The Ghosts of Manhattan

[sawyl]

Stocking up on books for the week, I picked up a copy of George Mann's The Ghosts of Manhattan on a 3-for-2 deal. Set in an alternate version of the 1920s, where cars are coal-fired and a cold war exists between Britain and the US, it follows the adventures of a vigilante — the Ghost — as he battles a mysterious mob boss known only as The Roman.

The book follows many of the conventions of pulp novels past. The hero struggles with his own morality which only allows him to shoot people if they've fired first, his dark past which in this case embraces a traumatic war experience, and his disintegrating sense of self. Lacking any sort of superpower he is forced to depend ingenious inventions and low cunning, while his enemies seem happy to mix technology and eldritch nastiness to get what they want. His assistants too, fit the model: an honest policeman, anathamatised by the Roman for his unwillingness to take bribes; and a femme fatale with a mysterious past.

The novel knocks along at a fair old pace, with car crashes, shoot-outs and even a biplane chase along Broadway. Fortunately, all the characters seem to have remarkable powers of recovery, requiring only a bottle of bourbon and a night's sleep to shake off the worst effects of gunshot wounds and glass cuts. The characters generally work pretty well, from the languid Gatsby-like Gabriel Cross, to the driven Ghost, to the duty-bound Donovan, but they action is often so busy that they don't really have many opportunities to develop into fully rounded individuals.

That said, Ghosts of Manhattan is a short, fun novel that mixes Batman and the Shadow with just a hint of Lovecraft in a way that works rather well. It has zeppelins, clockwork automata, Tesla coils... What's not to like?