urban noir by D

Back in the U.S.A. for a change, I'm reviewing a novel, set mostly in Atlanta (my former home town). There's at least one modern noir classic set in Atlanta, Down on Ponce, by Fred Willard, and it's certainly no surprise that urban noir should focus on one of the centers of hip hop culture and commerce. Atlanta has also in recent years been the site of one of the most spectacularly noir true crime stories, a murder-for-hire carried out by a drifter carrying a shotgun in a box of roses, delivered in dramatically hard-boiled fashion to the Buckhead home of a doomed wife, as well as a famous recent hostage situation and the Michael Vick case. Cake takes the terms of the hip hop or "thug lit" novel seriously but adds some twists from the broader world of noir fiction: D's novel compares favorably with Kenji Jasper's urban noir but also with George Pelecanos, Alan Guthrie, and Charlie Huston's Hank Thompson novels (with all of which Cake has a good deal in common). But Cake also reminds me in some ways of the noirest of classic noir, Paul Cain's Fast One. Both D and Cain are pseudonyms, both novels move very quickly toward doomed and fated endings. D's novel is also short, more in the tradition of classic noir (or Alan Guthrie, among newer novelists) than the contemporary, more expansive noir fiction. The assertively masculine quality of Cake is shared not only with thug lit but also with classic noir (Cake's female characters are mostly hookers, strippers, or baby mamas--the one exception plays the role of fate). The central character of Cake is unnamed, referred to throughout in the second person: there's a trick of cinematography that came to be known in the '80s as "suture," shot and counter-shot of two speakers, with the viewer "stitched" between them by the action of the camera. D's technique has a similar strategy, placing the reader in the position of the protagonist, almost as in a video game, by the use of "you" to refer to his character instead of "he" or "I." In a short, fast novel like this one, the device is very effective. In effect, "you" are on the run from a Brooklyn massacre (from D's previous novel, Got), moving to Atlanta to attempt to reboot your life by going back to school. But you move in with a cousin who's a small time dealer, and you get caught in the middle when a bigger dealer coopts his operation and starts killing people. Like Paul Cain's Kells, D's "you" isn't a thug, he's trying to stick to a principled position, to a certain humanity that's contradicted by almost everything in his situation. The results in both cases are met with the open eyes characteristic of noir rather than the rose-tinted glasses of some other genres, such as thrillers, cozies, etc.

The end of the Havana Quartet

Havana Gold is the last of Leonardo Padura's tetralogy-plus-one of novels about Havana detective Mario Conde, the Count. Actually the books are as much about Havana as about the detective or the crimes he investigates. In my limited acquaintance with Cuban literature, no one evokes that city in so poetic and evocative a way since G. Cabrera Infante (who was an emigre, while Padura has remained in his native city). Havana Gold is the last published but the second in the tetralogy (the fifth novel, Adios Hemingway, was an addendum featuring the same character but not a continuation of the series). As usual, the third person narration is interrupted by other voices, and there are metafictional elements (Conde proposes to write a novel about his current situation and call it Havana Gold (that's the translation, I'm sure the original novel uses its own Spanish title), plus when Conde is looking for something to read (while longing for his new girlfriend) the only book that appeals bears the title of Padura's obscure first novel. Padura's books resemble the Brazilian series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (which evokes Rio in a similar way, as well as having the meandering plots that characterize Padura's novels), But in a way a more apt comparison is to the detective novels of Yasmina Khadra, in that both are dealing with a threatened regime (Algeria threatened by a government that denies its citizens basic human rights and insurgent Islamic fundamentalists, Cuba's by U.S. embargo and its own clinging-to-communism-and-revolution regime). Khadra's detective is also a writer, though already a succesful one, while Conde remains a writer manque. Neither Khadra nor Padura have any optimism about their societies, though Padura is both more emotionally attached at least to his city and is less overtly political than Khadra. What is distinctive about Padura's detective novels is a pervading melancholy of nostalgia--not a nostalgia for a lost golden age, but for the loss of youthful dreams (not only Conde but all his friends have settled for less than seemed possible in their schooldays at the Pre-Uni that figures largely in this novel). Havana Gold finds Conde caught between two women, one a murdered teacher with an ambiguous reputation, the other a beautiful woman who mysteriously appears in Conde's path, needing her car's tire changed (the car itself being a mark of her position in Cuban society). Conde manages to solve the case of the murdered woman (not by ratiocination but by doggedly following leads and instincts). But the "case" of the mysterious woman leads him down his often-traveled path from love to loss. Not that he doesn't manage some consolation (from sex, from the cooking of his friend Skinny Carlos's mother, and from a tentative dedication to the job to which he is dedicated, without ever quite being a "real cop" or even a real adult (along with his nostalgia for lost youth there is much of the aged adolescent about Conde, with his penchant for picking fights, among other juvenile traits). It is Padura's strength that he achieves much poetry and truth with his flawed characters and within the structure of the crime novel.

