A forgotten book for Friday, plus: Love, death, and ostriches: Mick Herron's The Last Voice You Hear

Mick Herron says in an interview that he began his second novel, The Last Voice You Hear (set in Oxford, London, small town and semi-rural England, and transport systems between), with an idea about "a man who insinuates himself into the lives of lonely women, promising them love, but removing all hope of it instead. And the woman investigating this would be someone for whom love had become a forgotten language; one she had to learn again along the way." (see Shotsmag interview here). Sounds like a serial killer novel, and in part it is. But he also says that three ostriches were part of his original idea, and they do indeed, in the last quarter of the novel (their role is partly what you might be expecting when you get to that point, and partly not). There is a second plotline, having to do with solidarity among cops who are inclined to ignore the law: a plot element that is carefully prepared for in early chapters and provides much of the narrative drive in later chapters. In fact, the novel develops slowly, mostly from the point of view of private detective Zoë Boehm (a minor character with a major effect in Herron's first book), mostly in interior monologue. Boehm is following (without a paying client) the aftermath of a previous case (which we see in progress in the flashback first chapter), concerning a teenager's fall from the 14th floor of a housing block. The boy's death gets little attention because the body of a gangster who had evaded prosecution is found on the same day, grabbing all the headlines. Boehm's paying customer is a businessman whose longtime secretary jumped or fell under a subway train: the client wants Boehm to find a boyfriend who entered the secretary's previously loveless life in the months before the event. Some of Boehm's ruminations have to do with love and the lack of it in women's lives, and with the kind of man who might provide relief from that lack for a woman in middle age. Some have to do with the case involving the teenager, his grandfather, and her lingering guilt due to her treatment of the boy during the earlier case, plus the facts of the gangster's life and death. Those thoughts develop slowly alongside Boehm's pursuit of the very slim leads in the secretary's death, until she treads on some toes and the narrative shifts into action and dialogue. The two-part structure has something in common with Herron's earlier Down Cemetery Road, but in the first novel the early sections are comic (at least in part) and the shifts in plot and narrative abrupt (to good effect). In the second novel, the early sections are more melancholy and the shifts, though still dramatic, are less frequent and less abrupt. The result is that the second novel lingers a while in a more literary fictional realm that is very effective but perhaps not to every crime reader's taste (I mentioned Kate Atkinson in connection with Down Cemetery Road, and that comparison, as well as another, to the novels of Sophie Hannah, also apply to The Last Voice You Hear. But when the narrative kicks into high gear, in its thriller sections, the novelist I though of was Stanley Ellin, a master of crime fiction (too little known today--and that brief mention is my "forgotten books Friday contribution) from a couple of decades ago--specifically a siege thriller that I think is called Stronghold. Herron's siege holds up very well in comparison to Ellin's, as well as carrying forward the unconventional serial killer story that Herron is telling. A different and rather more straightforward book than the others by Herron that I've read, The Last Voice You Hear has definitely shoved the followup (featuring at least two of the same characters) to the top of my reading pile.

Mick Herron's first: Down Cemetery Road

I liked Mick Herron's most recent novel, Slow Horses, a lot and have been looking for more of his writing. I found Reconstruction at the local library, and though I didn't like it quite as much as I did Slow Horses, it was very good. So I thought I should go after his other books in order of their writing, partly because the first three are a sort-of series. The first, Down Cemetery Road, begins with a prelude suggesting a conspiracy novel, but then shifts into a very funny satire of suburban life in Oxford, beginning with a dinner party hosted by Sarah and Mark with guests including a hippy-esque couple with ridiculous names and an obnoxious plutocrat whom Mark is courting as a customer at his investment bank. The dialogue at this mismatch of a party is nasty and funny, up until the explosion. It's hard to guess how much of the plot to give away from that point forward--it's really better to know as little as possible of what is to come, in order to enjoy the twists and turns that the author is going to take you through (my advice is not to read the blurbs or intro copy on the dustcover, just dive into the book). Though there are some spoilers in it, the best description of the book that I've seen is in a Shotsmag piece by Herron on the source of his plots (see here). As Herron says there, Sarah is the center of the novel, and he's very good at getting into her head (the narrative is in the third person, though, and does stray beyond Sarah's point of view). The story shifts from domesticity with violence and private detectives (initially seeming something like Kate Atkinson's detective novels in both the quality of the writing and the lightness of tone) to something like Christopher Brookmyre at his best. Plus there is a vein of spook-fiction in everything I've read by Herron so far, post-cold-war spy games of a very entertaining and pointedly skeptical order. I'll be going fairly quickly to his second novel, already in hand, and the third and I'll report on them in due course. But judging from the three novels I've read, and the first in the sort-of series, Herron is a major writer of considerable wit and talent who should be better known.

