International Noir Fiction

Glasgow and Paris:Two dark tales

2012-01-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting much lately, since I've gone through several books recently that I found disappointing enough that I wasn't inspired to write anything about them. Then I got started reading two books simultaneously, which slowed me down a bit, and also provided a contrast that didn't necessarily do one of the books any favors. The two books were Denise Mina's new The End of the Wasp Season and Cara Black's Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, set in Glasgow and Paris respectively.

Both books are from a series, though Mina's is a new one (this is the second book in the series featuring DS Alex Morrow) and Black's is the most recent of the 12 Aimée Leduc series (Leduc is a security consultant who acts like a private detective). Mina's book surprises at every turn: when we think she's writing one kind of story, we discover that it's actually something else entirely. Black's book is a dependable entry in a good series, in this case continuing a theme begun in her last book, in which the story follows the unfortunate love life of the two strongest minor characters in the series, Morbier and René.

It's partly that contrast between the unpredictable and the dependable that made Black's novel less rewarding for me, when experienced in parallel with Mina's. Aimée once again explores for us a quartier of Paris that we, as tourists, wouldn't be able to experience, in this case several distinct Chinatowns, each, though, tied up in the same illegal-immigrant-and-snakehead problem. The villains are mostly offstage, and mostly just what you would expect them to be.
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WnqPrvjYz6I/Tyb3FiAzNII/AAAAAAAACBU/mAP8wDEdasA/s1600/51pBPPaeNsL._SL500_AA300_.jpg">
Mina's book, though, follows a case concerning a young woman brutally murdered in the house of her recently deceased mother. We see the build-up to the murder and then the police investigation after the fact, but not the act itself. Then we follow several parallel threads, including Morrow's investigation, the life of a former friend of hers who gets caught up in the investigation, and a teenager who was involved in some way that seems clear, then not so clear. It's that narrative concerning the teenager that keeps surprising the reader. I was getting ready for a young-thug-from-a-slum narrative, and it's not that at all—the polar opposite in fact (yet not quite the spoiled rich brat either). Toward the end, we think we know what has happened, and then a coda twists us back to the beginning, to rethink the whole crime (I found myself rereading the first chapter with new eyes).

Mina's prose is clear, if her narrative style is somewhat indirect in a way that's usually interesting. Morrow is an unconventional detective in an unusually realistically drawn squad. She's pregnant with twins, so she'll be on maternity leave soon. The squad is caught up in a power struggle that isn't about rank (in fact, the culture of the squad enforces an interest in not gaining rank, only in protecting their current positions). Morrow's own social background is problematic, for a cop (not too different from that of the central characters in her other series, so her tale is not a total shift away from her own previous books). But she is livelier, more present in the story, somehow, than in the previous book, though she's offstage a lot of the time. And the story is full of nice images and parallels (such as the life cycle of wasps) that bring together the whole novel in a satisfying way that reinforces not only the telling of the story but its significance for the reader as well. Some books undermine the whole "genre" business separating crime fiction from "mainstream" or "literary" fiction, which I suppose Kate Atkinson does from one direction and Mina certainly does from another.

Mina's book is in one way a straightforward example of a series novel about a police detective, and in another way it's simply a novel about the damage that families do to one another, and how some people escape and others don't. Though if I saw that description (from an author I didn't know and with no mention of the books genre structure) I would almost certainly not have picked it up from the library (where I got the copy I read). It would have been my loss.

So I can recommend Murder at the Lanterne Rouge to Cara Black fans, even to newcomers to the series, without being able to say too much about it. And I can recommend End of the Wasp Season to anyone who's interested in the more advanced (in terms of both the writing and the story) end of crime fiction.

Korean and American: Mr. Kill, by Martin Limón

2012-01-12T07:47:00.001-08:00

One of the pleasures of reading international crime fiction is the glimpse of other cultures through the stories of crime, criminals, police, etc. martin Limón's series featuring George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, detectives with the 8th Army CID in Korea in the post-Korean-War era, offer insights into two cultures: South Korea and the U.S. Army. Sometimes one predominates in a particular novel, sometimes the other. The new Mr. Kill is a balance between the two.

A Korean woman is raped on a train by what appears to have been an American soldier, and the detectives are called in, without much enthusiasm on the part of the brass because they want to downplay any possible U.S. involvement. At the same time, Bascom & Sueño are ordered to investigate the theft of equipment from an all-female Country & Western band touring Korea for the USO. The detectives shuttle back and forth between the two assignments throughout the book, with the band offering Bascom plenty of opportunity for philandering, one of the primary aspects of his character.

But at the same time, Sueño is particularly horrified by the crime on the train and a subsequent even more brutal assault, in both cases in front of a young mother's children. His sympathy and determination are major drivers of the plot (and of a reader's interest). The addition of a Korean detective, whose name (Gil) sounds like "Kill" to an American ear, giving rise to his nickname and the title of the novel) is also very interesting, since Kill is both effective on his own and a big support for the detectives when the Army hierarchy is resisting their investigation.

All the shuttling back and forth across South Korea (as the band travels the USO circuit and the detectives pursue leads concerning GIs that may have been off base during the crimes) gives perhaps a better overview of Korean society than any of the previous Sueño/Bascom books. I was not totally convinced by some of the plot twists late in the book, when the story shifts to hot pursuit of the rapist, and there's a third subplot that seems to be there mostly to set up the next novel in the series. I would also have liked to see more of Mr. Kill (and it seems he may have a role in the sequel. But overall, it was a brisk and interesting read, and the Army CID elements are a consistently interesting twist on the police procedural/detective story model.

Declan Burke's new novel and anthology

2012-01-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

The trope of fictional characters having a life of their own has a considerable precedent, from Flann O'Brien to Raymond Queneau (whose fictional author left the MS by the window and a breeze blew the characters into the street), to Felipe Alfau (whose characters hang out in a cafe awaiting employment by authors), to Gilbert Sorrentino (who acknowledged his considerable debt to O'Brien), to the experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose and the Italian crime-writing duo of Fruttero & Lucentini (and even back to the second half of Don Quixote). We can now add to that estimable list a further entry, Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool (and one of the virtues of Burke's book might be to send fans of his comic fiction back to some of the lesser-known purveyors of characters independent of their authors).

A writer who shares some biography with Declan Burke is ensconced in a writers' colony, trying to meet a deadline for the delivery of a new novel, when a character from a manuscript he had earlier abandoned shows up demanding attention. Not shows up in his imagination, shows up in his living space. Karlsson, who now insists his name is Billy (and is sometimes referred to simply as K), wants to be liberated from limbo and begins to collaborate with the author on the completion of the novel.

Karlsson's story involves blowing up a hospital, and also the editorial process of "killing babies" (cutting out passages, characters, etc., from a novel in progress). As the author tries to work on his new novel (and also conduct his life with his wife and young daughter), he gradually becomes implicated in Karlsson's story and Karlsson's narrative becomes more dominant as he takes over authorship. Who is writing whom becomes unclear, with disastrous, even tragic, results.

The narrative thus shifts between the author's ordinary life to Karlsson's rambling monologue, peppered with quotations that suggest a broad deep acquaintance with Western philosophy (or perhaps, as the story suggests, a judicious use of Google). Karlsson's voice itself begins to suggest another associate suggested by the author, Patricia Highsmith--not only in her a-moral Ripley stories but also some of her stand-alone novels featuring sociopathic or at least gloomy characters. Among the many crime fiction references, it's Highsmith that resonates most with Absolute Zero Cool (for me).

The tale is comic in its structure, though frequently dead serious in its monologues and in its violent conclusions (the final one being a more or less absolute denial of a continuation of the story's telling). It is to Burke's considerable credit that he keeps the reader's interest without pandering to our craving for thriller plots or compromising in the depth of K's philosophical ramblings. It's in part the characters who keep our interest, not only K and the author but also K's love interest, Cassie, and the author's family.

Burke has also recently edited a valuable anthology on Irish crime fiction, Down These Green Streets, which mixes interesting commentary with new stories, all by practitioners and critics of a genre that has become one of the country's important exports. Between the valuable anthology and the innovative novel, Declan Burke has cemented his central position in the current wave of neo-noir and contemporary crime fiction.

Jake Needham, Laundry Man

2012-01-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

I've reviewed a couple of Jake Needham's books (The Amassador's Wife and The Big Mango) but Laundry Man is the first of his Jack Shepherd series that I've gotten my hands on. Needham's books have mostly been available only in Asia, though his current publisher, Marshall Cavendish, is now making some of them available in the U.K., including Laundry Man, and several of the books are also available as e-books.

Laundry Man is a caper novel (sort of) about money laundering. The unique device of Laundry Man is that the caper is going on offstage while the narrator-hero struggles to figure out what's going on and why everybody thinks he's involved. Jack Shepherd is a banking specialist who moved from the Washington DC area to Bangkok and has a teaching job (and a wife who's a respected painter) there. A supposedly dead voice from his past calls him and asks for a meeting, setting in motion a wild ride through international banking scams featuring a colorful panoply of Asian and Western characters. There are, in fact, a lot of characters, but Needham does a good job of keeping them straight for the reader.

Another thing the author does well is explaining the technical details of banking and money laundering, which he does in Needham's voice as well as in conversation with several members of the legal and illegal establishment of Bangkok. In addition, the novel gives a very good portrait of the city (as well as glimpses of Phuket and Hong Kong). No other Bangkok novel I've read gives as vivid view of the Thai capital.

The story is, for the first 3/4 of the novel, mostly Jack stumbling around in the dark, exploiting his various contacts to try to figure out what's going on. Then some of his contacts start turning up dead, and the story shifts into thriller gear. But Jack (thankfully) does not suddenly transform from a banker and professor into a neo-Rambo. When he ends up with a gun in his hand, it's with reluctance and without the amazing shooting technique that mars some other ordinary-guy-in-extraordinary-circumstances sort of book.

Also, unlike some o.-g.-i.-e.-c. stories, Jack's narrative voice is consistent and entertaining, whether he's talking to his wife, his students, a guy who claims to be FBI, a top Thai cop, or any of the other spectrum of characters (and whether he's facing an offer of information or a threat of violence). It's Jake's voice, in fact, that is the key to the novel's entertaining quality, and the quality that will send me to the other Shepherd novels, when I can get hold of them (in fact, I already have a digital copy of the next one, Killing Plato, in my tbr virtual pile).

Night Rounds, by Helene Tursten

2012-01-01T12:22:00.001-08:00

After a protracted gap, SoHo Crime has begun issuing more of the novels in Helene Tursten's Swedish crime series featuring detective Irene Huss of Göteborg. The TV series based on the novels, produced for Swedish television but made available with English subtitles by the independent public television station MhZnetworks in the U.S., has run past the previously published Huss novels, so that in fact I had see the film of Night Rounds before I had access to Laura Wideburg's translation, forthcoming next month from SoHo.

Reading the book after seeing the movie was quite interesting. The TV version accented some aspects of the story (a ghost story, though fairly prominent in the text, is highlighted by its visual presentation in the film). Some of the changes veer toward TV cliche and because of that, I'd recommend the novel over the movie, if you have to choose. There are several more cops in the team in the original book, giving some opportunities for interactions (positive and negative) not possible with the more limited crew in the film (though the characters that do survive the transition are very true to their literary forebears).

Two plot elements central to the story were changed, though. One takes a passing attraction that Irene feels toward one character, a doctor who is also the owner of the hospital where first one nurse and then another is found dead, and turns the attraction into an almost-affair that I found untrue to Irene's character even before reading the book.

The other big change is in a backstory that, in the film, combines the history of that doctor with that of a homeless woman, transforming these threads of the tale into a new character in the film, a mentally challenged caretaker at the hospital. The change lessens the impact of the doctor in the story, leaving him to be mostly a failed administrator and a womanizer rather than a more interesting figure. There's also a denoument in the film that transforms a believable struggle in the doctor's home in the book into a melodramatic scene in the spooky hospital attic in the movie.

Back to the book itself, though: Night Rounds takes advantage of the author's medical background to create an interesting scenario around a private hospital, giving an interesting window onto the Swedish medical system and class structure. The plot closely follows the police procedural format, mostly but not totally focused on Irene, with a sidetrack regarding the detective's family (a chef-husband and two twin, but seemingly not identical, daughters) that's interesting in itself and gives the author the opportunity to show another (not totally honest or legal) side to Irene's character.

The Huss series was one of the earliest of the Swedish crime series to appear in English, thanks to SoHo, and the publisher deserves praise for continuing to translate Huss's novels. Night Rounds shares a supernatural aspect with another Swedish writer, Johan Theorin, but with a lighter and more urban flavor that is less spooky but more contemporary (not a slam on either author, just a different approach).

Johan Theorin, The Quarry

2011-12-18T16:33:00.001-08:00

Johan Theorin's third novel to be translated into English (by Marlaine Delargy, for Doubleday U.K.--it's not available in the U.S. yet) is the third novel in a trilogy organized around the seasons and set on the Swedish island of Öland. It's spring on the island and Theorin's running character, Gerlof, is moving out of the assisted living home that he moved into in earlier novels. He's moving back to his cottage near the island's quarry, to live alone but in proximity to an interesting group of the island's part-time, warm(er) weather residents.

Theorin continues here to pull off an unusual structure (for a crime novel at least). Among the Scandinavian crime novels to have appeared in ever larger numbers in English, Theorin's are perhaps the most focused on ordinary people's ordinary lives. There is what I have elsewhere called a "dailiness" about the books, with no hint of criminal conspiracies, international incidents, or big-time mobsters. Yet, on the other hand, there is a supernatural element, also told in the most ordinary way, as if the elves and trolls who are a very palpable presence in this novel are among the ordinary residents of modern Öland.

The other constant in the series (apart from Gerlof, who is in any case not a central character in the novels' mysteries) is the overlay of the past and the present. In The Quarry, it's the past of Gerlof's marriage, the youth of a spring/summer resident of the island, Vendela Larsson, and another part-time resident, Per Mörner. Vendela was raised on the island, but in peculiar circumstances and with frequent interaction (in her imagination at least) with elves who seem to be granting her wishes when she places offerings on a stone with a mysterious presence.

Per's past on the other hand, invokes a subject that was the international profile of Sweden in the 1970s and '80s but as far as I know not the subject of any of the other Scandinavian crime novels to have appeared (at least in translation): the porn industry. It's the decline (for various reasons) of the porn business that provides the tensions that finally shift this novel of ordinary live into high gear thriller territory (at least, almost).

There are many other elements going on in this novel stuffed with ordinary (rather than high pressure) incidents and emotions. Per's daughter is mysteriously ill. Gerlof has found his wife's diaries, which speak of an odd "changeling" who had visited her only when she was alone. Vendela is descending into a dangerous psychological state and is stuck in a marriage with a manipulative egotist. Ordinary lives, but with extraordinary twists.

Theorin is one of the least conventional of all the translated crime writers, and although his books are certainly not everyone's cup of tea (being probably as far from that Tattoo series as it's possible for two series in the same genre to be), his distinctive writing deserves close attention. Some reviewers have expressed some disappointment in The Quarry, given the high expectations that Theorin's first two novels created. I found it to be a valid continuation of the series, with a bit less tense a tone overall, and with a less intense presence of both nature and the supernatural. It's a further development of his style, though, and unfailingly interesting.

Jo Nesbø, Headhunters

2011-12-09T13:44:00.000-08:00

Headhunters, published recently by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard in Don Bartlett's translation, isn't a Harry Hole book and is in fact quite different from that famous series. First, it's fairly short (and the Hole books are real doorstops). Second, the main character is a somewhat unreliable narrator named Roger Brown (he's Norwegian, but his father was English). Roger is a corporate headhunter (though other kinds of headhunters do crop up) and he's very impressed with himself and his record of getting businesses to hire his candidates (in fact, his only shortcoming, in his eyes, is that he is indeed short, by Norwegian standards).

Roger has the perfect job and the perfect wife (the only fly in the ointment being that he has refused her request that they have a child). His reason is that he doesn't want to share her with anyone, not even his own child (and the flaw in that reasoning comes back to bite him). She runs an art gallery, and during a private viewing for a new show she introduces Roger to the perfect candidate for a job he (and several other headhunter agencies) is trying to fill.

So far so good--but warning: spoilers ahead. I hate the blurbs on the backs of paperbacks, because they frequently (and in this case) give away what would have been, for an un-forewarned reader, a pleasant discovery in the story. So my recommendation is: Don't read the back of the paperback, don't read the blurb on Amazon or elsewhere. Come to the book as unprejudiced as possible, to best enjoy the twists and turns (of which there are many). Before going on, I should only warn prospective readers that there is some disgusting stuff in the book, not so much violence (of which there is some, but less than in the Hole books), and more scatology of various sorts (disgusting aspects of human bodies).

So: on to the story. Roger has a hobby. He gets his clients to tell him, during interviews, what sort of art they own, and if he finds what he hears desirable, he steals it. His partner in crime works for an alarm agency frequently used by Roger's clients, and he arranges for his partner to turn off the alarms and cameras at convenient times. But Harry's day job, his night job, and his marriage all come clashing together and create a mess that it doesn't seem like he can crawl out of (a bit of the mess is telegraphed in the prologue to the book, in which Roger and several others are trapped in a wrecked car, upside down in the woods).

Setting aside the disgusting parts, Headhunters is very cleverly plotted and a fun read. Roger is not a nice person, but as a narrator he's good company, and he withhholds just enough information to allow the reader some surprises (only a very alert reader will catch some of them in advance). So for Harry Hole fans and others who haven't discovered Harry or don't fancy him, Headhunters is highly recommended. There's supposed to be a movie coming out, but so much of the book is in Roger's head, it's hard to imagine what might be preserved of the pleasures of the story (leaving only the action, including the nasty bits).

Different kind of crime novel from Ireland

2011-12-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

An Irish Solution, a crime novel by Cormac Millar (pseudonym of Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, a translator and a professor at Trinity College Dublin) was published by Penguin in 2005, and is little acknowledged among the current generation of Irish crime novels and novelists. Millar, who is the son of the late Irish author Eilís Dillon, frustrates all expectations with An Irish Solution: it's impossible to talk about the book without giving something away. Even the pitch made by the publisher, that it's about Seamus Joyce, newly appointed head of a new Irish Drug Enforcement Agency (iDEA) is misleading. And it seems to be the beginning of a crime fiction series, but that isn't quite true either.

Millar manages to constantly twist the plot away from cliche and into surprise, right up to the ending. At the beginning, a reader may think he/she is reading one sort of book, only to discover after a few chapters that it's really another sort of book, centered upon different characters than at first seemed central to the story. I kept trying to find comparisons with other recent Irish crime writing, but the closest I could come would be a mash-up of Alan Glynn's Winterland and M.S. Power's Children of the North trilogy (though Millar's book is more complicated and more cynical than the former and less mystical than the latter, and also without the latter's focus on Ulster and the Troubles).

Seamus Joyce is indeed newly appointed as head of the iDEA, but he's a bureaucrat, not a policeman. The police under his nominal command are into a great many things that he doesn't know about. Also featured are a pair of schoolgirls moonlighting in a pub, a hapless former schoolteacher, a few drug dealers, a senior nun, an international Institute of vague principles, and Seamus's hospitalized wife (and we can't be confident even in the stability of this last-mentioned character with relation to Seamus and others).

The book is often quite funny, in both turns of phrase and twists of plot. It's also quite enjoyable, once you leave your expectations at the door. Allow yourself some time to get into the book and you'll see whatI mean. There's a sort of sequel that I'm trying to get hold of now, and if it's half as good it will be well worth the trouble

Another Swedish noir discovery?

2011-12-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

Has anyone run across The Girl With The Sturgeon Tattoo, by Lars Arffson? Published by St. Martin's Griffin in the U.S., it features hacker Lizzy Salamander and blogger Mikael Blomberg. I suppose it was inevitable (and purportedly it's pretty funny). Anyone seen it yet? It includes references to a new novel called The Vices, by American author Lawrence Douglas, whose image bears a striking resemblance to the photo of Lars Arffsen on the Sturgeon Tattoo...

A Vine in the Blood, Leighton Gage

2011-11-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

The fifth Mario Silva novel by Leighton Gage is a cracker. Each of his books takes on a different segment of Brazilian society, and in this case it's a middle class enclave inhabited by sports stars and lesser humans as well.

I'm not a fan of football/futbol/soccer, and the fact that A Vine in the Blood is based on the kidnapping of a football hero's mother (apparently to put him off his game just before a World Cup prelim match against arch-rival Argentina) gave me a little pause--but I needn't have worried. The book is in part about the social phenomenon of football, but not really about the game (in the same way that Vazquez-Montalban's olympic book isn't really about the Olympics).

Silva's crew is pressured on all sides to find the mother before the kidnappers kill her. The kidnappers aren't revealed until the end, but when the plot is finally detailed, it's a heist-story in itself (I can't reveal any details). There's only a brief glimpse of the kidnapped mother in captivity, and the rest of the story is with the cops, chasing one false lead after another.

When the final break comes, it's a perfectly believable insight rather than the strained coincidence that we sometimes see in crime fiction. All in all, the Silva series just gets better and better.

Budapest Noir

2011-11-21T13:15:00.000-08:00

Budapest Noir, by Vilmos Kondor, is a Hungarian novel that is scheduled to be published in English translation next year (I received a digital copy via NetGalley). The central character is Zsigmond Gordon, a crime reporter in Budapest in the 1930s. At the same time as the prime minister is being eulogized (having died while out of the country), a young woman is found dead on the street in a rough area of town. But the girl seems to be from a high class background and is carrying a Hebrew prayer book, and Gordon glimpses a nude portrait of the girl in a powerful policeman's desk drawer (while snooping). All in all, Gordon suspects that there is more to the story than a casual murder of a prostitute.

But no one else seems to care, not the police and not her family (when he finds them, he discovers that they've disowned her--and the motives for that act are at the center of the story). But as Gordon digs further, he stirs a hornet's nest in the underworld, and brings violence and threats upon himself, his artist girlfriend, and his grandfather (a retired cop who retired to Budapest and took up the making of fruit preserves).

The time frame, the underworld dealings, and the East European setting suggest a comparison with Marek Krajewski's excellent series set in pre-war Breslau, but Kondor avoids the downright strange storytelling and structure of Krajewski's series (though that's no slam on Krajewski, whose weirdness is extremely compelling). Unlike Krajewski's detective, Kondor's reporter has positive relationships with both his girlfriend and his grandparent, and though there's plenty of kink in the tale (among the brothels and in the city) it's more a straightforward thriller and crime novel (while Krajewski's books are more like nightmares).

There's a lot of classic noir in Budapest noir, in fact. Kondor gets it right without striving for exact equivalence to the American noir ambience. His Budapest is striking and his story is compelling, dealing with ordinary human venality as well as heightened versions of it that will become more virulent in the years just after this book's timeframe (though distinctly forshadowed in the story of the young Jewish girl, whose murder, though, takes the reader less in the direction of Nazi horrors than into the noir territory of Ross MacDonald and (more recently) Declan Hughes. The distinct strains of noir continue to intertwine in the hands of talented writers like Kondor (or Krajewski, for that matter) who are finding new vitality in the genre.

I'm pasting in the U.S. cover as well as a small image of the Italian translation and the Hungarian original. All in all, I think I like the Hungarian one best: more atmospheric.

Death and the Olive Grove, by Marco Vichi

2011-11-14T12:47:00.001-08:00

I haven't read the first of Marco Vichi's Inspector Bordelli novels, Death in August, and beginning with the second book in a series is frequently not a good idea, I realize. There have been frequent references to Agatha Christie in the p.r. and reviews of the Bordelli books, but at least in the second book, Death and the Olive Grove, any reference to Christie could only be useful to mark Vichi's novel as "cozy" rather than "noir", though perhaps neither sobriquet actually applies. The novels are set in Florence, not quite a big city but certainly larger than a country village, and most of the crime novels set in Florence do have a lighter tone than other Italian and Italian-set mystery fiction, and the setting is mid-20th-century rather than more contemporary times.

Death and the Olive Grove doesn't feature much mystery-solving, and much of the narrative is about Bordelli's personal life and in particular his World War II experiences (according to the review, there's a lot of World War II in Death in August as well). Bordelli is an interesting character, and lively enough to be around—though I personally got a bit tired of the constant reference to the War, rather like being stuck at a dinner table next to someone who can't talk about anything other than his war experiences.

Death and the Olive Grove is really not a police procedural either: Bordelli doesn't really figure out what's going on, he stumbles on facts or is presented them on a silver platter by one or another of the numerous (and somehow quaint) underworld figures that he has cultivated, and whose crimes Bordelli is inclined to overlook.