More from Sweden: Camilla Läckberg's The Ice Princess

The first of Camilla Läckberg's mysteries, The Ice Princess, has finally appeared in the U.K. (not yet in the U.S.) in English translation. I say "mystery" rather than "crime novel" because although The Ice Princess has all the elements of noir, it also has elements of the "cozy" and the mystery genre. As one of the characters says about the evil within a small town, "Hatred, envy, greed and revenge, all of it concealed under a huge lid that was created by sentiments such as: 'what would people say?' All the evil, pettiness and malice was quietly allowed to ferment beneath a surface that always had to look so neat and clean." That pretty much captures the duality: a bleakness and malice common to crime fiction and a calm surface more common to mysteries. Whether a small-town story falls on one or the other side of the divide is a matter of emphasis, and Läckberg's novel includes enough naivete and good-natured surface that it falls mostly within the frame of the cozy: within a plot that includes enough horrors for a Gothic novel, the main characters, writer Erica Falck and detective Patrik Hedström, and others react in ways that suggest their own distance from those horrors rather than a weariness or complicity that one senses among characters in noir or crime fiction. There are elements in the plot, also, straight out of Bridget Jones's Diary (a connection suggested by the author herself, within the narrative) that don't fit the noir genre very well. None of that is a criticism, and though my own standards should put The Ice Princess outside the boundaries of this blog, I'm reviewing it anyway--partly for autobiographical reasons. My grandmother emigrated to the U.S. from southern Sweden in the early years of the 20th century, along with her mother, sisters, and brothers. I knew all of them, including my great-grandmother, except for my great-grandfather (who is another story, for another time). In 1973, I had a chance to visit Sweden briefly, and went to the little town of Asarum to look for my grandmother's cousin, who had stayed in Sweden. I didn't find her, but did find her brother, then in his 80s, and had tea with him and his girlfriend. A few years later, I had a chance to live in August Strindberg's apartment, now a museum, in connection with my doctoral dissertation on his autobiographical novels, and also a chance to visit with a well-to-do Swedish family in their summer cottage at Midsommar. My relatives in the U.S. and in Sweden have not really been captured in the Swedish crime fiction I've read so far--which has dealt more with cities, with modern (rather than traditional) rural locations, and with middle-class or urban communities--much more the milieu of my second trip to Sweden than my first. The Ice Princess is the first of the new wave of Swedish crime fiction in which I've recognized small town Sweden (more so than in the Gotland novels of Mari Jungstedt or the northern novels of Åsa Larsson, which resemble Läckberg's books more than others of the Scandinavian wave) and the people I know from that milieu. None of the portraits in Läckberg's novel are exact resemblances to my relatives and other small town Swedes I met, but many of them share (sometimes not very pleasant) characteristics with those I knew. That said, some of the characters are little more than caricatures (like the comic chief of police) and others are sketched in to little effect (like the other cops). There's also a "polyanna" aspect to the story, in the naive responses of Erica and Patrik--but that's a common feature in Swedish crime fiction (noticeable in Henning Mankell and most others), possibly a realistic aspect of the portrait of a culture less acclimated to violence. And for me, Läckberg captures both the dark underside and the real daily life of her fictionalized village, making it rhyme, at the very least, with my own experience of a very similar village (though one that is, I expect, not even now experiencing quite the property boom Läckberg depicts). If I don't find The Ice Princess exactly corresponding to my taste in crime writing, I nevertheless am grateful to her for bringing these characters to life, in all their varied social graces, pretentions, convictions, pettiness, flaws, graciousness, and charm.

