Book Review: The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

When famed true-crime writer Julian Wells´ body is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why?

The death is obviously a suicide. But why would Julian Wells have taken his own life? And was this his only crime? These are the questions that first intrigue and then obsess Philip Anders, Wells´ best friend and the chief defender of both his moral and his literary legacies.

And so the journey, in The Crime of Julian Wells, begins. A journey that will take the reader by the hand and lead him into the wilderness of the human psyche, moving back and forth in time, describing some of the most heinous crimes that ever took place in history and bringing to light the dark secret that haunted for years on end the soul of poor Julian Wells.

“There’s no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime, Julian had once written,” and now Philip, the friend who thought so highly and yes, even a little bit jealous, of him needs to find out for himself the reason why he has taken his own life.

His quest for the truth will not prove easy though, because Julian died leaving behind him just a small clue as to why he did it but no real answers. Could the truth lie somewhere in his books, or did something else happen that made his friend decide that enough was enough and that he couldn’t go on living in this brutal world of ours?

Philip can’t stop himself from feeling a little bit guilty for what have happened. Maybe if he was there more, maybe if he knew his friend better, maybe if he could read in his face his sorrow and his pain, he could have helped him. Julian however has always been a man on the move, for him the road was home.

From his first trip abroad, I’d had little doubt that he would remain an expatriate all his life, which made it all the stranger that in the end –that terrible, lonely end– he had died at home.

Now, my thought, growing more insistent by the hour, was how I may have saved him.

Too little, too late. “Guilt is a luxury, Philip,” Julian told him once, but that doesn’t make him feel any better now. So, for the first time in his life, he decides to do something out of character, to put everything on hold and follow in his best friend’s footsteps to find out the truth about his life and death.

Thus as a man on a mission he crosses the Atlantic and goes to Paris to gather Julian’s belongings from his apartment there and then decides to keep on traveling, moving from one place to the next, visiting the places that the latter’s books talked about, meeting people who knew him and finding out a lot of the secrets he never told him.

Who, really, was Julian? he asks himself time and again. Who was that eccentric, mystifying and introvert man? As it turns out he was, as expected, somebody else. Who exactly? It well take a lot of time and a lot of traveling, and a quite a bit of detective work, until the reader, as well as the hero, finds the answer. However the journey that will lead him to the final solution will be full of surprises and flourished with bits and pieces of history that make the narrative much richer, and as time goes by more compelling.

There’s not a single word too many in this novel. The author wanted to say a story about love and loss, but also about personal and collective pain, and dress it in a coat of mystery and he did just that. This is not your usual crime novel, which makes it all the much better, not just because it crosses genre boundaries, but primarily because it does.