Product Description

St. Paul, Minnesota, 1939. The body of a beautiful dime-a-dance girl is found on a hillside, and Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner, struggling and alone after his wife's recent death, heads the investigation into her murder. His chief suspect is Herbert White, an eccentric recluse and hobby photographer who spends his days recording his life in detailed journal entries and scrapbooks. In Mr. White's Confession , Robert Clark illuminates the complex relationships between truth and fiction, past and present, faith and memory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1188019 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

From Amazon.com
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. --Emily Hall

From Publishers Weekly
By opening with a long epigraph from St. Augustine's Confessions (in the original Latin, no less), Clark's ambitious, atmospheric rumination on good, evil and the gray area in between announces intentions far loftier than those of the standard dime-store detective novels to which the book bears an intentional but superficial resemblance. Set in St. Paul, Minn., in the bleak winter of 1939, this high-brow thriller retains enough lowdown grit and grime to qualify as both a suspenseful read and a surprisingly touching character study. When two young "dime-a-dance" girls are murdered, tough-as-nails homicide cop Lieutenant Wesley Horner hones in on eccentric recluse and amateur photographer Herbert White as the prime suspect. Looking like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Paul Bunyan, and equally obsessed with Hollywood starlet Veronica Galvin and the voluminous scrapbooks and journals he keeps in order to compensate for his (narratively convenient) memory loss, White takes the fall with sympathetic dignity: astute readers will have fingered the real culprit many pages earlier. The true mysteries here are psychological: Horner's morally suspect relationship with teenage drifter Maggie is particularly fascinating. Having previously written a biography of James Beard (The Solace of Food), a cultural history of the Columbia River (River of the West) and a critically lauded first novel (In the Deep Midwinter), Clark here seesaws, most often successfully, between hard-boiled cliches and an earnest, self-conscious concern with the natures of memory and love. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Is solitary eccentric Herbert White involved in the murders of two young women, or is his short-term memory failure really pathological, as he claims? As in the author's acclaimed first novel (In the Deep Midwinter, LJ 12/96), this psychological mystery is set in Minnesota in the mid-20th century. Wesley Horner is a seemingly hardened police lieutenant with a tragically fragmented family. The triumph of his pursuit and capture of pitiful suspect Herbert is cut short, however, when Horner's new sweetheart thinks that the man might be innocent. Fellow officer Welshinger is a bit too conscientious in extracting a confession from White. Damning evidence telegraphs to the reader the identity of the real murderer, since the real point is not whodunit but whether or not the truth will emerge. A literary treat for procedural fans, this belongs in all libraries.?Margaret A. Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
A truly different type of mystery in which the characters are richly drawn and unforgettable. Mr. White "seems" to be a rather pitiful fellow, but all is not what it seems to be. In this novel, the good guys can turn out bad and vice versa. Told from each character's perspective, the story weaves not so much a mystery thriller, but rather an insight on personal pains, demons, and redemption.

An unnerving novel
Herbert White lives a strange life in Saint Paul in 1939. He's a very lonely man, has no friends, is profoundly attached to his daily routines and is an amateur photographer. He particularly likes taking pictures of taxi dancers working at the Aragon Ballroom where Herbert occasionally goes. And so he met Charlie Mortensen - also called Carla Marie LaBreque - and Ruby Fahey. Due to Herbert's eccentric way of life as a recluse, he doesn't feel very comfortable in the presence of women. All the photography sessions taking place at his apartment, Herbert's behaviour is always uneasy whenever a woman comes for posing. When Charlie Mortensen is found dead by strangulation on 30 Sptember 1939 and Ruby Fahey (killed in the same manner) on 22 October, the police suspect Herbert White and arrest him. Slowly White will be drawn into signing a confession stating that he killed the two women. But Lieutenant Wesley Horner becomes suspicious: why did Hebert White state in his confession that he killed the women "by battery to the head" when both of them died from strangulation?
Truth vs. fiction, past vs. present, love vs. hatred, faith and memory are the themes illuminated masterfully by Robert Clark. This is not a mystery story in the classic sense but rather a complex, intriguing and fascinating journey into the human psyche. A beautiful book.
Philippe Horak / phorak@gibz.ch

A Mystery about the Mystery and Beauty of Life
What a marvelous novel: a searching exploration of memory, love, beauty, good/evil, and the hideously mistreated victim, who endures life and takes himself to a higher spiritual plateau. This novel is soaked in mystery, albeit most of it not of the superficial kind that litters most mysteries by, for example, Sandford, Grafton, Patterson, E. George. Readers enjoy a speed read through the kinds of novels written by most mystery authors. I have no quarrel with them. But I would argue vehemently that one Mr. White's Confession is worth more than all the "speed read" novels put together. I am of course making a value judgment, a rather absolute one, but the depth and beauty of this novel demands praise and the most heartfelt entreaty that if you are reading this commentary that you read this novel--your life will be enriched. This novel almost broke my heart at several points. But what it really did is stir into my consciousness the memories of love and beauty in my own life; it made me take stock of where I have been and how important it is that my future create memories that are full of love and beauty. Read this book and be the wiser for having read it.