THE SUMMER OF HAIGHT

Petersen’s novel offers a winning Summer of Love take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Longfellow (whom everyone simply calls Longfellow) is a British expatriate living in San Francisco and working as an attorney. The year is 1967, it’s the first weeks of the Summer of Love, and he’s having foreboding dreams about dead hippie girls. That’s not the only strange thing happening: When Longfellow visits his fellow British expatriate and psychiatric researcher friend Jonathan St. Amour, the Good Doctor, as Jonathan is known, leads him through his impressive new laboratory with its “long row of glass cages filled with snakes of every conceivable size and variation, all slithering about and hissing and showing off their tongues.” Jonathan lectures Longfellow and other gathered guests about his recent study of transmogrification, the ability to “unleash the will to be whatever we wanted to be.” Even more curious than this is the Good Doctor’s request to Longfellow regarding the alteration of Jonathan’s will—he wishes to bequeath his life earnings to a man unknown to Longfellow in the event of an unexplained absence for any period exceeding three months. This unknown man, Dr. Asmodeus Youngblood, soon moves in with the Good Doctor and begins running the home. Longfellow takes it upon himself to start following Youngblood, a hippie who wears “a tall top hat tilted rakishly low on his forehead. The word ‘LOVE’ had been painted in bold white brush strokes across the black felt. He was dressed in a long, full-length indigo plush velvet coat, with the collar flipped up, covering his face and ears.” Longfellow becomes convinced that Dr. Youngblood is planning to do away with Jonathan and enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend, a detective named Maggie Shaughnessy, to figure out what’s going on. His suspicions intensify when a young girl is found dead and he becomes convinced that Dr. Youngblood is her killer. Intercut with scenes of the investigation are Longfellow’s visions and dreams, presented as italicized poems as he tries to connect the swirling dots of the case.

The story will read as familiar to anyone acquainted with Robert Louis Stevenson’s original Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—Petersen acknowledges the obvious precedent in the afterword. Like the original, this story is fleet-footed, moving quickly from scene to scene in short chapters in which the author displays an impressive command of atmosphere. Petersen captures the textures of the era and the unease that the relatively straightlaced Longfellow feels as he is forced to navigate the Fillmore and various hippie gatherings: “I saw a sea of hippies blowing whistles, counting their toes, diddling with kinetic sculptures that ‘thundered’ when struck, sharing with each other their feathers, whistles and curious pebbles.” In creating Longfellow and giving him an obedient Schnauzer who comes along on his investigations, the author has also potentially decanted a formula for a new detective series, should he decide to pursue it. Even if the solution to the central mystery may appear obvious to readers early in the story, the evocative first-person narration by Longfellow will still keep them reading.

A smart and fast-paced hippie noir.