Forgotton-books-Friday: Bernard Share's The Finner Faction

For forgotten books Friday: Bernard Share's The Finner Faction delineates the investigation of a World War II incident involving secrecy, spies, sex, and sand castles--it's definitely not noir, but is very funny (and gets funnier as it goes along). It was a paperback original, published by Poolbeg in 1989 (the author's name is a pseudonym for writer/historian/journalist Bernard Bolger). The Finner Faction shares (and puns become irresistible when quoting from or referring to The Finner Faction) something with the pseudonymous Flann O'Brien's fiction (it's a spy novel such as O'Brien might have written) and with Catch-22 (in its maze-like structure, its mixture of broad and indirect styles of humor, crash-landing airplanes, and both straight and comic sex, but without the bombs). The premise is that during Share's research for his history of the Emergency (published by Gill & Macmillan in 1978), he ran across a Fine Gael scheme to protect Ireland from Germany with a force composed of U.K., U.S., Irish, and French forces, led by the French, as well as two manuscripts that suggest a French agent landed at Finner during the war in pursuit, perhaps, of that proposal. The novel has a tripartite time structure (wartime Ireland plus approximately the years of publication of Share's Emergency book and The Finner Faction itself) and the narrative jumps between them unpredictably, seemingly as required not by the plot buy my the many tri-lingual puns, the plethora of ridiculous passwords in 3 languages (English, French, and occasionally Irish), and the author-narrators interviews with old geezers in pubs, with men and women who (might) have something to do with the men gathered together by the protection plan, and (possibly) the stories (real or imagined) of those men themselves, with guest appearances by General de Gaulle and his wife. It's perhaps the only comedy of Ireland's Emergency period (or of the historians of the period), with particularly Irish political comedy (suggesting the Myles na gCopaleen newspaper columns that are cited by Share in the novel) that I'm sure I'm not quite understanding but that is funny nonetheless. There is some spycraft (those absurd passwords, unexplained code names, doors removed from hinges, old notebooks that turn out to be blank) and also the craft of the historical researcher (lampooned for the most part, as in the narrator's task of filling in those blank notebooks with historically appropriate ink and handwriting). There are also carnivals, dogshows, and sporting events with iniosyncratic titles, and the putative spy cell "secretly" meets as two of the three members are entered in a sand-castle contest (they're appropriately enough building a maze). The historian/narrator is searching for "something that would lift my muddied fragments into the steady stream of coherence," as are we the readers, and Share finds something like coherence (and even a "thrilling conclusion" of sorts, featuring a gun and a knife) in his shift from fact into fiction, history into comedy.

The Fugitive, by Massimo Carlotto

Massimo Carlotto's The Fugitive was published as a novel (in Italian, 1994, in English translation by Antony Shugaar and Europa Editions) in 2007; but it's not really a novel--it might once have been called a "confessional novel" or a memoir lightly disguised as a novel. It's organized thematically rather than as a linear plot. Carlotto provides a guidebook to being on the run, as well as anecdotes from his life as a prisoner and as a fugitive from the Italian government, and a memoir of several aspects of his life in that period (such as binge eating). The short chapters focus on the Mexican revolutionary circles that sheltered him (and betrayed him), on creating new identities while living in Paris, on the difficulties of maintaining a sexual relationship or finding new ones while on the run, and so forth--told in a hybrid form that has aspects of the essay and the novel (considerable discussion of the fugitive life along with narrative sections on his particular experience). The book is book-ended with an introduction by the author, giving a few details of the "Carlotto case," two short chapters about his experience on his forced return to Italy, and a publisher's note at the end, giving a timeline of the case as it worked slowly through the Italian legal system and through the protest movements and ultimate pardon by the State. The story is fascinating, though the reason for his original arrest is never made clear (the case is abundantly discussed elsewhere, so he perhaps felt no need to return to that aspect of it). But the narrative is more static, more like an essay, than Carlotto's fiction (which is typically dark, fast-moving, and linear). The Fugitive is dark enough but more a political discussion than a crime novel (the major crime being the workings of the Italian legal system and the cruelties of a chaotic Mexican situation). I'd say that anyone who has read Carlotto's other books or is familiar with his life will be fascinated by The Fugitive, and it provides an interesting background to at least two of the other novel (Death's Dark Abyss and The Goodbye Kiss). It's also essential reading for anyone interested in the Italian period of "troubles" or the legal system there. But the reader of crime fiction should start with his unconventional detective novels (featuring "Alligator" and his friends) or the more straightforward noir fiction of his other novels. The Fugitive has a great cover--another excellent book design by Europa.

Vengeance, by M.S. Power (unique twist on serial killer)

M.S. Power's 2002 novel, Vengeance, is an adaptation of the serial killer genre in which the serial killer is to a certain extent left behind. The novel has three threads: Chief Inspector Robert Harvey (in London) is, at the beginning, confronted with the 4th in a string of murderous attacks on "rent boys," whose bodies are found naked, with their throats cut. His investigation proceeds by fits and starts, in a fairly conventional police-procedural manner, with some time devoted to Harvey's family (wife Helen and 17-year old son Justin). The second thread is from the point of view of the serial killer, who thinks he's "saving" the boys from their sin, and has frequent flashbacks to his brutalized youth in a Catholic orphanage. The third thread deals with Harvey's twin sons, only slightly older than Justin, whom he's never met--he tried to convince their mother to have an abortion but she refused and cut off all contact with him. The twins (a continuation of Power's exploration of murderous children) have found out who their father is, and that he wanted to abort them. The relationship of the twins, and their plot to get revenge on Harvey, takes over the novel as it progresses, to the point that the serial killer is at one point himself puzzled at being passed over, unable to achieve his moment of recognition and repentance. At another point, one of the characters refers to something he's read "in a book" about the pleasure of killing--the sly reference is to Power's own Stalker's Apprentice, reviewed here recently. Vengeance has some of the same claustrophobic narrative as that novel, when the focus is on the twins, but with a menace that is further developed here through the twins' conversation with each other. Though not identical twins, the boys have the empathy with each other that twins are reported to have, but in this case with quite different personalities. The development of their plan (as well as its execution) is chilling for its ordinary, even childish, quality. Ultimately the story is more about families, and family loyalties, than murder and detection. But the story pulls the reader along to a conclusion that defies the conventions of the mystery/serial killer/crime genres, drawing closer to certain kinds of psychological thrillers (from Patricia Highsmith to Ruth Rendell, to mention just two). Vengeance is more compelling than Power's other novels that hew more or less to crime fiction conventions (Stalker and its sequel, Dealing with Kranze, plus Nathan Crosby's Fan Mail) but doesn't reach for the weird-and-yet-convincing achievement of his trilogy of the Troubles, Children of the North (which I keep bringing up here in order to keep its memory alive, since the trilogy is out of print).