Gallows Lane, by Brian McGilloway

The second novel in the "Inspector Benedict Devlin" series has just been released. As with Borderlands, the first in the series, the style is understated in a way that paradoxically emphasizes the horror and emotion of the crimes and their aftermath. McGilloway's characters are not "hard-boiled" in the venerable noir tradition, they are instead struggling with the consequences of their contact with death and violence. Devlin is concerned about the effect his work is having on his family, though the family members are themselves barely sketched in. More completely drawn, and also conflicted about her job, is Devlin's partner at work, Caroline, as well as a few other cops. The murders are as lurid as in Borderlands, though there is more variety in the deaths here. There's also plenty of misdirection in the plot, which is not straightforward in terms of either story or police work. But the novel is carefully constructed, emphasizing Devlin's mistakes rather than his competence, and the ensuing self-doubts (just as he's up for a promotion that he's not sure he wants). There is an interesting, aggressive hostility between Devlin and one of his colleagues that keeps the police aspects of the book lively. Some of these threads of conflict and self-doubt promise much for a sequel, but Gallows Lane is itself a satisfying story on many levels. The book's complicated group of police, the female detective as partner, and the very strong sense of place echo a faraway detective series, the "peninsula" novels of Garry Disher, from Australia. But McGilloway is a more terse and poetic writer, compressing a great deal of event and emotion into a small space. Among the very accomplished group of new Irish crime writers, McGilloway ranks very high in his ability to evoke a particular milieu, to populate it with interesting and believable characters, and to structure his stories around meaningful (if sometimes horrifying) metaphors.

Benjamin Black's second

Like the first "Benjamin Black" novel by John Banville (Christine Falls), The Silver Swan is beautifully written, and is fully realized in its details. The characters are interesting and believable, the setting meticulously rendered, and the language evocative. But where Christine Falls had, if anything, too much plot, The Silver Swan doesn't have quite enough. Not to say that nothing happens: there are plenty of incidents along the way as Quirke, the curious pathologist in Dublin's post-World War II days, follows a thread revealed when a college friend asks him not to perform an autopsy on the friend's wife, apparently drowned, probably a suicide. But the incidents don't quite cohere into a story. First, there are some aspects of the plot that are difficult to believe: Not only the many coincidences required to involve practically Quirke's whole family in the story, but also specific plot points--beginning with that autopsy, which Quirke performs secretly, without informing the husband. I'm no expert, but it seems that an autopsy would, be a bit difficult to conceal from a family member, and in any case, the ease with which Quirke's deception succeeds is never explained. There is also a lot of very lurid material here, but all of it joyless. And the key figure in that part of the book, a Viennese-Indian guru of sorts, remains so opaque that his motivations are difficult to grasp. Black-Banville also departs from his hero's point of view so often that we hardly know what Quirke has discovered, or even what he knows of the "true" events at the end of the book. Black-Banville's narrator is more godlike than is usual in the best crime novels, which frequently depend on the limitation of point of view to draw the reader into the police procedure, the detective's investigation, or whatever thread leads through the maze of motivations and events. Though the ending of the book does include surprises, we know a bit too much as we go along for us to bother too much about where we are going to end up, especially given the tawdriness of much of the story. I was reminded of Graham Greene's early "entertainments," particularly by one of the most oddly engaging characters, the self-styled "spiv" Leslie Swan, a slimeball of the first order. His victims are perhaps less innocent than some of those in those early Greene books, and the moral less clear. Like those books, too, Black-Banville's is mostly atmosphere, something that Banville is, of course, known for in his mainstream novels, and the ambience is quite engaging and interesting. But, for me, the atmosphere is not quite enough to hold together a story whose various elements are linked by strands of coincedence, but are at the same time never quite cohere into a whole story.

