Alfred Alcorn

In the aftermath of a murder at a city museum, Norman de Ratour, a self-effacing secretary and fastidious sleuth, begins an investigation and uncovers a cannibal cult in the anthropology section and eugenics in the genetics lab. IP.

When Professor Humberto Ossmann and Dr. Clematis Woodley, who heartily despised each other in life, are found together in a mortal embrace, Norman de Ratour knows that evil once again stalks the hallowed precincts of the Museum of Man. It has been several years since the museum was wracked by what became known as the “cannibal murders.” Many of the same characters – Malachy Morin, Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department, Constance Brattle of Wainscott University's Oversight Committee, the Reverend Alfie Lopes, Elsbeth, now Norman's beloved wife, and Israel Landes, his devoted friend – play their parts as an unseemly conspiracy unfolds: A powerful aphrodisiac under development in the Genetics Lab is being used as a murder weapon. Norman, now director of the museum, figuratively dons his deerstalker hat to help the Seaboard police find and bring the miscreants to justice. The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man takes black comedy to philosophical heights, exploring the human (and inhuman) condition and seeking to redeem it through humor in a novel that combines parody and murder mystery suspense.

When Norman de Ratour discovers the body of Heinrich von Grümh in a car outside his beloved Museum of Man, he knows he faces a sticky public relations mess. What he doesn’t know is that the gun used to kill the honorary curator is his own Smith & Wesson revolver. Implicated, publicly embarrassed, his life’s work in danger, Norman becomes the prime per- son on a list of unusual suspects.Along the way, he both lives with and is aided by Alphus, former denizen of the Primate Pavilion and a creature who has an intellect to be reckoned with as well as a low, finely articulated opinion of the human species. As Norman endeavors to find the villain and clear his name, he learns that more than coins gets counterfeited — that people, from the ravishing merry widow Merissa Bonne to the dour Feidhlimidh de Buitliér, are not always what they purport to be.Replete with institutional spoofery, a plot hedged like a garden maze, and a literate style that treats the English language like the verbal funhouse it is, this third in the Norman de Ratour murder mysteries series sustains the genre invented by Poe while twisting and bending it into new forms.

Set on a farm in western Massachusetts, Sugar Mountain is a novel about the struggles of an extended family to survive a lethal avian flu pandemic.

Alfred Alcorn has another winner. The Long Run of Myles Mayberry , his fourth novel, is a delicious send-up of shallow liberalism with surprisingly profound moments of insight. His well-intentioned, agreeable loser of a hero, Myles O'Malley Mayberry, is a thirty-year-old graduate school drop-out with no particular long-term plans. Alcorn masterfully titrates suspense with a deeper exploration of Myle's psyche, raising intriguing questions about the nature of our ambitions and goals. After some surprising plot twists, by the end of the book, we feel both exultant and gratified, as if we'd just completed a particularly challenging and satisfying run."- Helen Fremont, Harvard Review , Fall 1999 "'Marathon Man' pens novel Author Alcorn's book is runaway fun. "We have to think about time and how we spend it," Alfred Alcorn says, the author of The Long Run of Myles Mayberry , a funny and touching novel published by Cambridge's Zoland Books. Alcorn "When Myles hit his stride, there seemed no limits. He could run to China and back. He could run beyond himself." "We are all obsessional to a point," Alcorn says. "From politics to writing even to fixing up a country house, the nature of an obsession isn't that is necessarily has to have a goal. Once someone starts obsessing-running, alcohol, birds, football, almost any human activity-it generates is own momentum, its own rituals."-Wendy Button, Cambridge Tab (excerpt), 11 May 1999 "Alcorn's new novel is an odd a send-up of the loony fads, bad fashion and sexual shenanigans of the 1970s crossed with a sober meditation on another of the decade's crazes, running and on the dangers of obsession. Myles Mayberry is a thirty-year-old, Harvard-educated under-achiever who, in almost all walks of life, is running in place. His business, his marriage, even his sanity are failing. Alienated from the '70s excesses that surround him -- the wicker and rattan, the macrobiotic foods, the new-age therapies, the religious leaders in loincloths -- he runs, not away but around and around, in preparation for the Boston Marathon. Through Myles and his "long last shot at winning," Alcorn illuminates the inner life of the runner, exploring running

While Hedley Vaughn tenaciously clings to his farm, his young wife, Janet, seeks an escape from her unbearable boredom in the arms of Lucien Quirk, a battle-scarred World War II veteran

A powerful story of one man's search for spirituality and love in today's world by a writer the New York Times Book Review called "a serious novelist with the enviable ability to create credible, moving human beings".

