THE SILVERBERG BUSINESS

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Robert Freeman Wexler's The Silverberg Business is a detective novel set in Texas in the late 19th century, when Shannon, a Jewish detective from Chicago, is visiting the Texas coast and asked to look into a swindle that targeted Jewish immigrants to the area. While the novel begins as a pretty standard detective novel, Wexler allows Shannon's investigation take a turn into realms beyond the fields we know, providing an alternate world in which things are familiar, yet different.

Shannon begins to look for Nathan Silverberg at the request of Rabbi Henry Cohen in the small towns that had sprung up along the Texas coast south of Galveston. He quickly determined that Silverberg was traveling with two other men, Stephens and George Granger, of whom Stephens had a threatening demeanor, even when he wasn't doing anything. Interviewing people who had seen the three men, Shannon becomes convinced that after convincing Silverberg to turn over the money he had collected for the immigrants society, the two men killed him, but Shannon needed to track down evidence of the crime, which took him into the Texas wilderness.

While Shannon takes a methodical approach to her search, his journey finds him passing through to a world in which skull-faced humans hold sway. Although he takes this strange realm in stride, he must figure out Stephens' tie to the skeletal world, what it has to do with Silverberg's disappearance, and how it involves the money missing from the immigration fund. Upon returning the civilization, Shannon finds the town has changed in subtle ways as he continues to figure out exactly what has happened.

In The Silverberg Business, Wexler deftly handles a detective story, a western, and a weird tale, melding the tropes from each of the genres together to create a rich world that is simultaneously familiar and strange, offering the reader a setting which follows established rules but offers the necessary space for offbeat twists that make the reader question their assumptions even as Shannon takes things in stride. Wexler's story unfolds in a leisurely manner, occasionally taking its time to describe the most mundane details of Shannon's adventures in the various versions of the world he seems to inhabit. At the same time, Shannon's investigations take him on an almost hallucinatory voyage that is reminiscent, in some ways, of some of Michael Moorcock's characters' travels through the multiverse.

Even though Shannon never really gets close to any of the characters who inhabit the towns through which his investigation leads him, Wexler draws them with quick strokes that allow his supporting characters to come to life in a manner which fits in perfectly with the situations find themselves facing. Accepting that which should raise alarms in a manner that draws attention to the supernatural by making it appear mundane.

While the world Wexler creates is the focus on the novel, Shannon's attempt to get to the bottom of The Silverberg Business and figure out how Stephens fits in is never lost. The mystery is constantly brought to the forefront as Shannon chases down clues, eventually coming to his own conclusions and revealing the answers to the questions that he has turned up through the course of his investigation.

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