A writer—a pulp novelist, a man who’s betrayed his own talent and, by his reckoning, every important relationship he’s ever known—lies in a hospital bed, delirious from disease. He can’t grip a pen; he can’t move at all without excruciating pain. To keep from going mad, he sets out to rewrite in his head The Singing Detective, his now-ancient first novel. But the world intrudes at every turn. Characters from his childhood and his wrecked marriage start turning up in his imaginings and take the story away from him. The serial’s writer, Dennis Potter—who died eight years ago this month—is wholly unknown in America, but he was one of the finest playwrights of Britain’s post-war generation, a fact too little noticed because he did all his writing for television. Potter, you should know, suffered from the same disease as his singing detective, Philip Marlow, a periodically flairing condition known as psoriatic arthropathy. The disease defined a great deal about Potter’s life; from time to time he was prone to thinking it had a moral dimension, and that if he could solve the riddle of his own life it might purge his illness. The Singing Detective is his brilliant, desperate effort to do just that, and in the process it redeems every cliché about the healing power of art.
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