The case begins with a corpse (reported to the Inspector by a dwarf who is one of those informants) that has vanished by the time Bordellii gets to the scene (the olive grove of the title). That's an interesting beginning, along with the hazards that Bordelli and his temporary sidekick encounter in the grove, but the book is really about a series of child murders. Bordelli and his partner, a Sardinian (whose father Bordelli knew in, wait for it, the War) pursue leads and lock onto a prime suspect, but that suspect is under surveillance during the later murders, thus provided with an ironclad alibi.

So there's plenty of mystery, as well as mayhem, but the pace is very leisurely, frequently interrupted by Bordelli's reminiscences, depictions of his own and his partner's love lives, and the cooking of various of Bordelli's acquaintances among the restaurateurs and criminals of Florence. There's a curious parallel in Bordelli's private life with the plot of Temporary Perfections, the most recent Guido Guerrieri novel by Gianrico Carofiglio: Both Bordelli and Guerrieri have a friendship with a former prostitute of their own age, and a sexual relationship with a much younger woman (in Bordelli's case, 30 years younger, a woman involved in Nazi hunting, which becomes a substantial element of the plot). Some reviewers found Guerrieri's behavior to be problematic, to the point of putting them off Carofiglio's books, and I'd be curious to know how readers react to Bordelli's behavior.

I'd be interested to read more of Vichi's books, but his depiction of the criminal class as a misunderstood economic minority is a bit quaint, given what Italian crime already was at the time the novels are set. To be fair, though, some of Magdalen Nabb's excellent crime fiction set in Florence has a similar pattern. And Bordelli's war experiences neatly sidestep the Fascist era of Italy's participation in the war, casting Bordelli as an irregular fighting the Nazis, rather than a soldier fighing for Mussolini. The Florence of Bordelli's day is evocatively described, and I'd prefer to hear more about that setting and less about Bordelli's War.

The latest (and first) K.O. Dahl crime novel from Norway

2011-11-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

Lethal Investments, recently published in a translation from the original Norwegian by Don Bartlett, is the 4th of the novels featuring detectives Frølich and Gunnarstranda to be published in English but is in fact the first novel in the series. A young woman is murdered in her apartment, just after a man (a one-night stand) has left her. The detectives pursue the one-night stand (identified by a peeping tom across the street from the murdered woman's apartment) as well as her workplace, a decidedly odd software company full of suspicious characters.

What keeps the Gunnarstranda and Frølich novels lively is the conversation and inner monologues of the two detectives (one a short man toward the end of his career and the other a large man at the beginning). Neither detective is a typical crime-fiction policeman, though they share some characteristics with the standards of the genre (Gunnarstranda's wife has died, leaving him alone and lonely, and Frølich's relationship with his lover has its ups and downs), and the book is solidly within the tradition of the police procedural. But the two cops are not cliche partners, their relationship is decidedly spiky, and their dialogue is often realistically indirect and allusive, surely a challenge for a translator, but brought off very well by Bartlett.

What's going on in the software company will be more obvious to a reader now than it might have been some years ago when the book was published, but the story isn't otherwise dated or stodgy (it's just that there have been so many frauds exposed in real life in the past few years). Corpses begin to pile up, and there are some coincidental sightings of suspects as the cops drive around Oslo (on duty and off), but everything is brought off with naturalistic and believable style. The detectives remind me just a bit of the odd couple featured in Roslund and Hellström's Swedish crime novels, but without some of the extremes of those characters and Dahl's plots are more varied and more focused on ordinary crimes and everyday lives of contemporary Scandinavians than is the case with Roslund & Hellstrom's books (which frequently deal with international crimes and prison situations).

K.O. Dahl's novels are among the very best of Scandinavian crime fiction, and the author has a voice that is distinct from the rest.

The Fatal Touch, by Conor Fitzgerald

2011-11-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Fatal Touch is the second crime novel set in Rome, by Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald, featuring an American detective in the Italian police. International enough? Someone is mugging tourists, and in the midst of that investigation, the body of an old man is discovered on the street, perhaps murdered. He turns out to be an Irishman known for art forgery and a partner in a dodgy art gallery. Alec Blume, the lead character in the series, is mentoring a woman recently transfered into his department, and her relationship with the other members of the team isn't going very well. On the other hand, Blume is inept in his dealings with everyone, from witnesses to cops to friends.

In fact, Blume is the most difficult personality in Italian-set crime fiction since Timothy Williams's irascible Commissario Trotti, and as in Williams's novels, Blume's character sets the tone. The story is complicated, with frequent digressions into the forger's story as revealed in his journal. Those digressions are in a way a separate story, going back to the old man's youth in Ireland: some readers find the alternate narrative engrossing—to me they were interesting but distracting from the main story, making the book seem longer than it needed to be.

But the plot intricately intertwines this backstory with several threads in the here-and-now, without resorting to cliche in bringing the story toward a coherent conclusion. Fitzgerald is not afraid to deal harshly with some of the series's more interesting characters, a trait he also shares with Williams (whose characters frequently move away from the unnamed setting of the series or get killed). There's also a vivid villain in the novel, in the person of a corrupt and ruthless Carabinieri Colonel who takes over the investigation from Blume and lurks behind everything that happens in the story from that point on.

The spiky central character, eccentric plotting, and the capacity to let bad things happen to good people give the Blume books an authenticity and immediacy that a more reticent writer might not achieve. And the Roman milieu is vividly evoked here, perhaps even more so than in The Dogs of Rome, the first in the series. Plus the reader learns in the new book a lot of fascinating information about the trade of art forgery.

The Good Thief's Guide to Venice, plus Fatale

2011-10-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

Chris Ewan has produced "Good Thief's Guides" to several cities already but the book set in Venice is the first one I've picked up. The books are not, of course, tour guides or thievery guides, but clever crime novels. The two covers illustrated here, from the U.K. and the U.S., illustrate the two halves of this book: the genuine appreciation of the city of Venice and the comic approach to the crime novel (the U.K. cover seems to be designed to capitalize on the cover's blurb from Colin Bateman, in fact).

But Ewan's novel is not as funny as Bateman's books, at their best. It's not so much a comedy as a light-hearted crime novel. Charlie Howard is a professional housebreaker who has sworn off his life of crime to pursue his other profession, writing crime novels featuring a housebreaker. There are a few times when the book becomes "self-conscious" or a "metafiction" in a comic way, but for the most part, the story is told straight, in Charlie's own voice.

Charlie's voice is self-centered but also self-critical, and he's good company. He's wakened in the middle of the night by a female burglar who steals only his prize possession and the magic talisman that keeps his writing on track, a framed, signed first edition of The Maltese Falcon. She leaves clues that lead finally to her challenge: she'll give the book back if he returns a briefcase to the home of a wealthy Venetian count; and he's forbidden from opening the case.

There are surprises and twists in the plot, but the point is not really the danger to Charlie, his agent Victoria (who's staying with him in Venice), the count, the book, or the burglaress, any more than the various threats are the point of, say, The Pink Panther (and Ewan's Guide is in a way a throwback to that sort of comic crime).

Charlie's a bit obtuse about some things, and in some ways hardly seems to rise to the level of "master thief" that is ascribed to him (maybe that's more well established in the earlier books). Charlie's meanderings around Venice are interesting glimpses of the city, and the story is entertaining, while not being either laugh-out-loud funny or serious about the genre. Given the light tone, I found the book to be a little long.

Fatale, on the other hand, is very short. Jean-Patrick Manchette is a revered French crime novelist, two of whose books have already been translated, Prone Gunman and Three to Kill, both of which I liked. Fatale, though, seems artificial or contrived, a thesis novel more than a fully realized fiction. It's about a female hitman with a very complicated way of doing business that's only gradually revealed.

She's the center of the story, but isn't much fun to be around. Her skills are employed ruthlessly until things start to get complicated in her last job, which is mostly the subject of Fatale. But I found it hard to care much about her, the job, or her victims. I have a sense that Manchette didn't intend for us to get too involved: he's not so much telling a story as a fable or parable. I don't know whether this is more obvious here, with a female heroine, than it was in the other two novels, both of which centered on men: I may go back and re-read the others to see if that's the case.

However, it's an intense book in the mode of classic noir, a descent into hell without any redemption. For that alone, the book is well worth reading, and the shortness of the text makes that easier to do. But prone gunman is, as I remember, a more fully rendered hitman story.

Gianrico Carofiglio's Temporary Perfections

2011-10-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

The new Guido Guerrieri novel by Gianrico Carofiglio (translated by Antony Shugaar) is a lot of fun, in spite of the dark-toned plot. I've been mulling over the differences between character-driven and plot-driven crime fiction lately, and Temporary Perfections is decidedly character-driven. Guido is a first-person narrator, and he's clever, introspective, full of interesting digressions, and generally fun to be around. The plot moves slowly forward, frequently interrupted by those digressions, up to a point near the end when suddenly things start to happen, after Guido achieves a particular insight.

The Guerrieri novels are mostly set in Bari on Italy's east coast, but Guido goes to Rome a couple of times in the new book, for a couple of different reasons. So we get a flavor not only for the provincial city but also the capital, both from a legal and a non-legal perspective.

Guido is asked by a friend to help a couple whose college-age daughter has disappeared. The Carabinieri, in charge of the case, have stopped looking and are about to shelve the case, because there aren't any leads and because the daughter is of age and may well have simply decided to disappear.

Guido goes about his usual legal business while also interviewing the detective in charge of the original investigation and several of the daughter's friends, without really breaking any new ground. Along the way, he develops relationships with two women, one close to his own age (the owner of his favorite bar) and the other much younger, one of the daughter's friends. The bar owner's dog will also play an indirect role, but the younger woman begins to take up more and more of Guido's time and interest, along with his deep misgivings about consorting with a woman almost half his age.

Though the mystery is interesting and its solution is complex and moving, the novel stands or falls on Guido's voice, and fortunately he's a delightful character, someone that we'd love to be sitting across a dinner table from. Though there are running characters in the series, it's basically a one-man show. There is a stark difference between Carofiglio's stand-alone novel, The Past is Another Country (made into an interesting film) and the Guerrieri stories, though in fact the stand-alone deals with a lot of the same people and issues as Temporary Perfections. The difference is Guido, who is our window on the dealings of young people veering into crime and vile behavior, while in Another Country, all we have are those same young people. By means of Guido's voice, we have both a clearer view and in the end more sympathy with these people whose behavior eases from self-interest into sociopathy.

There are different publishers and different covers for Temporary Perfections in the U.K. and the U.S. The U.K. cover (the one posted at the top of this review) is both clearer and more specifically atmospheric than the U.S. one (which suggests Rome, an important but after all secondary setting) more than Bari, though I confess some bias toward the U.K. edition's publisher, Bitter Lemon, who brought the Guerrieri series to the world originally.

Outrage from Iceland

2011-10-10T14:41:00.000-07:00

Outrage, Arnaldur Indridason's newly translated Icelandic crime novel, is a departure from the series featuring the dour detective Erlendur, while still being part of the series. Erlendur has gone walkabout, in the fjords where his brother was lost, his body never found, in a storm many years before (the event that has marked the rest of Erlendur's life).

In his absence, Elínborg, Erlendur's female colleague, steps to the foreground of the series (Sigurdur Óli, their other colleague, also features in the book, but in a smaller role than Elínborg). Crime writers have often shifted focus from one running character to another, but rarely has it made such a dramatic difference in the mood of a book: Elínborg is not exactly cheerful, but she lacks Erlendur's gloomy outlook, and her family (all of them alive, not so common among fictional detectives) is constantly in her mind.

The case at hand involves rape and roofies (the date rape drug). In a preface we see a young man on the prowl in a club. But when the police arrive at a crime scene (spoiler alert) in the first chapter, it's a man's body that's found, not a woman's, and he's wearing the T-shirt that the predatory male's potential victim was wearing in the preface. In addition to a difficult case, Elínborg is dealing with (in her own family) a hostile teenage son who's a bad influence on a younger son, an exceptionally intelligent daughter, and a foster son who has abandoned the family that took him in.

Elínborg's passion for cooking (noted in earlier books in the series) is also a strong thread in the story, not only in her own home (where she seldom has time to exercise her talent) but also in the case (where subtle odors play a major role). As in the books featuring Erlendur, the shift away from traditional Icelandic culture to a more homogenized modern one is an important theme, but the shift from Erlendur's point of view to Elínborg's provides a less gloomy and reactionary perspective on the phenomenon.

The subject of rape is investigated in some depth, with special emphasis in the damage that the crime does to the victim's life and mental state. Elínborg claims no special insight because she's a woman, but perhaps the author chose to bring her to the forefront in this case because of her more possibly more sympathetic attitude toward the victims. Yet she does not hesitate to pursue the possibility that the victim of the rape at the center of the story may (when she finally finds her) be the perpetrator of the murder. Other actual and potential victims of rape and murder are offered, giving shades of emphasis about the crime, the victims, and the attacker.

It's always puzzled me that Arnaldur (Icelanders actually go by their first names rather than patronymics, a fact that gives the stories an interestingly informal quality) emphasizes Erlendur to the detriment of his other, quite interesting, police colleagues: perhaps he was thinking the same thing, since Elînborg, when given free rein to dominate the book, is indeed quite interesting, fully the equal of other female detectives in Scandinavian fiction (by male as well as female authors). While I'm curious to know what is happening with Erlendur (there a very few clues, none of them very positive, in Outrage), I'd also be glad to read more about Elínborg in the future (Sigurdur Óli seems not quite so interesting: a more impulsive than intelligent detective).

Outrage follows the pattern of the subgenre of police procedurals, though perhpaps less completely than in Dregs, reviewed here recently. There is a mystery at the heart of Outrage for which some clues are supplied to the reader and the detectives, and we may guess at some aspects of the facts of the case (some of which will be upturned by the development of the tale), but still Elînborg's skill is supplemented by her unique insight perhaps more than is the case with William Wisting of Dregs, whose talent is in organizing the investigation and remaining open to new facts rather than in any special insight. Just goes to show that two excellent books in the same sub-set of crime fiction can demonstrate quite different approaches. I hope that it won't be too long before we get another installment in this series, no matter which detective takes the main role.

Dregs: Norwegian police procedural

2011-10-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

Dregs, by Norwegian crime writer Jørn Lier Horst, is a first-class police procedural. Horst has had some time to perfect his craft: this is apparently the 6th in the series featuring Detective William Wisting, and his 8th novel, but the first to be translated into English. Though it's always preferable to start a series with the first book (to my mind), Horst does a good job of keeping the reader informed about the characters' past, so we English-speakers won't get lost.

The book is set in Stavern, in southeast Norway (near the city of Larvik, where Horst is himself a policeman). Wisting is called to the shore where a left-foot running shoe has washed ashore, with the foot still inside. This is the second recent Scandinavian crime novel to feature a foot-washing-ashore (Swedish writer Kjell Eriksson's The Hand That Trembles arrived a bit earlier), but apart from that and the fact that both are police procedurals, the books don't have a lot in common. Horst's book is a bit more straightforward, while Eriksson's ranges quite far in time and geography. Plus in Horst's book, the reader sees only a few brief scenes that either Wisting or his daughter Line (a journalist) don't see (there aren't scenes from the viewpoint of the killer or victims).

In Dregs, too, more shoes come washing ashore, all for the left foot (which is also present). Wisting and his team quickly align the case with the disappearances of a group of old men and two women, but no one can figure out what's going on, or why the missing people's feet (rather than whole bodies) keep showing up. Simultaneously, Line is in town (she normally works in Oslo), working on a feature article about released prisoners. One in particular has captured her interest, and eventually his story becomes intertwined in the investigation—but not in an obvious way (nothing about the story is obvious).

Wisting is a very interesting character (and the novel is more character-driven than plot-driven, unlike a couple of other Scandinavian crime novels I've read recently). Wisting is feeling his age and waiting for results from a doctor's visit. Like many other fictional detectives, there's a tragedy in his past (the death of his wife and Line's mother), but unlike many others, he has partly moved on and is now in a positive relationship with a woman in the town. Line, as well, is in a relationship, but one that her father is not entirely happy with.

All in all, it's a very realistic story, focused on the characters and the slow progress through the investigation (leading through spirals of information, going through the facts again and again from various newly discovered angles—as in any good police procedural). It's not a puzzle mystery, since neither the reader nor the police are in possession of the information necessary to solve the case until well into the story. The police procedural format is more satisfying to me than the puzzle mystery, for reasons I don't fully understand. But the pleasures of the procedural are very much in evidence in Dregs.

The title works very well, too—various shades of meaning of "dregs" surface at various points. Horst is one of the best writers of the current crop (a new Scandinavian crime wave in English translation): nothing like the books of Stieg Larsson, and actually not much like those of Henning Mankell either (though they share the procedural format). Horst's style is low-key, but very involving, vivid, and persuasive.

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

2011-09-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it has already run in the U.K., but the TV series based on Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels is about to be shown on public television in the U.S. And I also don't know if there are plans to film Atkinson's latest (and so I've heard, last, for a while at least) Brodie novel, Started Early, Took My Dog. It's hard for me to imagine a film or TV show based on the book, but then it's hard for me to imagine any film adequately dealing with Atkinson's fictional universe.

Started Early, Took My Dog is full of parellelisms and coincidences, in a story based in Yorkshire and mostly in Leeds. There are parallels everywhere, within the "present-day" plot and between that and the flashback plot (set in the mid-'70s, with many references to the Yorkshire ripper, whose spree was just starting. But this is no thriller, and no Red Riding either, to cite that other Yorkshire crime novel/series that is bound to come up in any discussion of Started Early, Took My Dog. Atkinson's novel is instead a book of dazzling surfaces and profound depths, which constantly (through those parallels and the brilliant writing, calling attention to its fictional nature.

There are several kidnappings, beginning with a retired policewoman abruptly deciding to "buy" a child from a prostitute/junkie who is abusing the kid. Jackson, for his part, takes a small dog away from a man who is abusing it, establishing comic (and not so comic) parallels from the beginning. There's also kidnapping the the '70s plot, in an incident that provide much of the plot and links most of the characters. A third main character is an aging actress, succumbing to dementia, whose links to the kidnappings are tenuous until the very end.

Atkinson has a talent for combining lively writing with careful characterizations. A reader not only knows these characters very well, but ultimately cares about them. And Atkinson doesn't abuse the reader's concern (I won't explain for fear of revealing too much plot). The various characters and the intertwining plots (through the two eras of the story) hold the reader's interest all along, and in the last half of the book the pace picks up with new twists on various kinds of chases, retiring gangsters, police corruption, speeding trains (a parallel to an earlier Brodie book), TV cop shows, and damsels in distress. She also provides a child character who is affecting without being cloying, true but also comic: both a literary device necessary for the story and a lively element of the story (though she doesn't say much). Child characters are difficult (not to mention that dogs are a crime fiction cliche), but Atkinson pulls off these elements of the story as effectively as the "bigger" aspects of the novel.

One element tying the whole Brodie series together is Jackson's monologues with Julia, a character in the series from the beginning, who now serves as a kind of chorus as well as an idiosyncratic character in her own right. Atkinson wisely anchors Brodie's melancholy with Julia's flightiness: we need them both, even when Julia isn't really part of the story. Started Early, Took My Dog isn't perhaps for every crime reader, but it does reinforce a reader's convicion that genre isn't everything. Atkinson gives us the elements of the crime genre, sometimes turned inside out, but without ever condescending to the genre itself. It's a structure, much like all those parallels, that enables a good story and in this case a very good book.

Stefan Tegenfalk, Anger Mode

2011-09-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

Stefan Tegenfalk's Anger Mode (recently published under the new Nordic Noir imprint in translation by David Evans) is sort of like a combination of Jussi Adler-Olsen's Danish crime novel The Keeper of Lost Causes (aka Mercy) and the novels of Swedish crime/thriller writer Leif GW Persson. Like The Keeper of Lost Causes, Anger Mode starts with a horrific car crash and proceeds according to the revenge motive of a survivor. Like Persson's novels, Anger Mode shifts from one set of characters to another and plays off the regular police against Sápo, the security police (and as in Persson's work and for that matter Stieg Larsson's, Sápo is both stupid--or at least so narrowly focused that they can't see the truth--and ruthless).

Anger Mode also has, like Adler-Olsson's novel, a detective who relies on unorthodox methods and a character from Syria whose name is a running joke (the Danish novel features a mysterious police contractor named Hafez el-Assad and the Swedish one has a criminal informant named Omar Khayyam). But like the most recently translated of Persson's novels, the detective has a young female partner who both struggles against and disproves the sexism of the police force.

The strength of Anger Mode is the plotting, which is devious and avoids the obvious (right to the end, which points to a pair of sequels). The writing (or the translation, and perhaps some Swedish speakers can help us here) is sometimes a bit wooden, especially in the dialogue (sometimes stiff and over-explaining rather than natural). The diverse characters have a bit more life and considerably more backstory than Adler-Olsson's, their individuality indicated by the narrator's comments but only revealed fully more slowly, by their actions. There's one character, a villain, whose total package of personality traits seems a bit strained to me: one moment he's an ideologue, the next a scheming embodiment of greed: it's not impossible that those elements could be combined in one character, but the shift from one to the other is a bit abrupt (and perhaps the two strains will join together later in the trilogy).

Anger Mode is long-ish (about 470 pages) but reads quickly (except for some of those turgid dialogue passages, and skimming over those speeds things up, after all). It's a worthwhile addition to the translations of the Nordic crime wave, though not among my top-ranked novels (and perhaps those who rejected my previous negative comments about Adler-Olsson will find even more to like in Tegenfalk's writing than I did). I'm simultaneously reading (or rather listinening to) Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, which is very well written and contains totally natural, believable dialogue--but in which things happen glacially rather than rapidly. I don't fault either Tegenfalk or Atkinson for their different aims and approaches, but perhaps there are some writers out there who combine their virtues?

Alan Glynn, Bloodland

2011-09-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

The sequel (sort of) to Alan Glynn's Winterland is set for release by Picador in the U.S. in January (I think it's already out in the U.K.). It's more of a thriller than a straight crime novel, but the thriller aspect is quite different from the usual novel of that genre. There's a lot of tension and plenty of threat, but most of the story takes place in the ordinary streets, apartments, hotels, and boardrooms of today's society.

The link to Winterland is Larry Bolger, now the former prime minister (Taoiseach) of Ireland, and not comfortable being out of the loop of power brokers who had put him into power in the first place. There also some shadowy American plutocrats that played a role in the previous novel and loom even larger here.

The young, unemployed journalist who is the closest thing to a central character in Bloodland summarizes the story at various points as being about a helicopter crash, a UN inspector (dead), an actress (dead), a village massacre, and a presidential candidate. There's also scandal, despair, PTSD, burnout, debts incurred and called in, and several unhappy families. Other than the journalist, Jimmy Gilroy, and Larry Bolger, we get the story from the point of view of a couple of those American plutocrats (one of them the brother of that presidential candidate), some of Bolger's former associates, an Irish developer ruined by the collapse of the Celtic tiger.

Jimmy, who has managed to get an assignment to write the actress's biography, is steered away from the project and toward a bio of Bolger, but in the process he snags onto a thread that links the massacre, the crash, the plutocrats (American and Irish), and some very ruthless people who work for a private security company. Jimmy is a likable innocent caught up in forces way beyond his control, and ends up in New York with everyone on his tail. It takes a while to sort out the cast of characters, but Glynn gradually gives each of them a full portrait through their inner and outer dialogues.

The tone is fast and lively, but not frenetic. It's quite enjoyable to see the plotlines converge, and the characters are fully alive (even the ones moving swiftly toward their deaths). The major difference between Winterland and Bloodland is that, beyond the developers, politicians, power brokers, and moneymen that the two stories share, Winterland also involved gangsters and a woman determined to find the truth about her murdered brother. Jimmy doesn't quite have the personal motivation that she did, at least not until his own life is at stake, and the gangsters anchored Winterland in a gritty urban milieu, in contrast to the boardrooms. Bloodland is anchored instead in a fast-sinking middle class watching jobs and investments and businesses disappear before their eyes (again in contrast to the denizens of the boardrooms).

It's interesting to see Glynn make such a substantial shift between two novels that are in other ways closely related. He's showing the common ground between crime fiction and thrillers, and twisting both genres into his own particular style. The cover of the U.S. edition makes it look like this is a New York story, and it partly is. But at its heart is an Irish story, but anchored in new global economic, political, and social realities. Among the very talented crop of Irish crime writers on the scene today, Glynn has the most global outlook. He's also the author of a semi-scifi thriller made recently into the movie Limitless, but if you're not into quasi-Blade Runner/Phillip K. Dick tales, don't let that association put you off Winterland and Bloodland. They're very vivid stories of today's low and high crimes, and very much tied to a base in contemporary Ireland (while also believably portraying American, Italian, and African milieux).