Petros Markaris: Zone Defence (Athens noir)

There are two "Inspector Costas Haritos" novels by Petros Markaris already published in English (Deadline in Athens, also published as Late-Night News, and Zone Defence, with a third promised soon (Che Committed Suicide). I reviewed Deadline in Athens some time ago but was slow in getting hold of Zone Defence because of the title: I assumed that football would be a big element of the plot, and I'm not that interested in sports-themed mysteries or crime novels. But Zone Defence is mostly concerned with horrible families, corrupt politicians, bribe-taking doctors, rigged opinion polls, and fraud masquerading as everyday business strategy. Football does play a role, low-level Athens teams are part of the big fraud scheme and football strategy supplies the Inspector with a scheme to protect himself from suspects, politicians, and his own boss. Two murders (which will inevitably become intertwined) call Haritos back from his island vacation: a corpse is uncovered by an earthquake on the island where the inspector's family is visiting relatives and an Athens club owner is shot outside one of his clubs. Haritos is pulled back and forth, with his boss demanding the island corpse be identified and the murderer caught but the club owner's death to be shelved as unsolved. Throughout, there is considerable comedy in the police work, the cranky Haritos's relationship with subordinates and superiors, and his family life (his wife Adriani alternates between watching reality TV and worrying the detective about his health), but also frequent references to the era of the colonels (the repressive and violent Greek junta--and if you aren't familiar with that period of Greek history, go out and rent the wonderful Costa-Gavras movie Z--and be sure to watch it straight through to the text at the end that explains that one-letter title). With all the pressures on him, it's no wonder that Haritos is irritable or that stress is taking its toll on his health. The investigation suggests organized crime, political corruption, and even a Ross-McDonald-style family drama (stick around for the end to see which is the ultimate cause of the situation, and for Haritos's very-much-in-character cliff-hanger that will pull the reader forward toward the next installment). There's a lot of back and forth on the streets of Athens, seemingly constantly jammed with traffic, and it's very much modern Greece that's portrayed here (in depth). Occasional references to early Greek history are sparked mainly by street names that honor historical figures whose lives resonate directly or indirectly with the contemporary plot and characters. (I can't figure out that cover image though...)

Sjöwall/Wahlöö at the movies

I've been talking about film versions of north-European crime novels in the past few days, a good time to mention the one film of the Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö that Sjöwall has endorsed, the 1977 film of The Abominable Man (retitled as Man on the Roof or Mannen på taket in the original Swedish), directed by Bo Widerberg (famous for his Elvira Madigan outside of Sweden) and starring Carl Gustaf Lindstedt as Martin Beck. Man on the Roof is available in the U.S. (second hand only) as a VHS tape, but outside the U.S. There's evidently a DVD available. The film is shot in documentary style, in available light (but without the busy camera motion of more recent documentary-style fiction films), so that the screen is often very dark and frequently the image is grainy. There's no explanatory material--we see a murder in a hospital and then we follow the very-un-theatrical policemen as they puzzle over what's going on. It's a senior policeman who's been murdered, and he's the "abominable man" of the title. As in the book, Beck relies on Lennart Kollberg, his much younger but solid colleague, to bounce ideas off, while the other detectives, including Einar Rönn (who plods along) and Gunvald Larsson (who irritates everyone but takes action as necessary) take various roles in the story. Larsson is played with some flamboyance (especially in his '70s outfit, now looking ridiculous and perhaps meant as ridiculous by Widerberg) by Thomas Hellberg. The Larsson role was played to great effect (and with a more understated but still stylish wardrobe) by Rolf Lassgård (years before his role as Wallander in the original series for Swedish TV). The movie moves slowly and deliberately, frequently focusing on Beck's face, which shows concern but not much else, until the killer takes up a position on the roof of an apartment block and starts shooting people with a sniper rifle. Then the very dark comedy of the novels takes over as the police scurry to control the scene and in the process make everything worse. The achievement of the novels and this film is in making Beck's team (mostly) sympathetic while attacking the police force and its methods at every level, from patrolmen to the chief. Overall, Man on the Roof is understated right up to the ending, a cliffhanger that would never be resolved on film, since the subsequent novel, The Locked Room, has never been filmed for TV or the big screen, as far as I can tell. Though I can see why Sjöwall preferred this movie to all subsequent films of the Beck series, in its fidelity to the books, the TV series (with Lassgård, as mentioned, plus Gösta Ekman as Beck) is also very, very good--Ekman (whose father by the same name was a famous Swedish actor as well) is the equal of Lindstedt in showing Beck's concern and empathy without overstating anything (the other TV Beck, Peter Haber, is not quite so understated). The series featuring Ekman is not available in the U.S. on DVD, though all 6 films were shown some years ago first in the American Film Institute film series in Washington and then on MhZ TV network, in its early years of showing international crime series. Of the two cover images I'm reproducing here, based on the same helicopter photo, the American VHS emphasizes the action and the Swedish DVD cover hints at the chaos of the plot (and is therefore more effective, I think).

Outsider in Amsterdam: The movie

In the Kittling: Books blog today, Cathy Skye posted a review of Janwillem van de Wetering's Outsider in Amsterdam here, and coincidentally I saw a 1979 Dutch movie made from the book (with the title changed to Fatal Error, and the movie has also been released with the title Grijpstra & de Gier), with Rijk de Gooyer as Grijpstra and Rutger Hauer as De Gier. Though de Gooyer sounds like an interesting person (Nazi hunter in WWII, worked with CIA in Berlin), the movie is available as a DVD only because it's an early appearance by Rutger Hauer. The picture on the DVD box, by the way, seems to be from a different movie. The movie itself (contrary to Skye's impression fo the book) is quite dated. It's not only the clothes, but the acting, camera, direction, pretty much everything. There is a lot of comedy in the movie, some of it intentional, and a bit of surrealism (a floating mouth appears sometimes when the cops are listening to the disembodied voice of the police dispatcher, a woman. Hauer is OK, but hasn't really come in to his own as an actor at this point. And the movie is unfortunately dubbed into English (a feature that the Amazon website, which evidently produced the DVD, didn't mention) rather than subtitled, so we not only lose the actor's real voices, the dubbers tried to Americanize the dialogue (talking about the IRS when the cops complain about taxes, using even street names that seem to have more to do with the U.S. than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is definitely a character in the movie as in the books, but the lighting in the movie is often so dark that it's difficult to see much--atmospheric, perhaps, in some scenes, but the screen is sometimes virtually black. So the movie is only a relic, amusing at best. It does illustrate some of the reasons for the ponderous pacing that Skye noticed in the book: van de Wetering is really more interested in his characters (the spiky Grijpstra, the Asian-obsessed de Gier, and the particular characters involved in each book's murder), in comedy, and in social observation than in a straightforward murder mystery. As a movie, Fatal Error has more in common with two TV shows, Barney Miller (of the same error, and more interested in comedy and characters than crime) and the two versions of the Life on Mars series (but particularly the U.K. original), because of the period clothing and policing but also because of the mixing of plot with odd and sometimes mystical sidelines). It was fun to watch, but I wonder whether the more recent Dutch TV series made from the Grijpstra & de Gier books might be better--or whether the British TV series made from Nicolas Freeling's Van der Valk books (also set in the Netherlands and from the '70s) might be worth looking for...

