Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet
stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger
Rosenblatt imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With
the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone 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. He investigates 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 and the
Empire State Building.
A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of
faith, suffused with a mixture of acute observation and bracing humor,
lyricism, and wit, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel
and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.