Jussi Adler-Olsen's Danish crime fiction

2011-09-13T13:12:00.000-07:00

An Engish translation of Jussi Adler-Olsen's Danish crime novel arrived in the U.K. last spring under the title Mercy and is about to arrive in the U.S. with the title The Keeper of Lost Causes. The U.K. title (and cover) suggest a major plot line concerning the kidnapping and imprisonment of a woman who is a politician and the caretaker of a disabled brother. The U.S cover mimics the U.S. covers of the Tattoo trilogy, and otherwise suggests the plot obliquely. Neither, however, does much to suggest the major characteristics of this book and the series which it inaugurates, which deal with a "cold case" squad in Copenhagen called Department Q.

Department Q is started partly as a means of getting a troublesome detective, Carl Mørck, out of the way, and partly to leech some extra cash out of the government (a substantial part of which will not actually to to Department Q, an ongoing element of the story). Mørck has been wounded in an assault that killed another detective and crippled a third, and Mørck might be expected to have some "PTSD" and guilt feelings: but except for a brief moment in an encounter with a therapist (whom the detective visits mostly because she's attractive), Mørck is mostly a straightforward egotist, loudmouth, obnoxious, and effective policeman.

That "straightforward" in the previous sentence indicates a certain lack of enthusiasm on my part. Neither Mørck nor his erstwhile assistant (whose very name, Haffez el-Assad, is a running joke) are really fleshed out. Merete, the kidnapped woman, is a little more substantial, but her story is mostly given in the extreme situation of her imprisonment, so that what we see of her is mostly alternating determination and despair. Her determination, in particular, is very interesting (given the usual use of the kidnapped woman in crime fiction), and we have her life story in some detail, but for me she remained, like the detective, a character more on paper than in the flesh.

The story is moved forward mostly in narration (partly from inside Mørck's head) rather than dialogue. And up to the end, it's mostly Merete's misery and Carl's gradual progress in the investigation (aided very substantially by his mysterious assistant), as well as in his occasional work on the homicide squad's other cases (and the other cops are mostly foils for Mørck (he's the only one who seems capable of actually detecting anything). And the villains, as they are gradually revealed in the second half of the book, seem inadequately motivated, veering from mad science to petty vindictiveness without revealing much else.

I don't mean to say that this is a bad book. It's just not as three-dimensional as another recent Danish crime novel, The Boy in the Suitcase, or as the best of the Scandinavian crime wave (Theorin, as just one example). I don't know what Mørck's name means in Danish, but the "murk" of the English homonym suggests something of the character: he seems to be mostly lazy, though more capable than his colleagues; even his relationship to his estranged wife seems perfunctory, as if he can't be bothered to be much more than mildly annoyed with her. And Assad, as he's mostly called, is almost cartoon-like, revealing hidden talents at every turn but always falling back into a jokey "immigrant" style of speech and character.

The Keeper of Lost Causes reminded me a bit of another book (which I haven't reviewed yet) that disappointed me, the much shorter Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette. All of Manchette's translated novels are a bit flat in tone, taking a philosophical, noir approach rather than a fleshy, full-bodied approach to crime fiction. But I liked Three to Kill and Prone Gunman, whereas I found Fatale a bit tedious, the characters flat and not rounded. It's a "thesis" book rather than a full story, to me. I have been listening to an audio book of Ian Rankin's The Complaints while reading Fatale on paper and The Keeper of Lost Causes as a pdf (from Netgalley), and though the Complaints may not be Rankin's best book, the characters are certainly fully fleshed out, and the story natural and not forced. Perhaps the other two novels suffered from comparison to the vivid quality of Rankin's prose.

I'm happy to be contradicted, if others got more from the book: Adler-Olsen is well respected in Denmark and has been well reviewed around the world. Perhaps the Department Q series will grow on me. In the meantime, I've started Alan Glynn's Bloodland, which is certainly lively and engaging so far.

Leif GW Persson and Swedish noir '78–'84

2011-09-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

Bo Widerberg's 1984 film The Man from Mallorca is taken from Leif GW Persson's 1978 novel Grisfesten (Pig Party or Pig Roast), which seems to be the first appearance of the central characters from several later novels, Detectives Jarnebring and Johansson (who were at that point in their careers working in Vice). Several other characters who are at least referred to in later books also put in an appearance (and you may recognize Sven Wollter as Jarnebring in the photo pasted in here, from more recent crime fiction TV series, if not Tomas von Brömssen as Johansson).

As a movie, The Man from Mallorca is very close in style to Widerberg's The Man on the Roof, taken from a Sjöwall/Wahlöö novel (The Abominable Man). The story is presented without commentary, in short scenes that are sometimes confusing until the story starts to come together about halfway through (and the style is in the end very effective).

The story concerns a post office robbery by a clever and capable thief: Jarnebring and Johansson ar ethe first on the scene and, having let the thief get away, they become involved in the investigation. The thief proves to be not only ruthless but well-connected. A persistent theme in Persson's later books is already in evidence: the conflicting interests of the police and the security police (whose methods and aims are a constant source of tension, criticism, and even comedy for Persson). The thief's costume is also quite funny (I'm not going to explain--not exactly a plot spoiler, but...), and the fact that the robbery takes place during a Lucia celebration gives a very Swedish slant to the scenes (not quite the Swedish Christmas of Bergman's Fanny & Alexander, but close).

Viewers may find the ending of the movie rather cynical, though it is absolutely consistent with Widerberg's style and Persson's story (don't know if the book's ending is the same, since it hasn't been translated—though if I could find a copy my Swedish is probably just about adequate to tell if the ending is substantially different--anyone who's read it is invited to step in with a comment).

It's interesting that a movie from an earlier Persson novel has been available with English subtitles for years, while Persson's writing is only now appearing in English--possibly Widerberg's post-Elvira Madigan international rep is the reason... In any case, it's quite a good movie, and an interesting insight into the characters' early careers (with interesting ironies for those who've read about their later careers).

P.S., did you recognize Sven Wollter from his recent TV-detective role?

Leif GW Persson: Another Time, Another Life

2011-09-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Another Time, Another Life, by Leif GW Persson, is scheduled to be published in the U.S. in March, 2012 (by Pantheon, in translation by Paul Norlen). The novel is a sequel to last year’s Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End, and both have the subtitle, “The Story of a Crime,” which inevitably suggests the great Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (especially in the Swedish context). But Persson is doing something different from S&W, at least in these first two volumes of what is said to be a trilogy: he is dissecting a particular crime with national and international consequences, brought into the perspective of the daily routines of the investigating police (who are portrayed warts and all). S&W were focused more closely on the lives of ordinary citizens stressed by the tensions of the welfare state of the 1970s in Sweden. But Persson's writing shifts back and forth between an almost documentary style and a fictional form, drawing the reader along seamlessly through story and history.

The earlier book led up to the assassination of Olaf Palme, and this newly translated one begins with the bombing of the German embassy in Stockholm in 1975 by factions of the German radical movement that’s generally lumped under the heading “Baader Meinhof Gang.” There are several jumps forward from the year of the bombing to the late ‘80s (and the fall of the Soviet bloc) to the late ‘90s, when a murder in the ‘80s comes into focus with the embassy bombing. Along the way, Persson depicts the security establishment of Sweden is less-than-flattering terms, while also repeating to the point of comedy the policemen’s assessment of one another as a “real policeman” and their work as “real police work.” The same pattern is to be found in the earlier book, as well.

One of the interesting things about reading these two books is the way they interlace the history of modern Sweden and the lives of the characters who appear in both.

But in the second book there is a new twist. Many readers have remarked on the sexism of Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End, with some wondering whether Persson was portraying accurately the macho attitudes of the police of the time or was perhaps himself betraying his own attitudes. The new book doesn’t answer that latter question, but here he’s playing with the sexism/machoism in a blatant way. Jarnebring, the lead detective of the first sections of the book keeps referring to his new female partner but both he and the narrator refuse to give her a name. She turns out to hold her own, though, forcing them to recognize her as an individual. And soon after, a contrast is drawn with an old-line male pathologist and a new female one who is far more knowledgeable and professional than the male (though one running character in Persson’s books, Detective Bäckström, refuses her conclusions and goes to the old man for confirmation of his own prejudices about the victim.

Those prejudices (and Bäckström’s other sins) come back again in an amusing way in the last pages of the book, while the story has shifted to a squad made up of Jarnebring’s friend and now superior officer (Johannson) and three hyper-competent female detectives. But neither the narrator nor the police environment has suddenly become enlightened on the topic of gender: the police and others continue to utter disparaging remarks about women in particular and specific female characters as well. If the sexism hasn’t disappeared, it’s at least interesting (and often funny) when thrown into the stark contrast that Persson accomplishes in Another Time, Another Life.

And Another Time is indeed an accomplished work of crime fiction, holding my interest easily through it’s 400-plus pages and offering a subtle and complex payoff at the end. Persson is, we’re told, a leading expert on crime in Sweden and a criminal profiler much in demand. He has experience and authority in his portrait of the police (in a way that begs comparison with the past master of the police story in the U.S., fictional and documentary, Joseph Wambaugh--also known for the comic elements of his books). In addition to the trilogy, it looks like all of his books recycle the characters in the two translated books, leading me wish for more translations beyond those apparently planned at the moment (at least one film based on his books, The Man from Mallorca, had international distribution some years ago).

As a point of disclosure but also an explanation of the cover pasted into this review, I received an advance galley of Another Time, Another Life from Pantheon, its U.S. publisher: the galley was bound in a plain yellow wrapper, but inside was a possible cover that more or less matches the style of the U.S. cover of Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End, but I haven’t been able to find an image of it anywhere--hence the Swedish one that shows up above--which I actually prefer to the U.S. covers anyway because it ties the story to the historical event (without being quite as explicit about the violence of the event as another cover published for the book in Sweden).

The Rage, by Gene Kerrigan

2011-08-31T17:24:00.000-07:00

Irish crime writing was already booming before the economic bust in that country, but the collapse seems to be supplying even richer material for the writers there. The gritty realism of Gene Kerrigan seems to have anticipated bad times, as if his style of noir has only now found its proper environment.

His new novel, The Rage, is a very good book that very effectively evokes the decline in the Irish economy and sense of national identity. Bob Tidey is a detective who is determined to the right thing for the victims and their families, and his efforts lead him into a professional and personal quagmire. Vincent Naylor, recently released from prison, is a hard man who's trying to control his impulses, not to go straight but to make the risks of his actions match his possible gains, especially in the complex and daring robbery he has in mind.

The strength of Kerrigan's writing is that the cop and the thug, not to mention Tidey's obstructive bosses and Naylor's criminal associates, are fully human. Tidey struggles with his duty and his conscience and his relationship with his former wife. Naylor struggles with his anger, his impulsive older brother, and his sense of justice (which is fueled by the rage of the book's title). Naylor seems on sounder footing in his relationship to the new woman in his life, a better match than he deserves. One minor character who is essential to the plot, a nun, gets more and more complex as the story goes along, drawing in the traditional virtues (some of them no longer seeming so virtuous) and recent failings of the Irish church. She in particular could have been less interesting and more of a bit player in the hands of a lesser writer, and sh adds a lot to the depth of the story.

The plot is subtle and thoroughly believable, with a lot of killing but without using death as a casual plot device. I've been a fan of Kerrigan's since he started writing fiction (I haven't read his nonfiction crime writing, but I understand it to be highly regarded), and like Maxine over at Petrona-land, I found his third book, Dark Times in the City, to be very good but not quite as darkly effective (emotionally and dramatically) as his first two novels. But The Rage is very good indeed, and I found in it some of the grim poetry of the first two books (which Maxine found less evident in this book), as well as a very original approach to crime writing, responsive to both the demands of storytelling and the truth of a realistic portrayal of a very specific social milieu.

I'm pasting in two covers, the one that seems to be the official Harvill Secker cover and one that seems to be an alternate (it shows up only on a couple of Australian sites—perhaps an official Aussie cover?). The Aussie or alternate one is closer to the actual story, but the official one is more tensely ambiguous. But neither really evokes the power of the story that they purportedly depict.

All Yours, by Claudia Piñeiro

2011-08-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

All Yours, Argentine writer Claudia Piñeiro's second novel to be translated into English (in this case by Miranda France), is really more a satire than a crime novel, and it's sometimes quite funny, in a dark way. While that's also true of her first book, Thursday Night Widows, that novel is a bit more complex and realistic. All Yours is more like a novella, with a plot that takes a couple of twists and is narrated in several voices but is much more straightforward that the earlier book.

Ines overhears a phone conversation between her husband, Ernesto, and a woman, and suspects betrayal. She follows him and witnesses a confrontation between Ernesto and his secretary: he shoves her and she falls against a tree stump, breaking her neck. Ines sneaks away without confronting Ernesto, and what follows (mostly in her voice but also briefly in his and occasionally in what seem to be police documents) is a tale of self-deception and revenge and a final twist.

Interspersed with the main story is the story, mostly in dialogue, of Ines and Ernesto's teenage daughter, who suffers from typical teenage angst and a few more serious problems. But her story veers off from the main plot without really reconnecting to her parents' tragedy. I don't know if the book would have been better if her story were more developed or simply left out, but it seems underdeveloped and not that relevant as it is.

But All Yours is a quite interesting social satire, making fun of middle-class suburban life in a more straightforward way that Thursday Night Widows. It's a quick read and remains light and entertaining. In a way, it's the flip side of the social portrait given in Ernesto Mallo's dark novels of the military dictatorship and its aftermath. Piñeiro's world is the shallow bourgeois social miasma that has followed a more overtly dangerous political past. The cover, by the way, is very effective as an image, and suggests the sexuality inherent in the story but isn't otherwise very much related to the plot.

China, thrillers, and a "forgotten friday" entry

2011-08-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

Rock Paper Tiger, by Lisa Brackman, is more of a thriller than a crime novel. There are probably or likely murders, but no corpses; lots of violence and many threats, but not much effort to solve a mystery. What it reminded me of in an odd way is a wonderful book from the 1960s, Lionel Davidson's The Rose of Tibet. The Rose of Tibet was much praised when first published and has been revived from time to time, but it's still worth reminding people about a book that is in part a throwback to the great adventure novels of previous centuries, updated to the 20th century's global politics.

First, Rock Paper Tiger: the story revolves around Ellie Cooper, an Iraq-war veteran and former medic who saw a few too many things during the war that now threaten her psychological balance, her marriage (to another Iraq vet), and even personal safety. She finds herself adrift in Beijing, having left her husband, sent there by a security company (sort of a small-scale Blackwater). He found a Chinese girlfriend and she left him, having already left the Christianity that was (besides the war) about all they had in common.

Ellie has fallen in with some fringe groups she drifted into while studying Chinese: some Internet role-game-players and some artists, in particular. On a visit to an artists' compound (a vivid glimpse into the overheated world of Chinese contemporary art and its conflicts with a suspicious and paranoid government) she briefly meets a Uighur who may be a freedom fighter or a terrorist (depending on your point of view) who is apparently on the run. Then her artist friend disappears. Then she's invited into the different but possibly overlapping worlds of art collectors and game players, while simultaneously being pursued by various threatening groups (sometimes hard to tell apart) from various governments and interest groups, all of whom want something from her (it's not too clear exactly what) and all of whom are willing to exert violent force to get it.

What ensues is a wild ride back and forth across the new China, with glimpses of the old China. It's in these sections that the resemblance to The Rose of Tibet occurred to me: in that book, an Englishman who had come to Tibet to look for a missing brother is thrust into the role of protector for a young boy and a beautiful woman, with whom he travels in haste across the mountains, with the Chinese army in hot pursuit (it's during the Red Army's invasion of Tibet). Davidson's story is marvelous, a wild, sometimes funny, sometimes erotic, sometimes even spirtual quest or flight that never lets up. Don't listen to me, go read it. Graham Greene meets H. Rider Haggard, as reviewers have remarked. Or Eric Ambler (another writer unjustly gathering dust) meets Edgar Rice Burroughs. There's nothing quite like it (even among Davidson's other, in different ways also excellent, books. It would have made a great movie, if anyone managed to do it right, though it's probably impossible to do it now (special effects would kill the story).

Brackman's novel is almost as intense, a good trick given how vague the threats to her and the goal she is supposedly seeking are. the book has a bit of a cyber-punk edge (in the gaming and its devotees) as well as some serious consideration of the extent to which both repressive and supposedly democratic governments will go in the era of globalized terror and global paranoia. I enjoyed the story and its propulsive motion, and also felt a not-unpleasurable sense of having been conned, when the threats against Ellie more or less evaporate. The real point of the story, I suppose, is Ellie's growth, her shift from a passivity that even predates her PTSD war experience. Her voice is paramount, and Brackman's chief achievement is that the reader never doubts her and remains interested in her and in her voice.

Norwegian noir: The Shadow in the River, part 2

2011-08-20T15:29:00.001-07:00

The Shadow in the River, a 2005 Norwegian crime novel by Frode Grytten, is classic noir with a wry edge. It could almost be Chinatown, with the incest changed to adultery and the water rights manipulation motivated by development changed to industrial theft motivated by globalization (there's even a sly reference to the movie). It's a Jim Thompson novel with a political theme (the same racism and xenophobia recently used as an excuse by a deranged Norwegian nazi) and a bit of Samuel Beckett's absurd comedy.

Grytten vividly evokes a grim post-industrial landscape and its citizens (some winners but most losers as their town dies). The narrator and central character, Robert Bell (I wonder if the anglo name is itself a noir reference) is the pessimistic wise-cracking anti-hero of noir, this time a reporter on the verge of losing his job rather than a down-and-out detective.

The plot is not complicated. A young man has drowned in the river, his car forced off the road. He had been fighting with some Serbian immigrants, and everyone is happy to assume that the foreigners are guilty of the crime. In the first half of the novel, Robert lethargically investigates the crime, which has attracted national attention, while occasionally seeing his brother, a police detective, around town and in press conferences.

The brother finally appears directly in the second half, first to ask Robert to accept a TV station's invitation to appear on a news show to discuss the investigation from their different points of view and then to confront Robert about the fact that has become the central tragedy of Robert's life: he is in love with, and having an on-again off-again affair with, his brother's wife.

There's murder, racial hatred, adultery among brothers, plus blackmail, manipulation of the town industry's bankruptcy…plus the worldy and wry voice of the narrator—all the elements necessary for first-class noir. Plus an element of the absurd in both the plot and Robert's attitude, as well as globalism, to bring the story up to date.

Grytten has written a series of short stories based on Edward Hopper paintings, certainly a noir topic, but no other crime fiction that I'm aware of. I had been putting off reading The Shadow in the River because I'd read reviews that made it sound grim and self-consciously “literary,” but the book is winning in its style and its development of the noir form. If you're in the mood for something dark but funny, downbeat but vivid, I'd highly recommend it.

Frode Grytten's The Shadow in the River, part 1

2011-08-19T07:20:00.000-07:00

Split my review of a short book into two parts might seem odd, but this is an odd book in some ways. The reviews I'd read of The Shadow in the River (translated from Frode Grytten's Norwegian by Robert Ferguson) mostly emphasized the dark and grim qualities of the book; to be honest, it didn't seem very inviting, and it was pretty expensive every time I looked for it, so I forgot about it. Recently I noticed an ex-library copy on-line that was cheap enough to give it a try.

The beginning is indeed a bit dark and grim, concerned with a reporter, the discovery of a body in the river, and small town pettiness, and the style is clipped and indirect, not pursuing the crime so much as portraying the reporter in his own voice. But once it gets going, the book has a lot of bitter humor. Especially toward the middle, where I am now in my rapid progress through the book, with the swarm of national newspapers descending upon the small, decaying, formerly industrial town of Odda, the comedy is quite broad, though still dark (almost Evelyn Waugh-like in tone, and Waugh, too, took on the press).

The humor reminded me of a line repeated a few times in Jan Costin Wagner's The Winter of the Lions, not a book (or a series) much noted for its humor (though th odd sense of humor of somoe of the characters is referred to occasionally). In a book whose characters are called Kimmo Joentaa, Ari Pekka Sorajärva, Tuomas Heinonen, Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen, etc., every time the name of an emergency-room doctor is mentioned, Valtteri Muksanen, some one says "Funny sort of name" or something like that. Does anyone recognize if that's a joke (to a German or Finnish reader)?

More about the plot of The Shadow in the River soon.

The Winter of the Lions, by Jan Costin Wagner

2011-08-18T11:51:00.002-07:00

Structurally, the third Kimmo Joentaa novel to be translated into English (by Anthea Bell (from the German original of author Jan Costin Wagner), is a straightforward police procedural. Joentaa, still finding it quite difficult to cope with the death of his wife (a major theme in the first of the novels, Ice Moon) is called out to a crime scene where one of his team's own crime techs has been murdered savagely. The attack came while the man was cross-country skiing, early on a winter morning (just before Christmas, a season where a number of recent Scandinavian crime novels have been set). Christmas in Finland is evoked quite vividly by Wagner.

Another attack suggests a direction for the investigation, confirmed by a third, but there are no clues to work with. It's a bit unusual for police procedurals to concentrate on a mere detective, not the head of his unit or team. Joentaa is very much the eccentric outlier, doing what he's told but then moving off on his own tangent (which he frequently finds it difficult to explain to his colleagues). H latches onto an idea and slowly works through it until he finds some kind of thread to unravel.

The slowness of the investigation's progress and Joentaa's constant memory of his wife (particurly her last moments) give the book a melancholy, even poetic quality. The narrative sticks with Joentaa for the most part, but shifts into the head of a troubled woman who seems to have something to do with the crime, but her relation to reality is vague, and we get little sense of who she is until Joentaa begins to clarify for himself what has happened. The reader is pulled in by impressions rather than events: the interest is more in how te crimes happened rather than who is the killer. The charaterizations are somewhat quirky: some characters are fully fleshed out and others are sketched simply with a few elements of personality or their relationship to someone else.

The selection of covers (from the U.K., Germany, and France) is telling: The U.K. cover suggests a frozen forest, when most of the story actually takes place in the cities of Tuku and Helsinki, and a good deal of it happens in the context of a TV talk show rather than a forest (though admittedly the first crime scene is adjacent to a forest), and the film industry in Finland plays an important role in the story. The window looking out on an icy scene (the German version) is more closely evocative of the book, but the French version, of a woman peering in a window, suggests in its use of contrasting haze and clarity more of the psychological realities that the novel turns upon.

Manuel Vazquez Montalban at the movies

2011-08-15T10:48:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I watched the only film version of one of Manuel Vazquez Montalban's Pepe Carvalho novels that I've been able to find with English subtitles, Rafael Alcazar's 1993 film El Labirinto Griego (The Greek Labyrinth, taken from the novel published by Serpent's Tail in English translation as An Olympic Death). There are several other movies and at least two TV series based on private detective Pepe Carvalho and on Vazquez Montalban's novels, but all made for a Spanish audience and not available with subtitles.

But oddly, for El Labirinto Griego, even though Vazquez Montalban was involved in the screenplay, the character's name was changed from Pepe Carvalho to Juan Bardón, and certain other facts about the novel and the life of the detective are changed (plus several of the more colorful running characters are left out). Does anyone know why the name was changed? Copyright problems, given the other film and TV companies that have bought the rights to the Carvalho books? There's also not much about food in the movie, a big departure from the books.

In any case, An Olympic Death/Greek Labyrinth is a somewhat odd book turned into an even odder movie. The plot twists and turns without much logic, leading the detective on a merry chase through a Barcelona that is being transformed by the upcoming Olympic Games (and not for the better, to listen to the detective and other Barcelona natives in the story): In particular, Pueblo Nuevo/Poble Nou (correct me if I have the name or spelling wrong, please), a working class and industrial neighborhood being razed to build the dormitories for the teams. Along the way, the detective and his clients are threatened and the detective is in trouble with the police.

The plot is loosely wound around a man and woman from Paris who hire the detective to find her husband, a Greek painter and artist's model who has run off with a new lover. She keeps justifying her search by saying he is the "man of my life," the title of another book in the series (a much later one). Bardón/Carvalho leads this pair through a tour of Barcelona at night at this specific time in history, visiting a decadent artist's party, a few bars, a warehouse where a couple of theatrical events for the Olympics is being rehearsed, and an abandoned warehouse where the painter has been living. There are a few surprises when the painter is finally found (a bit predictable, though, and tied to the time of the writing and filming), but mostly the story hinges on the emotional experiences of the characters, the detective included. His daughter (I don't remember a daughter from the book, but someone can perhaps let us know if that's a character invented for the movie) is played by a very young Penelope Cruz (her first film, at least that's what's reported in the film's reviews), and the style of filmmaking is visual rather than narrative (sometimes to the point of annoyance, in my opinion, sapping some of the narrative motion). I thought the actors were well chosen, though (even the Galician/Catalan detective is actually played by an Italian).

But this is the one we have if we don't speak Spanish. I'd love to see the TV series (one from the '80s, I think, and one from the '90s, and there are perhaps others), if anyone has a source for subtitled version or can encourage the distributors to subtitle and release them. Some basis for comparing the Laberinto film to the other versions of Pepe Carvalho would be very interesting.

