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:
“and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.”
—Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984)
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)