Beijing Noir: The 2nd "Mei Wang Mystery" from Diane Wei Liang

The followup to Diane Wei Liang's The Eye of Jade from a couple of years ago is a more assured novel, but retains the mixture of family, politics, and melancholy from the first book. The blurb on the U.K. paperback, "Bridget Jones meets Val McDermid," has some truth, and in the early chapters I though Bridget Jones was coming out ahead. But when private detective Mei Wang (who can't call herself a private detective since that profession is illegal in China) begins a new case, searching for a missing singer/actress, the story gets more serious about its status as a crime story. The tone of the novel has something in common with another Chinese emigre crime writer, Qiu Xiaolong, and perhaps it is the approximation of Chinese culture and speech that is the source of the similarity. In the work of both, characters speak in a somewhat literal and stilted style, quite unlike Western dialogue, particularly in the hard-boiled detective vein. Once the reader gets used to it, the style is not distracting in the case of either author, though. Liang participated in the Tiananmen events in Beijing in 1989, and her books are colored by the massacre and subsequent crackdown. In Paper Butterfly in particular, Tiananmen lies behind the characters' stories and motivations. In addition to Mei's investigation into the missing starlet, a second narrative concerning a young man sentenced to hard labor after Tiananmen threads through the book, finally joining the other story in an unexpected way and providing the somewhat downbeat but not pessimistic conclusion. The second Mei Wang book is altogether more satisfying than the first, and holds the readers interest very well in the several sittings it takes to consume its fairly short (by current standards) length.

Michael Dibdin's Ratking reconsidered

I've never been a big Michael Dibdin fan, without quite being able to put my finger on the reason for my coolness to his writing. I'm generally attracted to crime fiction set in Italy, and am a fan of a diverse range of mysteries set in Italy by writers both Italian and not. I recently went back to Dibdin's first Aurelio Zen novel, Ratking, to try to discover why he has never appealed to me (and I plan to continue on to the last Zen book, published posthumously, End Games). After Ratking (and before reading End Games) at least some of the particular quality of Dibdin's writing is clear. The plot of Ratking is very noir, looking back toward Ross MacDonald among others: Zen, a policeman shunted into administrative tasks after his involvement in the investigation (or non-investigation) into the Moro kidnapping, is reactivated to deal with a very nasty family whose patriarch was kidnapped some months earlier. So far, so good: the Moro case has been the source of much good fiction and film from Italy. Zen is a perfect outsider, being a disgraced detective from Venice dropped into the insular hill town of Perugia. There is much cynicism on Zen's part regarding the family, the police, and Italian politics, and cynicism is always a good thing in noir fiction, and an attitude shared by Camilleri's Commissario Montalbano and Leon's Commissario Brunetti. But already in this first book, Dibdin indicates a key factor of the series: Zen is not anchored in his professional or personal life into a community (in neither a positive nor a negative way). He is always, as in this first case, "parachuted" in to various cities to deal with a situation. His girlfriend in Ratking, not a central character but an interesting one, dumps him at the end. His mother, who is a central character in spite of being mostly off-stage, is barely characterized beyond her motherhood and her isolation in a Roman apartment. And Zen drifts through the case in Perugia, among a cast of unlikeable (though believably so) characters among the family, the police, and the perpetrators of the various crimes that had already occurred before the beginning of the story and those that occur during its progress. When the solution is finally arrived at and a form of justice has been achieved (though in a partial sense that will be familiar to readers of Leon and Camilleri), it's difficult to care too much: neither the unmasked killer nor the victim and his family elicit much emotion from the reader, neither sympathy nor antipathy. Only in the final paragraphs does an event (carefully prepared for in early chapters) give a final twist that provides some satisfaction (and a considerable link to later books int he series). In other words, I found the book rather flat, though well-written, in spite of the considerable appeal of Zen himself. I have some sense that Dibdin's books are a bit of a throwback to an earlier era of crime writing, but I can't quite pin down where that notion comes from. Perhaps after reading End Games I'll have a different opinion (though the very slight, comic penultimate Zen book, Back to Bologna, reviewed here some time ago, didn't change my attitude toward the series). I'm sure there are vehement alternative opinions about Dibdin out there, and I'd love to hear them--I'd even love to be convinced that I'm wrong.