Kjell Eriksson's The Hand That Trembles

2011-08-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of Kjell Eriksson's crime fiction since his first book featuring Uppsala detective Ann Lindell and her colleagues (The Princess of Burundi) appeared in English translation a few years ago. He has a distinctive voice that separates him from most of the Scandinavian crime wave authors and might make his books less likely to be made into TV or theatrical films.

The distinctive quality of his books, very much in evidence in The Hand That Trembles (published recently by Minotaur in Ebba Segerberg's translation), is a what I think of as a "dailiness." These books are not thrillers, they focus on the everyday lives of people (some of them cops) who happen to be involved in crime, in one way or another.

This new novel features several overlapping plots, beginning with the early and recent history of a man who grew up in rural Sweden, near Uppsala, and ultimately shifted from a career as a plumber to one on politics, as a socialist county commissioner. Most recently, he has vanished from Uppsala and reappeared under an assumed name in Bangalore, living a humble life as a gardener and sometime English instructor in a local school. Why he undertook this journey and why he vanished is a major aspect of the story.

Back in Sweden, in a winter that is a radical contrast to Bangalore, Ann Lindell reluctantly takes on the case of a foot discovered along the shore: reluctantly because the site of the discovery is near the home of her former lover, the father of her young son and, and her longing and loneliness are major factors in this book and the series.

During the investigation, she discovers an almost "locked room" situation, a group of houses apart from the mainland, where a few older people and some middle-aged bachelors live, as well as a younger woman who is a painter (and whose hands are among the trembling ones of the title).

Ann is also involved tangentially in the cold case that her former mentor is investigating, as he recovers from brain surgery, the unsolved murder of an old man in Uppsala who turns out to have been a Nazi sympathizer. While the case of the severed foot moves forward slowly but relentlessly (as Ann and a local colleague speak to the "locked room" houses over and over again), the other threads of the book move along in sudden twists and turns, as threads from Spain, India, and Sweden intertwine. Though there's little likelihood of a reader discovering who severed that foot much before Ann does, there are considerable surprises elsewhere in the story.

So The Hand That Trembles is a police procedural, but also a close-up portrait of a group of people as they live through ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, navigating lost opportunities, regrets, longings, and everyday responsibilities. None of them are stock characters, and it's that "dailiness" that is the prime experience in reading the book, transported though we are to a small city in Sweden and a garden in India.

Eriksson's books relate much more closely to the everyday realism of Swedish crime writing that goes back to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and that is sometimes evident in Henning Mankell's writing, rather than to the thriller writing of Swedish authors from Stieg Larsson to Liza Marklund. Though I enjoy the thrillers, I am myself more drawn to the quieter, more reflective, and more character-driven works by writers like Eriksson.

Ernesto Mallo, Sweet Money

2011-08-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

The sequel to Ernesto Mallo's remarkable Needle in a Haystack, Sweet Money, is scheduled to be published in the U.S. in October, in a translation by Katherine Silver (published by Bitter Lemon Press). Every reviewer of Needle in a Haystack remarks on the surprising fact that there could be a sequel, since "Perro" Lascano, the central character in what we are told is a trilogy, lies dying in the gutter at the end of the first novel.

But Mallo is not engaged in the kind of magic or comic realism that characterizes the life-after-death of the central character of the detective novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II of Mexico. Mallo's detective is nursed back to health under the protection of a dishonest but wily policeman who is arranging to become the chief of police in Buenos Aires after the end of the military government--and who needs an honest cop like Lascano. But just as Lascano is achieving his recovery, his mentor is shuffled off the stage by a cabal of corrupt police who not only don't need Lascano, they target him for murder.

At the same time, a smart bank robber is released from a prison and follows a plan for his future that quickly falls apart, leaving him in need of cash. His solution is a robbery that has several unfortunate aspects, including a killing, an arrest, and the hidden source of the money stolen. Lascano, hiding from the police, is offered a lot of money to find the surviving robbers and the money before the police do. Lascano needs the money to escape from the police who want to kill him but also to find the woman who got away, his lover from the first novel.

The style of the writing in the series is direct and straightforward, with dialogue presented in blocks of italicized text, with no indication of who is speaking. A reader quickly gets used to the odd presentation of dialogue, and immersed in the multiple pursuits that make up the plot. The charactrers and the story are quickly but vividly drawn, but what Mallo is after isn't so much plot and character as a wider portrait of a society so poisoned by the violence of the military dictatorship (portrayed in Needle in a Haystack) that the new democracy is characterized less by freedom than by greed and corruption. A pervading theme is the kidnapping of dissidents' children, "adopted" by members of the ruling military.

Sweet Money is a grim but not heavy story. Mallo makes us care about the characters and about their shattered social milieu. And the blow that Lascano receives at the end is a final twist that, again, makes a sequel seem unlikely and at the same time inviting.

The Hypnotist, by "Lars Kepler"

2011-08-09T07:23:00.000-07:00

The new Swedish thriller The Hypnotist, by the psuedonymous Lars Kepler provoked a Swedish media swirl around the nom de plume and discovered that it hides the identity of a married couple, writers Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril). The identity of the couple was long-revealed before the recent publication in English translation by Ann Long, and in any case the writers (who appaently have a reputation as literary authors in Sweden) are unknown in the rest of the world so there's no thrill of discovery. Reviews of The Hypnotist in translation have varied from positive, to positive-with-some-complaints, to negative. I find myself more to the right-hand side of that spectrum, I'm afraid.

Joona Linna, he central investigator starts out to be an interesting character, but oddly in a novel of over 500 pages, he remains paper thin, merely a bundle of quirks (he's always right and not afraid to say so; he's Finnish; he has a tragedy in his past). More fully realized is the eponymous hypnotist and psychiatrist, Erik Maria Bark, enlisted by Joona to help interrogate a boy after most of his family is brutally murdered and the boy is left for dead.

The plot is interesting and "cinematic," as several reviewers have commented (and a film is apparently on the way): short chapters broken at the point of some crucial revelation; lots of brutality; vivid scene-setting. There are numerous red herrings, and even the main thread of the plot gets left behind a couple of times (once for a very--very--long trip to the hypnotist's past therapy sessions (though the sessions produce both clues and more red herrings, as well as an explanation for Erik's abandonment of hypnotism until the present case, I found these passages distracting rather than revelatory). There are very clever twists, especially in the unveiling of the killer's identity and the shift to a new plot thread (when the hypnotist's son is kidnapped).

I found the conclusion to be operatic--i.e. extravagant and not that believable, though linked to both the main plot and the hynotist's flashbacks. There's also an odd dichotomy between vivid and violent murder and a curious unwillingness to fully embrace the tragedies that the plot veers toward. I can't explain what I mean without giving too much away. I enjoyed the book more than my review my indicate, but found it too long and found Joona in particular to be too undeveloped (maybe he'll get his due in a sequel). I keep separate mental lists of new crime novels that I recommend to friends and others that I don't. On balance, The Hypnotist falls into the latter category--but I'd love to hear from other readers and bloggers that have a more positive reaction to the book (would you recommend it to a friend, or to a friend who's a big fan of the Scandinavian crime wave? Would you recommend it as the first Swedish crime novel they should read?

There are very different covers for the U.S and U.K.: I like them both, graphically, though the U.S. one focuses on a narrow plot point that's hinted at earlier on but only fully present very late in the story.

Finally, the sequel to Liza Marklund's The Bomber

2011-07-30T13:45:00.001-07:00

Years ago, I picked up a copy of Liza Marklund's first crime novel, The Bomber in its English translation) as a remainder in a bookshop. Shortly after, a second novel by her, featuring the same investigative journalist (Annika Bengtzon) showed up, also as a remainder (evidently there'd been a big first printing, the publisher expecting a blockbuster that didn't happen--these were the pre-Tattoo, pre-Scandinavian crime wave days). The puzzling thing was that the second book, Studio Sex, was set years before the first one, a prequel in fact.

And only now has the fifth book in the series caught up with the first: Red Wolf takes place in the aftermath of the emotionally, professionally, and psychologically turbulent (for Annika) conclusion to The Bomber. Annika has passed up a chance to advance in the hierarchy of the Stockholm tabloid where she works (Kvällspressen or Evening Post), choosing instead to be an "independent" writer (though still dependent upon her immediate boss and the paper's editor in chief to actually publish her stories). And the atmosphere around her at work is troubled, even beyond the conflictual scenes of The Bomber.

She's trying to get her editors to publish her research into an old terrorist incident in the far north of Sweden when she falls into something more current and more dangerous: a serial killer is stalking the same northern province, and there are echoes of the earlier incident. But the editors forbid her to pursue the case (they think she's still suffering from shell-shock, as indeed she is).

Annika is surely one of the most flawed leading characters in contemporary series-crime-fiction. The only character I've come across recently who's even close is the heroine in the excellent Danish thriller The Boy in the Suitcase, and even she is more together than Annika. Suffering hallucinations, resistance from her bosses, a husband who's having an affair, Annika is barely holding it together. We see her not only in her own interior monologue, but also as her best friend Anne and her husband Thomas see her, emphasizing the egoism, determination, ambition, near collapse, and self dramatization that make up her character.

But she's never dull. And never as callow (even in the earlier books) as the main character in the pulp thriller she wrote with James Patterson (The Postcard Killer, and by the way, I thought that Patterson could have been bothered to offer a more substantial blurb for the back cover of Red Wolf than just "gripping"). Annika's family life is entirely believable: her frustration with Thomas and Thomas's self-justifications and lies surrounding his affair are drawn with credible and lively strokes.

And the extent to which Annika will go to protect herself and her family plays out in the subplot of family betrayal in perhaps an even more interesting way than in the terror-serial-killer plot, demonstrating a ruthlessness and skill in manipulating the social system and the truth. I don't find her relationship with her editor-in-chief entirely credible in Red Wolf (less so than in earlier books) but the sleazy capitalist tool that he shows himself to be here is a logical outcome of his earlier career, as well as an echo of the main plot, which veers into the history of radical groups in Sweden in the '60s and later.

Marklund is clearly at the forefront of Swedish crime writing, perhaps less well known than she should be because she came earlier than that blockbuster trilogy (and her third and fourth books never appeared in the U.S., the first and second long since out of print here--so that a well known and otherwise well informed critic described Red Wolf as the first of her novels to appear in English).

The two movies by Colin Nutley based on her earlier books also were never released in the U.S. (though The Bomber made a pretty good movie), but there's a new series being developed by Yellow Bird, the film company behind not only the Tattoo trilogy but also the Wallander series (the Swedish TV series not taken from Mankell's novels and the U.K. TV series that was), so maybe the films and the books will finally find their English-language audience. Whether U.S. readers are ready for this deeply flawed character and the mayhem she follows or creates (in her career and her family) is another question.

New Swedish crime: Arne Dahl, Misterioso

2011-07-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

Arne Dahl's Misterioso, newly translated and published in the U.S., resembles the Sjöwall/Wahlöö Martin Beck series than it does any of the other Scandinavian-crime-boom novels that have been translated so far. There's a brief prelude that seems to have nothing to do with what most of the book is dealing with, there is a team of cops, the style is distinctly "police-procedural," and there's a good deal of social criticism (the tale is set in the 1990s (it was originally published in Swedish at the end of that decade), at the beginning of the financial and other crises that continue to shift the foundations of the "middle-way" capitalist socialism (or socialist capitalism) of Sweden.

There are, however, many differences between the Beck books and Dahl's "A-Unit" series, of which Misterioso is a part (apparently 11 novels published so far in Swedish). Dahl spends a lot of time in the beginning setting up his team (and the similarity of the group's name, arbitrary and tentative though it is at the beginning of the book, is a bit too close to the "A-Team" of American TV fame: especially since threre is a "one of each" quality to the team's members. The ending of the book drags out a bit too long, for me, spending a lot of time setting up the series as a whole, whereas the Beck books end abruptly, carrying forward in a more natural way to the next in the series.

But Misterioso is a good read and has a lot of interesting characteristics, in the diversity of the cops' characters, in the use of music and social commentary, and in Dahl's skill at keeping a story moving forward while the cops are making little or no progress. The story involves a serial killer targeting high-level businessmen in Sweden. Paul Hjelm, in the wake of an incident that simultaneously makes him a hero and a target for Internal Affairs, is recruited to the A-Unit, while also in the midst of a puzzling crisis in his marriage. Though Paul is the main focus of the story, each of the numerous members of the team gets a turn in the spotlight, as each investigates an aspect of the crime or the possible identity of the killer (Russian mafia, disgruntled employee, personal connections among the dead men, etc.).

In a satisfying way, the reader discovers a key element in the crime before the cops do, bringing together the strands of the narrative. The final assault on the killer's hiding place is a bit of an anti-climax, though. There are also a number of coincidences in the story, but the author deals with them in an interesting way, invoking the killer's notion of fate.

It's also interesting that a number of publishers around the world have highlighted different aspects of the crime in their cover art. I'm pasting into this post covers from the U.S., Poland, Spain, and Sweden as examples. I can't figure out the Spanish one, though, the one with the woman's face and the birds...

New Danish thriller: The Boy in the Suitcase, by Agnete Friis & Lene Kaaberbol

2011-07-21T10:21:00.001-07:00

Scheduled for November release in the U.S. by Soho Press, The Boy in the Suitcase, by Agnete Friis & Lene Kaaberbol and translated from the Danish by Lene Kaaberbøl, is an unrelenting roller-coaster ride of a thriller/crime novel with a vivid cast of characters and an unusual "hero." It's also one of the best books I've read this year.

The first sections can be a bit confusing, but all will become clear if the reader just sticks with it. Four threads interweave without any connections being made until much later. In a sort of prologue, someone who has been asked to pick up a heavy suitcase decides to see what's in it before she puts it in her car, and discovers a young boy, alive, neatly folded into it. From there, we meet Jan, an anxious architect; Jucas, an obviously shady character who years for a normal family life with his girlfriend but has one more job to do; Sigita, a Lithuanian single mother who has been plunged into a paranoiac's nightmare; and Nina, a nurse who seems to be fleeing her family responsibilities by becoming involved in rescue missions.

All of the people are caught up in a plot wherein nothing goes according to plan, beginning with an airplane delayed when it strikes a seagull and cascading from there on. The outlines of what's going on become clear gradually, with the true nature of the plot becoming clear between half and two-thirds of the way into the book. Along the way, we gain and then lose sympathy and respect for the characters, resulting in a fully drawn and multivalent cast. Nina in particular, obsessive-compulsive or perhaps high-functioning autistic, launching into rescue missions less from bravery than from anxiety, emerges as a new sort of icon for crime fiction.

Agnete Frii, according to Soho's p.r., is a children's book writer and Lene Kaaberbol is a fantasy author, and neither had written crime before their collaboration. Perhaps the vivid quality of the writing has something to do with their diverse backgrounds, and their fresh take on the crime and thriller genres may derive on part from their non-crime writing careers. Whatever the reasons, The Boy in the Suitcase is the impressive beginning to what is reportedly a series (hinted at in the last pages of the novel) featuring the unconventional, troubled, and determined Nina. More, please.

I read an advance reviewer's copy of The Boy in the Suitcase, and I always wonder whether it's best to time a review to coincide with the publication of the book (when readers can actually get hold of the book) or to preview it (especially with a book I am praising, is better (to whet readers' appetites. Let me know what you think, or what you do in your own blog in cases like this.

Re-reading crime fiction

2011-07-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

What is it that distinguishes crime fiction that you can read over and over again from books that, read once, have exhausted their interest? I'm almost done reading Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini's 1972 The Sunday Woman, translated by William Weaver, for at least the third time (spread out over more than 30 years). The Sunday Woman was published originally more as a mainstream novel than a work of genre fiction, and in fact is seldom cited in the U.S. as a groundbreaking crime novel (though it is). At around the same time I picked up my copy (the early '70s), I was also beginning to read the Martin Beck cycle by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, all of which I've re-read at least once.

Where the Swedish writers mixed in a lot of politics and irony as well as comedy, Fruttero and Lucentini give us a lot of comedy, satire, and social observation, without directly engaging in political commentary. Both the Swedish and the Italian collaborators structure the stories as police procedurals (rather than whodunnits or least-likely-suspect stories), which makes re-reading easier for me (the stories are all about process rather than the revelation of the murderers' identities).

But is it the quality of the writing, the pleasure of the comedy, something else, all of the above that makes a crime fiction novel re-readable, a book to save and take off the shelf again and again, rather than something you simply get rid of or something that's just taking up space on a shelf?

By the way, there's a movie version of The Sunday Woman (La donna della domenica) featuring Marcello Mastroianni, Jacqueline Bisset, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, made for Italian TV in the '70s—but it's only available with Italian subtitles (intended for hearing-impaired Italian speakers), not any other languages. What a shame, it should be more accessible (though there's apparently a new Italian mini-series based on the book that is being considered for international release).

Turkish crime: Esmahan Aykol's Hotel Bosphorus

2011-07-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Billed as the "first kati Hirschel murder mystery," Hotel Bosphorus by Esmahan Aykol (recently published in a translation by Ruth Whitehouse, for Bitter Lemon Press) starts from a comic and cozy premise: like Colin Bateman's "mystery man," Kati runs a crime fiction bookshop (in Istanbul), and as with Bateman's books, the tone is frequently comic (not quite as broadly as Bateman's, though).

Kati is a German who was born in Turkey and has returned to Istanbul, running through several jobs before opening her bookshop. One of the interesting and amusing things about the story is this reversal, a German immigrant in Turkey, and the culture clash of her situation is a frequent subject of both plot and comedy. A childhood friend who is now a minor film actor arrives in Istanbul to make a movie, and calls on Kati. The reunion takes a sinister turn when the film's director is murdered in his hotel.

The novel seems to be taking a well-trodden cozy-ish path when Kati turns amateur detective and makes a professional and personal connection with a handsome Turkish detective. For a good part of the story, her attraction to the detective and her reluctance to follow through with her desire for him are accompanied by the very slowly moving investigation into the crime (by both parties to the not-quite-consummated affair). After that had gone on for a while with no advance in the story, I was beginning to lose interest in the story.

But there is a sudden turn, when Kati's mother (in Berlin) is hospitalized and Kati feels an urgent need to be by her side. There are a couple of ensuing coincidences that strain credulity a bit, but twist the story in a much more interesting direction (and even the trip to Berlin is interesting, in advancing the culture-clash aspect of the tale). I won't say anything more about that twist, but it takes the story out of the conventional cozy and into much more interesting territory, right through to the conclusion.

The tone is light, throughout, and the violence is off-stage. So even if the books isn't quite a cozy, it's not as dark as the contemporary noir genre can be. I'm interested to see where Aykol takes the series: it could go in either direction, light or dark, or could perhaps maintain the delicate balance that kept Hotel Bosphorus interesting for me. I'm hoping that Bitter Lemon will continue to translate and publish Aykol's work, which is at the very least quite different from the other Turkish crime fiction (but Turks and foreigners) that we have had access to in English up to now.

The cover image, by the way, is related to the crime and is quite atmospheric, but doesn't give much of the flavor of the book--it suggests a much more relevant cover for one of Sophie Hannah's books. Still, it's an attractive cover and does set up one scene that is referred to but never actually experienced by Kati herself (a frequent problem for amateur detectives, who don't have the access of a professional detective to all aspects of a crime).

Stuart Neville's Stolen Souls

2011-07-12T13:41:00.001-07:00

Due out in the U.S. in October, Stuart Neville's third crime novel, Stolen Souls, is a terrifying trip through a heartless underworld, the dark side of today's Belfast. Galya, forced into prostitution and trapped in a Belfast brothel, escapes by killing a Lithuanian, one of her captors, but every time she seems to have gotten free, another monster appears. And this story is full of monsters: corruption, greed, ruthlessness, and lack of empathy reign.

There are a couple of character with redeeming qualities, beyond Galya herself. Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, the central character, now, in a series that started with a focus on someone else, is deeply flawed, struggling personally and professionally, but not a monster. His daughter (abandoned by him during her first years but now jealously guarded from her mother's family (see the first two novels for details of that relationship) and other threats, retains some of her second sight and is taken care of more often by Susan, her father's neighbor and sort-of girlfriend, more often than by her father himself. Susan is an ordinary person, not a saint but in the novel's mire of horrible people, she shines out as a beacon of normalcy.

As Galya bounces from frying pan to fire, Lennon follows in her wake, tracing the murders that followed the Lithuanian's death (andn there are a lot of deaths). The story is part gang war, part serial killer story, and part revenge tragedy (some of which is carried over from the previous novels, and various elements threaten Lennon from different angles.

A casual reader might have thought The Ghosts of Belfast, Neville's first book, to be an unlikely candidate for a sequel; and that same reader might have thought, after reading Collusion, the second in the series, that any sequel would be unlikely to sustain the ruthless momentum of the first two. But Stolen Souls, while quite different from the first two, is equally compelling and rewarding (and also equally dark, even without the emphasis of the earlier two books on the legacy of the troubles, a minor element here).

Cold Swedish noir: Mons Kallentoft

2011-07-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

I mentioned yesterday that the newly translated (by Neil Smith, forthcoming in October in the U.K. from Hodder) crime novel by Mons Kallentoft (Midwinter Sacrifice) has a unique style that (at least for me) demands a certain style of reading. The text is frequently allusive and features numerous passages from the point of view of the corpse discovered at the beginning, hanging naked, tortured, high in a tree in the frozen forest near Linköping. The language varies considerably from the fairly straightforward interactions among the police to the very fluid narrative passages, frequently told in sentence fragments.

The style suits the story, which involves urban-rural conflicts and contrasts, cults and the revival of old religions, and the damage that families can do to children. The lead detective, Malin Fors, is a single mother (with a teenage daughter and all the conflicts that that implies). Her colleagues are a distinct group of mostly pretty normal police officers, each with his or her own quirks. The corpse, however, was a damaged man, who seems disturbed and perhaps autistic (though the term is never mentioned) eccentric, if seen from the outside (his monologue after death is surprisingly normal).

The search for the killer or killers is conducted as a police procedural, with more than the usual frustration, perhaps, since no leads give any promise of concrete evidence. There's a dysfunctional family living (literally as well as figuratively) outside the civilized city, a small group worshipping the old Aesir gods, some criminally delinquent teenage boys, a nearly catatonic rape victim and other characters. Some of their stories evidently overlap into later installments of this series (and it will be interesting to see if the author's style changes when his focus changes to other plots and stories),

I tend to appreciate a fairly straight style in crime fiction (allusive, certainly, but perhaps not fragmented in the more poetic style that Kallentoft employs), but Midwinter Sacrifice was very engaging once I got used to the shifts between voices (the narrator's, the corpse's, even a tree at one point) and the dialogue (very realistic) among the cops. The conclusion involves a race to save a trapped victim, but in a way that turns that convention of the thrilling ending upside down and inside out, while also leaving enough unresolved to lead forward to the next installment... Plus I found myself thinking of Sara Lund (from the Danish TV series The Killing) while in Malin's company—a reference that's also made in the back cover blurbs and a comparison that isn't quite accurate but still suggests something of Malin's personality and the tone of the book as well.

Brian McGilloway's Little Girl Lost and some other stuff

2011-07-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

Does speed (as in how fast you read a book) make a difference to your appreciation of a book? Does speed indicate something about the book itself? A few days ago, I finished Brian McGilloway's new book (featuring a new character, DS Lucy Black, of the new Northern Ireland Police in Derry), and started reading the much longer Midwinter Sacrifice, by Swedish author Mons Kallentoft (his first to be translated, featuring Detective Malin Fors of the Linköping police). I finished Little Girl Lost quickly (it's not that long) but actually read the text at a fairly leisurely rate (engaged with the story but not forced by the plot to speed up to reach the conclusion). I find that with Kallentoft's prose, which is almost stream of consciousness (lots of sentence fragments, sections from the point of view of the corpse discovered at the beginning) I can only stay engaged with the story if I read very quickly—not to advance toward the end of the over-400-page story, but simply to keep up with the flow of the language.

Little Girl Lost steps aside from the characters in McGilloway's previous novels and into Lucy Black's complicated personal and professional life. She has returned to Derry to take a new job and to take care of her ailing father, only to be shunted into an ostensibly less prestigious position in the force and also to discover that her father is slipping quickly into the difficulties of Alzheimer's. She is called to the scene of the sighting of a young girl wandering in the frozen forest during a winter storm, thinking that the girl is the one everyone is looking for (the kidnapped daughter of a local builder) but finding instead a younger girl covered in blood that is not her own.

