D.O.A. meets Blade Runner

Necropolis by Michael Dempsey
Book Review by Michael Isenberg

“Ten minutes before I died, I realized I was out of cigarettes.”

The opening line of Necropolis, the debut novel by actor/director Michael Dempsey, pretty much summarizes it. NYPD detective Paul Donner walks into a Korean market with his wife to buy some cigarettes. He dies. But only temporarily.

It’s forty years later when he revives, and he must face two shocks. The first is that coming back from the dead is quite common. There’s an epidemic of it. No one knows why, or why New York City is its epicenter. The leading theory is a bio-weapon gone wrong. But “The Shift,” as it’s called, turned the city upside down. There was chaos for a time—looting, murders, etc. But then the Surazal Corporation stepped in with its private security force to restore order. Donner’s former partner, now an old man, tells him, “We can’t take a piss without Surazal holding our dicks.”

The other shock: Donner and his wife were murdered.

On learning this, Donner eschews the factory job arranged by his assimilation counselor, Maggie (a virtual person, i.e. artificial intelligence, who eventually, and ironically, becomes his anchor to his own humanity). Instead, like Frank Bigelow in the 1950 noir classic D.O.A., Donner sets out to solve his own murder. His investigation takes him into a world of high stakes drug research, missing and murdered scientists, sadomasochism clubs, and a “cyburban myth” about the Lifetaker, a spectral virtual person gone rogue. Whenever Donner seems to have figured everything out, he’s blindsided by yet another twist.

Along the way, he confronts a host of metaphysical and social issues: The nature of artificial intelligence (à la Blade Runner). The surveillance state (“It seemed to me the only thing more disgusting than the speed at which we’d handed over our freedom for the promise of security was the speed in which others had stepped in to take that control.”). And racism. Easily identified by their white hair and gold-flecked eyes, the reborn are relegated to second life as second-class citizens (Albeit the hair can be recolored with Just for Reborn Men). Violence against “reebs” is endemic and the security forces are never on their side. In the subway, signs decree, “REBORNS IN REBORN CARS ONLY.”

Tying these issues together is the theme of the novel: how our environments shape our identities. If that environment is stripped away, as Donner's was, we learn that we’re not who we thought we were. And then we face a crisis—but also an opportunity to start anew.

I’m making it sound rather grim, but Necropolis is a fun book. Retro is the order of the day. Having lost the sense that the arrow of time only moves forward, each NYC neighborhood chooses its own decade. In midtown it’s the 1940s. Men in trench coats and fedoras drive mag-lev Studebakers. Many of the early chapters take place here, which gives the whole thing a noir sensibility. But in Harlem it’s the 1920s. Gangster Queenie St. Clair (look her up) lives again and the Cotton Club is back in business. It’s the ‘60s in the Village of course, and in Battery Park City, the competition between horses and cars snarls traffic, and 1880s hoop skirts are all the rage (Were hoop skirts still popular in the 1880s? But, I nitpick). In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t even get into what’s going on at the Meadowlands. Suffice to say, it will be familiar to fans of Star Trek TOS.

Of course it’s not just ordinary citizens like police detectives who come back from the dead. Celebrities are reborn too, and it’s not unusual to walk into a night club and find Judy Garland belting out Over the Rainbow. The Beatles finally have a reunion concert, absent John who hasn’t found his way back; Peter Best subs for him. And in the morgue at Bellevue, a medical examiner sadly fills out an autopsy report, “Name: Belushi, John. Cause of death…Same as the last time.”

The writing in Necropolis is excellent, a skill honed during Dempsey’s stint as a scriptwriter for the ‘90s sitcom Cybil. Granted, that's probably not where he learned the Raymond Chandler hardboiled-detective-speak, but regardless, he nails it. A sample: “The setting sun transformed Manhattan’s aeries into postcard silhouettes. I looked at the skeletons of warehouses, the rolling tide of razor-wire, the rusted steel shutters. The desolation was somehow beautiful. In a world of lies, it at least was honest.”

The dialogue sparkles. Donner pulls off the requisite wisecracks. For some reason, my favorite exchanges had to do with sadomasochism.

“Why do people go in for S&M?”
“Beats me.”

“For a submissive, you ask a lot of questions.”
“I’ll stop if you want.”

Not sure if my enjoyment of these reflects on me or the author.

A thriller is only as strong as its villain, and Dempsey provides a great one in the person of Nicole Struldbrug, a stunning woman with Japanese Tanto blades up her sleeves. Sister to the CEO of Surazal, she starts out as the stock noir character who walks into the shamus's office and hires him to find a missing person. “Mickey Spillane’s wet dream," is how Donner describes her. "This woman had been wrapping men around her finger since puberty….I was wondering where she went to stereotyping school.” But later, as she contemplates an antique chess set, we get inside her head and discover hidden, albeit delightfully malevolent, depths:

Most of all, though, she loved the Queen. Before the board’s “conversion” [from a Muslim game to a Catholic one], there’d been no female figures. How strange that a church so violently patriarchal would replace the King’s vizier, originally the weakest member on the board, with a woman—let alone transform her into a superpower. Maybe it was due to the rising importance of the Virgin Mary in church doctrine. But Nicole suspected that, on a deeper level, humanity was finally beginning to sense where the real strength lay between the sexes. The King was a figurehead, trapped by the burdens of office. He could only move slowly, carefully, one square at a time. The Queen had no such impediment. She could act without regard to opinion, rules of conduct or even the rule of law. She was the real mover and shaker, putting the right words into the King’s mouth, kissing his cheek, and acting deferential. That’s how Nicole preferred to operate, in the shadow of the crown. Let her brother play alpha male. Let her deluded father try to control her from afar. Her plans had already been set in motion, in the dark. Her dear, dear family would realize this far too late…. She looked across the board again. Besides the queen, the other players—the knights, bishops, even the kings—when you got down to it, they all were pawns.

To learn what these plans of hers are, and how she intends to make Detective Donner her pawn, read the book.

Michael Isenberg has had a checkered career as an astrophysicist, weapons merchant, manufacturer of cigarette butts, and senior editor of Nerds who Read. His novel, Full Asylum, is about the consequences of handing over freedom for the promise of security. And hospital gowns. Check it out on Amazon.com.