Mick Herron, Reconstruction

The title of Mick Herron's Reconstruction initially is a bit of metafiction: the narrator inserts himself briefly to announce that the text is a post-incident reconstruction of events leading up to a hostage situation in a nursery school in Oxford. But there are many other levels of reconstruction, of the past and of a particular nation, that resonate in the title. As with the more recent Slow Horses, the security service is involved (this time MI6 instead of MI5, and there are lots of twists and turns--though not quite as abrupt and not quite as much fun as the about-faces in Slow Horses. A young man with a Spanish name and a gun appears in a nursery just as it is about to open: only one parent, his twins, one teacher, and a cleaning woman are present, and the teacher heroically shuts down the school and chases away the arriving parents and children, then goes back into the school, in a heroic gesture (possibly) or from a sense of responsibility to her students still inside. Herron does a good job of keeping this claustrophobic situation tense and lively, with just enough action among the police and security service outside the school to broaden out the story. For my taste, though, the close focus on the schoolroom got to be a bit too much and it was a relief when finally the hostage situation ends, and the novel shifts for the final twists, having to do with both who the criminals are and who finds him or herself actually at the center of things (rather than egotistically imagining that they are at the center of things, one of the major themes of the book). The book is tight and enjoyable, but I think Slow Horses is better, tighter, twistier, and funnier. But on the basis of both books, I'm trying to get hold of Herron's earlier detective series, which promises something of the same pleasures but also something different.

First thoughts on Jo Nesbø's The Snowman

I may post about The Snowman again later, but for now: Nesbø writes beautifully, with a style that seems simple but is interlaced with humor, metaphor, character, and menace. Though many readers will figure out who the killer is long before Detective Harry Hole does, the fun in reading the book really comes in reading the prose and watching the plot twist and turn through numerous red herrings and false leads until it reaches its inevitable conclusion. There are images running through the text that tie the whole book together, some of them relevant to the story directly, others simply accompanying the tale with their own metaphorical power. Don Bartlett's translation is excellent, as usual. Perhaps not the Harry Hole book to start with, but if this is the one you can get, go for it--any Nesbø book will take you where Harry is going, and with a lot of pleasure (not to mention blood and terror) in the journey. The plot here concerns a serial killer who preys on young mothers and leaves a snowman as a signature. There are too many suspects rather than too few, and along the way as they police close in on one or another, you know they're following the wrong track because there are 200 pages left. But the detective team, including a new partner for Harry, Katrine Bratt, who is intriguing and unusual and has her own very significant impact on the story.

Newest Italian crime series in English translation

Luigi Guiccardi's Inspector Cataldo's Criminal Summer has just been released in English in the U.K. by Hersilia Press, with a translation by Iain Halliday. They've wisely chosen to start the series with the first book (unlike many other series in translation) and this novel augurs well for the series as a whole. It's told in a plain-spoken voice by a third-person omniscient narrator, with a straightforward writing style that's a pleasure to read. It's more of a puzzle mystery than noir, and something of a throwback to an era when the psychology of the characters was of more importance than any sympathy that a reader might feel for them. Cataldo himself is nicely characterized, particularly through his feelings about the "girl he left behind" in Sicily when he took up a post in the fictional small town of Guiglia (near Modena in Northern Italy). She not only refused to move with him, she dumped him when he accepted the transfer, setting up a dynamic between them and also with Cataldo's mother, who thought they were perfect for each other. The mystery at hand concerns a traffic accident from 18 years in the past, during which a man died and a considerable sum of money disappeared. Now someone is reviving the memory of the crash, causing consternation among a circle of friends that includes two competing academics (one more succesful than the other), a real estate agent, a priest, and several others. There's a little academic satire in the story (especially between the two rivals with whom the novel begins), along with some insight into the particularities of the Italian university system (and Guicciardi is himself a historian, but like Cataldo was born in Sicily and ended up in the Modena area), but the action is actually confined to the small town and to Cataldo's interviews with the circle of friends. Cataldo does have an assistant, but he's a minor character: after the introductory chapters leading up to the first murder (and these chapters are very engaging in themselves), it's mostly Cataldo's ruminations, his interviews, and a few glimpses of the murders. Of the recent Italian crime novels I've read and reviewed here, Guiccardi's novel is the most distinctive, mining older traditions of mystery fiction in a very modern fashion. Something about the tone and style strikes me as being very European, turning away from the Anglo-American style of not only of recent authors writing in English about Italy but also some of the recent cinematic and hard-boiled crime writing in Italian. There are evidently a few other Italian crime writers making their English debuts in upcoming months, and Inspector Cataldo's first case augurs well for what is to follow.