Once it is discovered that it's not the kidnapped girl, no one seems very interested (except Lucy) in the girl, who is now mute and unresponsive). Lucy tries to discover who she is, while also trying to stay involved in the hunt for the kidnapping victim, and when she discovers links, the police hierarchy try to steer her away from the high profile case. Her family history (her parents both cops, in the complicated situation of Catholic police officers in the Troubles) and her conflicts with her superiors are matched by her increasing difficulties with her father (and all strains of the story converge, in a perhaps too convenient way, making Derry sound like one of those small cities where everying and everyone are ultimately connected).

I found the fairly straightforward storytelling very appealing, though less complex than the more ruminative Inspector Devlin series (set in the borderlands between Ireland and Norther Ireland). The far less straightforward Midwinter Sacrifice gave me some trouble until I sped up my reading: it's not that the prose is difficult or self-consciously literary; it's more that the style is very expansive rather than economical. We've grown to expect a certain terseness in the writing of noir fiction and a simplicity of style in more conventional mysteries. The complexity is not particularly a Swedish style (from Larsson to the many newly translated Swedes and back to the classic Sjöwall/Wahlöö books there is a great variety of styles, as well as lengths, in crime fiction books), but seems in this case linked to the subject matter, replete with mysticism, malice, and insular families.

One more entry in this "portmanteau" post: I'm halfway thtough watching the excellent RAI TV series based on Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels. The films are very well made, capturing the period (end of WWII in Italy) as well as the character of the conflicted Commissario De Luca. The first installment, though, was made not from a De Luca book but from a stand alone novel by Lucarelli set in the same period, in Rimini, and in spite of the rewriting to bring it into the De Luca ambience, there's a telling difference in tone, and the series really comes alive with the second episode, based on Carta Bianca (Carte Blanche in English). The first episode is based on an untranslated book whose title would be something like "Unauthorized Investigation," and I'm curious now about what the book is like (and how different the main character is from the De Luca that he becomes in the film).

Trackers, by Deon Meyer

2011-06-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

Deon Meyer has followed up his most straightforward book, the relentless Thirteen Hours, with his most complex, the forthcoming Trackers. As is usual with Meyer, characters recur from his other books, from the earliest to the most recent. Lemmer, the bodyguard, Mat Joubert, the cop (now former cop) and several of his colleagues, as well as several other minor characters, put in appearances.

There are several kinds of trackers in Trackers: animal trackers, spy trackers, private detectives, and more. In the first and third sections of the book, we follow a Presidential Intelligence Agency, whose head is trying to keep the agency independent in the face of a consolidation of the South African intelligence services, and recruits a team of stray white people (beached in one way or another by the rapidly changing society) as information analysts. One of them is a housewife who has abandoned her abusive husband and useless son to seek a life of her own (as a writer, she hopes). The agency is caught up in the pursuit of an Islamic terror cell that is planning a big event.

The second section follows Lemmer (telling his own story in the first person), living happily in the desert-like, remote Bo-Karoo area with the girlfriend he acquired in Blood Safari, the previous book featuring him as a main character. He is suddenly and inexplicably offered a job protecting a pair of black Rhinos that are being smuggled out of Zimbabwe (most often referred to as Zim by the novel's characters) for their own (and their species') protection. There are hidden agendas, though, that end with Lemmer in pursuit of a tracker who has disappeared with evidence implicating Lemmer in a murder.

The last section follows Joubert's first case as a private investigator, working for a large firm that seems more concerned with making money than solving cases. His case concerns a man who disappeared some time before, and his wife has raised the money for a private investigation since the police put no effort into finding him.

The three threads intersect in unexpected ways, leading to twisty and satisfying plot developments. There are elements of the Graham Greene or Eric Ambler school of writing in the spy sections, with the reader understanding more of what's happening than the spy catchers do, with considerable irony. There's also one plot development that the reader may think has been undercut by history--but be patient, what seems at first like an error becomes logical in the end.

There is much that Deon Meyer fans will recognize and appreciate in Trackers, as well as a lot of new and interesting developments. I've been a fan since Meyer's first two novels were translated into English from Afrikaans (one featuring Mat Joubert), and Trackers reinforces my appreciation for Meyer's work (he's certainly the "dean" of South African crime writing).

I've pasted in the U.S. (Rhino) and U.K. (road image) as well as the Afrikaans editions: of the three, I think I like the U.K. one best and the U.S. one least, though the rhino cover does have a certain appeal--both refer to the Lemmer plot more than the other threads (which indeed are harder to represent). Thoughts?

Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man

2011-06-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

I'm tempted to say, "go read the review at http://shadepoint.blogspot.com/
2011/05/review-troubled-man-by-henning-mankell.html, I agree with everything the blogger says." Then I could just point to the U.S. cover (which I don't like) and be done with it. But it's a peculiar book and I can't resist, in the end, saying a few things.

In the Wallander books, Mankell is pulled between his global concerns and the daily lives of people affected by ordinary crimes. Sometimes the balance is excellent (as in the references to xenophobia in Faceless Killers, a topic that, in seeking a vehicle to address it, was apparently the reason he created the Wallander character in the first place. In others, to me, the balance is tilted too much to the global conspiracy (The Man Who Smiled, for instance). And in the non-Wallander books, I frequently find the "daily" aspect shortchanged in favor of the global theme.

In The Troubled Man, the balance is achieved by an unusual emphasis on Wallander himself, and his aging in particular. There's a valedictory tone (noted by Maxine) in the memories and visitations from previous stories, and the detective's health is an ever-present concern, as well as the continuation of his argumentative relationship with his daughter Linda (now a mother). The global plot (which tried my patience a bit at times) is nevertheless well-realized in its own right, a twisty spy story of sorts. The father of Linda's baby introduces Wallander to his own father, a former naval officer who is obsessed with an incident from decades before in which Soviet submarines were detected in Swedish waters. We find out more than most of us will care to know about those submarine incidents, but rest assured that Mankell ultimately makes interested plot-content out of them, in a manner different from all the previous Wallanders. Wallander is pulled into a personal investigation (rather than an official one) when the former officer (Linda's father-in-law-to-be) disappears without a trace.

Much has been written about the gloomy tone of The Troubled Man, and with reason. But the emphasis on only that aspect of the novel shouldn't put off readers (as it initially put me off): Wallander is as he always is, and the investigation proceeds at the usual ruminative pace, leading to a final confrontation that is as active as in any of the stories. As the Shade Point blogger suggests, this is not the book to begin with, no one should start the series here. But anyone who has appreciated the series in its book form, in particular, will be rewarded in the same fashion with this final volume. And the conclusion, much referred to in reviews in negative language, is not what I expected from that advance press (I won't give it away, but it's more respectful to the character than I expected from the reviews).

So I've ended up saying more about The Troubled Man than I thought I might. Go read it, and let us know what you think (it offers more food for thought for both its story and its themes than most crime fiction).

Out of South Africa: Killer Country by Mike Nicol

2011-06-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

I suspect it may not have been the best idea to read the middle novel of a trilogy-series, but Mike Nicol does pretty well in involving the reader so that one doesn't miss references to the characters' past exploits. Killer Country, the second of the three Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso novels, focuses more frequently on Bishop, whose family has been under threat before and is here again. Bishop and Buso are former freedom fighters (of two different races) who now run a security agency (mostly bodyguarding tourists uncertain of their safety in the wild-west milieu of Cape Town).

In Killer Country, they are seduced into a job that is outside their comfort zone, to do a security assessment of a judge's father's farm (there have been many farm killings in the country). They are also trying to nail down the last element of a land deal of their own, to develop a golf community, but a well connected and ruthless (also former freedom fighter) businessman currently in jail for fraud is also trying to tie up the same land. The "uber-nemisis" of the series is also lurking behind everything: a woman they interrogated with violent and crippling results in the camps of their freedom fighting days, who is now an influential lawyer. Also in the mix is a cold-blooded assassin and his not-so-controllable driver and minder, down from Johannesburg.

The two threads of the story inevitably become connected, with violent results. Bishop proves to be rather careless at times, not the super-competent bodyguard of some thriller series, and pays for his inattention several times over. Nicol writes very well, and he manages to evoke many aspects of the multi-cultural and troubled country while keeping the story colorful and fluid. I found, though, that I didn't much care for the not-so-heroic heroes and (perhaps part of the author's point) could see things from the nemisis lawyer's point of view.

While not as compulsively readable as, for instance, Deon Meyer's recent 13 Hours, Nicol is in the best tradition of current South African crime writing (and there's a very high standard of crime fiction coming out of the country right now). Nicol pays homage to George Pelecanos explicity, and like Pelecanos, he offers a playlist based on both Bishop and the assassin's taste in "killer country" music.

Two new Italian crime novels

2011-06-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

Newly arrived in print in the U.K. are two new detective novels set in Italy, one written in English and the other translated from Italian. Tobias Jones's White Death is a sequel to his recent Salati Case, featuring Parma private detective Castagnetti (we discover his first name, which reflects the politics of the region, but he doesn't use it). White Death is concerned primarily with the politics of zoning and property development, with a particularly nasty Italian slant. Alessandro Perissinotto's Blood Sisters introduces Bergamo psychologist Anna Pavesi, who has become (against her will, almost) an unofficial detective, tracking down missing persons.

Castagnetti is called to a factory where the owner's car has been torched. In the process of seeking the arsonist (who had also been making threatening phone calls), the detective discovers an elaborate scheme to profit from advance knowledge of changes in the city plan, a plot involving a spectrum of the social structure of Parma, from high to low. Castagnetti becomes involved himself, even when his original commission is canceled, and manages to discover at least part of the truth, though only one of the more sympathetic characters suffers from being brought to justice.

Pavesi's story has an ingenious structure, alternating passages of the erstwhile detective digging up a corpse and of her telling herself the story of how she got to that point. A socialite comes to her asking for help in discovering the background of a half-sister who died in a hit-and-run accident and whose body is now missing. The socialite is mostly concerned that no scandal be attached to her name, but Pavesi becomes concerned with a much wider pattern of threat and violence. The dead woman turns out to have been involved with several citizens of a Milan suburban town, including a physician who treated her after her accident, and Pavesi has put herself into the crosshairs of all of them.

I found Jones's book to be very well written, with a lot of clever evocation of daily life in Parma, while Perissinotto's book is more of an internal monologue. The former book is more about politics and the social realm, while the latter is more about family, love, and loss. Jones's story is (not surprisingly) more an Anglo-American style crime novel, while Perissinotto's is more brooding and introspective, in the mode of several crime novels from Italy and Germany recently. Both are very good, though I found Blood Sisters starting to drag a bit in the last third, after a very fresh and entertaining beginning. So pick your poison, though you won't go very far wrong with either.

Phantoms of Breslau, by Marek Krajewski

2011-06-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

Can anyone answer a question about Marek Krajewski's tremendously entertaining Breslau series: each novel is set further in the past than the previous novel in the series, and my question is, how far back has he gone in the Polish originals? With the arrival of Phantoms of Breslau in English we have arrived in 1919, with flashbacks to the World War, and Krajewski has illuminated some of the mysteries of his detective's life and career.

Eberhard Mock is a unique character in crime fiction, and his personal demons have been a major factor in the series. In Phantoms, they're the key to everything. The mutilated bodies of four sailors (more likely male prostitutes in sailor garb) open a case that pushes a haunted Mock to the brink of both love and death. His nightmares are making him attempt to stay constantly awake, and his father (with whom he is living) is haranguing him about his drinking (being drunk is the only respite from his sleeping horrors).

Even worse, everyone he interviews in connection with the four sailors seems to be next in line for the killers, leading the police chief to remove him from the case. Mock's guilt over the deaths lead him to take extravagant measures to protect everyone with whom he speaks. In two cases, those protected witnesses are young prostitutes (of the female variety) who have touched him, in different ways.

Another thread of the book consists of the increasingly insane musings of the murderer, who is involved in a spiritualist cult, the tenets of which are discussed in the killers rantings. The identity of the killer, however, is concealed until a very literally tortuous conclusion.

Krajewsk's novels are violent, but in a uniquely decadent and symbolic fashion. The works have a loopy structure that mirrors Mock's state of mind. The overall effect is compelling. I had almost finished Phantoms when I left for a 10-day vacation, and not wanting to haul around a book I'd finished from town to town in Italy, I left it until I returned home. I worried a bit that I'd have a hard time getting back into the story, but I needn't have: Krajewski's crime-fictional world is so vivid, and his reminders to the reader so carefully laid out, that I was instantly sucked back in.

You don't hear the word "louche" much any more, but the Mock series calls the term to mind (if I remember correctly what it means). These are stories of corruption, decadence, depravity, and cruelty. All of the above in an engaging and entertaining way, leaving the reader anxious for the next (and at the same time previous, given Krajewski's unique way of creating a series) book to arrive.

I'm pasting in two covers, apparently alternates rather than U.S. or U.K. versions. The more stylized one is the one actually published by McLehose in the U.K. and is by far the better one. The other, showing a fedora'd detective lurking in a cityscape, is wildly inappropriate to the era of the novel and the headgear of Mock.

Requiem for a Gypsy, by Michael Genelin

2011-05-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

The fourth book in the Commander Jana Matinova series, based in Bratislava, Slovakia, is arriving this summer from Soho Crime. The book is chock full of plot elements that resolve themselves not in clockwork fashion but in an almost lurching motion as Matinova uncovers crimes and ethical quandaries involving Nazis, Communists, Gypsies, Turks, International bankers, assassins, and a teenage criminal courier named Em. The action moves from Bratislava to Berlin, Vienna, and Paris.

For all that complication, the book is more direct and also more satisfying than its predecessor, The Magician's Accomplice. Genelin's style is more thriller than police procedural, and that remains true in the new novel, except that the police investigation is the key to all the plot elements. In a prologue, an enigmatic old man is run over in a Paris street. In Bratislava, Matinova and her boss, Colonel Trokan, are asked to guard Oto Bogan, a rich banker who has received a death threat but whose wife is determined to go ahead with a planned gala event. Shots are fired and Trokan manages to save Bogan's life, but the wife is killed.

Matinova is sidelined from the investigation but inserts herself anyway, first without authorization and then with a grudging invitation from a prosecutor who nevertheless refuses to give her key information in the case. As things develop (discoveries including a peculiar menage-a-trois with Bogan, the wife, and her former husband, a banking scheme that is either criminal or outlandish, and the shadowy influence of an international assassin who's supposed to be dead.

Other plotlines include the death of a Gypsy boy whose parents think he was murdered, the appearance of a waif at Matinova's door in the middle of a snowstorm, and an almost heartwarming development for Matinova's lazy and annoying assistant, Seges. While not all the plot elements end up being tied up in a knot, everything is related to the tangled history of Slovakia over the past century. One particularly interesting thread (and the most interesting of Genelin's flashbacks to Matinova's past so far in the series) involves a young man she sees being beaten by the police during a demonstration against the then-Communist government—an incident that divides her from her Party-member mother in unpredictable ways.

I wish in fact that the plot dealt more with those Soviet-infused years rather than the more distant Nazi past. I for one am a little tired of Nazis popping up out of the woodwork in crime fiction. Alas, I suppose as villains (criminal and historical) the Nazis are irresistible. Bratislava is the home ground of the series, but in this novel the cities of Berlin and Paris (and to a lesser extent Vienna) are more vividly evoked. Em, the waif whom Matinova adopts (or perhaps it's the other way around) focuses the tours of these cities both as a young tourist and the center of a criminal vortex. She's partly the daughter and granddaughter Matinova has lost, and partly a master manipulator (Zazie on a crime spree, if you will—if anybody remembers Queneau's most memorable character).

As always, it's dangerous for anyone, especially other policemen, to be around Matinova (as cops from Germany and Paris discover here) and Matinova herself is frequently threatened in Requiem for a Gypsy. Her actions here seem more human and less superhuman than in some of the incidents in earlier books. In fact, though her own story has been more central to earlier books, she seems more human, more a sympathetic character in this latest book.

Jan Marete Weiss, These Dark Things (Captain Natalia Monte 1)

2011-05-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

The beginning of These Dark Things, Jan Marete Weiss's new police procedural set in Naples, shows off the author's strengths, description and scene-setting. The crime scene in the crypts and ossuaries of a church aptly named for the souls in purgatory is marvelous, and Weiss goes on to give a first-rate portrait of the purgatorial Naples of today, the Camorra, corruption, and garbage with Vesuvius in the background. The writing is also first-rate, except for a certain stiffness in the dialogue, and the characters and plot are set up in interesting ways: a German student who knows too much about the city's street shrines (and the contract that the Mob has with the Church to collect the donations from the shrines), Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabinieri and her Buddhist partner, various secondary characters from the Church, the University, the Camorra, and Natalia's life.

But neither the characters nor the plot are really developed. It was the descriptions of Naples that kept me reading; except for the power of the imagery, I might not have finished this relatively short (224pp) book. The characters don't progress beyond their initial framing, and the plot is complicated but undeveloped (it's like a string of incidents, without much connection from one to the other). When the solution to the original murder comes along, and the violent consequences to the other plotlines follow, the reader isn't surprised or moved—it's just more stuff added to the string.

But Weiss's writing does promise something that I hope can be accomplished in future novels in the series, enough that I will surely read them when they arrive in print. On a recommendation from someone very well informed about Italian crime fiction, I recently read two other novels in which the setting is the main interest, both by John Grisham (not my usual cup of tea). The novels are The Broker (set in Bologna) and Playing for Pizza (set in Parma, but not a crime novel). Grisham, of course, does know how to construct a plot and can certainly portray three-dimensional characters. But it is mostly a very good tour of these cities of Emilia-Romagna that I took away from the books (and I'd definitely pass along the recommendation of both books on that score). But Weiss and these two efforts by Grisham prove to be evidence that contradicts a complaint heard not long ago that crime fiction is just literary tourism: these books are very good as tourism but do not rise to the level of the best international crime writing, whether about Italy or the rest of the world, writing that uses these settings to construct full, complex, and rewarding reading experiences.

Death on a Galician Shore, by Domingo Villar

2011-05-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Domingo Villar's very interesting first crime novel, Water Blue Eyes, set in the Galician city of Vigo and featuring Inspector and reluctant radio star Leo Caldas, left us waiting impatiently for a sequel, and it has now arrived, published in the U.K. by Abacus and translated by Sonia Soto. A U.S. edition from Little, Brown is apparently in the works, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's available yet. The title, Death on a Galician Shore, is an adequate adaptation of the Spanish original, which means something like Beach of the Drowned. A body of a fisherman washed up on the shore near a fishing village is assumed to be a suicide, though his hands are tied behind him with a plastic cable tie (apparently a common way for fishermen to drown themselves, though it seems a bit odd). The autopsy confirms drowning, but the position of the cable tie and the presence of a head wound suggest murder.

Caldas and Estevez, his somewhat thuggish (though otherwise pleasant) non-Galician assistant, plod back and forth between Vigo and the dead man's home village without finding out much or getting anywhere at all (becalmed, as the narrator says) for most of the novel. That's not really a complaint: it's not only a good depiction of police work, it's an opportunity for the reader to soak in the atmosphere of the village and the life of the fishermen. A link to a more-than-a-decade old incident involving the dead man, in which a ship on which he was working sank, drowning the captain, brings in ghosts and the talismans that the fishermen use to ward off evil spirits, a theme constantly raised by Caldas and others and dismissed as ridiculous by Estevez.

We also learn more about Caldas's family (mainly his father and an uncle) and his lost love (who walked out on him a while back), and about food and what might be called the cafe culture of retired academics on the one hand and fishermen on the other.

The atmosphere and the pace shift suddenly when a new thread of the story emerges and from that point (about 2/3 of the way into the book) the story moves very quickly from one theory of the crime to another, as Caldas is convinced of each in turn and tries to act on them. Having already met the other men involved in that earlier shipwreck in the first half of the novel, we learn a good deal more about them in the last sections, as their role in the various scenarios changes and changes again, Caldas leaping from each newly discovered clue to a conclusion that may or may not be supported by the facts. By the last few chapters things are changing almost too fast, though some of the melancholy turns of events and the buried facts and motivations reminded me a bit of Leonardo Sciascia's subtle delineations of crime in Sicily.

Having set up Caldas as a character very thoroughly in Water Blue Eyes, Villar doesn't take his personal story much further in the new book, perhaps part of the reason that the early sections seem a bit slow, A reader new to Villar might find them much more packed with detail and incident. But in any case, Death on a Galician Shore does provide an interesting take on the "locked room" or village mystery, with a limited set of suspects but a sudden shift of perspective at the end. The atmosphere is interesting and the melancholy tone wholly appropriate to the crime and the ultimately discovered motivation and back story. My interest never flagged, though I was starting to get frustrated with the pace just as it began to pick up.

Finnish noir in German: Silence, by Jan Costin Wagner

2011-05-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

Silence is the second of Jan Costin Wagner's crime novels featuring detective Kimmo Joentaa to be translated into English (by Anthea Bell). Wagner divides his time between his native Germany and his wife's native Finland, and his familiarity with Joentaa's country results in a vivid and unforced evocation of the place.

Silence, though, is very much a psychological story, told in looping intertwined narratives that go backward and forward in time, recapitulating events not so much from a factual standpoint as in terms of emotional reality. Joentaa continues to deal with the death of his wife (a major theme in Ice Moon, the first Joentaa book), but his pain is joined here by that of his former partner, now retired, who is obsessed with the unsolved case (33 years before) of a murdered teenage girl.
Another girl disappears in the same location, and her parents' pain is linked to the ongoing pain of the first girl's mother.

And as in Ice Moon, we see a perpetrator's mind from the inside, though in this case it's a witness who could have stopped the murder of the girl but didn't. His guilt and compulsion is another of the very strong emotional patterns of the book. We also see something of the life of the actual murderer, though he is affectless and doesn't actually participate in the maelstrom of the story's narrative.

Silence is an unconventional crime novel and presents difficult emotional states on the part of several characters, but Wagner's writing (and Bell's translation) carries the book forward and keeps the reader interested. There is a sort of resolution at the end, yet the reader knows more than any of the characters (literary irony), maintaining the emotional rather than literal truths of the story.

I'm pasting in the U.K. and forthcoming U.S. covers, as well as the German cover. The U.K./Harvill Secker cover (which has some similarity to the French cover I haven't pasted in) is, I think, the truest to the character of the book.

Garry Disher's Wyatt

2011-04-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

The latest Garry Disher novel to arrive in the U.S. is a continuation of his Wyatt series (about a dispassionate thief) rather than his police-procedural series (better known here). Wyatt recalls the noir end of Donald Westlake's oeuvre, and in fact Disher offers an homage to Westlake in two names that appear in the book (Stark, one of Westlake's several pseudonyms, and Parker, one of his longest-running characters). Disher's Wyatt has some of the same profile as Parker, a master thief for whom things are always going wrong. But in the new novel, Wyatt is confronting problems that Parker didn't have to: money that moves electronically rather than physically, new security systems, and the constantly rising surveillance of our world today.

The characters in the Wyatt series are pretty much stock characters, interesting in their own way but reduced to their relevance to Wyatt (though the narrative does depart from the central character a good deal of the time). And Wyatt himself is always guarded, always careful, never emotional. He is a particular sort of sociopath: without empathy or even interest in his fellow humans; he's almost high-functioning autistic.

There's a telling passage in which he is attracted to the central woman character (who is one of the most interesting characters, as she veers from normal life into Wyatt's world and then into Wyatt's point of view). He feels the attraction but doesn't quite know what to do about it. Wyatt is super-competent in other ways, and his inability to understand affection or to act on attraction keeps him human, in an odd way. He isn't vulnerable, but he's damaged.

But the plotting is the outstanding characteristic of the Wyatt series. Through the twists and turns, Disher manages to manipulate the standard tropes of the noir-heist story in lively ways, much as Westlake did (though without the overt comedy that Westlake often employed). Disher's Wyatt (the novel and the character) are as dark as they come, but engaging and involving for the reader. Wyatt seems in some ways to be a posthumous tribute to Westlake, and is definitely both an excellent novel in its own right and the best "post-Westlake" take on that master's style that I've read.

Continuing the discussion of covers: here are the Australian (from Text Publishing) and U.S. (from Soho Crime) covers—the Australian original by far the best, to my eye.

The Leopard, Jo Nesbø

2011-04-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

The eagerly awaited sequel to Jo Nesbø's previous Harry Hole novel (The Snowman) has arrived in English (translated by Don Bartlett). The first question that the book raises is "serial-killer-porn," because of the manner of death of the earliest and some other victims of an unknown killer who ultimately becomes known as "Prince Charming": a torture device with interesting links to the colonial excesses of Europe's African adventures: a device whose lethal power is described at length at the beginning of the novel.

I can't pretend to present any illumination for the sadistic aspects of most serial killer fiction, or Nesbø's particular use of the trope, but I can reassure potential readers that the viciousness of the early passages of The Leopard do not make up the largest part of the novel. If the sadism had continued, it would have been difficult to continue with what is overall a very well written, well constructed crime novel, fully on par with Nesbø's best work.

