Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Publishers Weekly called him our best unknown novelist. Jim Hougan, writing in Harper’s Magazine, said Whittemore was one of the last, best arguments against television…. He is an author of extraordinary talents…. The milieu is one in which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally transformed by the writer’s wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of time and history.

An epic hashish dream … cosmic … fabulous … droll and moving. — The New York Times Book Review on Sinai Tapestry For international customers: The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 7AM and 14PM Israel time Toll But we were wrong. Whittemore, after a tour of duty as an officer in the Marines in Japan, was approached there by the CIA and spent the Kennedy years working for the Agency in Europe. During those years Whittemore would periodically return to New York City. What are you up to? one would ask. Oh, this and that. For a while he was running a socialist newspaper in Rome. After he left the Agency there was a stint with the Addiction Services Agency in New York City. Later, there were rumors that he had a drinking problem and that he was taking drugs. He married and divorced twice. He and his first wife had two daughters. And then there were the women he lived with after the second divorce. There were many; they all seemed to be talented—painters, photographers, writers, sculptors, and dancers. There were more rumors. He was living on Crete, he had no job, no money, he was writing. Then silence. Clearly, the fair-haired undergraduate had not gone on to fame and glory. A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims.

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By 1981, Whittemore was living in a studio apartment on Third Avenue in New York City. And he was writing steadily. I had left Holt earlier that spring for another publishing house and a young colleague, Judy Karasik, took over the editorial work on Whittemore’s new novel, Nile Shadows. After Ted died, she wrote the epilogue to this novel. It is one of the most moving accounts of an editor’s working and personal relationship with an author I have ever read. She should have given it as a eulogy at Whittemore’s funeral twelve years after Nile Shadows appeared. The war is raging all around – soldiers fight and soldiers die… But at the same time all over the world the invisible fighters of the secret services continue to fight their invisible combats… And the rest of the people are frightened and waiting for the worst…

Sinai Tapestry is the first book in the Jerusalem Quartet, a series written over a decade in the late '70s and '80s. The series garnered much critical acclaim, but little publishing success, which is a shame because I think this is one of the best books I have ever read. I would like to say the same about the rest of the series, but I haven't read them yet. I definitely will be though.I’ve been thinking about doing a series about various pop culture stuff that are, in my mind, under- or even totally unappreciated. These can be works that are critically acclaimed but deserve to be more popular, popular but deserve to be more critically acclaimed, or neither popular nor critically acclaimed and deserve something from the masses. Greg Hatcher has always written about some obscure corners of pop culture, but he’s kind of carved out a niche in the pulp fiction and science fiction genres, and if I come across something from those, I’ll write about them, but I’m going to be a bit more catholic in my purview. I’m going to write about books, music, television, and movies, and maybe some other stuff, too, if I think of it. I already have several topics in mind, and I’m starting with some of my favorite books – the four novels that make up Edward Whittemore’s “Jerusalem Quarter”– Sinai Tapestry (1977), Jerusalem Poker (1979), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic (1987). Poker is now played by professionals, amateurs, both at land-based casinos and many play poker online .So, what makes poker so popular, how old is it, and what was the biggest ever poker win? It was during this time that Whittemore began working on the novels for which he is probably best known. These constitute the Jerusalem Quartet. His earlier book, Quin's Shanghai Circus (1974), contains the seeds of his series. [2] Cairo Martyr got to his feet not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible man and woman still stood on the summit with their arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane. The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer, then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the far side of the pyramid. At first I thought it was just druggie humour (and it IS damn funny) and then I figured maybe historical speculation with a satirical edge, until it started playing with my mundane perceptions of time, history, and causality. It's the kind of book (series) that weaves itself into your dreams.

There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that the disparate parts of Ted’s world came together, perhaps for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with their own families (but not Ted’s former wives or the two daughters who had flown to New York to say goodbye); there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any spooks in attendance? One really can’t say, but there were eight spooks of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were, of course, there.Out of print for many years, all five books were reissued in 2002 by Old Earth Books. The Old Earth Books editions are now out of print, but Open Road Media announced plans to publish eBook editions of all five novels in July 2013. SOME TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs officials that showed that he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States four decades before." Thus begins Quin’s Shanghai Circus; it ends with the largest funeral procession held in Asia since the thirteenth century. A lonely hero still only twenty-one years old, wearing as an unlikely disguise that day the uniform of an officer of light cavalry in Her Majesty’s expeditionary force to the Crimea, 1854, the medals on his chest showing he had survived a famous suicidal charge and been awarded the Victoria Cross because of it, far from home now huddled over a glass of Arab cognac that helped not at all, finding life bleak and meaningless on that cold December afternoon, simply that. Edward Whittemore was such a writer! IMO, the Jerusalem Quartet (of which Sinai Tapestry is the first volume) is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Practically no-one has read it. Here's Jeff Vandermeer's recommendation. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

A major hole in the book for me is Stern himself. Whittemore handles the mystery, the ambiguity, the paranoia, the charismatic cult around this unknowable shadowy figure well, but when the actual dude finally does show up... He just doesn't seem all that interesting. He is just this guy, you know. (Have to furnish your own German psychoanalyst accent.) His appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions: which Joe frustratingly doesn't seem to want to ask. And it really does feel like a deflation. But no, after this section and the novel goes on, and Joe doesn't seem to have changed his view of Stern. That was a let down for me, though I guess it is equally possible that I missed the point on my rather fragmented first reading. (I'm sure there is a whole graduate thesis to be done on all the pillars of smoke in this novel, all leading to the columns of smoke coming from the Nazi death-camps.) This is the first Whittemore I've read, based on a recommendation by another author I love, Jeff VanderMeer. Though it is a stand alone novel it's the penultimate book in the Sinai Tapestry series (also the only Whittemore my local library had). The earlier books are supposed to have much more fantastical elements (while Nile Shadows on its own is more an absurdist spy novel in places). I'm quite happy to have discovered this 'hidden treasure' author and can now hunt down the rest of his books. Bloody Arab excuse for a pub, he muttered. Just bloody awful, that’s what. Not an honest pint in the house and no one to drink it with anyway.Spy and be spied upon…” It sounds almost like a proverb. Concerning himself with the clandestine activities of mankind Edward Whittemore boldly combines tragedy, mythology and buffoonery… one of the main themes of the quartet are fathers and sons […] they’re definitely male-centric […] Whittemore also loves describing the places where the action is set”