Our Man in the Dark

Harrison’s debut fuses fascinating history with a repellent protagonist and an implausible pulp plot. In 1964, John Estem is a bookkeeper at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With his leg in a brace from surviving polio, an unhealthy fixation on a nightclub singer, and a penchant for prostitutes, Estem’s civil rights involvement is the only thing in his life that isn’t lonely or fractured. When his idea for a march is scuttled, Estem embezzles $10,000 from the organization to fund the march himself, but squanders most of the money on clothes, women, and a Cadillac. In his compromised state, Estem is an easy mark for Mathis and Strobe, FBI agents who recruit him to inform on purported Communist infiltration of the SCLC. Estem takes a loan from “Count,” an underworld nightclub owner and the possessive boyfriend of a singer Estem pines for, allowing Estem to maintain his duplicities for a time. But it soon becomes clear that the FBI wants to use information about Dr. King’s personal life to discredit the civil rights movement, information Count is after as well for his own blackmail purposes, Estem turns the tables on his handlers. Harrison shows promise in his evocation of time and place, but Estem’s transformation from spineless embezzler to ruthless, reckless survivor who can outwit the FBI is less successful. He comes across as unpleasant and unbalanced, and given that he never seems more than minutes ahead of being exposed, his gutsy maneuvering late in the book seems especially unlikely. (Nov.)