What does make up most of the story is Nesbø's talent for deploying the usual elements of crime fiction and then undermining and twisting them, so that the reader is continually kept off balance. Throughout the books over 600 pages, an easy or typical resolution looms at the edges only to disappear with a surprising turn of events. Through this process and through Nesbø's writing, the reader is fully engaged in this very long police procedural.

Harry has hit bottom in Hong Kong, where he fled after the traumatic events of The Snowman (a story that haunts this book). He is pulled back to Oslo unwillingly, as a new serial killer is on the loose and the Crime Squad is in disarray, threatened with losing its access to murder inquiries by police politics (the creation of a new national "major case" unit) and by the ruthless ambition of another of Nesbø's complex, ambitious policeme bureaucrats, Mikael Bellman.

The story includes a couple of passages that stretch credulity a bit (including the aftermath of an avalanche, though what do I know about escaping from an avalanche...). But the story pulled me along strongly enough that I've been toting around this large, heavy hardback all week.

Concerning the covers: I'm pasting in the U.S., French, and German versions. The U.S. is probably the weakest graphically, but has the most to do with the actual plot—but the American version is marred by the predictable but irritating "next Stieg Larsson" nonsense.

crime, cricket, murder, and marriage

2011-04-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, an Irish cultural organization in Washington DC set up a table near my Metro stop (at the office end of my commute) and gave away books by Irish writers all day. I looked over the offerings on their table a couple of times during the day, and finally carried away a copy of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a 2008 novel about New York after 2001 but also about marriage, separation, childhood, and despair. But it's also, as the blurb on the back of the book says, "a paen to cricket and a murder mystery," according to the Sunday Telegraph. So it's at least partly a crime novel, and as book by an Irish writer about a Dutchman (Hans van den Broek) who emigrates first to London and then to New York where he becomes involved with a Trinidadian gangster and cricket promoter, the story is sufficiently "international" to qualify for this blog, and since it begins with the discovery of that Trinidadian gangster's body in the river (two years after his disappearance), it's also a crime story.

But Netherland is primarily about van den Broek's descent into a tepid middle-class version of hell. New York is vividly evoked (and the writing is poetic and suggestive and frequently funny), but the city is metaphorically a post-apocalpytic backdrop for Hans to experience the despair and dislocation of being abandoned by his wife.

But what primarily marks the difference between Netherland and crime fiction is that once the Chuck-the-Trinidadian's murder is evoked as the foundation of the story, Hans, as the first-person narrator, spends the rest of the book telling how he, Hans, reaches the point of hearing about Chuck's death, rather than how Chuck got there (or why). The criminality of Chuck's life or his death are only part of Hans's trip down and out (out of his apartment in lower Manhattan when the area is evacuated after 9/11, out of marriage and a comfortable life, out of contact with his young son, out of the upper-middle-class and into a netherworld of the denizens of the Chelsea hotel (a transvestite Turkish angel among them) and the petty criminals of Brooklyn.

Hans becomes drawn into a support system based around his childhood sport, cricket, which is played in New York mostly by Carribean and South Asian immigrants on inadequate grounds with no audience. Hans is a very personable and likable tourguide for this world and for his own life's journey, but the narrowness of the focus on Hans gets to be a bit claustrophobic. That perhaps is the difference between the common literary novel and the average crime novel. I'd have liked to hear something about what Chuck was actually up to, who some of the characters that surround him actually are, and what Chuck's own family life is all about (all of which are only suggested). Not that I'm putting a value judgment on it: I am myself, though, drawn more to the expansive view of crime and the city rather than the use of bath simply to illuminate the corners of the narrator's psyche.

Brunetti #20: Donna Leon, Drawing Conclusions

2011-04-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

I'm pasting in three cover images: the U.S. cover (with the blue sculpture), what seems to be a U.S. alternate cover (a view over the rooftop domes of San Marco), and a U.K. cover (moon over Piazza San Marco). The official U.S. cover is very attractive, but somehow a view of Venice is much more so, and the U.S. alternate seems both more effective and ultimately more related to the story than either of the other two. Maybe that one will be revived for a paperback edition.

In any case, Brunetti's 20th novel is an understated tour de force, with all the usual elements of the series (the insufferable toady Vice Questore Patta, the resourceful Signorina Elettra, Commissario Vianello, and Paola, Brunetti's wife--still preparing lunches that Brunetti doesn't get home for). The children and Paola's parents are in the background this time, as Brunetti focuses on a puzzling case that isn't officially a case at all.

When a neighbor discovers the body of a woman in her apartment, neither the police nor the medical examiner find a definitive reason to classify the death as other than natural, though there is evidence that she fell or was pushed, hitting her head on a radiator. Brunetti, though, can't leave the case alone, pursuing leads down two tracks that deal with the protection of battered women and the sometimes brutal honesty of the elderly.

Those familiar with the Brunetti novels know that increasingly there is little on the surface that we might call action. Instead, the important events are ethical and emotional in nature—and the ethics are always ambiguous, given that Leon's overarching theme is the ethical quagmire of contemporary Italy. Plus the listing of the running characters that I gave above suggests a less sophisticated delineation of characters that is actually the case in Leon's work. For example, Brunetti here displays something close to brutality in his questioning of and attitude toward one character; and a character who appears to be a thug (and is referred to as such) turns out to be something else entirely by the end of the book.

As usual, the city of Venice, in all its fading glory, is a vital element of the story. Leon doesn't so much describe the city as saturate her story with the lives still intertwined intimately with this place teetering between collapse and Disneyfication. Drawing Conclusions is perhaps quiter and even more melancholy than some of the other Brunetti novels, but is as well written, as involving, and as powerful as the best of the series.

The Magician's Accomplice, by Michael Genelin

2011-04-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm catching up a bit late with the third volume in Michael Genelin's Bratislava-based Commander Jana Matinova series, The Magician's Accomplice (the next volume is about to be released, in fact). In The Magician's Accomplice, Matinova is handed two murders at the very beginning (and fair warning, in order to talk about the book at all, some spoilers are inevitable): one is a student who tries to get a free hotel breakfast and is assassinated for his trouble (was he the target, or was it the actual hotel guest whose place he was taking?). The second murder is her lover, a lawyer in the state prosecutor's office, who is blown up by a telephone bomb.

But Matinova is quickly steered away from both, naturally enough, because of the death of one so close to her. She's in fact shipped out to the Europol office in The Hague, where her duties seem to be mostly busywork. Her predecessor in the Slovak "chair" at Europol disappeared, and she begins to investigate, unofficially, eventually enlisting the help of some of her colleagues. And all the while, she intends to investigate secretly the two cases from which she was removed.

What results is a wild ride across The Netherlands, Vienna, Prague, and points between, in which Matinova is accompanied by an elderly former magician, the uncle of the student killed at the beginning, who has followed Matinova to The Hague. The story pulls the reader along without revealing much of what lies behind the murderous conspiracy that ties everything together, a testament to Genelin's skill in bringing together character, plot, and exotic settings.

But the thriller-like plot begins, for me, to seem a little formulaic at times, and one important element of the plot turns on a pretty extreme coincidence that I expected to be more fully developed somehow, more integrated into the story than it was. And Matinova's skill in the violent encounters with bad guys verges on 007 standards, a bit of the "last woman standing" sort of thing. The magician, too, seemed to be developing into an interesting plot device (as well as character) but then wasn't, quite.

Nevertheless, these quibbles won't keep me from progressing fairly quickly to the fourth installment in the Matinova saga. I'm interested to see how her character might deepen after her loss and its violent consdquences in The Magician's Accomplice—another example of the author's skill in drawing in the reader.

The 5th (and last?) Commissario Trotti novel

2011-03-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

The place of Timothy Williams in the crime fiction world was recently attested to by his inclusion in a lit of the top ten European crime writers in The Guardian (yet he's surely the least well known name in the list). I haven't yet read his series set in Guadaloupe (and so far published only in French, though there's a rumor of publication by Soho Crime), but his Commissario Trotti series is perhaps the best of the distinguished crop of non-Italian crime fiction writers whose work is set in Italy, a literary generation that includes Donna Leon, Magdalen Nabb, and Michael Dibdin.

All of these writers share a jaundiced yet appreciative view of Italy: dismayed by the politics and seduced by the culture. But Williams digs deeper into the real social and historical background, from the "years of lead" and the kidnapping of Moro through a series of scandals in government and church, as well as campaigns against corruption, leading to the "mani pulite" years of the '90s, which is the background of Big Italy, the fifth and last-published of the Trotti novels. In all cases, the big, historical events are filtered through the lens of small, local events and people, accenting the impact of social patterns on the daily life of individuals.

That all sounds dry and stuffy, and the novels are anything but. As with all the books, Big Italy progresses mostly through the often oblique dialogue of the Commissario and his associates and the suspects. The effect is frequently both frustrating and comic, as well as reinforcing the overall sense that what is really going on remains resolutely below the surface of events.

Trotti gets two requests from current and former associates, both of which he refuses. One is from a former colleague, now a private detective who watches too many TV detective shows, who asks for his help in solving a cold murder case, a doctor murdered as he walked from his house one morning. The other request is from his boss, the questore, and from a social worker that Trotti once recruited to assist in the investigation of child molestation; they want the Commissario to reconsider his retirement plans and to take charge of a new "special victims" unit for the protection of children.

Things get more complicated when the private detective is himself murdered and no one wants Trotti to investigate. Two former colleagues (much abused by Trotti when they were working with him) come to his assistance (and are not well rewarded for their cooperation), and local and national politics become implicated in the crimes and in the police as the story moves along (and the book's title, when explained, says a lot about Williams's targets in the series as a whole).

Big Italy has, like the other Trotti novels and most crime fiction set in Italy, a less-than-conclusive ending, without the absolute resolution of much mystery writing. But there's a note of hope in the ending: hope for the future of some of the individual characters and for the goals for which they had been striving, if not confidence in the future of the country as a whole. I hear that there's a sixth Trotti story as yet unpublished. I can wholeheartedly encourage readers who are interested in atypical, ambitious, and atmospheric crime writing to go out and find used copies of the five published Trotti novels, and then to pressure anyone they know in the publishing world to (first) bring them back into print and (second) give us all the chance to read the final episode in the series.

The Killing Redux

2011-03-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that there is a version of the excellent Danish series, The Killing (the original Danish title, Forbrydelsen, actually translates as "The Crime"), being produced for AMC-TV, the U.S. basic cable channel that brings us Breaking Bad and brought us the late lamented Rubicon. It's 13 episodes rather than 20, still one episode per day of the investigation of the death of a teenager. So far, the press is good--and since it starts on April 3, apparently, we'll soon find out if it measures up to the Danish original.

The American Killing is shot in Vancouver, BC, but set in Seattle. It's produced by Fox Television (which thankfully has little resemblance to that other branch of the company, Fox News). The actors who can be seen in the photo pasted in this blog post are Mireille Enos (as "Sarah Linden," the lead detective) and Joel Kinnaman (as "Stephen Holder," the new cop in the team). The pilot was directed by Patty Jenkins, who directed Monster (a good sign). Here's hoping it has even a glimmer of the quality of the original.

Now I've got to finish watching the original before the new version starts...

The newest Aimee Leduc

2011-03-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

The first of Cara Black's "Aimée Leduc investigations," Murder in the Marais, was published in 1999 but set in 1993, in Paris of course. The 11th and newest in the series, Murder in Passy, has just been published but is set in 1997: Aimée is progressing more slowly into the future than her books are. The historical distance allows some temporal ironies regarding technologies that Aimée and her cohorts are exploiting in their infancy (GPS is one), and also allows (rather in the fashion of French crime writer Dominique Manotti) some historical events to anchor the stories (in the case of Murder in Passy, it's the Basque presence in Paris, including the region's militant factions.

I've recently mentioned, in a review of a quite different book, the difficulties of picking up a series in the middle. It's not really a problem with Black's books (pun not intended, if you remember the U.K. TV show of that name), except that some of the running characters surrounding Aimée come and go rather quickly in Murder in Passy, the reader's awareness of who they are depending on prior knowledge of her career. But it's the most prominent of the regulars, Morbier, her cop-godfather, and René, her vertically challenged partner in Leduc Investigations, who carry most of the weight anyway.

Aimée becomes involved in Morbier's love life, making an appearance in his place at his recent amour's daughter's wedding rehearsal party—where a murder occurs, implicating Morbier himself. And with Morbier's less than collegial relationship with his colleagues, they are only too happy to stop looking for the murderer once they haved evidence against Morbier.

As Aimée mobilizes in his defense, against his own wishes, she becomes involved in Basque separatism in various forms, as well as embedded in the history, architecture, life, and culture of the Passy neighorhood (one of the pleasures of the series is Black's detailed evocation of the neighborhood's of Paris, as well as the city as a whole.

Aimée stumbles around without much cooperation from anyone involved, including various branches of the police, until things become both clearer and more dangerous. There's a concluding thriller-sequence in an old underground reservoir that's right out of a French adventure-romance novel of previous centuries. And Aimée inches a bit further toward a personal relationship...

I haven't read all, or even quite half, of the Aimée Leduc stories, but the new one is certainly up to the standard of the ones that I have read. Aimée herself remains interesting and lively, without succumbing to clichés of the genre or of fashion (her wardrobe is an ongoing element, along with he pink scooter). Food, though certainly one aspect of the stories, is not as important as it is for, for example, the novels of Vázquez Montalbán or Camilleri, though wine is never far from anyone's mind. When I catch up with my tbr pile a bit, I should go back and fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Aimée's career...

Brooklyn Noir and my mistake

2011-03-18T08:43:00.001-07:00

I don't usually review U.S.-based noir fiction here, but I received a copy of Reed Farrell Coleman's 2008 Empty Ever After (not from the publisher, but from the printer of a recent edition, as a printing sample offered to support a quote for a book project I was working on). I'd been curious about Coleman since I've heard a lot of praise for his work, especially from other writers.

This is the 5th of the 6 (so far) books in the Moe Prager series, featuring ex-cop (and by the 6th novel, ex-private detective) and wine merchant of that name, set in the '80s for the most part and in Brooklyn and Long Island. My mistake was in picking up the 5th novel in the series: as I've since read elsewhere, a lot of the impact of Empty Ever After relies on a reader's prior knowledge of these characters and their history. It's not that there is prior knowledge required (Coleman does a good job of filling in the blanks, in conversation and flashbacks). It's that by this installment of the series, who the suspects might be and what their history and emotional baggage is with Prager are well established for a regular reader and not so well established for a new reader.

In terms of the quality of the writing, the setting, the vivid characters, and the ethnic background, Coleman's Prager novel reminds me of Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Quartet, and excellent series that can also be hard to pick up in the middle. Where Coleman's Empty Ever After differs from most noir-detective writing is in the focus on Prager and his family There is not really a "case" here, only a threat to Prager's ex-wife and to the detective himself. That narrows the focus, especially in a first-person narrative. And the wider focus (on local politics and corruption, on the police, both corrupt and honest, and on the social sphere) is to some extent carried over from the previous novels rather than directly investigated here.

The story is very complicated, with frequent flashbacks and side stories, but basically concerns the disturbance of several graves, the ghostly reappearance of Moe's ex-wife's dead brother (around whom an earlier novel in the series focused), and a host of people who hate Moe for one reason or another. Although the ending is well prepared for, it seems abrupt to me, and a death that occurs in the ensuing violence seems almost offstage, though it happens in the reader's presence.

So other reviewers will have to offer a more complete picture of Coleman's Prager series and his other novels; I can offer only praise of the writing and a caution: don't pick up the series in the middle.

I found three coves for this book: the skyscraper one (on the edition I have) and two graveyard ones. The skyscraper one is not really appropriate, given the often rural and suburban settings; of the other 2, I think I prefer the one without color, giving a sense of the bleakness of the story Coleman tells as well as the theme of the living presence of the dead.

Translator on board

2011-03-10T08:11:00.000-08:00

I've added a Google translator to the blog, having seen that it works pretty well on websites. Let me know what you think. And has anybody else tried a hosted translator on their crime fiction blog?

Allan Guthrie, Hard Man (2006)

2011-03-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

I'm just now getting around to reading Hard Man, a 5-year old book by Allan Guthrie, the master of the noir farce. And, just as in the French comedies, Hard Man is full of motion and action, but rather than being about sex, it's about violence. And there's plenty of it--but the effect is more of comedy than horror (in spite of an extended scene right out of the serial-killer-splatter-movie tradition.

Everyone in the book is damaged, before the story starts, each in his or her own way: damaged by prison, social structure, domestic violence, industrial accidents, or just plain thuggery. We're introduced the the Baxter family, fecklessly trying to get revenge on their sister (and daughter) May's husband Wallace, who kicked her out and threatened her when she announced she was pregnant, and that another man is the father. Pearce (known mostly by his last name) is minding his own business when the Baxters, well and truly thumped by Wallace, intrude and try to persuade him to help them protect May.

What follows is a combination of family solidarity, total idiocy, and the attachment of a solitary man and his dog (who only has three legs). Guthrie is expert at setting up expectations and shattering them, and also at building a narrative's drive and speed. Though you may find none of these characters appealing, and will most likely find what they are all doing reprehensible, once you get into the story, there's no stopping.

Regular readers of Guthrie's books will know what I'm talking about: this book is well up to his usual standards (I haven't read his newest book yet, Slammer, nor the one that came right after Hard Man, Kill Clock). He's the most unrelenting of the "tartan noir" writers, and the funniest, in his uniquely violent style. The writing is clear and crisp, each character with his own personality and style as the narrative moves among them. If you're up for the combination of pain, darkness, and comedy, Guthrie definitely delivers, better than anyone else I can think of.

And that nail on the cover of the U.S. edition offers a certain queasy promise that the text actually surpasses.

South Pacific Noir: Graeme Kent's Devil-Devil

2011-03-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

The detective in conflict with his boss is a common trope in crime fiction, but in his new Devil-Devil, Graeme Kent takes the theme further than anyone else I can think of. Sergeant Kella, of the Protectorate Police in pre-independence Solomon Islands, is by blood a native of Malaita, one of the larger islands, but he was educated in Western culture and is now caught between his native culture and the West, Western religion and traditional religion. When he is in the presence of his superior officers, all English, he is deferantial in a manner suited to his rank. When he's not in their presence, he ignores them almost completely.

Kella is not only a cop. He has taken on a traditional peacemaker role in his culture, through which is responsible for everyone on Malaita in a much more complete way than simply as a cop. As several people remark along the way, he will be a very important man in the islands once the English leave, and is already an important man within his culture.

His counterpart, Sister Conchita, is a young nun with a troublesome habit (no pun intended) of also ignoring her superiors, or at least of exceeding her role in the social and liturgical hierarchy. Although she does play a part in the working-out of the mystery (more about that in a minute) she's not an amateur detective, really. She's more of a Western foil (much more so than his police superiors) for Kella.

The novel, in terms of plot and atmosphere, has something in common with Charlotte Jay's marvelous Beat Not the Bones (set in nearby Papua New Guinea) and also with Leaphorn and Chee novels of Tony Hillerman (though Kella's cultural conflict is to some extent divided into two characters in Hillerman's stories of skinwalkers, ghosts, and ordinary murders). My wife was reminded of Colin Cotterill's historical/magic-realist/comic crime novels set in Laos. But Kella's adventure is more distinctive than the comparisons can suggest.

Devil-Devil is almost casual about some of the several murders in the story, and the moral tone of the book has more to do with cultural survival than the life or death of individuals. There's plenty of crime: not only murders but smuggling of various sorts, corruption, violence, etc. But the story is more political in a way, dealing not only with the cultural conflict but also with the waning colonialism of circa 1960.

An American anthropologist has disappeared into the mountains, a skeleton is unearthed by an earthquake, and omens foreshadow violent deaths that soon follow. Kella needs to find out what's going on, but he's not as concerned about English justice as with restoring order of a more fundamental sort. There are several sections that could have been from an adventure novel instead of a police procedural, as well as gritty scenes in rough and tumble towns. The story moves forward in loops and twirls rather than a straightforward investigation.

There are some aspects of the novel that didn't quite work, for me: some of the dialogue is a little stilted, and some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional. But in the context of a linguistic milieu that alternates between proper English and local pidgin, the dialogue could be appropriate, certainly much more so than any imported "noir-speak" drawn from urban crime fiction. And the characters reflect the larger frame that Kent is dealing with: the islanders notion of who the Europeans are is not particularly 3-dimensional (though Kella sees more shades of gray than others do), and Kella himself is not simply an individual: modest though he can be, and human in many ways, he's bigger than just a guy on the street (or in the jungle).

There's some humor in the book, mostly light-hearted, and a distinctively South-Seas kidnapping and imprisonment is one element of that. But even those elements are tinged with a darkness of both animism and human nature. This is an unusual crime novel, and it will be interesting to see how Kent develops the series. The U.S. and U.K. covers are more completely different than is usually the case--I think the prize goes to Soho Crime, for the U.S. version (the skulls, rather than the U.K. version's map), this time.

Icelandic noir/political/police procedural

2011-02-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

Published in the U.S. as Frozen Assets and in the U.K. as Frozen Out, Quentin Bates's new crime novel set in Iceland is evidently the first in a series featuring Sergeant Gunnhildur, a uniformed police officer in charge of the station in a small fishing town. Though Gunnhildur is a widow who refuses to talk about her husband and is now the single mother of a teenage girl and a young man (out at sea on a fishing vessel), she has little of the grim outlook of the main character of Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic series and less of the "ordinary-life," almost cozy character of Yrsa Sigurdardóttir's.

Bates is English, but has lived in Iceland and has also been a journalist for a commercial fishing magazine, both certainly qualifications for the job of bringing Gunnhildur's setting to life. The novel is first a straightforward police procedural, with "Gunna," as she is frequently known, dealing with her superiors in Keflavik and Reykjavik, her diverse colleagues in Hvalvik, and a drowned man who is found along the docks.

Her superiors want the case ruled a suicide, but Gunna thinks there's more to it and pursues it doggedly to its roots in a Rekjavik P.R. agency, an aluminum plant and a power plant in her own neighborhood, and an anonymous blogger who seems to know too much about the private lives of some politicians, P.R. folks, and the financial shenanigans behind the construction projects. And lurking behind it all is what some of the characters fear (and the reader knows is looming), the Icelandic financial meltdown.

Fans of police procedurals as a genre will be with Gunna all along, and thriller fans will be engaged by the time the plot gets into high gear in the last half, after Gunna has discovered who's behind the death (and some others) and is in hot, but frustrating, pursuit. And increasingly as the plot moves along, we are in classic noir territory, as the corruption at the top of government and business throws sand in the gears of the investigation.

Wisely, though, Bates keeps the focus on the street level investigation, rather than moving into the corridors of power. The story stays at the level of the ordinary policewoman rather than reaching into political-thriller territory, and we see the effects, rather than the closeup activities, of the corrupt hierarchy. Also interesting is the penetration of the blogger into the plot, in terms of periodic posts, and the young journalist who is shadowing Gunna for a story on rural cops.

All the elements mesh smoothly and enjoyably, and every time the story seems to be heading for a cliche, Bates steers away into something more interesting. While the gloomy intensity of Indridason's novels is not present here, Bates's book is more vivid, to me, than Sigurdardóttir's: livelier and more noir, somehow, at the same time.

I'm curious whether readers find the U.K. or the U.S. title and cover more appealing. Votes, anyone? I think the U.K. cover is more graphically interesting, but the U.S. cover has a certain retro-noir appeal that I actually prefer (Soho Crime, the U.S. publisher, does a good job with covers).

Hans Werner Kettenbach's The Stronger Sex

2011-02-17T12:28:00.000-08:00

The Stronger Sex, newly published in English translation (done by Anthea Bell) by crime fiction publisher Bitter Lemon Press, isn't really a crime novel, or even a thriller, despite including a private detective, a race track, a mysterious older woman and a young lover, a young lawyer thrust into a difficult case without knowing the consequences, and so on. But the case deals with an accusation that an employer has dismissed a worker improperly: a woman working for a despotic entrepreneur asks for time off, and when refused, she takes sick leave. When the employer fires her without notice, she sues under German workers' rights laws and the case is set to come before a special employment tribunal.

Young attorney Alexander Zabel is assigned to defend the employer, Herbert Klofft, in the case by his boss, who is a friend of Klofft's. Most of the novel is Zabel's first-person puzzlement over how to proceed in the case, mixed with his on-again-off-again relationship with an attractive art critic, his fascination with the sexy-but-seventy Cilly Klofft, the defendant's wife, and his alternating sympathy and repulsion with regard to the difficult but very ill Kofft.

