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Elizabeth Zelvin in her own words.

At the beginning of Death Will Get You Sober, my protagonist, Bruce, wakes up in detox on the Bowery on Christmas Day without a clue as to how he got there. If face down in the gutter is the ninth circle of hell, a detox for the most chronic alcoholics might be the sixth or seventh. It’s a gritty beginning for an amateur-sleuth traditional mystery. 

But neither Bruce nor the novel stay on the Bowery. Detox is like any other health care setting in the age of managed care: patients get kicked out pretty quickly. That’s okay: in recovery from alcoholism, not drinking is just the beginning. Bruce returns home to his rent-controlled apartment uptown and gets involved in a murder investigation along with his quest to stay sober. In AA, they have a simple answer to the question, “How does an alcoholic stay sober?” “Don’t drink and go to meetings,” they say. Bruce and his friends Jimmy and Barbara give it a twist of their own: “Don’t drink, stay sober, and investigate a murder.”

The formula is not by any means as flip as it sounds. Alcoholism is a killer of feelings. Bruce has made a habit of not caring about anyone or anything. But that’s about to change. His best friends are giving him a second chance, and he doesn’t want to screw it up. And the affection he feels for his detox buddy Guff, the shock when he dies, and the desire to find out what happened become motivation to keep going to AA, stay off the booze, and pursue the investigation.

I’ve been asked more than once how I can mix humor with alcoholism in Death Will Get You Sober.  The recipe isn’t mine. Alcoholism isn’t funny, but to recover, alcoholics need a sense of humor. There’s a lot of laughter in AA meetings. In AA they talk about “spiritual recovery,” which is not religious (except for those who want it to be). It means that recovering alcoholics reverse the negativity, hopelessness, and despair that accompany compulsive drinking. The goal is not just to stay on the wagon. It’s to become “happy, joyous, and free,” in the words of the AA Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous). On one level, the story arc of Death Will Get You Sober is crime, investigation, and solution, as it is in any whodunit. On another level, the story arc is Bruce’s journey from hell to paradise.

I’m an old literature major, so I studied Dante’s Divine Comedy in college. What most people remember—or have heard about, if they’ve never read the text—is the Inferno: the nine circles of hell and the damned souls enduring their everlasting and ingenious punishments. But I can also remember reading the Paradiso. Dante’s vision of heaven was an eternal present drenched in light—unimaginable, blinding light.

Alcoholism used to be eternal hell with no possibility of parole. It’s still a chronic disease that can only be arrested, not reversed. But in recovery, alcoholics get to walk back out that door that says, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” Bruce’s climb out of hell is erratic and not without struggle, like any alcoholic’s. But in the end, he gets to experience a moment of that joyousness and freedom. Oh, and he solves the murder.