Declan Hughes #3

The third Ed Loy novel by Declan Hughes continues to explore the wealthy and middle class families of Dublin, but with a somewhat broader social eye as well: the horsey set, from owners and trainers through jockeys and hangers on, is the primary focus of the crime and the novel, but public housing estates and crimes usually associated with such settings also appear. The title of the book depends on your location: In the U.S. it's The Price of Blood, continuing the "blood" series of Hughes's titles and picking up on the Judas theme of the novel; in the U.K., it's The Dying Breed, emphasizing another theme, the bloodlines of horses and also people (with an additional suggestion of families prone to violent death, a theme in all Hughes's novels so far). The story is character-driven, and Hughes once again shows his background in drama: the characters are individually well drawn, but come to life especially in their interactions with one another. The story is also dramatic, in the sense that is it has the structure of a tragedy rooted in family history. The gangsters that have haunted the books are back again, in a slightly different assortment of the Halligan family, as well as the pro- and con-Loy police and other running characters--more fully realized than the minor characters in some crime fiction, and without the usual cliches of speech or action. The story relies to a very large extent on the lies that people tell, or the information they withhold, from Loy and from each other. Loy bounces from one set of assumptions to another, as the truth, or some fragment of it, unfolds. The plot works better at the level of metaphor than as a reasonable story, but it's really the writing that holds the book together, a fluid and allusive style that fits very well with the symbolic rather than rational storyline. And after all, the plots of Hammett or Chandler don't always make straightforward sense, and Hughes is operating, as I said, at the level of tragedy rather than slice-of-life fiction. There is, however, a self-mutilation that I find difficult to swallow (I'm making a little joke, but I won't spoil the plot by explaining it here). But Loy's voice as narrator is solid and believable: he's lively, without being overtly clever or glib like some crime narrators, to keep the reader on his side. And the rhythm and flow of Hughes's prose style is rare eloquence in the field of crime fiction.

Derek Raymond and a few upcoming titles

Coming up next: the new Declan Hughes and Brian McGilloway from Ireland and the first of Swedist crime novelist Camilla Läckberg's novels to make it into English. But first... Serpent's Tail is bringing out new edition of How the Dead Live, by Derek Raymond (a pseudonym used by British writer Robin Cook--no, not that Robin Cook), with a new introduction by Will Self (who had stolen the title for one of his own books without having read Raymond's book)--giving an excuse to reconsider the Factory series that Raymond-Cook published in the '80s. Raymond broke new ground for noir fiction, updating classic pulp noir with an almost baroque style of writing and a police detective (nameless) at the center of the narrative rather than the private detective that is more typical of classic noir. Raymond certainly established a precedent followed by Ken Bruen (and others) years later, the irritable, violent, and philosophical detective that lies behind Bruen's police detective and to some extent his ex-Garda private detective as well. As in any kind of writing, crime writing generally falls into two categories, in terms of style: a transparent, almost journalistic style and a self-conscious style that calls attention to itself as a narrative. Raymond definitely falls into the latter category. Not only does the detective-narrator use dated London slang (probably dated when Raymond was writing) but also a manner that includes colorful, pithy observations and asides--even extended philosophical considerations of death, loneliness, and social deterioration (Raymond is perhaps the poet of the Thatcher years). And the plots of the Factory books are also distinctive: while most of them are set in gritty London, How the Dead Live moves out to small town England--but not a cozy village: this is the small town of Gothic extremes. Indeed the plot is extremely Gothic, rather than crime or mystery oriented. The detective is sent down to the village to look into the apparent disappearance of a leading citizen's wife, who has been missing for months without the local constabulary taking any notice. What the London detective finds is a crumbling manor house, with beautifully described ruined rooms, and a defrocked physician who has done something dreadful with his wife (all will be explained in a more or less reasonable manner, but the Gothic atmosphere is as think as Jane Eyre or the Surrealist/Symbolist excesses of the turn of the previous century). All of that with the tough detective on top of it is a heady mixture bound together by Raymond's quirky prose. This is definitely a unique and distinctive read, quite different from even Raymond's other books (much less the run of the mill detective or mystery novel). What the current crop of crime fiction owes to Raymond is his example of thoughtful, distinctive prose along with the hard-boiled police detective--but a little weirdness perhaps, too, in some of the "mire" of Arnaldur Indridason's first novel, as just one example of neo-Gothic noir. I can only ask of the living inheritors of Derek Raymond's mantle: more, please.