The Magician's Tale by David Hunt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'That, my dear, was the best part! Brother and sister! Like Tristan and Isolde. The depravity of it! The absolutely scrumptious degenerate depravity!'"

When I was a child I could never understand the saying "too much of a good thing." I considered it one of million stupid things that the grown-ups used to say. How could there be too much of a good thing? Well, David Hunt's (which is a pen name for a really good mystery/thriller writer William Beyer) The Magician's Tale (1997) is a great example of there being too much of a good thing in a novel. While the same author's Switch is one of the best procedurals I have ever read, perhaps not quite lean enough but at least relatively well focused, this novel tries too pack way too many goodies. Like a cake can be overfilled to nauseating effects with delicacies - raisins, almonds, figs, nuts, and others - this novel offers dismemberment, magic, sex trade, twins, pedophilia, serial killers, photographic art, bread making, generous helpings of depravity, and even autosomal recessive achromatopsia (check it out in a medical dictionary).

The narrator of the story is Kay, a single woman in her thirties, an award-winning photographer specializing in portraying the people and situations in San Francisco's "Gulch." This is an area of sex hustlers, chicken hawks (older men interested in much younger ones), and sex transaction brokers; in a neat phrase it is the center of "alternative sexualities." Kay is street smart, knows virtually everybody in the area, and cruises the San Francisco's Gulch and Tenderloin districts with her Contax camera.

One of her friends, Tim, a young and beautiful hustler, whom she used to photograph, has been killed and dismembered. Kay is needed to identify the body parts; she befriends a female detective, thus allowing the author to relate the investigation from Kay's point of view. Connections to a serial killer case from the past emerge and - to further increase the complexity - the reader learns that Kay's father, a policeman, had been involved in that case.

The Magician's Tale is still a very good book. First of all, I love the highly accomplished prose:

"[...] there's the fragrance of wild fennel and night-blooming shrubs mixed with the resin scent of the Monterey cypresses that compose the woods around Coit Tower. I'm so accustomed to viewing this place from a great distance through a lens that I'm surprised by the intimacy this sweet aroma conveys. Suddenly I feel heady. [...]"

The long passage depicting Kay's photographic session with Tim is a piece of serious literature subtly evocative of erotic undercurrents. Furthermore, the author succeeds in conveying the specific San Francisco's sense of place:

"I like the Castro, its parade of purpose and flamboyance, tank tops and tattoos, tight asses, pert tits, piercings, muscles, leather, flesh."

And of course there is the magician's tale, the story within the story. Those of us who, unlike me, read books for the stories they tell, will love it.

Highly recommended novel, but it would have been so much better had the author deleted half of it! Or, even better, why not make two novels out of it? There is enough of the "scrumptious degenerate depravity" for two books!

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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