Date Published: 1990, ACE FantasyISBN: 0-441-06795-6
# of Pages: 200
I picked this book up in a bargain bin a number of years back. I was going through the heaps of books I have piled in boxes recently in a painful effort to rid myself of those that I REALLY NO SERIOUSLY never plan on getting around to, and this little book was uncovered. I've obviously been in a vampire mood lately and it looked quirky enough to tickle me, so I gave it a chance.
It was honestly about what I expected, though I was certainly entertained and sometimes meeting expectations is better than being pleasantly surprised. The premise is this -- a man wakes up one day to find that he has been murdered. He is able to determine this, of course, because he is now undead -- a vampire. The gimmick becomes clear at this point. He's able to track down and punish his own murderer, and the process is charming, as he must team up with a quirky British private investigator who is utterly intrigued by the protagonist's "condition".
I was a little turned off at first by the traditional way in which vampires in this story were imagined (the need to sleep with one's native soil, difficulty crossing running water, ability to become invisible, etc.) but I got caught up in it pretty quickly and while it's still not the sort of vampire I prefer (it all just strikes me as SO far-fetched that it's hard for me to suspend disbelief) I did find it fun being involved in a story in which something so fantastical was wrapped up in something as mundane as a detective story.
Oh -- and the setting is post-prohibition Chicago for the most part, which is charming for its own reasons. It's really actually very "cute", in a loose sense of that word. Again, what I mostly enjoyed was seeing a vampire character forced to deal with a genre that traditionally has never seemed to have any room for the supernatural.
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