The Evil That White Men Do is both a satiric and sympathetic take of the current turmoil about Donald Trump and race relations in the United States. It is a novel in the tradition of Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, J. P. Dunleavy and my own Murder in the Museum of Man, which the New Yorker called “An adroit, hilarious send-up.” Trump’s election devastates Claire Fitzmorgan, who teaches English literature at Byles, a small college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not only has political correctness run amok at Byles, but Claire, ironically enough, has been passed over for tenure in favor of a man. This puts her at odds with the department head, the aging, acerbic, old-school Giles Newcombe. Coming in the aftermath of these professional set-backs, Hillary Clinton’s defeat all but unhinges Claire. She not only spent time, money, and passion on the campaign, but she had staked much of her identity as a woman on the election. The triumph of Donald Trump deepens her angst. For Claire, the man personifies all that is wrong about white male America. Her chagrin and disappointment give way to a depression that leads to a bad case of what some choose to call Trump derangement disorder. She can scarcely abide hearing that name much less seeing that face on every available screen. In her misery, she associates Trump with Fergal O’Fallon, her alcoholic, outspoken, and contrarian father-in-law. Worse, she conflates Fergal with her techie husband Donal and their precocious, six-year-old son Finn. They come to form a triptych of white maleness that twists her heart and mind. Increasingly angry, confused, and vulnerable, she leaves Donal and Finn to go with her best friend, the wealthy Mims Pappas, to Eagle Nest Farm, a rural retreat in the northern Berkshires of Massachusetts. There, for a hefty sum and in decidedly primitive conditions, they join fifty or so like-minded souls, many of them women, seeking to to be cured of whiteness. In the temper of the times, whiteness, specifically white male whiteness, is viewed by many as a rapidly emerging social pathology. At Eagle Nest Farm, as part of the cure, the members experience life as it was lived before the advent of the white man. There they also imbibe the wisdom of the charismatic Nogumi, a trans-racial, trans-cultural, trans-gender holy woman. To some it would appear as an elaborate scam, one not without its adventures, its dangers, and its inadvertent dark humor. Claire, a devotee of Virginia Woolf, keeps a journal in which she comments on Nogumi’s frequent homilies to the assembled members and records her own mixed feelings. So much of what Nogumi says about white male whiteness and the ills of the modern world initially make sense to her. Then doubts creep in. At the same time her husband Donal begs and threatens in letters (no phones are allowed) in an attempt to have her return home. His efforts include a visit to the farm with Finn, a visit that does not go well. She is conflicted and decides after several weeks that she wants to return to her old life, despite the ever looming Trump. But in the meanwhile, the rich and pampered Mims, to whom Claire is devoted, has joined the Paleo Realm. This is an experiment in Stone Age living located in the nearby woods. Here, in conditions so primordial that even language is forbidden, its denizens live off the land in a haphazard sort of way. Staffed by three young, studly men, the Paleo Realm is in reality little more than a male brothel serving the needs of those members in need of servicing. Once there, Mims, hooks up with one of the young men and doesn’t want to leave. She has found her real self in being, as she puts it, a fake among fakes. Claire hesitates, torn between loyalty to her friend and wanting to return to her real world. At which point things fall apart as in a nightmare within a nightmare.

Set in 2041, the novel GEMINIUS revolves around the whole brain emulation (WBE) that Marcus Aurelius McIssac undergoes at the labs of the UPlode Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a thriving, for-profit company. The Mellon-Musk Professor of Imagination Studies at Harvard, Marcus is chosen as the prototype for UPlode’s first complete WBE in part because, at the age of 65, reasonably affluent, and a member of the professional class, he fits the company’s ICP -- ideal customer profile. He is also familiar with the project having consulted for the company. And, finally, he is viewed as an effective spokesman in being articulate and engagingly eccentric. The story opens on a warm sunny day in late May when Marcus, relaxing with Lilly Benoit, his wife of many years, at their country place in the Berkshires, receives a communication from the UPlode Group that they are considering him as a candidate for this first WBE. Though Lilly is skeptical, Marcus, at heart a philosopher, is intrigued. Geminoids, copies of people, had existed since the teens, but this was to be the first time a fully emulated brain (produced by a complex technique of self-copying) would be coupled with a look-alike, fully innervated android. Marcus, a large-living character, is highly regarded as a pioneer in his field having made his academic bones some years before with the publication of The Muscle of the The Imagination and How It Works. The interviews with the team at UPlode go very well. They choose Marcus as their prototype. He goes back and forth with Lilly and with himself before making a decision that has profound, fateful, and unexpected consequences.

