Memory Book

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

This is the latest in a fine series that began in 1980 and has given us
Canada’s favourite private eye, the internationally popular Benny
Cooperman of Grantham (St. Catharines), Ontario. Not only is this
adventure Benny’s most unusual, but the very existence of the book is
remarkable. Howard Engel, the author of this series, awoke one morning
in 2001 and found that he could no longer read. Perversely, he could
still write, but could not read what he had written. Eight weeks of
tests and therapy in hospital followed, and he continues the difficult
relearning process.

In Memory Book (which Engel dictated and had read back to him as he
wrote), we find Benny in hospital, where almost all the story happens.
He had been found in a dumpster with a female university professor. Each
had been clubbed on the head. She was dead. Benny’s memory is severely
impaired; he can no longer remember names, for instance, and he has no
idea who he was working for, what he was investigating, or even why he
was in Toronto. From his hospital room, with help from his girlfriend
and others, he sets out to find the answers. He is also handicapped in
that, like the author, he suffers from alexia sine agraphia—the
ability to write without being able to read.

A series of novels is best read in sequence; characters from Benny’s
last adventure, The Cooperman Variations (2002), appear here, and
indeed, that case, it turns out, led directly to the one we gradually
learn about in Memory Book. Shorter than some of his previous novels, it
still crackles with the Cooperman wit, moves right along, and no doubt
reflects many of Engel’s hospital experiences. Included is a
fascinating afterword by Oliver Sacks, a famous expert on bizarre
neurological conditions.