M.S. Power and Dealing with Kranze

M.S. Power has had something of a specialty in sociopaths in a number of his novels. His first, Hunt for the Autumn Clowns, features a mentally challenged young man who is missing, among other things, any sense of wrong or guilt (and we experience his mind from within in part of the narrative). The Children of the North trilogy features a number of men who are willing to do literally anything in the service of their political cause, whether that be the maintenance of order or the overturning of it. Bridie and the Silver Lady centers upon a young girl who has been molested by her father, retreating thereafter into an amoral egocentricity and delusion that turns murderous. The Stalker's Apprentice and its sequel, Dealing with Kranze (for which I haven't found a cover image, so I'm using an image of the film of Stalker's Apprentice here, and more on that in a minute), deal with Marcus Walwyn, who is simply a pure sociopath: he feels no empathy and feels no emotion other than (occasionally) fright and anger. In the first novel, he kills two people with such dispassion that the reader almost passes by the events without "seeing" them. The murders have no emotional impact for us, no more than for him. But the first novel has a counterweight, in Inspector Maurice Birt, who is the focus of the central third of the novel and half of the final third. In Dealing with Kranze, we only get Marcus's point of view, and it is a claustrophobic one indeed. There is an emotional flatness to the entire book, and when the murders begin, late in the novel, Marcus feels only a tinge of melancholy that his plans have been completed, leaving him without something to do. The reader, as well, gets little emotional payoff from the murders: neither pleasure nor shock. That emotional flatness is the prime achievement of both books: rarely has sociopathy been so completely portrayed, without sensationalism. Lest it seem that there is no payoff at all for the reader, there is considerable black (very black) comedy in Marcus's narration, as he plots his way through daily life and through his "practice murders" and those that are his actual aim. A good deal of the comedy is satire, its target the jingoism of class: Marcus has inherited his mother's class consciousness though he wouldn't admit it, and his view from the very high perch of the English upper middle class, looking down upon all the unfortunates not among that elite crew, is quite funny. And Power, who is Irish, frequently pokes fun at Marcus's attitude toward the Irish. There is a particular irony in the reading experience: the gap between Marcus's experience and our own is so large that we can appreciate his world with the same kind of dispassion that he experiences with regard to everyone else. There is also one of those ironic endings, the criminal tripped up by an unseen flaw in his plan (whereas Stalker ended with an ambiguity regarding a third murder). We can't like Marcus, but we can't hate him: we mostly watch him with fascination and a weird kind of appreciation. But there is a flaw in the first novel that is to some extent corrected in the second. In The Stalker's Apprentice, we never really understand how Marcus is selected by his puppet-master Kranze. We see how Kranze manipulates him, through a manuscript, but there is a big leap of faith in Marcus being the one, the perfect one, who chances upon the manuscript. Given the portrait of Kranze as a master manipulator, would he have left it to chance regarding who would read his story and become his pawn? Is he just unbelievably lucky to get his manuscript to the perfect reader at a publishing house (or is it perhaps Power's wry comment on the publishing industry, in which every writer depends on just that kind of luck). When Marcus seeks a puppet to carry out his plan regarding his revenge, every step is clear. We know how and why the person is chosen and exactly how he is manipulated. Power spares us the cliche of the publishing world that might have accompanied the end of Kranze: though his editor-in-chief tempts him, Marcus is NOT writing his own history, not writing (in other words) the book we are reading. I wonder whether the film version of Stalker's Apprentice uses the ambiguous ending of that book or the rounded-off irony of the sequel?

Wallander: The Tricksters

The Tricksters (Swedish title, Den Svaga Punkten, which means something like the weak point or the weak spot) is the 6th of the new Wallander series produced by Swedish TV, with stories supplied by Henning Mankell but scripts written by others. For some reason, the MhZ Network, which is running the series on U.S. TV, seems to have run 5 of them, not having yet shown one called The Darkness, which evidently features Wallander's daughter Linda and her partner/boyfriend Stefan more than Wallander himself. That plot is relevant to my impression of The Tricksters (the English title really doesn't make much sense), which to me has far too much of Wallander and far too little of Linda (there's a bit more of Stefan than of Linda). The new Swedish Wallander is played by Krister Henriksson, without the sloppiness or manic-depression of the two others who have played the role (Kenneth Branagh and Rolf Lassgård, the best of the three, to me--he more convingly captures the loner, the opera fan, the conflicted relationship with Linda, and overall the complexity of the character). In The Tricksters, he's chasing after clues that keep piling up after a horse trainer is found dead in his horse barn, by two young girls who have been learning riding there. The plot moves from possible accident to murder to a Nazi neighbor to compulsive gambling to S&M, blackmail, and more. A bit too much plot in fact, too much of the police Saabs and Volvos running back and forth from the crime scene to Ystad police headquarters to the various homes of those involved. On the plus side, this film, like some of the Mankell novels, shows the horse country around Ystad and a bit more of the town than some of the other films. And Kurt (almost) gets an age-appropriate girlfriend, who provides a more emotional coda to the movie than the actual plot manages to do. Still, it's enjoyable enough TV-crime-show fare, and I look forward to more in this series (and in the Varg Veum series) from MhZ (which should be more widely available on U.S. cable and satellite systems than it apparently is). MhZ also returns in September with the 5th season of the famous La Piovra (Octopus) series, delineating the rise of the Mafia as an ever-present force in Italian society and politics.

Jef Geeraerts, The Public Prosecutor

The Public Prosecutor, by Belgian author Jef Geeraerts (translated by Brian Doyle) is a very dark thriller that reminded me alternately of Dominique Manotti's crime novels and Evelyn Waugh's satirical novels. The novel has a terse, almost pictorial style, with multiple points of view (which is what reminded me of various of Manotti's books) and a dark, dyspeptic view of humanity (and of the characters in the story) reminiscent of Waugh's early books, in which there are no heroes and no positive outcomes. Albert Savelkoul, the closest thing to a central character in the novel, is an Antwerp public prosecutor with a good deal of power and plenty of money (some of it not strictly legal), but also a wife he detests and a mistress who is beginning to wander. Courtesy of his wife and son, he will soon also have Opus Dei, the dark underside of Catholic piety, to contend with. What ensues is comic but without jokes: the plot's machinery purrs along toward a conclusion that will not be foreseen but is inevitable, once you get there. There's plenty of violence (social, psychological, and literal) but no murder until the very end. Instead of a crime investigation, the reader sees various self-interested parties in conflict, conspiring against one another even when they don't know that the other is pursuing them. Private investigators working for Opus Dei set in motion one plotline when the bungle a surveillance, leading to the death of a dog (theirs) and a horse (their target's). Savelkoul is thrust into an investigation of his own while his private life shifts from complacency into fears for his health and the discovery of perhaps the love of his life.
He's also plotting against the unseen forces that are ranged against him, and using unsavory associates in ways that implicate him in their violence. Apart from Savelkoul, the most vivid characters are the several Opus Dei members that are seen conspiring to strip Savelkoul's family of their money and property (for the glory of God and Opus Dei) and the family's Polish maid. The Opus Dei sections are quite descriptive (though who knows how accurate) about that secretive organization: chilling in their depiction of ruthlessness and the members' extreme piety. Some readers may not be happy with the conclusion, but Geeraerts is not writing a conventional thriller, he's investigating corrupion in Belgian politics and in religious extremism of the home-grown variety. A sunnier ending would betray his satirical and social purpose, as well as violating the tone and thrust of the story. The Public Prosecutor is one of the sharpest, darkest, and in its own way most enjoyable of the estimable Bitter Lemon Press's recent publications. The actual Bitter Lemon cover suggests the class pretensions of some of the characters--an alternate cover that's posted at fantasticfiction.co.uk is more ominous and ambiguous, but are actually a depiction of a woman with a horse, suggesting one element of the story and also the upper-class ambience. All in all I think I like the one they actually published better.

Allan Guthrie's Killing Mum

Killing Mum is a tasty morsel, a short and fast sequel, of sorts, to Allan Guthrie's funny, moving, and terrifying Savage Night. It's in the Crime Express series of small-format, short crime fiction (Killing Mum is 96 pages). Carlos Morales, who runs a murder-for-hire business, receives a package commissioning him to murder Valerie Anderson, who happens to be (though few know it) Carlos's mother. It's also addressed to "Charlie," a name that only his wife and his mother use for him, and they don't get along with one another. Killing Mum is tighter and more straightforward than Savage Night, with a smaller cast of characters (basically Carlos, his wife and mother, his baby, and his "firm's" hit man (really just a boy). And the focus is more straightforward, basically following Carlos as he seeks to find out who wants him to kill his mother, first by asking her if anybody wants her dead, then by setting up a "sting" of sorts that goes spectacularly wrong. Guthrie's style is lucid and his characters reveal themselves mostly through their speech, giving the story a terse and realistic quality. Though it doesn't have quite the inevitability nor the comedy of Savage Night, this short novel is another fine contribution to hard-core noir by one if its finest contemporary practitioners--and you can read it in almost the time it would take to watch the movie that its propulsive and "no distractions" style suggests.