The blurbs accompanying the book suggest a similarity to Patricia Highsmith, which is indeed a valid comment—but it's to Highsmith's tightly wound but quieter novels, rather than the Ripley books. For me, the relationship of Zabel and Cilly was the most interesting element in what is a noir story but one whose violence is for the most part emotional and psychological rather than physical or blatant.

In fact, The Stronger Sex reminds me, in retrospect, of a short story rather than a novel, a very long story (342 pages, but more of a meditation centering on a minor incident rather than working with a bigger subject or a more complex plot. Of the three Bitter Lemon books by Kettenbach, David's Story and Black Ice, I found The Stronger Sex to be the most interesting and the most readable, though the furthest of the three from any conventional aspects of crime fiction. In some ways it reminds me o the recent novels by Peter Temple (Truth in particular), though it is much further from the rules and structures of the detective story or mystery novel than Temple's books—it's the concentration on character and situation and voice that I was reminded of in reading Kettenbach.

So: It's a bit of Temple, a bit of Hollywood (or even London) Boulevard, a bit if Highsmith, and a bit of mainstream fiction. I recommend it if you're in the mood for something quite different.

Håkan Nesser: The Inspector and Silence

2011-02-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

Håkan Nesser's Van Veeteren series was written in Swedish in the '90s but is just reaching English (can his new series be far behind?), with what is, I think, the 5th translation, The Inspector and Silence. Simultaneously with reading the book, I heard a rumor that the MhZ Network in the U.S. has purchased the rights to the Van Veeteren TV series, to be shown this spring--an interesting development, if true.

The Inspector and Silence kept reminding me of two other, seemingly contradictory, crime novelists, the classic Swiss detective stories of Friedrich Glauser and the quirky novels of French writer Fred Vargas. Somehow, the ruminative Van Veeteren thrust into a small town (as he is in this book and in some others) reminded me of the dour detective of the Swiss writer, while his character quirks reminded me of Vargas's Adamsberg. Van Veeteren, just to name a couple of instances, plays both chess and badminton obsessively, likes to use stock phrases and aphorisms, and goes off by himself during the investigation, discovering the clue to the mystery by accident.

There are long passages of narrative, broken by occasional dialogue, and fortunately both the narrator and the interior monologue of Van Veeteren are lively and often funny. The narrator isn't Van Veeteren, but they share a wry sensibility, both of them often comparing the current situation to crime novels and movies (there are explicit references to Poirot and Holmes as well). The other cops are an intereting group, though not on stage nearly as much as the Chief Inspector.

The story isn't really a puzzle mystery, since the reader is as much at sea as the detectives. A woman calls a small-town police station, manned by a substitute while the chief of police is on vacation (it's July, and all the other detectives have vacation plans for August), saying that a young girl has disappeared from a summer camp run by a religious cult. When the acting chief, and ultimately Van Veeteren, called in to assist, question the cult (which has sexual overtones), no one will admit that anyone is missing, and no one offers much help.

Most of the novel is taken up with Van Veeteren's musings about what little they know, and about the cult itself, with little progress (though events do begin to take over the story with new discoveries). Much of the considerable pleasure, though, is sharing time with the off-center detective, who at the beginning is plotting to vacation in the same spot as a woman from a previous case (she's unaware of his machinations) and his desire to quit the police and become part-owner of an antiquarian bookshop.

Readers of the series will know (and anticipate with pleasure) the latest of Nesser's books to be translated, and new readers might dive in to The Inspector and Silence without any problem. Either way, I can highly recommend this book by a very different Swedish crime novelist.

Roslund & Hellström, Three Seconds

2011-02-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

The new Swedish noir by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström is unusual in several ways. First, the running character around whom their crime series is based, Ewert Grens, isn't at the center of the novel; and Grens is probably the most thoroughly unlikable central character in any crime series. The idiosyncratic pair of detectives in K.O. Dahl's series come close at times, but are more sympathetic (to peers and readers than Grens, who drives everyone away who might become a friend. More about him in a minute.

The character who is at the center of Three Seconds is the most unusual undercover operative I've come across in crime fiction, apparently a reflection of the real tendency of Swedish police to use criminals, rather than undercover cops, to penetrate criminal organizations. So Piet Hoffman, the "hero" of the book, is a snitch. We learn something about his motivations only very late in the book: for the most part, we can only see his sacrifices (paid off the books and not that handsomely; forced to lie to his wife and kids, and then to put them at risk). His criminal record is exaggerated by his handlers to give him street (and prison) cred, while he's actually a petty criminal whose background we know little about.

Roslund & Hellström frequently write about prison and prisoners, and most of this book is about both the Polish mafia and the police striving to insert Hoffman, code name Paula, into prison in order to take over the drug trade (and, on the part of the police, attack the crime organization). Hoffman's preparations for prison are fascinating, approaching The Day of the Jackal in the intricacy of technical processes about which the reader can only guess the function.

And the novel ticks along quickly until suddenly Hoffman needs to put his preparations into use, at which point (fair warning) the book shifts into very high gear, pulling the reader along compulsively. It's fascinating to watch the plot unfold, to find out what the "three seconds" of the title signify, and to follow the ultimate shift of emphasis from Hoffman to Grens. Readers will probably anticipate one of the final plot points, but it's nevertheless a pleasure to see it unfold. The story is very Swedish, in the sense that it turns upon a type of corruption that a number of Swedish crime writers have depicted, more so than some other nationalities of noir (not only Larsson but in different ways Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Leif G. W. Persson).

Grens is here finally undergoing a process of grief, letting go of a wife injured by his own (inadvertent) actions and recently deceased after a very long sojourn in a nursing home. In the process, his obsession with a particular Swedish pop singer of an earlier generation is ever-present in his very renunciation of it (and her). Grens is almost at retirement, obsessive, solitary, aggressive, angry, and finally showing a few glimmers of humanity.

Three Seconds improves upon an already accomplished crime series, through its glimpses of Grens's life in transition and through the creation of an original character in Hoffman: plus it has an intriguing and involving plot. Don't be put off the book if prison stories aren't your "thing,": although the prison is at the heart of the book, it's not a prison book. And although it's a "thesis" novel, taking on a social ill as perceived by the authors, the story remains in the characters caught in nets of their own making, rather than in abstract principles.

Jake Needham's The Big Mango

2011-01-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Big Mango, by Jake Needham, is a confident thriller that builds up to its explosive conclusion, rather than blowing up people and things from the beginning. The story is more in the line of Eric Ambler than that of many recent thrillers, taking an ordinary guy and thrusting him, in frequently comic ways, into an unfamiliar and unfriendly situation. The writing is clear and evocative, whether in portraying San Francisco in the early chapters or Bangkok for the majority of the book, and the characters are lively and interesting. The story is set in the '90s (originally published in Asia in 1999, The Big Mango was reprinted in 2010 by Marshall Cavendish in Singapore; the only editions so far have been limited to Asian publishers and distributors). Eddie, a small-time lawyer and former Vietnam-era marine, starts getting threatening mail and visitors that refer to his time in Vietnam, when he worked in a squad involved in guarding the Embassy in the waning days of the U.S. presence.

The maguffin is the stuff of legends, urban and otherwise: it seems the gold and currency from the Bank of Vietnam vanished during the chaos of the U.S. departure, and someone (several someones, as it turns out) thinks Eddie's former Captain knows what happened to the money, and maybe Eddie does too. After a visit from the Secret Service, Eddie gets an offer from a mystery man offering him a lot of money to go to Bangkok to look for the Captain and the money.

From there, Eddie becomes involved with a shady crew: his old Army buddy, a laid back bookstore owner and Native American; an American in Bangkok who writes a column on the nightlife there; a DEA agent; and various other Americans, Thais, and Vietnamese. It's a story told from the point of view of outsiders, seduced by Thailand but not blind to the pollution, corruption, and violence of the capital city. The other book I've read by Needham, The Ambassador's Wife, is quite different, more of an insider's look at another Asian crossroads city, Singapore (also seen with a jaundiced eye). And The Ambassador's Wife is a police procedural or mystery, whereas The Big Mango is more of a slowly building adventure story.

On the basis of these two books, I'm now a fan of Needham's writing, and wish that the more of the books were more accessible: maybe his books are a prize to be sought by travelers and noir readers who find themselves in English-language bookstores in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, etc.

Crime metaphors in non-crime fiction

2011-01-22T12:33:00.000-08:00

I've noticed lately that crime fiction seems to have become a touchstone for writers who want to write about contemporary life, particularly city life. A book I just finished, Sleepwalker, by John Toomey, is a comic portrait of an Ireland just poised on the brink of the boom going bust. The only crimes inflicted by or upon the characters in the book are emotional: there are some very funny scenes depicting the miseries that families inflict upon themselves and outsiders, and the main character, a slacker drifting along miserably from job to pub to bed, stupidly inflicts pain on everyone who loves or even likes him. The writer plays comically with fictional structures like the famous "unreliable narrator," and one of the comic turns concerns the narrators intrusions into the story.

But at a couple of points, Toomey invokes crime and crime fiction as a means of putting his story into context. In one passage, he contrasts the peaceful, if miserable, lives of his characters against the violence going on offstage, in the city only glimpsed by the reader and the characters themselves. More explicitly, he depicts a demoralized character thusly: "The things he thought he had earned on his own steam had been laid down beside him, like a framing murder weapon, carefully placed at the scene while he slept, ready to incriminate him and strip him of all credibility further down the plotline."

Just a passing metaphor, perhaps, but also a means of casting the characters miseries into a harsh comic light by the use of a framing device much more serious than what is actually confronting him. Comic crime fiction does some of the same sort of thing (I'm currently reading, or rather listening to, a Donald Westlake novel). So crime fiction and its particular toolkit are in a way a standard for considering modern life seriously, and also a means of viewing lives less stressed comically. Does that make any sense? Does the notion described above say anything about a novelist like Kate Atkinson who uses crime fiction as a serio-comic framing device for "literary" fiction?

Or perhaps I'm just overinterpreting, sequestered as I am in a warm house on a very cold day. Sleepwalker, by the way, is a funny book (perhaps not quite funny enough) and a cold, hard look at a culture on the brink of a disaster. It's published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive Press, which has a particular interest in comic and off-center fiction around the world.

New Catalan Crime: Teresa Solana's A Shortcut to Paradise

2011-01-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

Teresa Solana's new novel featuring unlicensed detective twin brothers Pep (or Borja, his alter ego) and Eduard carries forward the satirical style of her first novel, A Not So Perfect Crime, as well as the tantalizing view of everyday life in Barcelona (among both the high and the low of Catalan society), along with a plot that is a bit more of a puzzle mystery than in the first novel. But Pep and Eduard are no brilliant crime-solvers: they have to pay (bribe, almost) a retired cop to solve the mystery for them. The pleasure, indeed, is not the solving of the crime as much as the comic twists and turns along the way.

At numerous points, A Shortcut to Paradise (translated by Peter Bush from the original Catalan) made me think of the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. In particular, a chapter on one character's prison experience and another character's ultimate fate are reminiscent of the cruel farce of Waugh's satires. There's also a wild party that spirals out of control.

Solana also provides much comedy based on the literary scene of Barcelona, apparently (given the disclaimer at the end) pointed at specific targets. But as a reader unfamiliar with those real-life literati, I can attest that the comedy carries through without knowing the references. There's also some literary comedy concerning the literary value of certain kinds of writing, culminating in a final, extended joke regarding the fate of a posthumous manuscript.

But as with Eduard and Pep's first outing, a lot of the pleasure in reading the book comes from spending time with the disarmingly normal detectives, muggers, murderers, and falsely accused throughout the book, viewed through Eduard's first-person narrative and through third-person glimpses into the lives of others in the story.

I hope Solana keeps up this wonderful series: further comic and criminal forays into Barcelona life, and further installments in the brothers' lives (Eduard striving for an ordinary middle-class life and Borja dreaming of nobility, sort of) would be most welcome.

Jassy Mackenzie's second Jade de Jong (South African Noir)

2011-01-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

I liked the first Jade de Jong novel by Jassy Mackenzie, and the second one, Stolen Lives, is even better. The first half of the novel dragged me along relentlessly. There's a plot line that in the second half seems a bit tacked on (though it leads to a twisty and cliff-hanger-y ending) dealing with a character who could be very interesting but isn't fully developed—but overall the novel (and that second half) are very good indeed.

Jade, having returned (in the first novel, Random Violence) to her native Johannesburg to bring her private detective business there—as well as to a) inflict some revenge and b) reestablish contact with the object of her (mostly unrequited) passion, detective David Patel of the J-burg police. Patel refers a client to Jade thinking that it's just a woman in need of straightforward bodyguarding, after her husband has disappeared, but the case becomes complicated when the Jade and the client are shot at and later the husband is discovered nearly dead from extreme torture and their daughter is found to be missing. Then David's son, who has been living with his estranged wife, is kidnapped...

There is a parallel case developing in England, concerning brothels and human trafficking, which ties into Jade's case and links to a deadly and mysterious character at the fringes of both: an African man whom we glimpse in a pawn shop and other locales in several chapters interspersed with the English plot and Jade's case. The threads come together in an unexpected way, forcing the reader to reassess his or her opinion about the characters. And Jade herself is very interesting: we follow not only her professional exploits but also her troubled relationship with David and a discovery about herself and her heritage that she makes in connection with her current case.

The novel offers once again a dynamic glimpse of post-Apartheid South Africa in all its grime and glory, as well as thematic consideration of violence and its roots in culture (and perhaps genetics), marriage, and desire: it's among the best of the substantial crop of South African crime fiction now becoming available.

Helsinki Homicide II, Jarkko Sipila's next Finnish noir

2010-12-24T19:25:00.000-08:00

Jarkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide series (the new volume's title is Helsinki Homicide: Vengeance) is traditional noir in a lot of ways. The style of the writing is very direct, mixing dialogue and narration in about equal parts. That's a significant fact for Vengeance, which reminds me in some ways of the biker-gang novels of Canadian crime writer John McFetridge, except that McFetridge moves the story forward almost entirely via dialogue (and the Canadian writer's wit is frequently in evidence, whereas the humor in Sipila's books is very dry, in a laconic, somehow Finnish style).

Sipila's main character, Suhonen, an undercover cop, sets things in motion simply by seeing a suspicious driver, whom he follows. The driver meets a Russian-Estonian whom Suhonen discovers has ties to drug trafficking between Estonia and Finland, but the plot twists away from that revelation toward the just-released-from-prison leader of the Skulls biker gang, Tapani Larsson, who bears a grudge against Suhonen.

For me, the book began to pick up speed and to compel my interest as the character of Salmela becomes more important. Salmela is a low-life, brain-injured former prison inmate, as well as childhood friend of Suhonen. Salmela's attempt to do one drug deal to provide enough cash to get him out of the criminal life pulls him into the Skulls' orbit and a dangerous assignment from the police.

Sipila avoids cliches throughout: as Salmela spirals downward, his story never takes the obvious turn, and as his situation becomes more desperate, the tale tightens and compels the reader (this reader anyway) forward. Looking back at the first Sipila novel to be translated, which I reviewed here in a rather lukewarm fashion, I like the series more than I indicated then. I mentioned the link to McFetridge, and in the earlier review I mentioned a similarity to Elmore Leonard's casual, realistic plotting as well as to the Jim Thompson school of noir.

What I realize now is that Sipila's style is naturalism. He doesn't strain for effects or play up his hero as a flashy crime fighter. When Suhonen and Salmela are stranded in a tight spot, the outcome isn't determined by flashy martial arts skills or mind-bending feats of detection (or mind-stretching coincidences0 but by a very ordinary aspect of modern life. Sipila is giving a straightforward and believable portrait of conflict in the streets of Helsinki, and giving a gritty portrait of the city as well as a truly noir reading experience along the way.

Peter Temple, Dead Point

2010-12-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

I recently heard the audio version of Peter Temple's Dead Point, which I believe is the latest of the Jack Irish novels (correct me if I'm wrong, please). The Irish novels normally have three plots, coinciding with Jack's three careers (as a lawyer, a fixer for a circle of horse-racing enthusiasts, and an apprentice woodworker). The pattern holds here, with Jack involved in the aftermath of a failed betting scheme (and a couple of thefts from people after succesful betting schemes), in a missing-person case involving a bartender, and in the installation of a high-end library in a wealthy woman's house. Parts of the cases become related, but it's primarily Jack himself who ties the book together.

Jack is, in fact, good company. And his first-person narrative works very well in an audio version. The plot moves inexorably forward, but the primary interest is, as usual, the characters, not just Jack but important and even secondary characters throughout the book.

The denouement is complicated, as usual, and so is Jack's love life, as usual. The violence at the conclusion of the missing-person plot is perhaps less extreme than in the previous books, but is a very complicated incident, mechanically. I won't explain more, but Temple renders an almost Rube Goldberg series of events in a believable way.

The Irish novels are perhaps more pure entertainment than Temple's other recent books, but no less interesting for all that. I need to go back and read some of Temple's early books, most of which I missed—any recommendations?

The Irene Huss videos, 2-6

2010-12-22T12:33:00.000-08:00

I reviewed the first Irene Huss TV film, from Helene Tursten's series of crime novels set in Göteborg, a while ago, I'm just getting around to reviewing the rest of the first season because the disks I originally received were mislabeled, creating a bit of confusion as to what I was watching. All cleared up now.

The remaining films are 2. The Horse Figurine, 3. The Fire Dance, 4. The Night Round, 5. The Glass Devil, and 6. The Gold Digger. Of these 5, two (in addition to The Torso, already reviewed) are taken from novels already translated into English. SoHo Press has assured us that more of the novels are being translated, but I haven't heard which ones, yet.

The Horse Figurine was actually taken from the first novel to appear in English, translated as Detective Inspector Irene Huss, dealing with a wealthy man who falls from a balcony in the city, while his wife witnesses his death from a nearby taxi. The investigation leads to biker gangs, and to an apartment directly across from the fateful balcony, and along the way Huss's family is threatened.

The Fire Dance deals with serial arson, the stabbing death of an old woman, and an unsolved case from Irene's early career. The Night Round is a kind of ghost story, dealing with a murder on the staircase of an old hospital, murky goings-on among current staff, and the hospital's murky history.

The Glass Devil deals with religion, piety, satanism, and the murder of an entire family. The Gold Digger takes on propoerty developers, on-line poker, investment bubbles, and a possible affair on the part of Irene's seemingly model husband (a professional chef).

Translated to the small screen, all the stories are interesting, but all seem a bit too much like conventional TV cop shows (more so than the books, for some reason). Perhaps the things that make the books distinctive (Irene's very ordinary home life, struggling with two working parents, adolescent daughters, annoying neighbors, etc.) veers into sit-com or stock cop-show territory when produced for TV. Though all the secondary characters among the police get a certain amount of face-time, and all are characterized individually, the focus on Irene herself is also a bit more prominent when visualized for us on-screen.

Those are not major complaints, though—especially if compared to the rest of TV crime fare. Angela Kovacs as Irene is pitch perfect (not exactly how I imagined the character from the books, but better realized than my imaginary version), and the rest of the cast, including Bjarne Henriksen, Dag Malmberg, Eric Ericson, and Inga Landgré, is also very good, though working with material (in terms of their characters) that will be a bit familiar from cop shows around the world. A starring character is also the city of Göteborg and its surroundings, seen here not as a tourist mecca (which is may in fact not be) but as a gritty port city.

So: compared to Swedish TV crime series that rise far above the genre, Irene Huss perhaps gets 4 out of 5 stars. 5 stars would go to the original Martin Beck series starring Gösta Ekman, taken from 7 (I think) of the 10 novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö (I think they never filmed the Laughing Policeman or the Locked Room, and The Abominable Man was filmed for the big screen by Bo Widerberg as Man on the Roof); 5 stars would also go to the original Wallander series for Swedish TV, starring Rolf Lassgård. The later Swedish series based on Beck and Wallander, starring Peter Haber and Krister Henriksson, as well as the U.K. Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh, fall into the 4-star category for me, along with Irene Huss—so the Huss stories are definitely in good company (and highly recommended). The 5-star films are able to sustain a mood to a higher degree, and reach for (and mostly grasp) a wider scope than the 4-star ones, to me.

I'm happy to entertain other opinions about either set of rankings though—anyone have any thoughts? My only final thought is that I'm anticipating the translation of further Huss stories into English, whether they've been filmed or not—the novels are in the first rank of the Scandinavian crime wave.

Dogs of Rome, Conor Fitzgerald

2010-12-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Halfway through, Conor Fitzgerald's Dogs of Rome shifts from a fairly straight police procedural (featuring a somewhat unusual cop--more on that in a minute) to noir/Elmore Leonard territory. It works very well, except for an ending that seems a bit tacked on (concerning a woman and a dog), though perhaps it helps set up the characters for a series. The lead character is Alec Blume, an American who was orphaned in Italy and stayed there. He's now a Commissario in the flying squad, and there is some cultural friction between the American and the Italians (peanut butter is a significant plot point). There's also a quite different tone (more Irish, perhaps, since Fitzgerald is actually an Irishman living in Rome, rather than American, giving the book a tri-national character) from contemporary Italian crime fiction. There are some kinds of jokes, some language, and that Elmore Leonard quality to the plot of the second half that give the story an international, if not specifically Irish or American, quality.

The story concerns a break-in resulting in a murder (events that the reader witnesses), assigned to Blume's team, but they are hedged in by political implications (the victim's wife is a politician and he himself was an animal activist). There is a TV documentary about dog fights (thankfully not depicted directly, though there is some animal cruelty), a connection to professional gangsters, and cops feeding information not only to the press but to suspects and crime lords.

There's also a knowing young girl (a victim's daughter), an FBI lawyer (and potential girlfriend for Alec), and lots of internal police politics. Some aspects are standard fare for crime fiction, but overall the tone and style are fresh, whether compared to the Anglo-American or the Italian realm of crime writing. Of the several books I've read (or heard) recently, this one was the best written and the most fun to read.

Which cover do you prefer? I like the graphic one, though photos of Rome are never a bad thing.

The Tourist (no not the movie)

2010-12-20T10:56:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping to do some catching up over the next few days, and to get back to posting more regularly. To start with, I recently heard the audio version of Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, a spy novel unrelated to the recent (poorly reviewed) Hollywood movie. Steinhauer's tourist is a member of a secret black-ops CIA team based in New York (each member is called a tourist, the department is called tourism, etc.). Steinhauer is very good at depicting the characters as human (rather than as types), and he gets an effective sense of the gray moral areas of the contemporary spy trade. There's even some sly humor. But as a reader who has grown to expect the spy thriller to have a clockwork-like structure that surprises with its final but (looking backward) revelations, I didn't quite get what I wanted from The Tourist (there's a sequel that's well-reviewed--maybe I just haven't reached the end of the story yet). And maybe The Tourist suffers from my having read Mick Herron's Slow Horses first--that's a book that delivers the clockwork structure, the surprise, the irony, and considerable humor.

Milo the tourist has a fateful encounter in Venice, just before 9/11/01, in which his mentor is killed, and then time shifts forward to 2007 when Milo, now on administrative duty, is thrust back into black ops by the appearance of an assassin he has been tracking. But it's not the assassin that provides the tension, it's the consequences within the Department of Tourism, the CIA, and Homeland Security (as well as Milo's own family) that provide the impetus for the plot.

I liked this better than I liked the one of Steinhauer's East European novels that I read--and it provided enough interest and entertainment to get me through a 12-hour drive that I needed to make. It just didn't excite me in the same way that Slow Horses did when I first discovered it. Anyone read the sequel, The Nearest Exit? Does it provide completion for the story?

Finnish Noir: Raid and the Blackest Sheep, by Harri Nykanen

2010-12-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

"Raid," pronounced like "ride," is a Finnish TV series (and a later movie) about a scruffy hit man whose nickname relates to the bug spray ("kills indoors an outdoors" is one version). The series is very entertaining, wryly funny, and follows the strain of crime fiction that flows from Western, cowboy fiction. Raid and the Blackest Sheep is the first of the Harri Nykanen novels (on which the series was based) to be translated into English by the new Ice Cold Crime imprint.

The book is essentially a road novel rather than a mystery, though there are some revelations at the end. Raid is helping a career criminal named Nygren who has returned home to Finland for a kind of farewell tour, settling scores and making amends. A hard-nosed detective is trying to find out if Nygren is planning a last heist, and Raid's friend on the police force, Lieutentant Jansson, is lured out of a rehabilitation center (where he's supposedly losing weight) when Raid calls him.

The result is a wild ride across Finland, with colorful characters among the police and the criminals very much in evidence. Raid himself is a curious combination of laid-back friendliness and ruthlessness, with a dash of very dry wit. Nykanen's writing is quite unlike anything else in Scandinavian crime fiction (even the other Finns), with perhaps more in common with neo-noir writers like Alan Guthrie. The book also has something in common with the dour and off-center comedy of the leading light of Finnish cinema, Aki Kaurismäki.