Crime in Florence: Christobel Kent's A Time of Mourning

Florence has of course been the scene of crime fiction already, most visibly in the Guarnaccia novels of Magdalen Nabb. Christobel Kent, who has written several novels set in Italy, takes up the mantle of the English-crimewriter-in-Florence, now that Nabb is gone, and the first of her series based on the character Sandro Cellini has just been released. Kent shares some ground (more than just the city) with Nabb, but with significant differences. Both writers focus on neighborhoods, families, and personal/domestic crimes (rather than on globalized crimes, serial killers, conspiracies, and mafia criminals, such as is the case with another writer setting his works in Florence, the Italian former policeman Michele Giuttari). Nabb's Marshall of the Carabinieri is stationed at the Pitti Palace, and this first case of Kent's Cellini hovers around the Carabinieri station at the Pitti and the neighboring Boboli Gardens (but like Guarnaccia, Cellini roams far and wide across the city in pursuit of the facts in the case). But Cellini is a private detective, a disgraced policeman (forced out by departmental politics as well as his own actions). Cellini is, however, not a hard-boiled cop (he sympathizes with victims and others rather in the way that Guarnaccia does). Kent's plot turns rather a lot on coincidence (I'm tempted to say that she treats Florence more like an English village than the city it is, tending toward "two degrees of separation") rather than on perception of character (more Nabb's technique). The narrative is divided among third-person narrations from the points of view of Cellini, his wife, Iris (a young English student whose roommate, Veronica or Ronnie, has disappeared), and occasionally a couple of other chaacters, and in the first part of the novel, the narrative tends to summarize rather than present the dialogue (later, the dialogue is more commonly presented directly, and usually to better effect). Cellini is uncertain about his new profession, and his wife is helping, even pushing him, to set up his office and develop a cleintele. His first client is an elderly woman whose husband has apparently committed suicide, but she doesn't believe he could have done so. The case becomes intertwined with the missing student (the first of the coincidences) and we get inside the private art school where both young women were studying drawing. The story moves along rather slowly, with some reference to the "Room with a View" sort of English fiction set in Florence (Iris is in a sense a traveling companion for her roommate, engaged by Ronnie's mother) as Cellini uncovers some facts and has others presented to him by characters he encounters, but the pace picks up in the last third because of a sense of urgency created around Iris and her own search for what has happened to the vivacious and troublesome Ronnie. Kent also frequently (and to good effect) uses the novelist's trick of ending a chapter just before a new fact is revealed, delaying the revelation until other elements of the story have caught up. A Time of Mourning is at the opposite end of the crime spectrum from Tobias Jones's The Salati Case, recently reviewed here: where the story and the detective in Salati Case are both hard-boiled, the detective and the story in A Time of Mourning are rather soft, more in the fashion of the cozy. Even the covers of the two books suggest the difference in content: Jones's book shows dark, narrow streets of Parma and Kent's shows a rather idealized view of the Arno (and the river does, in fact, play a specific role in the book). Both novels use their respective Italian locations effectively (though Kent is more specific about on- and off-the-beaten track sections of Florence), but the two books appeal to different tastes in crime writing. I have to say my taste generally runs more to the hard-boiled or noir, but Kent's novel is far better than the aforementioned Giuttari's Florentine fiction, in terms of the writing and the plotting, and certainly a valid pretender to Nabb's crown as queen of Florentine crime.

New detective series set in Italy: Tobias Jones's The Salati Case

Tobias Jones is the author of a nonfiction book about Italy, through the lens of an Englishman, the author himself, who moved to Parma. His new detective series starring a loner private detective named Castagnetti is set in an unnamed city that is surely Parma (note the frequent references to the local ham), a locale that is vividly evoked (along with the nearby cities and towns, as the detective travels from place to place by car and train in pursuit of the truth about a man who disappeared 14 years earlier, while waiting for a train. The man's mother has just died, and a notary (a much more important official in Italy than elsewhere) hires Castagnetti according to the dictates of the mother's will, to determine whether the missing man (and her heir, along with his brother, of her estate) is alive or dead. Jones refers in interviews to his admiration for (and debt to) Ross Macdonald, and indeed the current detective novels that Castagnetti's story resembles most is Declan Hughes's Macdonald-homage series set in Dublin. But there is perhaps a bit more of Chandler's Philip Marlowe in Castagnetti, as well as Macdonald's Archer. Both Hughes and Jones portray broken families in the context of troubled societies, but Castagnetti is moodier, more alone than Hughes's Ed Loy. His only friend is less a personality than a property owner who hosts Castagnetti's beehives, and perhaps the most personal moment in the story shows the detective turning honeycomb into bee balm, a pot of which he presents to a charming but reluctant witness in an attempt to elicit information. The story is complex, and with a jaundiced view of Italian politics that will be familiar to readers of Italian crime fiction by natives and immigrant authors like Donna Leon (or for that matter readers of nonfiction and newspaper articles about Italy). The Salati Case is fairly short, 260 pages in an "A format," mass-market-sized paperback, but is a thoroughly fleshed out tale full of interesting characters. It's also less bloody than many current crime novels, though there is violence against murder victims and against the detective himself: Jones begins not with a corpse but with a missing person, and when he encounters violence against himself, it's in (somewhat delayed) response to a bit of detective bravado that the reader may find as just cause for the beating he gets. One quibble, and perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself about Italian police matters can help with this: Castagnetti seems to be looking for his Carabinieri contact at the Questura; I thought that the national police were found at the Questura, while the Carabinieri, a military police force, had their station elsewhere. There's another Castagnetti case in the works, and it will be interesting to see where Jones takes his Parma detective. There's also another new detective series set in Italy (in Florence), by another English writer, Christobel Kent, whose A Time of Mourning (which shares a bit of pacing but not much in tone with The Salati Case) will be reviewed here soon.

