Book Synopsis
THE THREE DEATHS OF HORST VON HESSELBRUT
The Hesselbrut Dossiers, Volume Five
Edited by Tony Arnold
He died of a fall from a ladder. He died of a spotted, cancerous malady. He died peacefully at a birthday party, aged ninety-one. He died in a Bangkok hotel room with no window. And the man who has been hired to settle the matter once and for all is, depending on which document you read, his student, his son, or both.
The Von Hesselbrut Archive files every subject by the manner of his death: one death, one buff jacket, one steel drawer. The drawer marked HESSELBRUT, H. VON holds three jackets and has begun to bow. The Trustees of the estate are not troubled that the Professor died. They are troubled that he died inconsistently. Insurers, two foreign consulates, and a gentleman in Tampa who claims to be a creditor all demand a single, authoritative account, so the Trustees have commissioned the one man who holds the keys.
That man is Dr. Crabbe Rangoon, custodian, editor, and chief of the White Devil Press. He opens the drawer and finds:
• A ladder that was polished by someone, stood upright and unmoved at the scene of the fall, and now sits in the Archive’s reading room, where he has climbed exactly halfway.
• A coroner’s form with a mango stain on the one digit that matters.
• A transcript in which the only witness to the second death answers every question with another question, and then asks the Archive to validate his parking.
• A home chemist’s notebooks containing twenty-two tests, twenty-two blanks, and one swab cleaner than a kitchen.
• A menu for a ninety-first birthday party at which the Professor will tell a story and will not answer questions afterward.
• Three birth certificates for the editor himself, which agree with nothing but one another’s disagreement.
• Margins filled with notes in green ink, written by a woman who was alive when the documents were written and who has since managed to die only once.
The Three Deaths is part detective story, part Southern Gothic archive-crawl, part mock-scholarly apparatus run beautifully off the rails, and part love letter to the hapless, endlessly self-contradicting man who raised, taught, or possibly fathered the narrator. The footnotes are small rooms in which an editor may sit down. They are also, increasingly, where the real story hides.
You will meet a night watchman who never asks for identification, a monkey with a horror of green ink, a bartender at a drive-in who served a drink to a tall old man who did not drink it, and a restaurateur whose daughter delivers his testimony from a kitchen that no one is permitted to enter. You will meet a Bureau of Planetary Intercessionary Affairs, which answers an urgent inquiry with a form containing tick boxes, one of which is left conspicuously empty. And at the end, in a sub-basement vault, you will count the canisters.
Perfect for readers of Borges, Pale Fire, House of Leaves, Tiki-bar mythology, Florida weirdness, and anyone who has ever suspected that the person who understands a man best is the one who wrote in his margins.
“I am obliged to report that I have died. I am further obliged to report that it did not take.”
— Horst von Hesselbrut, in a telegram to his publisher
Read the dossiers. Open the drawer. Keep the account open.
Published by White Devil Press, Candor-on-Asperger, Florida. No original document was harmed in the preparation of this volume, although several were sneezed upon.