The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

Written by Roger Rosenblatt

Narrated by Robert Fass

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit.

Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases.

Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me."

As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9780062293121

Roger Rosenblatt

Roger Rosenblatt  is the author of six off-Broadway plays and eighteen books, including Lapham Rising, Making Toast, Kayak Morning and The Boy Detective. He is the recipient of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

Reviews for The Boy Detective

[knittingmomof3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An exceptional memoir that would be perfect for discussion groups.

[chazzifrazz · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up due to the title and the cover image. I expected it to be a mystery with possibly a young boy as the detective. It wasn’t. It also wasn’t a type of book I’d normally pick up. If anyone has looked at the reviews I’ve written, they would see they’re mostly on mysteries.Since I bought it, I felt I should read it. So I did.It is a cross between a memoir and a collection of essays. There are no chapters, books or sections in the usual sense. Some can be 2-3 pages and some only a few paragraphs. I found it was better to read one or two or maybe three of the pieces, rather than try to read 20 pages as I would normally.Rosenblatt writes of Gramercy Park – the neighbourhood he grew up in. As a boy he would walk the area, imagining himself to be a private eye, pursuing criminals. Observing people walking and creating stories about them.Now, 60 years later, he is walking the same neighbourhoods remembering the earlier years and noting what has changed. He writes of the notable people who lived in the area at various times. Of monuments such as the New York Public Library, the Empire State Building, St. George Hotel – what he remembers from the past. He writes of the everyday people he sees on the street and the dreams he has of what he has seen and done.For me, this was a book to take my time reading. To give myself time to turn over, in my mind, what I had read. It was an interesting book to read.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I quit listening to this book about halfway through. I got so tired of the constant switching between time periods with no reason plus the frequent references to people or books for which the only purpose seemed to be to show how smart the author was. The thing that bothers me most is that the author teaches a course in memoir writing which means that there will be a new group of writers who think this is how memoirs should be written.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not bad and a nifty description of Gotham among the relatively well to do during the 40s and 50s. The author is as fond of old buildings and street scapes as I am and does very well in describing them, particularly the area around Grammercy Park and the Flatiron district.

[timbazzett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Roger Rosenblatt's THE BOY DETECTIVE: A NEW YORK CHILDHOOD was a very frustrating book to read. I loved his book, MAKING TOAST, which I know must have been excruciatingly painful for him to write, as it dealt with the death of his daughter and its aftermath with Rosenblatt and his wife trying to help care for their grandchildren. That book was a bestseller, and rightfully so, because the writing was heartbreakingly spare and beautiful.So I was looking forward to reading about Rosenblatt's childhood. But this is not structured like a normal memoir. And I get it that Rosenblatt wanted to do things differently, and that he wanted to use the detective theme, as well as an extended walk through the streets of his childhood neighborhood - Grammercy Park and the surrounding areas. In other words, he wanted to do a different kind of memoir. The problem is, his methods - the conceit of the PI, and the contemplative, daydreaming walker - got in the way of telling his story. It simply made me want to throw down the book in frustration and implore him, "Please, just tell us about your CHILDhood, dammit!"Rosenblatt, who is into his seventies now, is trying, through his wanderings of the streets of his boyhood, to separate fact from fiction. While he was writing this book he was also teaching a class in memoir writing."There is a connection between the memoir class I am teaching and this walk I am taking. I must remember what it is."The problem is I'm not sure he ever makes the proper connections, and maybe the walk and the memoir class actually served to obfuscate his own memoir, to make his own memories far too dreamlike."However sketchlike the pictures I draw of my parents - have I salvaged them from fiction? In my mother's temerity, my father's crust, did I overlook the subtle motions of their minds, their troubled consciences? Detective work, when applied to one's own family, perhaps especially then, is a bitch."No sh*t, Sherlock, so maybe you should have just dropped the detective conceit and told your story the best way you could remember it. And there are certainly plenty of references here to PI's and detectives here - Holmes, Poirot, Spade,Charlie Chan, Nick Charles, Monk, etc. Hell, they're all in here. And sometimes they serve to move the narrative forward, but more often, to my mind, they don't.In the end, while I did get a pretty good picture of Rosenblatt's childhood as the son of a wealthy, privileged family, his father a doctor, it was his choice of vehicle - that Boy Detective thing, which repeatedly broke down and stalled the story - that I didn't like. I still believe Rosenblatt is a wonderful writer, but this book was, like I said, a frustrating, if not exasperating, read. Perhaps I'll try another New York childhood book he mentioned here, and which I've considered reading several times in the past few years but never got around to - Alfred Kazin's A WALKER IN THE CITY. It's from an earlier generation, from the same era, I think, as Henry Roth's excellent novel, CALL IT SLEEP, which I read in college and appreciated immensely.'So many books' and all that. I'm glad I read THE BOY DETECTIVE, but I will recommend it sparingly with explanations of the problems I had with it.

[ronrose1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Boy Detective could most accurately be called a memoir. It is composed of seemingly random, train of thought ramblings, but that would be over simplifying. The small snapshots of live in New York are skillfully tied together. The author, now an old man, is looking back on the young boy he once was. He likens his life to that of a detective, trying to solve a life full of mysteries or is it life's mysteries? He likens his life to that of many a detective. Living by his own creed, true to himself and his beliefs, he seeks the answers to a myriad of mysteries. Even as a man, he is still the boy detective on the pursuit. The book was provided for review by Harper Collins.