The Park in Popular Fiction
A cave in Inwood Park is where Pete Hamill's protagonist in the 2003 novel Forever receives the gift of immortality as long as he never leaves Manhattan. The name "Inwood" is repeatedly invoked in the novel as a site of destiny.
Fiction authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child used Inwood Hill Park as a mysterious locale for their 2009 bestseller Cemetery Dance. The book also goes into some of the history of the park, but plays a bit of artistic license in adding a small dark enclave within the area as a plot device. Previously, mystery writer S. S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright) set the plot of his novel The Dragon Murder Case (1934) in a fictional estate located in the middle of Inwood Hill Park.
In the 1995 pastiche, Sherlock Holmes and the Houdini Birthright by Val Andrews, Holmes and Dr. Watson visit with Bess Houdini, widow of the legendary magician Harry Houdini, at 67 Payson Ave. (the home she lived in after her husband's death) located next to Inwood Hill Park.
The 2001 film The Caveman's Valentine features a former pianist and paranoid schizophrenic named Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson), who lives in a cave in Inwood Park. Ledbetter discovers the frozen body of a young man left in a tree outside his cave and attempts to find out who murdered the youth.
Edward Conlon's novel Red on Red (2011) begins in Inwood Hill Park ("the stalagmite tip of Manhattan") where a woman is found hanging from a tree.
Read more about this topic: Inwood Hill Park
Famous quotes containing the words park, popular and/or fiction:
“Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)
“But popular rage,
Hysterica passio dragged this quarry down.
None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part
Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)