Shane Maloney: Sucked In

Australian author Shane Maloney has been compared to Carl Hiaasen but his books actually have more in common with Garbhan Downey's comic crime/political novels of Northern Ireland (though Maloney's comedy is a bit less manic than Downey's). It took me a while to get a copy of the 6th and most recent of Maloney's Murray Whelan novels, published a couple of years ago, but the wait was worth it. Though Murray (a first-person narrator) wise cracks as usual Sucked In is a bit more seriously political than its predecessors. The story begins with a body emerging from a draining lake (shades of Arnaldur Indridason, though in a much lighter vein) and continues with a detailed tour through the politics of the state of Victoria. It's nearing the end of the millennium, and Murray is now a member of the state parliament, and his Australian Labour Party is, as usual, out of power. Another death, related to the corpse in the lake, creates an opening in the federal parliament and party officials, national and local, are jockeying for position in the race to fill the seat. The murder mystery is at the center of the political struggle as well, but the book is really not a "Murray Whelan Thriller" as the cover blurb promises: there's a bit of violence and a bit of blackmail, but the focus is mostly on political matters. For anyone familiar with Murray, the political focus will be no surprise and no disappointment, but for those unfamiliar with his career, it might be better to start from the beginning (or perhaps with the pair of TV movies made from the first two books some years ago, intermittently available outside Australia, Stiff and The Brush Off). Once hooked, it's Murray's voice that will lead you on through his personal travails and (very occasional) triumphs. Plus some very funny sex scenes, particularly in the new book.

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

I began Mick Herron's new Slow Horses with some hesitation, not knowing anything about the author and not being a huge fan of the "MI5" or "CIA" thriller. And Slow Horses is indeed about MI5, the U.K. domestic intelligence service (and subject of the TV series that's called "Spooks" in the U.K. and "MI5" in the U.S.). But Herron is not a conventional thriller writer, and Slow Horses is not conventional in any way. Just when you think you know what's going on, the novel twists away into something different, often enough that the effect is comic rather than annoying: Herron isn't tricking the reader, he's creating a story that, while remaining a thriller, is a farce with a deeply cynical attitude toward the intelligence establishment (more so even than "Spooks" or Le Carre), the government, and the general public. It's very difficult to say anything about the plot (or even the characters) without spoiling the plot (and the fun), but in its barest bones, Slow Horses is about a group of agents cast out of the inner circle of the organization (literally and figuratively) for various reasons (mistakes like leaving a computer disk on the train--one element stolen from reality). In fact, the first chapters of the book are about a spectacular mistake on the part of what seems to be the central character, River Cartwright (whose very name suggests a different sort of novel), and his attempt to redeem himself by stealing a file from a flash drive that he is not supposed to see. But the process he sets in motion shifts and twists so that a reader is pulled along both by the plot (murky though it is at times) and by the pleasure of the chase that the author provides. This is one of those novels that uses all the resources of writing--it is very much a written story rather than a film-on-the-page, like so many thrillers. Even when you think you've caught Herron in a typo or an inconsistency, beware of making any assumptions (even that is perhaps too much of a spoiler). If anyone has any recommendations about Herron's other detective and spy novels, please pass them along: I'm definitely looking for another one...

Gunshot Road, by Adrian Hyland

Australian Adrian Hyland's two "Emily Tempest Investigation" novels differ from Peter Temple's novels of Australia in a number of ways: Tempest is a half-Aboriginal woman who frew up in the Outback, left to travel the world, and is now back and looking for a "Centre," as she calls the region, of her own. The narrative is straightforward, and entirely from Emily's point of view. Where Temple's narrative is splintered by abrupt and slangy dialogue, Hyland's is more linear, punctuated by terms from local languages and mythologies. The mythologies are particularly important: as in his first novel (Moonlight Downs or Diamond Dove, depending on the country) the dreamings, songs (meaning much more than music) and divinities of the native people are taken seriously as an integral part of the community and the landscape. In Gunshot Road, maps are a particular focus, and not only those graphed on paper, along with a legendary figure who apparently buried under a collapsed mountain years before. Emily is more on her own here, and less of an amateur detective. She has been hired as a kind of auxiliary police officer, in training in the town, and only occasionally in touch with the people of her village (where much of the crucial action took place in Moonlight Downs). She's adrift, and uncertain about which of the townspeople, miners, suspect, police, victims, and even a Chinese artist she can trust. The mystery isn't so much the point of the book as the texture of Emily's world, and it's a rich adventure even without the action that erupts (mostly right on top of her) occasionally. She's an appealing and (something to remark upon given the gender difference between author and character) believable character, and the series reveals a very different facet of the Australian experience from the others in the crop of the current, remarkable burst of creativity in Australian crime fiction (not only Temple but Garry Disher, Shane Maloney--whose most recent Murray Whelan book I've just managed to get hold of), and many others whose names you can browse here, at the Australian Crime Fiction Database.