Janwillem Van de Wetering, The Maine Massacre

I recently heard an audio-book version (from Recorded Books) of Janwillem Van de Wetering's The Maine Massacre (though the image reproduced here is the cover of the SoHo Press edition of the novel, set in Maine rather than Amsterdam but featuring his usual cops (though Grijpstra is only in it briefly). The Commisaris, aging and a bit feeble, needs to go to a small town in Maine to help his sister, whose husband has just died. Grijpstra, worried about his boss, schemes to send Sergeant De Gier to the same town on an international police exchange program. The Dutch cops discover a series of murders flowing from issues of property development, preservation of nature, and class. There are frequently funny observations about the U.S. from a Dutch cop's perspective (Van de Wetering actually lived in Maine, at least part-time, in a small town, where he died, actually), and one of the pleasures of the audio version is hearing the reader, George Guidall, approximate the Dutch pronunciation of the cops' names (something I'd always wondered about--and Guidall seems to know something about Dutch pronunciation). Van de Wetering actually describes the Dutch "g" sound in the novel as sounding like someone had swallowed a fly and was trying to cough it up. De Gier's fashion sense is quite funny--his outfit is stuck firmly in 1979, when the book was published; Van de Wetering surely meant the sergeant's clothes to seem funny, especially in the wildly inappropriate context of the Maine woods, but they're funnier still for anyone who remembers the clothing of the era from the perspective of today (or anyone who is embarrassed by his own old photos dressed in the clothes of the era). The mystery aspect of the book is fairly typical of the series--I have to say, though, that I miss the atmosphere of Amsterdam, in which Grijpstra and De Gier swim comfortably, as opposed to the alien environment of small-town America. I've discovered that there is a fairly recent Dutch TV series based on the Grijpstra-De Gier books, by the same production team as had earlier produced a series based on the Baantjer books. Unfortunately the series is inaccessible here--though there is an old movie version (1979) of one of the books (Outsider in Amsterdam, I think) that IS available here (under various titles, mainly Fatal Error or Grijpstra & De Gier) because it's an early Rutger Hauer movie (he plays De Gier, appropriately enough). I've sent for a cheap DVD and if it's any good I'll review it here.

Varg Veum 2 (movie based on Gunnar Staalesen character)

Last night the MHZ Network in the U.S. ran the second of the Varg Veum movies based on Gunnar Staalesen's Norwegian crime novels. The title is Sleeping Beauty (originally titled Tornerose, which I think is in fact the Norwegian name for Sleeping Beauty--who was called Briar Rose in in the English translation of the Grimm tale, before Disney got to her). This one develops Veum's character a bit further (by exposing him to corpses, middle-class families, and gangsters), plus the girlfriend he established a bit of a relationship with at the end of the first film reappears (but it seems, from the plot, as if she won't be a regular in the series). The relationship between Veum and a senior cop is also developed a bit further, extending their antipathy to new levels. Sleeping Beauty's plot is a bit over-determined, including murder, incest, pedophilia, drugs, runaways, child prostitution, sex among neighbors, homosexuality (considered by a teenager's father to be worse than his drug abuse), insider trading, organized crime, police stakeouts, attempted matricide, and a pair of broken marriages (and I may have forgotten some plotlines by now)--but the 90-minute film doesn't seem overstuffed and the story moves along at a fast but not frenetic pace. And Bergen looks more pleasant (with its bay, hills, old quarter, charming center city apartments, and spectacular upper-class houses), though almost as cold, as in the first Veum film. The series is a bit more action oriented than the various incarnations of the Wallander series, but at the same time, Veum is a more complex character than Wallander: Veum has had a career change from social work to private detective, both with an emphasis on aiding children, and he's alternately hard-boiled and vulnerable. He does share with Wallander a certain lack of fashion (or even grooming) sense, though: Veum is taller and thinner than the 3 Wallanders I've seen, but his stubbly beard is more trendy--though his long, perpetually dirty-looking hair brings down his "look" a bit. I'm not sure how many more of the Veum films MHZ is running, but it looks like there are 6 that were produced for Norwegian TV: Here's hoping we get them all, and more in the future (maybe we'll see what summer in Bergen is like?).

M.S. Power and The Stalker's Apprentice

For forgotten-book Friday: Rob Kitchin's recent, highly praised police procedural The Rule Book is not the first book to propose a series of murders that follow rules set forth in a book (though Kitchin's may be the first in which the murderer is also the author of the book). It's a common enough theme, and there's another Irish writer who has used it two novels and a third that is a sequel to one of the first two. Nathan Crosby's Fan Mail, by M.S. Power (whose brilliant Childred of the North trilogy has been mentioned here several times) is a combination of the book theme with a Dick Francis plot (though Francis should have only hoped to write as well as Power). The novel concerns a serial killer novel set in the horse-racing world in England; the author-narrator is dismayed to receive letters announcing that the letter-writer is using the novel as a template for his own series of murders. The plot is conventional enough, and the book is best in its comic elements and in the interplay among its very well-drawn characters.
I've just finished Power's The Stalker's Apprentice, which is about a "reader" at a London publishing house who comes upon the manuscript for a novel of multiple murder and begins using it as the model for his own spree. The Stalker's Apprentice (which was made into a TV movie a couple of years ago) is very different from Power's Fan Mail book not only because of its setting in London rather than the racing world, but also because there's some ambiguity about whether the writer of the manuscript is manipulating the main character (who is also the narrator for about half the novel) into committing the murders. I had actually begun to tire of the killer's narrative until I reached the second section of the novel, which (along with alternating parts of the final section) focuses on Inspector Inspector Birt and Sergeant Wilson, the detecties in pursuit of the killer. The cops are interesting and quirky, and for me the police procedural opened the story out of the claustrophobic but oddly affectless world of the killer into a more involving tale. The tension builds as the story moves toward a final murder that is implied in the manuscript (and is the basis of the cops' theory of the crimes), but that killing becomes part of the devious interrelationships of killer, writer, and cops rather than a direct element of the narrative. The ambiguity of the ending implies a sequel--and there is one (it's on my tbr pile), Dealing with Kranze. I don't know whether Power planned the sequel from the beginning or wrote it to capitalize in the success of The Stalker's Apprentice, but it promises to take the story in interesting directions. Power has also written several other books that are, in one way or another, crime novels. His first book, Hunt for the Autumn Clowns, is a bizarre but frequently very funny rural Gothic tale of a slow-witted boy and his Irish-Faulkerian-sexualized environment. There are a couple of murders, but the pleasure in reading the book comes from the eloquent narrative and its twisted logic. Power wrote at least one other police procedural, Vengeance (which I had looked for for years and only recently found), also on my tbr pile, and one other Gothic tale, Bridie and the Silver Lady, which turns the spooky fairy tale on its head (the pubescent girl is the monster rather than the monster's prey). I was led into the search for Power's crime books by the powerful experience of reading Children of the North, but his other books are of various sorts and though always interesting a bit uneven. Clowns is funny and horrifying, in something of the same way as Patrick McCabe's Butcher Boy (though the books are quite different); Power's Come the Executioner, is very like a post-Cold War spy novel or thriller, with the setting of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; Fan Mail is a fairly conventional mystery novel; Bridie is a disturbing tale of psychology and supernatural visitation; and Stalker combines some of the elements of all of the above, along with a chilling portrait of an attractive, upper-middle-class English sociopath or two. What they all have in common is an attention to character and a style that varies from lucid to comic to startling. Two questions about movies: has anyone seen the film of The Stalker's Apprentice? And has anyone seen (or does anyone remember) the TV film made from a Bill James's Harpur & Iles book? I think the film was called "Harpur & Iles."