Ice Cold Crime also publishes the Helsinki Homicide series, by Jarkko Sipila, the second volume of which is in my short stack tbr pile.

Mari Jungstedt, The Killer's Art

2010-12-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

Maybe it was just that I was reading it under difficult (family) circumstances, but I thought Mari Jungstedt's 4th "Anders Knutas" book was the weakest of the series as so far translated from the original Swedish. Gotland, the island setting, is portrayed in vivid ways, but the story wavers back and forth among several strands without getting much of anywhere (in spite of the sensational elements of the story), and Inspector Knutas seems incapable of dealing with the investigation or even problems on his own staff (his favorite detective wants to leave). The running subplot of the series, concerning reporter Johan Berg and his true love Emma, puts them in threat (again) and builds up their relationship mainly to crash it down.

The story sounds interesting enough in summary: an art dealer is found hanged from a city gate, with no clues about his killer or a motive. Though secrets are discovered about the dealer and his wife, none get the police very far along in their investigation. The plot moves on to the theft of a famous Swedish painting, Dardel's Dying Dandy (which I think has featured in more than one Swedish crime novel), homosexual prostitution, obsessions revolving around family succession, and the summer homes of 19th century aristocrats and bohemians.

To me, the solution to the crime seems to come out of nowhere, and the concluding sentences reach for dramatic resolution not really justified by the story. Norm liked the book more than me (see here), and I'll bow to his judgement, considering the circumstances I mentioned above, which stretched my reading out over a longer-than-usual period and involved several airplane journeys and hospital bedsides. I'll read the next Knutas novel with hopes for a more positive experience. I have some catching up to do, blog-wise, and will try to post a few times in the upcoming days.

Bandit Love, by Massimo Carlotto

2010-11-15T12:53:00.000-08:00

The most recent of Massimo Carlotto's Marco "Alligator" Buratti novels to be translated (and a much more recent novel than the other two already translated), Bandit Love (translated by Antony Shugaar) plays out almost as a picaresque. The plot, based in Padua but going quite far afield, twists and turns without ever reaching a pat conclusion.

In this book, Buratti and his two friends/collaborators leave behind the bar and the private (unlicensed) detective business that they have been operating. Rossini, the gangster of the trio, discovers that his girlfriend, Sylvie, has been kidnapped, and as the team looks for her they realize that the crime relates to an event in their past, when they murdered a man who had been trying to involve them in investigating a theft of drugs from the police lockup. Their frantic search for Sylvie

There's much discussion of changes in Italy, with regard to the new and old mafias, the economic crash, and the loss of a local culture in the northeast, giving the whole book a melancholy (as well as noir) character. There are also various version of the love and loyalty between outlaws and their female partners, though Buratti himself has (mostly) lost his own love, Virna.

Like most of the books published by Europa Editions, Bandit Love is short, compact, and tightly packed with characters and incidents. [warning: partial spoiler ahead] Just when you think that the book is about to achieve a violent, final act of retribution, it veers off into an indeterminate future—possibly a sequel or possibly an end to the series that carries it forward into its own mythical future.

Bad Intentions, Karin Fossum

2010-11-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

One of the distinctive features of Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer series is that they're not formulaic. A couple of them are straight police procedurals, but others are told more from the point of view of the characters than the police. Bad Intentions (published in the U.S. this year by Houghton Mifflin in a translation from the Norwegian by Barslund) is different as well, beginning with an incident that seems to be a crime but then doesn't. Fossum also has in several books led the reader to certain expectations about the story that she proceeds to undermine, and that is also true of Bad Intentions. What we might take at first to be a murder among friends turns into an intense story of collective guilt, sociopathic behavior, and loss.

The novel is short and intense, not perhaps my favorite among the Sejer books (but then I'm partial to the police procedural form, which is not the most important part of Bad Intentions). We learn a bit about Sejer, though, now that he is aging, his daughter is not close at hand, and his Sharpei is his closest companion (Skarre, his partner, is on stage only a few times). What I like best about Bad Intentions is the quiet tone, which emphasizes ordinary human feelings and failings, offering in the end a glimpse of hope (or at least coping): this isn't about international conspiracies, criminal gangs, or serial killers. It's a very closely observed, economically constructed story of the needs and bad choices of ordinary people.

Camilla Läckberg, The Stonecutter

2010-11-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

Camilla Läckberg's The Stonecutter, which arrived in the U.S. this year, is about the miseries that parents visit upon their children, and vice versa. Many permutations are given, and almost everyone in the novel is guilty of something (so there are lots of suspects). This is the third book featuring Patrik Hedström, a detective in a small town in southwestern Sweden. His partner Erica, has just had a baby (and the baby is making her miserable in the ways that babies do). A young girl's body is brought to the sea's surface, caught in a lobster trap, and Patrik is thrown into the investigation of her disfunctional family and various possible perpetrators.

Along the way there are other, less dire crimes, and occasionally Erica's sister puts in an appearance--though more in a way that seems to be continuing her role in previous books and preparing for her role in a subsequent book than in any way directly relevant to the present book). A parallel story concerns a stonecutter in the area in the 1920s who falls under the spell of his employer's daughter, Agnes. Their story begins as a sort of reversed Elvira Madigan (a great Swedish romance directed by Bo Widerberg who also did the Martin Beck movie most praised by Maj Sjöwall), but Agnes is a particularly poisonous character and I found myself growing tired of this historical aspect of the mystery (a reader will probably figure out along the way what the relevance is to the present-day mystery.

There are a couple of crimes of opportunity that seem a bit contrived (a character is at the perfect place, and with the necessary "equipment" at a perfect time), and there's a good deal of fumbling around by the less effective detectives on the small-town force, along with the requisite incompetent boss--who also has a subplot that is relevant to the parents-and-children theme but not to the story per se.

I heard the Audible recording of The Stonecutter, rather than read the book on paper, and I found myself getting a bit impatient. If I'd had pages in front of me I might have started skipping ahead. Still, the story is well constructed, and its "cozy" setting is nicely contradicted by some of the family horrors concealed behind closed doors. Läckberg is not my favorite of the current crop of Scandinavians, and this book could have used a bit of trimming, in my opinion, but I'll still line up for the next one.

Friday Forgotten (or at least hard to find) book: new John Brady

2010-11-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

"Subtle" may not be an adjective that pops into your mind when reading most crime novels, but it does describe John Brady's new Matt Minogue novel, The Coast Road, so far accessible only from Canadian sources. Dublin Inspector Minogue has been sent to a new "cold case" sort of squad, charged to review unsolved cases, and his former colleague Tommy Malone is to be his assistant. Malone, as anyone who has followed the series, has a lot of baggage, and adds to it at the start of this book with a suspicious encounter with the gangster who had his twin brother (who was also a gangster) killed. And the background is post-Tiger Ireland, with all its still current difficulties, as well as the revelations of abuse by the priesthood.

But Minogue and Malone's survey of cold cases is derailed immediately into a review of the murder of a homeless man who had roamed the east coast of Ireland. The investigation leads to a nun who runs a shelter, a dodgy wannabe journalist, and a reluctant sister. But most of the book is told in conversations and interviews that circle around the facts and the plot rather than approaching them directly. What is actually going on, much less what led to the murder, lies beneath this surface for the reader as well as the detectives.

Fortunately, the dialogue is lively (all the more so because of the wit of the detective and the skill of the author). Minogue is dealing with some change in his family, not only with his emigre children but with his wife's involvement in a group that seeks religious renewal (Minogue himself has little sympathy for the Church).

A major theme is generational differences, particularly between urban Malone, not interested in the Irish language, and Minogue and his cohorts who were raised speaking (at least a little) the language. Among Minogue's generation, the regional differences (particularly in dialect and accent) of Ireland are important markers and the source of much slagging among the cops, while Malone is more of a European. The plot also turns on changes among the criminal community, including international participation.

Anyone who has followed Brady's work will be delighted to discover that there's a new book that is easily up to the standard of his earlier novels. Anyone not familiar with Brady could well start with The Coast Road, and if you have a taste for something quite different from the straight-ahead thriller sort of crime novel risks becoming the kind of fan that eagerly searches through used book sites and stores for the other books.

Foreign Forgotten Friday: crime in Singapore

2010-10-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

Not so much forgotten as inaccessible: Jake Needham's The Ambassador's Wife was published in Hong Kong in 2006 and is about to be reprinted in Singapore by Marshall Cavendish Editions; but there hasn't been, and evidently will not be, any circulation outside of Southeast Asia.

The Ambassador's Wife features Inspector Samuel Tay of the Special Investigations Section of Singapore CID, but it's really about Singapore more than Tay. In fact, Tay is in a way a personification of Singapore: Westernized and somewhat insecure, but very efficient and dedicated to his job. Tay is in fact wealthy, but stays with the police rather than lapsing into a life of leisure.

He's presented with a puzzling case when a woman's body is found in the Marriot Hotel, in a room that was not supposed to be occupies. She is battered, sexually abused, and posed, but the scene has been thoroughly cleaned. When she eventually identified, the American embassy becomes involved (I won't say why, unless spoilers are requested) and Tay is assisted and/or obstructed by an FBI agent and a security officer from the embassy.

The case presents few leads but ultimately leads Tay on a deadly trip to Bangkok. In a way, the book is a Bildungsroman, leading Tay toward a maturity that, despite his years, he has not previously achieved. By the end, his attitudes toward the case and those involved has shifted considerably, and his own insecurity and ambivalence is at least partly cleared up. What starts as a somewhat dark but conventional detective novel darkens and deepens considerably by the end. There are a number of false leads and a few loose ends, but the conclusion makes sense in terms of Tay's personality and his personal journey.

But the city state of Singapore (and to a lesser extent Bangkok) is the main character: there have been only a few Singapore crime novels available in the West, including one by Hwee Hwee Tan, a couple by Gopal Barathan, and the most recent in the series featuring Inspector Singh, by Shamini Flint. None of those gives quite as comprehensive view of the city and its citizens as Needham gives here. The Ambassador's Wife most closely resembles Flint's books, among the Singapore crime novels, but the Singh stories retain a cozy quality that Needham steers away from, into noir territory.

The third Qurke, by "Benjamin Black"

2010-10-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Elegy for April is the third book about Dr. Quirke, Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. The book is very well written, allusive and involving. The story relies on a good deal that a reader will know from Christine Falls, the first Quirke book, and will perhaps baffle someone who picks it up cold.

The plot, which is fairly static for the first 270 of its 293 pages in the U.S. edition, concerns April, a friend of Phoebe, Quirke's daughter, who has not been heard from by any of her friends in several weeks. Most of the book is Phoebe and Quirke going around together or separately inquiring of April's relatives and friends and looking around April's flat.

There's no investigation to speak of (unlike other fictional pathologists, Quirke's job isn't exploited by Black/Banville for plot potential), though Quirke involves his friend Inspector Hackett, and there are a few sexual encounters to liven things up. But mostly the book is Banville's prose, elegant in its flow and incisive in its particular images. The book as a whole is curiously both heavy and light, though perhaps not quite heavy enough for literary ambitions but too light for a crime novel, really.

When a sort of resolution is reached (by means in part of a very specific automobile that has been lurking in the plot, waiting anxiously for its moment of pertinence), it involves the same kinds of damaged families as inhabit the contemporary crime novels of Declan Hughes, but passed over quickly in those final 23 pages. Elegy for April is a quick read, probably of most interest to people who got involved in Quirke's character and story in the first two books (and who will be interested to discover his hesitant steps out of intoxication and into a relationship), and to lovers of efficient and lively prose (more efficient and certainly lighter than Banville's books under his own name).

Åke Edwardson, The Shadow Woman

2010-10-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

The first of Åke Edwardson's Erik Winter crime novels to be translated into English, Sun and Shadow, was apparently the sixth in the order of the series's original publication in Sweden. That was followed by translations of the seventh and eighth books in the series, and then by the translation of Death Angels, which was actually the third in the order of first publication. Now the fourth in the series (right after Death Angels, whose Swedish title actually means Dance with an Angel) has now been published in English by Penguin, translated by Per Carlsson: The Shadow Woman, whose Swedish title, Rop från långt avstånd, actually means "cries from far away."

But all that confusion shouldn't put anyone off The Shadow Woman, which is a first-class police procedural. The investigation is a particularly frustrating one, which concerns the disccovery of a body near a lake. Winter and the police cannot discover who the woman was, and a parallel narrative about a young girl who is taken from her mother during some sort of getaway from a crime, gives the reader a sense of the anxiety that will befall Winter and his team later in the book (though not in quite the way that the reader may think).

There are several other plot lines int eh background, most of them concerning biker gangs, evidently a big factor in Southern Swedish crime (and even bigger in Denmark, where Winter eventually needs to go for answers).

My only quibble with the book is that one clue that unravels the final elements of the story is withheld from the reader in a way that other clues are not (Winter knows about that clue but we don't). Not a big deal, but in a story that is about the frustrations of a police investigation that has too few clues and too little information, withholding that one clue grates a bit.

Still, The Shadow Woman is a compelling story, and one of the best of the Erik Winter series. I was not a huge fan of Åke Edwardson after reading the first couple of books to appear in English, but I'm convinced now—he's in the first rank of Swedish crime writers. One question for dedicated readers of Scandinavian crime: I can think of a number of Swedish crime novels in which the detective travels to Denmark during the investigation, but I can't think of a single time when the detective travels to Norway (except for a chase scene in The White Lioness in which Wallander crosses the Norwegian border in pursuit of the killer). Are there trips to Norway that I'm not aware of?

Forgotten Friday: from Wales

2010-10-21T11:22:00.001-07:00

On the occasion of the arrival in the U.S. of the new Robin Llewellyn book by Welsh writer Robert Lewis (Bank of the Black Sheep), I thought I'd say a few words about the first book in the series, The Last Llanelli Train, about which I haven't seen much discussion in the blogosphere (all of them have been published by Serpent's Tail). The Llewellyn books are a saga that marries the noir of Jim Thompson to the bohemian depths of down-and-out writing from Knut Hamsun's Hunger to Charles Bukowski to Irvine Welsh: but Lewis's writing is funnier than Hamsun's (which doesn't say much, but there's indeed a lot of very dark humor in the Llewellyn stories) and the books have more in common with Welsh than Bukowski. And each volume is remarkable for a fact that Lewis shares with at least one other writer, Argentina's Ernesto Mallo: at the end of the first book, the first-person narrator and hero has fallen so far that it's hard to imagine the possibility of a sequel (and at the end of the second book, Swansea Terminal, it's impossible to imagine—lending an additional temptation to see how Lewis manages the third book). A character tells the detective, "you're not going to sink any deeper than you are already I simply can't believe that's possible." Lewis seems to take the comments as a challenge.

Llewellyn (pronounced as "Lou-Ellen" by several people he meets) is a private detective in Bristol whose alcoholism occupies more of his life than his job (the later books will take him back to Wales, where he's from). Locked out of his apartment after a typical day's binge, and attempting to sleep it off in his office, he gets a phone call from a woman who wants him to entrap her husband into a sexual encounter to give her ammunition for a divorce. The price he asks for the job is matched by her demands for video documentation, and the entrapment proceeds slowly through successive drinking bouts, encounters with people to whom he owes money, and intermittent attempts to find a suitable prostitute and the equipment necessary for the job.

The plot twists several times in the last half of the book, not least in revelations about Llewellyn's past (details of which are more pertinent to subsequent novels). Who the woman who hired him turns out to be, who's really paying the bills, and what the plot is all about lead up to a conclusion that's satisfying in its unconventional approach to the genre. None of the Llewellyn books are for the faint of heart, though the darkness is leavened by the humor of a character who seems to have nothing left to lose, and then loses more (which is why, I guess, the books have been aptly compared to Beckett).

River of Shadows, by Valerio Varesi

2010-10-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

I seem to be going back and forth between Italy and Sweden these days, watching the Irene Huss TV series, continuing to catch up with the Commissario Trotti series by Timothy Williams, with new books by Åke Edwardsson, Conor Fitzgerald (Dogs of Rome), Mari Jungstedt, and Massimo Carlotto waiting impatiently on my table (a little excursion to Ireland possibly, in addition to the Conor Fitzgerald homeland, since I have a copy of the newest "Benjamin Black" from the library). I've just finished Valerio Varesi's River of Shadows, set in Parma and the Po Valley and featuring Commissario Soneri.

The book's first chapter is a bravado piece of writing set in a boatmen's club along the Po during an impending flood. Amid the conversation among the boatmen, a barge docks and then drifts away, and as the barge flows downstream they get intermittent radio reports on its seemingly unguided trip downriver, as it collides with a bridge and then runs aground. The chapter reads almost like a play, with the action restricted to the clubhouse and its immediate surroundings and the action reported in conversations and radio reports.

With the second chapter, we meet Commissario Soneri, a detective who's not fond of new technology (even cellphones, much less computers) and who tends to abuse his coworkers with his sometimes contradictory instructions, delivered frequently by telephone as he wanders around his domain not so much investigating as absorbing the environment. Most of the policemen are sketched in effectively but not in depth, with the exception of the long-suffering forensics specialist and a melancholy maresciallo of the Carabinieri. The boatmen in fact take up most of the space of the story, as Soneri spends a lot of time among them, asking questions or just listening and watching. One of the most lively characters is Soneri's girlfriend Angela, who's quick to be angered by Soneri's thoughtlessness and to be excited by risky sites for sexual encounters.

Soneri's investigation concerns an old man who fell (or was pushed) out of a hospital window and his brother, the captain of the runaway barge. Along the way, we learn a lot about the river and the towns along its banks, about the food and wine in the bars near the boatmen's hangout, and about the history and politics of the area (particularly the lingering effects of partisan/fascist conflicts at the end of Mussolini's reign and about the later history of the Communist Party in Italy (also a factor in the Trotti novels).

River of Shadows, though, is not a book of facts but of impressions and emotions, which are as murky as the mists along the river. Soneri discovers some of what has been going on but can prove little of it, and seems to make his discoveries not by logical reasoning but by sensory impressions of the people and the setting. He travels back and forth between Parma and Torricelli (the town where the boatmen live) and to some mysterious places along the way (including a ghost town submerged in the river after the war). The solution to the crime is also more effective in its emotional truth than in a solution to a puzzle.

Varesi's book is notable for its difference in style and tone from the other Italian mysteries that have been translated (and indeed from English and American crime fiction). Though some readers may be frustrated by the repetition inherent in Soneri's constant trips along a limited path and his return over and again to a small group of terse watermen, those who persist will be rewarded by a story that achieves more than the sum of its parts. I'll be very interested to see more of the series, to experience how Varesi's style changes (or not) when the river mists are less of a metaphorical and physical presence. And to see what Angela comes up with next, too. Translated by Joseph Farrell and published by MacLehose Press.

Foreign Forgotten Friday

2010-10-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

I've been working my way through the overlooked Commissario Trotti series by Timothy Williams, and this week I'm only going to give some highlights of Black August, the 4th novel in the series, which holds up the high standard that the author set in the first 3.

this one zeroes in even more closely on the irritable Trotti himself. Evidence of a possible suicide by drowning have appeared, and then an old friend of Trotti's (from the first novel) is discovered murdered in her apartment. Trotti's daughter, Pioppi, is expecting her first child (in Bologna) and the detective is anxiously awaiting news. He's warned off the murder investigation (since he's not part of the new Murder Squad) but continues to pursue it in his own way, giving evidence of why the Questore (sort of a police chief) doesn't trust him.

Trotti rides roughshod over his assistants, other cops, witnesses, and informants—getting to the truth but at considerable cost. Black August takes Williams's investigation of this difficult character to new levels. The city (more or less Pavia) is evoked in detail, and some of Italy's ongoing social problems (in particular immigration and the lack of facilities to care for the mentally ill) are a major focus.

If you haven't discovered the Trotti books, and if you're willing to do some work (Williams doesn't spoon-feed readers, and a lot of the dialogue is indirect in an interesting but oblique manner), all of them are highly recommended (if you can find them). Crime fiction publishers are missing a bet by not picking up the series (especially since Williams says that a sixth, unpublished novel is finished).

From Ghana: Kwei Quartey's Wife of the Gods

2010-10-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

Kwei Quartey's Wife of the Gods has a lot to recommend it. Darko Dawson is a
detective in Accra, the capital of Ghana. He's sent to a small town where an
AIDS volunteer and medical student has been killed—the same town where his
mother's sister lives and where his mother disappeared without a trace years
before.

There's a lot of local color in the language, the setting, and the action, which
concerns several traditional healers and a general belief in spells and witches,
as well as common ordinary adultery and crime. There are also striking elements
to the story, in particular the portraits of crimes against women (enslavement,
rape, the very provocatively evoked "wives of the gods," and more).

I suppose my impression of the novel is colored somewhat by the books I've been
recently reading, which have been carefully but obliquely constructed, leaving
much more than the identity of the killer for the reader to figure out.
Quartey's novel makes it much easier for the reader: in that way it's more of a
cozy, though there's certainly nothing cozy about the outlines of the story.
Darko several times exhibits rash and violent behavior such as isn't found in
the usual cozy, as well.

But the good guys and the bad guys (including cops) are mostly clearly
separated, with shades of gray only in a few characters, including Darko
himself. Several nasty characters (particularly a cop and a fetish priest) are
caricatures of destructive behavior. An interesting dilemma is raised, regarding the urge to preserve indigenous traditions while at the same time providing effective medical care, but the indigenous medical practitioners are not given much respect here (and Quartey is a better judge than I as to whether they deserve any, as he is both a doctor and a native of Ghana).

Family is a big part of the story. Darko is happily married but his son is ill,
having been born with a heart defect. His mother-in-law takes the boy to a
traditional healer, against the boy's parents wishes and with bad results. The
detective is personally drawn into the story not only by that event but also by
the fate of his mother and by the reunion with his aunt during the murder case.

The spectrum of current African crime fiction (mostly from South Africa, though there's a promising new Nigerian book, Adimchinma Ibe's Treachery in the Yard, that I haven't gotten hold of yet) runs from Alexander McCall Smith at the cozy end to "Michael Stanley," and, increasingly noir, to Jassy Mackenzie, Deon Meyer, and Roger Smith. Quartey's story falls somewhere between Smith and Stanley, dealing with terrible and dark events but in terms of family and ordinary human motivations (rather than extreme situations and emotions, however common those may be in a violent society).

A noir novel could certainly have been written (not to mention a lurid one) from the materials that Quartey assembles, but perhaps the crimes against women and the anti-modern religious atmosphere are more clearly evoked against the quotidian background that Wife of the Gods provides. One interestign fact-let: the cover used on at least the hardback of the U.S. edition uses a kinte-cloth pattern, rather than the symbolic pattern that actually plays a part in the story, while a cover that I see on-line (the first one shown above) uses a more appropriate pattern (but I can't find anywhere that the book has so far been published with that cover).

Foreign Forgotten Friday: Overlooked Italian crime

2010-10-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

Timothy Williams's third Commissario Piero Trotti novel was called Persona Non Grata in the U.K. edition and The White Audi in the U.S. (continuing the trend of the U.K. publisher going with the author's title, one that has something intrinsic to do with the story, and the U.S. publisher plucking out an automobile incidental to the plot as a "hook" for the series). Once again, the taciturn and somber detective is portrayed in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion, in dialogue among characters who are talking past, rather than to, one another and in terse but elegant narrative that moves forward in slanting leaps rather than pedantic plods.

The 11-year-old daughter of Trotti's former driver (when both were stationed in Bari) has been attacked with a knife while she slept, and her father (now a taxi driver) gives a description (based on a glimpse of the fleeing assailant) that seems to match her older sister's boyfriend.

But other things are going on simultaneously: an abandoned newborn is discovered, after the mother shows up at the hospital in distress, and a priest appraches Trotti about murders related to Trotti's own brother's death during the fighting between Fascists and Partisans in the '40s.

Trotti is assisted now not only by the long-suffering Pisanelli (who has advanced in the ranks and doesn't actually work for Trotti now) and his new driver and assistant, a female officer who gives Trotti as good as she gets in the dyspeptic interchanges typical of his relations with his subordinates (and even superiors, witnesses, and everyone else). There is a pattern in Trotti's relationships with women that deepends as the series goes along (his wife is now completely absent, and his daughter is studying in Bologna).

There is a sadness in the book that goes beyond Trotti's usual melancholy (for reasons I won't go into), and the social background here is Fascism (as the Moro kidnapping lay underneath the story of the first Trotti book and the "years of lead" did the same in the second). Trotti has become "persona non grata" even in his own department by the end, but it is his insight and persistence that draws the elements of the plot into a conclusion that isn't quite justice but is, for all that, reflective of the critical eye that Williams casts on the Italian social landscape.

Highly recommended, as with the first two in the series, and I'm currently reading the fourth (Black August, for which there was no U.S. publisher, hence no automotive title), which is just as good.