Mr. White's Confession: A Novel (1998)

This was interesting...mainly delving into the corruption of the police in the 1940s era and it develops a story of murder and intelligence both. I think it's well crafted with a likable victim who has a hidden eloquence despite his limited life experience in many areas. At the same time, it's not the kind of novel that is life changing..just an enjoyable read overall. I especially loved the parts about photography and the protagonist is a very likable photographer...you can't help feeling sorry for what befalls him. He is gentle, sad and beautiful and throughout time those type of humans have been drastically misused and under-appreciated.

Truly, this novel is about injustice and, though times have changed quite a bit, I'm sure that there are those still mistreated and wrongly imprisoned throughout all of the states in our country...

This is also a work of fiction and yet one can see how it could easily happen during this or any time since.


pg. 23 "I mixed chemicals for the darkroom in the kitchen in order to prepare the last roll I took of Ruby from The Aragon...working with the lights off-or rather with only the red safe light on-is a strange sensation, like what I imagine being deep underwater must be like. And I must say I have imagined that this is what death must be like., or the passage into death, a kind of blind trudge into the dark."

pg 26 "Maybe the future world is wishing for is a rather dangerous time, and that is part of the hollowness one feels."

pg 83 "I always think Sunday's sort of the saddest day...like the world's empty. Like nobody's home."

pg. 323 "Maybe I was only looking at the world. It was just a photograph. But perhaps now in my poverty, in my solitude, perhaps I'm in the world truly, at last. I can feel it in my flesh. I can see it and smell it and I have no other course but to love it." ( )

I picked this book up because it was an Edgar Award winner. I enjoyed its original format, its unusual story line, and its quirky characters. That said, the book was occasionally annoying--the author's metaphors, for example, became cloying after awhile because there were so many of them, and every now and again the plot line just didn't work. ( )

Two dance hall girls are murdered in the Minneapolis of the late 1930s, and a slightly retarded man is falsely accused of the crimes. The story alternates between the diary entries of the suspect, Mr. White, and the life of the police detective charged with solving the crime. This contemporary mystery set in the noir world of the past is an engaging story that leaves the reader with a bittersweet feeling. ( )

Amazon review:
In Robert Clark's second novel, Mr. White's Confession, two men grope through real and metaphysical mysteries in post-depression Minnesota. A pair of girls, taxi dancers at a local dance hall, have been murdered. It seems obvious to everyone involved that the killer is Herbert White, a quiet eccentric with a taste for glamour photography--particularly after portraits of the dead women are found in his apartment. Yet police Lieutenant Wesley Horner finds himself obsessed with the oddities of the case, starting with the fact that the suspect is afflicted with a faulty memory. Literally unable to recall anything but the distant past (and intermittent patches of the present), White cannot confess to the murders. Did he in fact commit the crime, or is he merely a convenient scapegoat? Agonizing over these questions, Horner also begins to ponder the role that memory plays in understanding the past--and the present.
Part of the narrative consists of Herbert White's journal, and this is the best part of Mr. White's Confession. Here Clark creates a voice that is both innocent and formal and, most of all, blind to its own desires. Recalling a visit by Ruby Fahey, one of the eventual victims, the photographer writes: "She went back to my bedroom to change, and I must say I felt a huge sort of breathlessness at the idea that she was in my room shedding and then donning her garments, rather as if some mystery of great enormity were taking place right here in my humble quarters!" Horner's half of the narrative, alas, is weighted down by tired lyricism, and populated by a hard-boiled cast straight out of Raymond Chandler. The result is a gripping mystery with an anticlimactic ending--less a philosophical resolution than the tail of a shaggy-dog story.

DNF. It just felt as though I would be so depressed by Herbert White and the torture of his life that I just didn't get very far. Not the novel's fault.

Read 2/11

good book but so much nastiness, when the killer took the girlfriend i had to stop reading for a while. the characters except for white were all so lonely. i thought the book ended too suddenly, we knew what happened to white but not the cop. ( )