Johan Theorin, The Darkest Room

In The Darkest Room, Swedish crime writer Johan Theorin skillfully brings together several disparate elements: a series of ghost stories, a thriller, a mystery, and a series of historical vignettes about the various ways to die in a cold, unforgiving environment. Like Theorin’s first novel, Echoes from the Dead, In the Darkest Room (whose original Swedish title is Nattfåk, meaning “night blizzard”) is set on the Swedish island of Öland, in the Baltic sea, south of Gotland. The first story evoked the towns and the prarie-like Alvar, and the second evokes the houses and lighthouses along the eastern coast of the island. The characters are as disparate as the plotlines: a young Stockholm family moving into an old lighthouse-keeper’s manor house with a plan to renovate it; a B&E crew made up of pair of meth-head, violent brothers and a local guy who’s only in it as a cure for boredom; a rookie cop and an amateur detective who lives in an old-folks home (that last character is a holdover from the first novel, and his appearance is telegraphed by an early encounter between the thieves and a ship-in-a-bottle). There are also the ghosts of sailors lost at sea, a young wife, a junkie sister, and various previous residents of the manor house—we meet the ghosts in a running narrative that turns out to be a confessional of sorts, as well as in stories from island residents, spooky presences encountered by various characters, the thieving brothers’ Ouija Board, and physical evidence in the house and its barn. Echoes from the Dead updated folktale motifs, and In the Darkest Room does the same (especially with one overarching metaphor related to the English title that becomes actualized in the second half of the book), but emphasizes both the unwilling dead and the weight of history. The novel is interesting from the beginning, naturalistic but spooky as well as well written, but as the threads of the tale begin to converge, along with the Christmas blizzard of the original Swedish title, the pace picks up to that of a thriller (and the translator, Marlaine Delargy, deserves a lot of credit for maintaining that pace in lucid English)—you’ll find yourself ripping through the almost 400 pages. But the climax is reached more in terms of character than violence (though there is violence), as in almost the style of Elmore Leonard rather than a standard thriller-writer’s climactic violence. But what the novel leaves the reader with (even after a coda-like ending that brings the book back toward the mystery genre) is a sense of the continuity of human dwelling and dying in a fully realized, particular place. And where a number of Scandinavian novels have dealt with the new immigtion problems, Theorin looks toward a different kind of “intruder” into the calm, uniform surface of Swedish life: the continuing presence of those who are gone but not quite forgotten. I’m pasting in three covers again, U.S., U.K., and Sweden, two of which offer (naturally enough) takes on the storm-and-lighthouse motif and one, the U.S., a scene of snow, forest, and glowing redness of dawn or dusk in the far north (another, less obvious motif in the book). Graphically, I like the Swedish and U.S. ones better than the U.K. one, which also emphasizes the sea a bit more than the others.

Karin Fossum, The Water's Edge

Karin Fossum likes to shake up the formula for her crime fiction (and for crime fiction generally) in her Inspector Sejer novels. The latest to be translated into English, The Water’s Edge (Den som elsker noe annet in the original Norwegian, literayy "he who loves something else), is no exception. A normal pattern for a crime novel (as for a crime TV show like Law & Order) is for a witness to discover a body at the beginning, and then the witness isn’t heard from again (except possibly as the subject of an interview). Fossum sets up a conflict between the husband and wife who discover a pedophile’s victim at the beginning of The Water’s Edge, and then carries that conflict forward through the rest of the book, as they argue about what they witnessed and how it has affected them (there’s even a hint of something else at the very end, akin to the end of Fossum’s Don’t Look Back, but I won’t telegraph that detail).
There’s a bit of the usual investigation, feature Sejer and his partner, the younger Skarre, but a large part of the narrative that focuses on them is taken up with an ongoing discussion between them of what pedophilia signifies about the perpetrator and his social/familial context. There’s also quite a bit of text devoted to the victims’ families and to the killer, and the pedophile becomes almost a sympathetic character, in a twisted way. The result of the combination of the more meditative, interior monologues and the dialogues between the cops and the glimpses of the married couple's daily life is a splintered image, a kaleidoscope or jigsaw puzzle that in the end emphasizes the daily tragedies of normal life as much or more than the awful crimes.
Fossum's ending (really there are plural endings, as each thread of the plot ends separately) emphasizes both the awfulness of the ordinary and what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, carrying forward the dark, brooding story beyond the end of the novel and into the reader's life--a most effective ending for a noir crime novel. Another query about covers: The U.S. and U.K. covers above are very similar, but I like the graphic and foggy quality of the U.K. one better myself (that's the one in the middle of the post). The Norwegian cover is much more explicit about the crime at the beginning of the novel--perhaps too explicit? Or are the English-language publishers afraid of visually addressing the pedophilia theme on a cover?

Delhi Noir

On the occasion of a radio appearance by Hirsh Sawhney (editor of Delhi Noir, Akashic's new book in its international noir series) along with blogger extraordinaire Peter Rozovsky, I'm posting a review of Delhi Noir today. Check Peter's blog, Detectives Beyond Borders, for details of the radio show, which should be available on the Wisconsin Public Radio website as a live feed or an archived audio. I don't know how Akashic does it--they find writer/editors all over the world that know just who to solicit new noir stories from in a given city. Delhi Noir has the usual high quality of the series along with an unusual continuity of tone (beyond just the setting) in the stories, so that the book reads almost like an episodic novel rather than a collection. Part of the tone is the language: the speakers in these stories (and there's a lot of dialogue) are polyglot, native speakers in a jumble of the native languages of Delhi and India, and there's a helpful glossary at the back of the book--though the stories so skilfully weave the non-English terms and the slang into the dialogue that a reader usually does not need to break the rhythm of the story to check the glossary. The overarching motif is the conflict of rich and poor, new wealth and old social practices, in the city of Delhi today. Sawhney makes the point in his introduction that Delhi doesn't have the tradition of crime fiction that exists in some other Indian cities, perhaps (says Sawhney) because of the character of the capital city's denizens, who aren't interested in the cruelty and inequity that might burst the bubble of their booming rise to capitalist or bureaucratic bliss. And cruelty and inequity are here in this collection in abundance, ameliorated by comedy, revenge (particularly in the science-fiction crime tale that ends the collection), and frequently a melancholy acceptance of the way things are at the bottom of the social structure. Rather than singling out individual writers (some still living in Delhi, some elsewhere in India, and some in the Indian diaspora) for praise, for now I will just advise you to get this collection asap, whether you're interested in India, international noir, crime fiction, or just good writing. Akashic scores again with Delhi Noir.

Norwegian crime novel translated in Italian film

Girl by the Lake (La ragazza del lago), Andrea Molaioli's award-winning first film as director in 2007 was an adaptation of Karin Fossum's 5th Inspector Sejer novel (the first to be translated into English), Don't Look Back. The translation to Italy (and to film) is surprisingly effective. The evocation of the lake (site of the murder) and the town in Fossum's novel were very vivid, and Molaioli's visual equivalent is entirely coherent with the original, transformed from a small village in Norway to a village in northern, Alpine Italy, near Udine. Inspector Sejer becomes Commissario Sanzio (played with understated brilliance by Toni Servillo), but is the same tall, glum, terse policeman. The plot is simplified and changed in several significant ways without taking anything away from the dark, emotional truth of the story. And Fossum's brilliant, misdirecting beginning is preserved perfectly. The visual storytelling of the film, alternating with the dialogue of the police investigation, evokes the story in (of course) an entirely different way that Fossum's novel, but the directness of the translation points out the visual quality of Fossum's own storytelling. And the dialogue, against that background, emphasizes an essential, almost metafictional quality of the police procedural as a genre: storytelling is the subject and the medium of the form. Everyone in Girl by the Lake is telling a different story, and the police keep adapting their own version of the story as facts become known. The viewer (or reader) becomes tangled in all the stories, straight through to a final resolution (or approximation of a resolution). Girl by the Lake is a very quiet cop movie, suited to both the setting and this particular story: a lyrical evocation of dreadful illness and tragic events.

