Pop-culture icons team up to fight crimes

For more than 30 years, Britain’s Kim Newman has been producing thoroughly entertaining, startlingly original fiction. He has remained something of a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic, but that situation could — and should — change with the publication of his immersive new horror thriller, “Something More Than Night.”

For readers unfamiliar with Newman’s work, here are some points worth noting. First, much of that work takes place within a coherent fictional universe in which a large cast of revolving characters moves freely from one story to another. “Something More Than Night” is a wholly independent narrative, but it, too, contains echoes and reflections of the author’s earlier fiction. Second, Newman’s narratives are steeped in the large and small details of popular culture — the books, TV shows and movies that have influenced us all. His magnum opus is the multivolume Anno Dracula series, which takes Bram Stoker’s original novel and turns it on its head, positing a world in which Stoker’s vampire-hunting heroes failed to destroy Count Dracula, ushering in a bizarre new future in which vampirism runs rampant. The series is both ingenious and utterly addictive. You’ve never read anything quite like it.

The same can be said of Newman’s latest. Though smaller in scale than the Anno Dracula novels, it is equally clever and equally indebted to popular culture. The story takes place in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. The protagonists are an unlikely pair who came to prominence during that era: “R.T.” (mystery novelist Raymond Chandler) and “Billy” (aka William Pratt, better known as “Frankenstein” actor Boris Karloff ). In Newman’s version, these men — who never met in real life — share a common history. Both are “English public school men” who met on the cricket pitch at Dulwich College.

Both, in their youth, were touched by an agent of the supernatural. That “touch” marked them for life and precipitated a series of paranormal adventures only hinted at here. The latest of these adventures forms the substance of “Something More Than Night.”

The story begins with a phone call in the middle of the night, as Chandler and Karloff are summoned to an apparent homicide at the Santa Monica Pier. The scene has been staged to resemble a similar murder from Chandler’s debut novel, “The Big Sleep.” But this victim’s face has been obliterated with a shotgun, making this a far grislier murder than anything

Chandler ever devised. The crime, Karloff notes, brings the separate worlds of Mystery and Horror together. As the narrative proceeds, Horror will soon become the dominant element.

The victim is quickly identified as Joh Devlin, private investigator, pulp fiction writer and partial model for Chandler’s iconic detective, Philip Marlowe. Three years earlier, the trio had investigated a sensational incident that came to be known as The Home House mystery: Ward Home Jr., wealthy head of Pyramid Pictures, was seen running from his home engulfed in flames, then disappeared into the night. The case became the focus of intense public scrutiny, but the details of what happened were never revealed.