A Paragon of Virtue, by Christian von Ditfurth

A Paragon of Virtue, Christian von Ditfurth's 2002 novel set mostly in Hamburg (published in English by Toby Press in 2008) has all the elements of a cozy. It's set in academic circles (the main character, Josef Stachelman, is a historian). Stachelmann, who can't seem to finish his the research that will gain him tenure in the German academic system, becomes an amateur detective when his friend Ossi, a detective in Hamburg's homicide division, asks him for help in a strange case: a prominent real estate magnate is being attacked for reasons unknown--so far his wife and two of his three children have been murdered. The hapless academic, who's having trouble with a female student who is coming on to him (to get the grade she needs) as well as having constant worries about his lack of progress on his own book and recurring problems with rheumatoid arthritis, is recognizable as an almost stock character of the cozy (of the amateur detective variety). But Stachelmann's academic subject is the Holocaust, and he begins to suspect that the murders lead back to the German politics, bureaucracy, and police of the Nazi era. Ossi stops listening to him (after a colleague of his is run over, perhaps murdered, right in front of him) and Stachelmann goes off on his own (with the occasional help of an attractive female colleague). The conflict between the cozy/mystery format and the awful events of both past and present (and the greed and lies of the past and present) keeps the book interesting for readers disposed toward both lighter and darker realms of crime fiction. The narrative alternates among Stachelmann, Ossi, and a murderous old man, all in the third person but hewing closely to the point of view of those three. Stachelmann's portion of the narrative is lively and believable, revealing much about German academic life, Nazi and contemporary bureaucracy, the archives of a reunited Germany, and the horrors of the Holocaust, and the old man's narrative is chilling. The police narrative, carried forward mostly in dialogue among the detectives, lacks a convincing vernacular language, and the police go back and forth from the real estate magnate/victim and several of his associates without making much progress. But Ossi is likable, and both his murdered colleague and the female detective who replaces her are interesting characters with lively voices, not intimidated by the male-dominated climate of the police force. As you might guess, the story is more ruminative than action-oriented, though there are several short eplisodes of action and suspense, especially in the later part of the novel. There is, though, a pervading atmosphere of anguish and threat (not so much on the husband-father-victim's part but among all the other characters) and Stachelmann is forced to confront his own family's part in the horrors of his parents' generation. A Paragon of Virtue is evidently the first novel in a series based on Stachelmann's character, though none of the others has been (or is projected to be, at this point) translated. Less hard-boiled than the Kayankaya novels of Jakob Arjouni and more distanced from the war than Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir series, von Ditfurth has carved out a particular niche in German crime fiction (or crime fiction set in Germany), oscillating between the country's past and present. It would be interesting to know whether the later novels follow that pattern as well, and how well Stachelmann and Ossi hold up as running characters--if anyone is familiar with the later books, please let us know.

Peter Temple's Truth

The only Truth in Peter Temple's new novel of the Melbourne homicide squad is not what you might think (I won't spoil the revelation). The novel is a complex story with an ambivalent moral sense, told in terse coded dialogue among the police and an almost stream of consciousness narrative in the third person but from the point of view of the new head of homicide, Stephen Villani. Villani is landed with two murder scenes, one a young girl in a new high-rise development and the other a torture-murder in a drug gang's house. He's also dealing with the breakup of his marriage, the descent into drugs of his youngest daughter, the revival of an incident from earlier in his career that threatens to land him in jail, and his father's refusal to leave his fire-threatened farm. There's more, but that gives you an idea of the mixture of plotlines in the book. Truth brings together the social conscience of The Broken Shore with the quick, oblique language of the Jack Irish books (as well as the horseracing theme of those books). Three characters from the other books make an appearance: Jack Irish does a cameo and Joe Cashin and Detective Dove from The Broken Shore are secondary but important characters (Dove, recovered from the shooting in the earlier novel, more so than Cashin). Villani is facing a multiple fork in the road of his life and career, and it isn't clear until the very end which way he will go (a lot in fact is left unresolved at the end, more in his private than his professional life). And which way he goes is not altogether by choice: fate and the influence of various superiors have a big part in the decision. There's so much going on that the two murder cases sometimes recede a bit into the background--though always nagging at Villani's mind and conscience. So although there is a very large element of the police procedural, the progress in the cases is less central (and sometimes more confusing) than in a straight procedural. In fact, the novelist I was most often reminded of is Joseph Wambaugh: like Wambaugh, Temple derives most of the comic element in the story from the dry wit and interplay among the cops. And like Wambaugh, crimes or moral lapses among the police are a big part of the atmosphere (along with stories about things that have happened among the cops in the past). But although authenticity in the depiction of the police is achieved by both, Temple reaches beyond that toward the complexity of Villani's life as a whole (partly in the stream of consciousness narrative that I mentioned before, a narrative style not chosen by Wambaugh in any of his books that I've read), from childhood forward, and also provides a concrete sense of Melbourne and Australia quite different from Wambaugh's southern California. Having caught up with Temple's current writing, I'm driven to go back and find the 2 Irish novels that I haven't read, as well as a couple of stand-alone books that I've had a hard time finding (but are apparently available second hand here and there on the Web). I have a nagging sense that I haven't captured something important about Truth, so I may come back to it--it's a book that has a lot going on (and a lot to offer).

