth “investigates the hard-to-crack case of Lost Innocence” (Entertainment Weekly). A Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist Book of the Year In the twilight of a mysterious childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is brokenhearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving partner, Caroline, has committed suicide. Ten years later, Billy, age thirty, returns from an extended stay at St. Vitus’ Hospital for the Mentally Ill to discover the world full of unimaginable strangeness: office buildings vanish without reason, small animals turn up without their heads, and cruel villains ride city buses to complete their evil schemes. Lost within this unwelcoming place, Billy befriends two lonely, extraordinary children—one a science fair genius, the other a charming, silent bully. With a nearly forgotten bravery, he experiences the unendurable boredom of a telemarketing job; encounters a beautiful, desperate pickpocket; and confronts the nearly impossible solution to his sister’s case. Along a path laden with hidden clues and codes, the boy detective may learn the greatest secret of all: the necessity of the unknown. “Haunted by the mystery of his sister’s death and feeling that a lapse in his sleuthing may be to blame, Billy is determined to find out the reason for her suicide and to punish those responsible . . . The story of Billy’s search for truth, love and redemption is surprising and absorbing. Swaddled in melancholy and gentle humor, it builds in power as the clues pile up.” —Publishers Weekly “The author gives Billy a gallery of rogues to combat and even sends him to investigate the Convocation of Evil at a local hotel (‘Featured Panel: To Wear a Mask?’). Meno sets himself a complicated task, marooning his straight-arrow, pulp-fiction protagonist in a world uglier than the Bobbsey Twins ever faced but refusing to go for satire. Instead, the author takes his compulsive investigator at face value.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Comedic, imaginative, empathic . . . investigates the precincts of grief [and] our longing to combat chaos with reason.” —Booklist

Download or read book Sad Boy/detective written by Sam Sax and published by Black Lawrence Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. LGBT Studies. From his first appearance on the page, "we knew he was bound for something unsolvable." But a little thing like futility can't stop our hero from holding up a magnifying glass to a world "so bright it's impossible to understand." In this searching, provocative collection of coming-of-age sonnets, the sad boy detective listens close, collects the evidence, and reimagines the strange landscapes of a life, a body, a boy, a self. Through a questioning, fervent lens, sam sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE reminds us how deeply bizarre and at times undecipherable all this existence stuff truly is. "Sam Sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE uses the unholy sonnet in ways that would make Jarman marvel and sigh. The entirety of this volume destabilizes our ideas of what it means to write the coming of age novel, what it means to be undetectable. And Sax is forever fighting the fight of a poet who is made aware of his separation from the world by the fact that he is-in sorrow, sex, danger, or celebration--moored to all he sees because his seeing is a searchlight."--Jericho Brown "The SAD BOY / DETECTIVE of this book is on the case of his biggest mystery yet: the strangeness of existence itself. Reading these cleverly serialized sonnets is like pressing your ear to a door full of wonders you're unsure you're prepared to inherit. The book enacts a powerful awakening. Sam Sax is a terrific emerging poet. Like a sleuth with a magnifying glass, you're going to want to follow him everywhere."--Dobby Gibson

Download or read book Rj - Boy Detective Books 1-8 written by P. J. Ryan and published by . This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a compilation of books 1-8 of "RJ - Boy Detective," fun short story mysteries for children ages 9-12. Each short story is around 30-35 pages long. It includes the following books: *The Mysterious Crate *Vampire Hunting *Alien Goo! *Mystery Poo! *Mr. Pip Is Missing! *Where Is Hensely? *Night Noises *The Cheese Thief RJ Spencer is a lucky 12 year old. He lives in the big city and his parents are landlords of the high-rise apartment building that is his home. The many tenants in the building, along with the endless possibilities of adventures in the city itself, are the perfect setting for the young detective as he sets out to solve every case he can get his hands on.

Download or read book How to Be a Detective written by Barbara Mitchelhill and published by Capstone Classroom. This book was released on 2006-07-01 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When one of his detectives-in-training spots a woman with nearly all of the signs of a criminal, young Damian Drooth tails her through a dog show and learns that she really is up to no good.

Download or read book The Dead Kid Detective Agency written by Evan Munday and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is new in town; she spends her free time in the Sticksville Cemetery and it isn't long before she befriends the ghosts of five dead teenagers, each from a different era of the past. They form the Dead Kid Detective Agency, a group committed to solving Sticksville's most mysterious mysteries.

Download or read book The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective written by J. Bradley and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Trapped in the body of boy detective extraordinaire Timmy Hightower, Jesus Christ is forced by his father to solve mysteries no mortal should ever solve. With the help of Timmy's uncle, a fourth generation circus knife thrower/acquitted serial killer Leopold Franz, they search for answers and for a way home"--Back cover.