SoHo Crime, Bitter Lemon Press, and Sergio Bizzio's Rage

SoHo Crime in the U.S. and Bitter Lemon Press in the U.K. are two of the leading independent publishers of international crime fiction in English. Their lists overlap a bit (both publish Garry Disher) and both publish novels that are detective-oriented and books that are more in the line of psychological novels (thrillers isn't really an adequate word), though SoHo's list tilts toward the detectives and Bitter Lemon's list tilts toward the psychologicals. The newly translated (by Amanda Hopkinson) Argentine novel Rage by Sergio Bizzio (from Bitter Lemon) is definitely in the latter category. The cover announces that it's to be made into a movie by Guillermo del Toro, and that's no surprise: the claustrophobic and high-concept novel hearkens back to early-20th-century expressionist writing in several ways. It's focused on the working class (as many of the expressionist writers were), it includes a hallucinatory (though also ordinary) architecture as its primary setting), and its effect is rather more like reading a ghost story or a fairy tale than reading a crime novel. In some ways it's a combination of the Phantom of the Opera and one of Francis Carco's gritty novels of lower-class Paris. There's also a hint of gender confusion in a couple of spots, one being that the primary character, José Maria, is most often called Maria. He's a construction worker who falls in love with a maid, Rosa, who works in a mansion near his current construction site. The novel actually begins with a suggestion of pornography, Maria suggesting a sex act that Rosa is reluctant to perform, in one of their rare moments together in a room-by-the-hour hotel. the tone shifts away from porn, though, when Maria goes on the run, pursued for the murder of his boss; instead of running way he runs in: he hides in the attic of the house where Rosa lives and works, but without telling her. The rest of the book narrates the scenes and sounds that Maria witnesses as he sneaks up and down staircases, through hallways of upper stories, and occasionally down to the ground floor, spying on Rosa and her employers and occasional visitors. The crimes that occur in the house, including rape and murder, are a less important aspect of the novel's texture than Maria's daily effort to survive undetected. As I said, it's easy to imagine del Toro's attraction for the story, given that director's interest in and skill with labyrinthine tales (both in scene and psychology). Bizzio's evocation of Maria-the-phantom's scurrying journeys and his glimpsed and overheard narrative is vivid, though I did find my attention lapsing now and then; it is, after all, a very high concept story--you either buy into the conceit or you don't; you're either in or out, there's no halfway. The same was true to some extent with some other Bitter Lemon books, Blackout (by Gianluca Morozzi, also to be made into a movie), for instance--though Blackout leads up to a plot twist while Rage moves forward with a kind of inexorable rhythm toward an almost inevitable conclusion foretold by a pun or double meaning in the original Spanish title that I can't explain without giving too much away. I'd definitely be interested in other books by Bizzio (and in the del Toro film), though Rage (in spite of the murder and mayhem) isn't the kind of crime novel I usually look for. Thanks are due to Bitter Lemon for stretching my reading horizons as well as for the high quality of their entire crime list.

Gunnar Staalesen's Varg Veum

I had a chance to see the first of the new TV films based on Gunnar Staalesen's series about Bergen, Norway private detective Varg Veum (on the MhZ Network, a public TV station in the U.S. that specializes in non-U.S. programming, mostly news). Three of Staalesen's novels have been translated, though a couple of them have been out of print for a while, and a 4th is about to be released by Arcadia in the U.K. The film is an interesting portrait of Bergen and of an unconventional private detective: Veum is a former social worker, specializing in children's cases. As a detective, he also frequently works on cases involving children. So while he's a tough and hard-boiled investigator on the one hand, he's also a principled and socially conscious citizen and professional (the social consciousness comes through a bit clearer in the novels). The actor playing Veum, Trond Espen Seim, is quite good, showing the character's melancholy determination without overdoing it. The rest of the characters, business professionals and cops, are a foil for Veum's seedy persona (and the cast is quite effective, in a European style of acting--fairly low-key). The story involves a missing child, a corporation that, while undergoing a generational change of leadership, is also involved in dirty deals. How the missing child is related to the corporation's greed is a complex trail that Veum gradually unravels, while getting abused verbally and physically by cops and corporate thugs. It will be interesting to see how the Veum series develops, but this first entry is quite effective in updating the private detective while also providing a new model for a detective's background and motivation. And the series also should remind us that what seems like a gap between Sjöwall and Wahlöö and the current Scandinavian crime wave (beginning with Wallander) was in fact a busy time for the crime genre in the Scandinavian countries--Staalesen's first crime novel appeared in 1975 and Varg Veum first appeared in English translation in 1986. This is an excellent and unique series that should not be forgotten in our appreciation of Scandinavian crime fiction's current worldwide popularity. And one benefit of the availability of the new film is that a reader finally gets some idea as to how "Varg Veum" should be pronounced...

Rob Kitchin, The Rule Book

I rarely read reviews of a book before reviewing it myself, but Rob Kitchin's new Irish serial killer novel breaks so many rules of crime writing (an irony perhaps intended by Kitchin in his title and the books premise: The Rule Book) that I went looking for other opinions before trying to formulate my own. The most useful review was by Critical Mick (see his review here), who remarks on Kitchin's rule-breaking style as well as other aspects of the book. I fully agree with Mick's praise of the book's success in pulling in the reader, as well as his analysis of Kitchin's twists on the serial killer genre in film and fiction. I also agree with one of his criticisms of the book (that there are a number of proofreading errors that may not be the author's fault) but disagree with a couple of others. Mick says that the police procedural method is followed too closely and accurately, perhaps confusing the reader with the numerous detectives' names and activities: I for one am a big fan of the police procedural as a genre, and Kitchin gives us an excellent version, emphasizing not the lurid crimes committed by the serial killer but the sometimes plodding pursuit of the killer in the detectives' meticulous methodology. I also disagree with Mick that the setting is evoked with perhaps too much realism. I haven't spent that much time in Ireland, and have never been to Maynooth or some of the other particular settings, but I found Kitchin's descriptions of these places evoked a real Ireland, a real picture of the place that formed an excellent "frame" for the fictional events. Kitchin's background in geography and mapping provided not only some conceptual elements in the plot and action, but perhaps also the background for his skill in sketching out his portrait of Ireland (and like Mick, I appreciate that the places in The Rule Book are not fictionalized equivalents, but actual places we might either recognize or visit. Mick mentions that Kitchin breaks a big crime-novel-plot rule in his ending (which can't be described without giving too much away): I can admire Kitchin's daring and his accomplishment in this particular case while still being a bit frustrated by it. You'll see what I mean when you read the book--which I highly recommend you do. The story follows Detective Superintendant Colm McEvoy's dogged pursuit of a serial killer who leaves behind a "rule book" that demonstrates his genius and lays out a plan (partly in code) of 7 murders in 7 days. That "rule book" provides the title and the structure, without overwhelming the narrative drive, mostly maintained in the dialogue among the cops (sometimes professional, sometimes emotional). As the killer progresses through his plan, the police have immense difficulty in keeping up with him, much less identifying or catching him. In a few instances, the killer is lucky, but in most cases, his rules (not always followed exactly) are proved in his acting out of them. McEvoy is frustrated not only by the killer but by an ambitious subordinate and back-stabbing superiors in the Gardai. He is also hampered by his own emotional and physical state (he's a wreck, in the aftermath of his wife's death, leaving him as a single father to a 12-year old girl). McEvoy's turmoil is believable and not overwrought, and the dialogue among all the police is also natural, not strained or over-written. The story is told in the third person mostly from McEvoy's point of view with occasional short segments from the point of view of the killer and that of a couple of the other cops, plus one of the victims. That focus on McEvoy tightens the drama without overly limiting the reader's perspective. And the story is tight indeed, moving along at an electric pace that never lets up. Kitchin's skill in maintaining that pace as well as the naturalism of the characters and setting is quite impressive in a first novel. A sequel is implied in the text (and Kitchin mentions he's working on the third McEvoy novel in an interview by Gerard Brennan here), and I'm hoping the sequel doesn't take long to arrive.

