Knock Off The Hat may be the best novel Dick ever wrote.
He died in March, but one of the things he left behind was the first novel in what would have been a new series about a gay private eye in 1940s Philadelphia. Decades ago, I reviewed one of those Strachey books, and Dick and I became fast friends. Richard Lipez, who wrote under the penname Richard Stevenson, was a groundbreaking author of gay detective novels featuring private eye Donald Strachey. The circumstances of this last recommendation are unusual. Knock Off The Hat: A Clifford Waterman Gay Philly Mystery, by Richard Stevenson On the night of her birthday, Alice returns from a drunken binge and stumbles into the gift of time travel, which allows her to explore the big question, "What if?" The greatest compliment I can pay to This Time Tomorrow is to say that I'd always considered Jack Finney's 1970 novel, Time and Again, to be the New York City time travel tale now Finney's classic has company.
That ordeal, coupled with Alice's approaching 40th birthday, plunges her into despondency: "Alice had always thought of her professional life in perfect contrast with her father's - he'd had wild success, and she, none, just hanging on to something stable like a seahorse with its tail looped around some seagrass. Her father, a bestselling novelist who raised Alice on his own, is dying in a New York hospital. The heroine here is a single woman named Alice who works at her old high school. Straub's new novel is a time-travel fantasy imbued with her signature awareness of the infinite ways we humans make life harder for ourselves.
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