The Dead Magician

By Evelin Sullivan

In this dazzling debut, Evelin E. Sullivan has written a novel in the form of a literary biography that will permanently color the way we read biographies. Charles Butler, a smug and slightly comical Professor of English, sets out to write the life of novelist Gregory Horace Bodamien: his poverty stricken childhood in England, his formative years at a Southern university, his eventual literary (and sexual) successes, and the grisly crime that brings his career to a halt. Interviewing Bodamien in his prison cell, Butler learns of Gregory's English father, hounded by failure into insanity; his strong American mother, who kept the family together; his older brother Adam, a talented but heartless surgeon; Elizabeth, whom Gregory courts only to lose her to Adam; and Lizzy, the daughter, claimed by both brothers, whose untimely end precipitates the final crisis. While vividly unfolding this fascinating life, Butler indulges in occasional autobiographical digressions, brief and apt at first but gradually revealing a tormented soul whose "objective" account of Bodamien's life must therefore be reconsidered by the reader. Yet another account of that life is offered by the manuscript Gregory leaves behind, "The Case of the Dead Magician." Begun as a parody of the detective novel, the tantalizing fragment shows stylistic incongruities that track the author's attempt to tell his own version of his troubled end. In addition to exploring in his story his brother's murder and reinventing the past, the novelist also makes outrageous use of his biographer, with hilarious and disturbing consequences.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0916583392
• ISBN13: 9780916583392
• Release Date: October 1989
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 315 Pages