Inspired by Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber," Natural Selection renders a vivid account of obsession, love, betrayal, and death on safari in East Africa. It is a novel in the classic mode of American fiction.

A striking range of brilliant oils and pastels by a master of colour, light, and atmosphere, taking inspiration from the realists' attention to physical details and the fauvists' use of untamed colours and forms.

Time Is The Fire recounts a day in the existence of Leopold BloomO’Boyle, chronophobe, travel writer, would-be novelist, and husband ofthe Reverend Annabel Chance. The day is September 8, 1992, and theplace is Harvard Square and environs. Like his namesake, Leo dipsinto and out of a stream of consciousness as he considers andreconsiders the most important decision of his life. In his quest foran answer, he struggles with his fear of time, a fear inextricablymeshed with the fateful choice he and Annabel must make. Along theway, he encounters characters real and imaginary, including the shadeof his late father; his friend Alf; the temptress Silvia; and the poetStratis Haviaras. He argues with Philip Larkin and harkens to thewords of James Joyce and Seamus Heaney, words that suffuse his heartand mind. He works feverishly to finish a draft of his languishingnovel, the protagonist of which, like himself, is trapped in theriddle of time.

The year is 2027. Climate upheavals and pollution have reached crisis proportions. People cover their houses with plastic domes and wear masks to go outside. Despite Homeland Security harassment, Harvard toxicologist Helen Michaelson works to stem the extinctions that are becoming routine. As the crisis deepens, she learns about and must decide whether to join or oppose a conspiracy among colleagues to depopulate the world with a deadly pathogen to save what's left of nature.

When Harvard Law School student Frank Howland shows up at the Caboto ranch on California's Point Reyes scarcely a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, his advent turns out to be far more than a temporary stop on a cross-country journey. From the start Frank is taken with the daughter of the family, nineteen-year-old Angela Caboto. She in turn is in love with Haru Kimura, a young Japanese-American, who, as a ranch hand, is Frank's bunkhouse mate and, quite soon, his confidant. Angela's brother, seventeen-year-old Stefano ("Call me Steve") doesn't much like Angela and Haru's mutual attraction. But her parents, patriarch Gustavo and his wife Maria, who calls Frank "Francesco" take the situation in stride. Like Frank, Haru is seeking a larger world, or at least one less confining than that of his family, first generation Japanese who own and work a vegetable farm near Petaluma. Haru tells Frank that he and Angela are saving up to elope to Hawaii where mixed-race couples are more tolerated. An aspiring writer and open-minded, Frank has no objection except that he is increasingly smitten by Angela, by herself-possession, her wit, and her courage. But his sense of honor and his regard for and growing friendship with Haru keep him from any overt declaration of his feelings. Not that he doesn't inadvertently betray himself through glances, chance remarks, and his willingness to help the family beyond farm work. Frank's sense of honor is severely tested when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Anti-Japanese feelings, never far from the surface, grow extreme and leave Haru vulnerable. Too high-minded for any obvious betrayal of his friend, Frank is nevertheless tempted. But as he reminds himself more than once, all is not fair in love and war. As the round-ups for the internment begin, a local deputy sheriff and FBI agent visit the ranch. But they are interested in the Cabotos, whom they mistake for Italian nationals. (They are Italian-Swiss.) Frank helps Haru to hide in an abandoned hut on the property. It proves an uncertain and temporary refuge. The Cabotos and all they have worked for become increasingly at risk as the shadows of war deepen and a harrowing fear grips a region bracing for invasion. Point Reyes is a story about honor, love, loss, war and place. Along the way, it examines, sometimes directly, sometimes head-on, what it means to be an American.

It appears that someone is trying to kill Norman de Ratour, the fastidious, old-school director of the Museum of Man in the coastal New England city of Seaboard. The Art of Murder takes our hero through some hair-raising and absurd adventures to the very threshold of death's door and unceremoniously kicks open that looming portal. But not before a lot of laughter in the dark, which echoes through the series starting with the first, a work The New Yorker dubbed "An adroit, hilarious send-up."

Myles runs. And runs...