Declan Hughes, All the Dead Voices

The fourth of Declan Hughes's Ed Loy crime novels is just coming out the U.S. now. The novel brings together the uncertain future of the failed Celtic Tiger and the deadly past of the Irish Troubles. The Troubles lurk in the background of any contemporary Irish crime novel (certain elements that had used crime to finance their violent actions are simply continuing their career as criminals now), but the IRA, INLA, etc., figure in All the Dead Voices more than in the first three Ed Loy novels. And it's a bleak picture that Hughes draws, of gangsters and good citizens that share a common violent past but have moved on in disparate ways, and of the new violence of an urbanized Dublin. As always, though, Hughes grounds his story in that most violent and turbulent of human institutions, the family. Loy is hired by two families in distress: a gangster who has fled to Greece asks him to look after his younger brother, now a celebrated footballer; and a young mother asks him to find out who murdered her father years before (her mother's lover had been jailed for the offense but released on a technicality, but the Gardai believe he did it and refuse to reopen the case).

The two cases inevitably intertwine, as Loy moves back and forth around Dublin among the cops and the gangsters, often becoming the subject of "unwanted attention" from both. There are a lot of characters (and a lot of murders), sometimes a little hard to keep up with the plot, but Hughes skilfully reiterates the story through Loy's overlapping interrogations of the suspects and victims--if the reader momentarily forgets what's going on, the narrator (whether Loy himself or the non-Loy-narrated sections concerning the gangster who hired him and a family in Armagh 20 years earlier) will set you straight. The plot goes off in some unexpected directions: just when you think you're headed for a predictable or operatic crescendo, Hughes undercuts that expectation with casual violence or the withdrawal of an expected twist. And at the end, amid the nearly Jacobean mayhem, there's a hint of redemption for Loy and those around him.

I see that Loy is off to his former home-in-exile, L.A., in the next book, and into a serial-murder plot that will threaten that very redemption--but we'll have to wait until next year for that. A word about covers--I'm pasting three images of the U.K. and U.S. covers as well as a Harper-Collins cover that apparently was rejected but still appears on the publisher's website (as H-C is the parent of Wm. Morrow, the titular U.S. publisher). In the U.K., someone (Loy?) is headed into a tunnel and in the U.S. released version he's headed over a bridge. Whereas the U.K. cover looks like a film poster ("Ed Loy in..."), the U.S. version is cluttered with text (blurbs and award announcements). All in all I like the unreleased U.S. version best (the one at the top of this blog post), though it misspells John Connolly's name in the blurb on that one, and there's a bit of Gothic type that doesn't quite work. Thoughts, anyone?

David's Revenge, by Hans Werner Kettenbach

The two crime novels by Hans Werner Kettenbach that have been translated so far (both translated by Anthea Bell and published by Bitter Lemon Press) have a carefully controlled point of view. In the new one, David's Revenge, we see everything through the eyes of a middle-aged schoolteacher who is married to a lawyer and has a teen-aged son who is an incipient skinhead. But Christian does more than narrate: he tells himself stories, spins rationalizations of his behavior and that of others, wraps himself up in his story-inspired notions of what is happening around him. The result is a particularly claustrophobic paranoid thriller, brought down to human (rather than global) level within a bourgeois German household. Regardless of this domestic focus, the plot is political: a post-Cold War tale of (possible) spies and collaborators in the newly united Germany and the newly liberated Georgia, thrust then (as again recently) into bloody civil war based on the country's former and current relations with Russia. The novel begins with a letter from Georgia from a translator, David Ninoshvili, whom Christian had met at a conference in Tbilisi a few years earlier, and who is now announcing that he's arriving in Germany to stay in Christian's guest room while pitching Georgian literature to German publishers. Christian remembers David and especially David's wife, with whom Christian had almost had an affair. The whole story turns on what David might or might not have known about the interrupted affair, and on who David might actually be now and have been then: a KGB or Georgian intelligence officer who lured a German into a compromising position? A jealous husband bent on revenge? Christian is quite a different character from the narrator of Black Ice, Kettenbach's previously translated novel, who was a bit slow intellectually. Christian is an intellectual and a seasoned high school teacher and drama instructor. Rather than piecing together the puzzle of what might have happened, as in Black Ice, Christian evolves through a series of reinterpretations of David and of his own wife and son (whose relationships to David change through the course of the novel), through the narration of events and through the stories (told in the present tense, as we would tell a joke--"a dog walks into a bar...", at least in English) that Christian's interior monologue repeatedly lapses into. As with Black Ice, though, the murder and mayhem are all off-stage, and Christian only catches glimpses of these events second-hand, through the TV and newspapers. Christian is an ordinary guy, caught up (or not) in international intrigue and suddenly fascinated by the history and literature of Georgia and its relationship to Germany. What Kettenbach is up to is not a Le Carre sort of thing, not even the post-Cold War Le Carre. His novel brings down the big-issue politics, the still active intelligence apparatus, and murderous crimes to the living room, to now, to the schoolroom, and to the bedroom and to the interior of an ordinary man's dialogue with himself.

Matt Beynon Rees, The Samaritan's Secret

Matt Beynon Rees is on track to construct a "Comédie Humaine" for Palestine in his series featuring Bethlehem school teacher and amateur detective Omar Yussef Sirhan. Volume 1 introduced us to Palestinian Bethlehem, Volume 2 to Gaza, and Volume 3 to both the dangerous city of Nablus and to the remnant of the Samaritan culture, which is partly based near there on the community's sacred mountain. In all three novels Rees demonstrates the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, the destructive competition between Fatah and Hamas, and the pervasive and oppressive (mostly offstage) presence of the Israeli army. The key problem of The Samaritan's Secret is the Hamas-Fatah violent competition for supremacy, with considerable energy also around the contrast of wealth and poverty and the tension between stricter and more liberal (or even secular) versions of Islam. In Nablus with his family for the wedding of Sami, a policeman we encountered in the previous novel, Omar Yussef becomes involved in the increasingly complex circumstances of the murder of a young Samaritan man (and we learn a great deal about his obscure culture). The strength of Omar Yussef (and also his Achilles heal, in terms of "getting along" in Palestine, and in Nablus in particular) is his empathy and humanity: he refuses to turn away from the Samaritan man's tragedy or to look away from the corruption that lies beneath not only the murder but daily life in the city. Omar Yussef is the furthest thing from a hard-boiled detective: he feels too much of the pain of individual victims in his splintered, unstable society. It is precisely the contrast he provides to the indeed very dark, hard-boiled, noir (whatever term you choose) environment in which he lives that gives the series its edge. His friend the Bethlehem police chief not only is cynical about politics and religion, he can casually kill a man for what seems to be convenience. Only Omar Yussef is troubled by that sort of thing, and even he remains loyal to his friend, fully aware of his character and his past (even more ruthless) deeds. The mystery is solved in an almost archaeological fashion, with numerous missteps and red herrings along the way (Omar Yussef is no ratiocinative detective, he's more intuitive and impulsive, a character trait that constantly troubles his family). He is only momentarily chastened when his actions endanger his favorite granddaughter, who has insisted on going out for a local sweet (which sounds indeed cloyingly sweet). Rees give us a couple of chase sequences that are nonetheless exciting for Omar Yussef's lack of speed and agility--and are not simply amusing or "cute" as has been the case with some elderly detectives over the years of the genre. There is humor (as always in this series) but without condescending to his characters--it is their own humor, which we are privileged to share in, their comic response in the face of the despair and terror of their seemingly endless situation. Rees provides insight and also a satisfying crime story.