South African crime novel by French author Caryl Férey

Zulu, the first novel by French author of "polar," (as the French call crime fiction) Caryl Férey is about Cape Town, South Africa: truly an international crime novel. Zulu (published this spring in English by Europa Editions) begins as a police procedural, centered on the head of the homicide team of the Cape Town police, Ali Neuman, whose Zulu background will become relevant to the plot, though, as it shifts from mystery to pulp noir to thriller (almost to futuristic thriller in its vision of an extreme category of crime), in constantly shifting plot lines circling around the drugs and violence in the townships surrounding Cape Town and the murder of two white women. Férey has a tendency to explain South Africa to the reader, more so than the indigenous crime writers of the country (Deon Meyer for one) whose first audience has been South African readers who don't need the "back story" filled in. In that sense, perhaps, Zulu is a book that could introduce South Africa as a setting for crime fiction to those unfamiliar with the country's history. And Férey gives a very comprehensive "tour" of Cape Town and environs, from the beaches (some with penguins) to the townships to Table Mountain, to the Cape of Good Hope, and several surrounding towns. But a reader will need considerable tolerance for fictional violence as the novel shifts from "policier" to pulp to thriller, as the tone shifts from the struggle against ruthless gangs to drug-induced of almost ritual intensity to sociopathic mass murder and international corporate crime. The novel becomes almost apocalyptic as it leaves behind more and more corpses and any sense of hope for the country (much less for this story) becomes less and less viable. Roger Smith's recent novel of Cape Town gang violence is violent and nearly hopeless, but Férey's raises the violence to another level. And Férey's story shifts from driven by dialogue and action to historical information to the biographical background of his characters and to philosophical and politically impassioned narrative: in that way, it seems more in one of the traditions of French crime writing, a philosophical and tendentious approach--but Férey never forgets about his story and the reader will be pulled along through the various stages and into identification with those who are killed and those few (people and values) that survive. This impressive and distinctive novel is a different angle on the South African crime story, and a bleaker one than some of the viewpoints offered by others in that rapidly developing field. After reading Zulu, the reader, a little stunned by the experience, may be left hoping for the no less jaundiced but perhaps more hopeful (and occasionally myth-making) Cape Town crime stories offered by Deon Meyer, whose new novel is to be released in English very soon.

Snow Angels, by James Thompson

Snow Angels, by Kentucky-born but Finland-resident James Thompson, is billed as "An Inspector Vaara novel," implying that Kari Vaara, the leading character and the focus of almost all of the narrative, will be featured in a crime series. There are a number of interesting characters, a lot of interesting background for Vaara, and there's a lot of plot going on in this short novel--but almost all of it is resolved by the end of this volume. A comparison with Arnaldur Indridason is apt, because both his Erlendur and Thompson's Vaara lost a sibling and thereby incurred a lifetime of guilt and regret. But by page 264, Vaara seems to have worked through it (if that's not too much of a spoiler--at least I won't say how he accomplishes that, or who helps him). Erlendur's whole personality (and his pastime) revolve around his dead brother. Similarly, there's an ex-wife in both cases (with a lot of residual nasty feelings), but Thompson deals with Vaara's ex-wife in rather absolute terms here, while Erlendur has only reached a face-to-face confrontation (engineered by their children) by the 6th translated novel (the 8th overall, I think). And one of the most interesting characters in Snow Angels, someone whom we might expect to explore further, disappears in a plot twist that provides surprise but denies further development of the character. There are virtues in literary delay, in the withholding of information and even action, especially in an extended series. All of the above is merely an observation, not a criticism of Thompson's book--which evokes northern Finland (above the Arctic Circle) in a lively fashion (as lively as the dour Finns permit) and gives us not only Vaara but his American wife, his family, the denizens of both the town and the resort (of which his wife is manager), and a lot of insight into the Finnish character in general. The plot is very violent, in very graphic ways, and there are several despicable characters providing various theories of the crime that begins the novel (the sexual and racist murder of a Somali-born actress). There are, especially surrounding those unpleasant types, various side-plots and criminal acts to fill out the main narrative and to complicate Vaara's life. I enjoyed Snow Angels, and would probably read a sequel, but there isn't the pull of unresolved plot and character development that draws a reader from, to give a rather extreme instance, one to another of Jo Nesbø's novels.

