I’m guessing author Michael Dempsey is both a fan of the classic hard-boiled detective stories, as well as cyberpunk, because in NECROPOLIS, he manages to mash it all up into something different, yet also familiar. Noirpunk? Cyberpulp? Well, whatever you want to call it, it works. Barely, but it still works.

Paul Donner is a NYPD detective with a shaky marriage and a drinking habit that is borderline out of control. One night, he and his wife are shot and killed during a hold-up attempt.

Fifty years later, Donner comes back from the dead due to “the Shift,” a retrovirus that reanimates dead bodies. The newly reborn — or “reebs” as they’re called — come back at the same age they died and with most of their memories intact.

A side effect of the bizarre phenomenon, besides the white hair and black fingernails, is that the reebs continue to age in reverse, until ultimately they become infants and then fetuses … which means the teenage girl that sells you popcorn and soda at the movies might actually be more than 100 years old.

New York is under lock and key in order to contain the Shift and stop it from reanimating more dead people, which makes the residents of the city not particularly fond of the recently-returned-from-the-grave. Bad enough no one can leave the city, but now the inhabitants of Necropolis — as New York comes to be called — have to share their increasingly smaller and smaller living space with former dead people who will one day need to be cared for as infants.

It’s a screwed-up world where clocks run backward and different sections of the city adopt lifestyles that correspond to the early 20th century. Some sections of the city adopt the fashion and attitude of the 1940s, while another area reverts back to the 1960s. Some go back even further.

It’s a strange world that Donner finds himself in. Although the fashion and décor may be based on the ’30s and ’40s, it’s mixed with futuristic tech: flying Studebakers, Tommy guns that shoot plasma bursts, and “virtual” people — artificial intelligence that can project themselves as holographic figures and have emotions just like the “fleshpots” (aka humans).

Donner doesn’t really care about that, and isn’t really even grateful to be alive again. He simply wants to find the guy who murdered him and his wife all those years ago. At the same time, while trying to adjust to life as a third-class citizen, Donner stumbles upon a missing person’s case. Much like the old pulp crime novels, these seemingly two different plots are destined to intersect.

Author Dempsey is new to the novel scene, but he’s made a living at writing for television and for the stage. So he’s not a novice when it comes to building a story and writing witty and compelling dialogue. But merging two disparate genres like sci-fi and hardboiled crime isn’t as much of a slam dunk of an idea as it may seem. As I said earlier, it almost doesn’t work.

He pulls it off because he has such an obvious love for the old crime novels, especially those of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, that it shines through his story. He catches the nuances of what makes those old stories so great: the hard-drinking, hard-smoking, sardonic hero who won’t let go of a case no matter how much trouble it is; the loyal Girl Friday; the Femme Fatale who is equally sexy and dangerous; the loyalty to former partners; and, of course, the whole “can anyone be trusted?” motif that is prevalent in all the great mysteries.

Dempsey also gives the reader some interesting concepts to chew on in the sci-fi part of the story. There are many legal and moral questions that erupt over former dead people coming back, and the author plays with these bits somewhat. It’s an interesting subtexture to the story, one that occasionally allows for a quirky scene or two: In one scene, a character bemoans the fact that the newly reborn and reformed Beatles are performing with Pete Best because, dammit, John Lennon didn’t come back.
 
For me, the story faltered at first, mainly because I didn’t find the sci-fi aspect of the plot that interesting (strange, I know). What drew me in, however, was the hard-boiled detective part of the story and the voice of the main character who, in the tradition of Philip Marlowe (and just about every Nelson DeMille protagonist) has a witty one-liner for every occasion. Once he won me over with that, the rest of the book became compelling reading.
  
Another thing that won me over was that NECROPOLIS had plot twist after plot twist. It’s hard to surprise a jaded reader such as myself, but I’ll say this: There were quite a few times when I didn’t see the story taking such unexpected turns. Yeah, the big reveal at the end was kind of a no-brainer and I saw the set-up for it waaay in the beginning, but some of the other turns took me completely by surprise.
         
There’s an event midway through the book that was a total shocker for me, to the point that I wondered, “What the hell can possibly happen now?” That feeling is rare for me these days, so when I come across it in a book, I savor it.

My complaints about NECROPOLIS are minor. The switch from first-person narrative when the story is focused on Donner, to third-person whenever the story focuses on the other characters, is a bit of a cheat. It’s a problem when a story is told completely in first-person because then the reader is only supposed to see what the main character — the narrator, so to speak — is seeing and experiencing.

It limits the story somewhat, but for mysteries and crime novels, it can work pretty well (see Chandler’s novels and Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series). It allows the reader to get into the head of the protagonist and see everything through their eyes.
 
Dempsey switches from Donner’s POV quite a bit in order to explore the supporting cast somewhat. I wish he had kept it one way, as I think Donner is the strongest part of the story and some of the ancillary scenes are unnecessary anyway. The story — with a little adjustment, I think — could have all been told from his POV, which would have kept closer to the crime genre that Dempsey was emulating.

Also, and this is probably just me, but the dig against John Belushi? Not cool. I get it’s a joke, and a throwaway one at that, but I miss that samurai/killer bee/Brando-imitating/Blues Brother bastard. —Slade Grayson

Buy it at Amazon.