Death in the New Republic, by David Dison

There’s a blurb provided by the publisher of David Dison’s Johannesburg crime novel, Death in the New Republic, comparing the book to Jeffrey Archer’s thrillers. I’m afraid I don’t get the comparison, which would be at the least very misleading concerning Dison’s subtle, complex story of betrayal, murder, disgrace, and solidarity in the politics of the new South Africa. Dison’s narrative progresses in alternating short sentence fragments, long complex sentences, and interior monologues, with frequent Johannesburg slang and bursts of Afrikaans and Sesotho, the African language most familiar to Dison’s hero, Jerome Michael Nossel, known to everyone as Nossel. The complexity of the text echoes the complexity of the story and its political background. I recently reviewed an older book by Gillian Slovo, The Betrayal, written just as the apartheid regime was ending. Slovo drew some of the faultlines in the anti-apartheid struggle (and the apartheid regime itself) that extend and branch in various directions in Dison’s story. There are the people Dison calls “struggelistas,” former activists who seem not to have moved on from the struggle; the black ascendancy (a new middle class, a few wealthy plutocrats, and the powers-that-be of the government; the new immigrants, living at the fringes of the society; unrepentant white supremacist cops operating independently within the new police force; and others who have accommodated one way or another to the new reality of the country. Nossel himself, whose Jewish family has been in South Africa for many generations, moved from the struggle and exile into the national intelligence service, only to be disgraced and suspended because of a trap laid for him by forces within the government. He is called upon to help a government minister’s family when their son is about to be arrested for drug possession and dealing, and then he stumbles upon a murder. Neither the white narco-cops who want to arrest the minister’s son nor the black cops who show up to investigate the murder seem to be completely above board, and Nossel becomes involved in intertwined plots that ultimately reveal not only the perpetrator of the murder but also the hopes and despairs of current South Africa, from AIDS and corruption to democracy and equality. There’s a negative review of Death in the New Republic in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper by Kwanele Sosibo (see here) and a positive one by Maureen Isaacson in Crime Beat @ Book Southern Africa (see here), demonstrating a healthy range of opinion in Dison's home country concerning a book that is ambitious in its reach both in political and crime-novel terms. For myself, I found it to be a subtle and moving story that in which the main character investigates his own character as doggedly as he pursues the truth concerning the murder and the other criminal acts in the book. Death in the New Republic is very different from other recent South African crime novels, closer to Slovo's The Betrayal than to the novels of Deon Meyer or Margie Orford. Surely that's an encouraging sign of healthy diversity in the crime fiction of a country with both great hopes and great troubles.

Brian McGilloway, Bleed a River Deep

The blurbs for Brian McGilloway's third Inspector Devlin novel, Bleed a River Deep, suggest a story that in lesser hands would have been a generic thriller: an American right-wing former Senator (and former IRA supporter) arrives in Ireland for the opening of a new gold mine run by an Irish-American company, and in spite of the senator's own protection and the efforts of Devlin and the gardai, the American celebrity is shot at. Shades of international incident and conspiracy? Not in this case. The hints of sensational thriller plot are only small elements, just some of the threads among others that focus on illegal immigrants, cross-border smuggling, and eco-activism, all in along the border of Northern Ireland and Donegal on the verge of the Celtic Tiger's collapse. And rather than a supercop, Devlin is constantly in hot water when his mistakes make things worse for the immigrants, the gardai, his old friends, and himself. His new boss is on his case, and he gets suspended early on in the book; for a good deal of the story he's acting more like a private detective than a copy (almost as if McGilloway is preparing a career change for him). It is Devlin's empathy and conscience that make the books interesting and give them depth beyond the average police procedural (and Devlin's home life is shockingly normal, for a crime-novel cop). The ccomplications of crimes and criminals crossing back and forth between police jurisdictions adds particular interest, taking advantage of historical tensions as well as more normal jurisdictional disputes. McGilloway is unafraid of events that change his cast of characters (as has been seen in previous novels) or of unresolved plots. Bleed a River Deep's conclusion is satisfying to the reader without being satisfactory for Devlin and a number of other characters. McGilloway deserves the attention he has been getting for his Devlin novels: he's stretching the boundaries of the crime novel without condescending to the genre, and his novels deserve even wider recognition among crime fans and general readers. A question for those who know better than I what's happening in the translations of the new Irish crime wave: are readers outside the English-speaking world getting access to the fine crime fiction of McGilloway, Declan Hughes, Declan Burke, Gene Kerrigan, etc?

New Finnish Noir

It is perhaps unfair that I'm reviewing Harkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall right after reading and reviewing Garry Disher's Blood Moon. In contrast to the Australian novel, the characters in Sipila's Finnish police procedural are rather flat. The plot is very good, in the hard-boiled, no nonsense tradition (more on that in a minute) but the characters are so little delineated that it's frequently hard to tell one from the other (hence the list of characters in the front of the book, which is helpful and perhaps necessary). Most of the cops simply blend together, except for Detective Lieutentant Takamäki and undercover cop Suhonen, who are at the center of the story and are boss-and-subordinate but other than that little differentiated from one another, despite some amusing banter among the cops, as well as collegial irritation about some of Suhonen's tactics. The same is true of the bad guys, who seem to be little differentiated except by categories: thug, prison gangster, narc, boss, and within categories they can be hard to tell apart. As I said, perhaps Disher's skill at making characters (even minor ones) come idiosyncratically alive proves to be an unfortunate contrast when considering Sipila's novel. The flatness of the characters actually suits the plot fairly well, reinforcing the noir/pulp quality of the book (and that's not meant in a derogatory way, I like noir/pulp fiction). This book could be an updated version of those straight-to-paperback tales of the 1950s, Jim Thompson included. The mystery aspect of the plot is undercut about 2/3 of the way into the story when the reader is informed by the narrator about who the killers are, long before the cops figure it out. Again, that's not really a problem for me--one of the most interesting aspects of the story is a double-dealing plotline concerning a mid-level gangster who's ripping off his boss and covering his ass--one of the most interesting characters and plotlines, and one that requires the mystery aspect to be set aside. The plot winds around, coming back to the seemingly unrelated prologue just as the story picks up speed and everything comes together for an effective twist-and-turn conclusion something like Elmore Leonard’s realistically quirky plots, but at the same time reminiscent of the comic mayhem of the amazing Finnish TV series, RAID. The best part of the book, though, is its palpable sense of the winter cityscape of Helsinki and the street-level history of the city (such as a corner where a famous cop-killing happened). For that alone, I can recommend the book, though it’s pulp-y, plot-heavy quality puts it in a different category of the fleshier novels. Sipila and his brother have set up a publishing house, Ice Cold Crime, to bring his own and other Finnish writers to English-speaking audiences—including, I understand, something by Harri Nykänen, the author of the books upon which the aforesaid RAID series is based. So please, go buy this book (despite my own reservations): we should encourage publishers who bring more crime writers to our attention from countries like Finland! It is, by the way, an attractive book in a nice, small-ish format, easy to carry back and forth on the Metro train while commuting, as I can attest. To read Barbara Fister's more positive view of Sipila's quick character sketches, and of the novel as a whole, click here.