Reading Finnish noir in an appropriate landscape

The photo of the day is the view out my front door, as we're socked in by 2-3 feet of snow (and it's still snowing). It happens that I'm reading James Thompson's Finnish police procedural, Snow Angels, after having read Stan Jones's bush-noir Alaskan novel Village of the Ghost Bears earlier in the week. Either I'm living in the perfect setting for reading these Arctic-Circle-winter-noir books, or I'm jinxing the weather here just outside Washington, D.C., don't know which...

Short post on Crime Always Pays by Declan Burke

Short review because I'm thumb typing on the same iPod touch on which I read Declan Burke's kindle-only novel, via new kindle for iPhone app. Crime Always Pays is part road movie and part farce, reminding me sometimes of Elmore Leonard, sometimes of Allan Guthrie (particularly Savage Night), sometimes of Donald Westlake (particularly the Dortmunder books), and sometimes of the Coen brothers (particularly Blood Simple)--sometimes all at once. There are a lot of characters, in three (maybe more) groups pursuing one another across Europe from Ireland to the Greek islands, and the novel is mostly conversation among them, in short overlapping chapters. It's a sequel to Burke's The Big O, and it starts immediately after the events of that book--a reader not familiar with the prequel may feel a bit lost at first, but never fear, the author recaps who's who and what's been going on often enough to let everyone keep pace. And a furious pace it is, continuing right on through the last word (and beyond). Highly recommended for the kindle-enabled, on one platform or another. A side note--I found the kindle-for-iphone app comfortable, and clear (with an adjustable font, bright screen, etc., on my ipod) but a little frustrating--no page numbers so it's difficult to tell where you are, and it's clumsy to flip back a few pages to refresh your memory in a complicated plot. But satisfactory, if not perfect--I'm holding out on buying an e-reader per se until the post-ipad shakeout occurs. Anybody else reading kindle on iphone, ipod?

Village of the Ghost Bears, by Stan Jones

The third novel in the Nathan Active series by Stan Jones, Frozen Sun, was almost urban, with its themes of prostitution, rape, and despair. The new, fourth, novel, Village of the Ghost Bears is back to the tundra and the town of Chukchi, the primary settings of the first two Active novels. Nathan, for those unfamiliar with the very interesting series, is an Inupiat Alaska State Trooper who was raised in Anchorage and is thus an outsider in his own culture (the series begins with his being assigned to the town of his birth, where his mother still lives). The new novel begins as Nathan and his new girlfriend (the emotionally damaged Grace Palmer of Frozen Sun) are dropped off beside a remote lake for some r&r, but instead discover a body in the water and then get a message about a deadly fire back in Chukchi. What follows is a complex investigation involving a lot of bush-airplane travel (some of the suspects and a lot of the leads are in areas so remote that they're inacessible except by air). One of the pleasures of this series, very evident here, is the language, enriched by terms from the Inupiaq language, by the very local sense of humor, and by the varieties of local dialects of English. The characters (suspects and bystanders) in this novel include a very convincing schizophrenic twin, a resourceful bush pilot and his irascible wife, an ambitious Inupiat policeman, and a large number of interesting characters who are dead from the beginning (in the fire), plus the damaged Grace and Nathan himself, who is uncertain about where he belongs culturally and personally. Nathan's desire to get out of Chukchi and back to Anchorage, a persistent theme of the series, reaches a climax in a decision that confronts him at the end of the book. I usually only review non-U.S. crime fiction, but Stan Jones's Alaska is so different from the normal U.S.-crime-novel setting that I can't resist including his books, and his more-remote-than-rural locale is a unique environment for his sometimes very dark stories. The blend of Inupiat, Korean, Hispanic, white, and black population of Village of the Ghost Bears is lively and full of conflict--more than enough reason to seek out the Nathan Active novels.

Good news for the Kindle-deprived (not to mention Declan Burke fans)

Good news for those who, like myself, don't own a Kindle (and thus have up to now not been able to get Declan Burke's Kindle-only crime novel, Crime Always Pays). Kindle is now available as an i-phone or ipod-touch app (free), and Crime Always Pays is quite legible on an ipod-touch screen (plus it's only US$1.25. PLUS Kindle is now also available as a free downloadable application for the PC, and soon to be available for Mac. Is this Kindle-strikes-back, after the rollout of the iPad?
For info on the Kindle app click here.

Spam in your comments?

Does anyone else (using Blogspot or other blog sites) have trouble with spammers inserting themselves into your comments? I'm getting three or four of these a day, some in English and some in Chinese and other languages. It's not too difficult to prevent them getting through, with the moderation tools, but it's still annoying to have that many trying to get posted every day. Any thoughts on how prevalent this is, or on what to do about it?

Wallander: The Joker

From late in the Swedish TV series's first season, Kurt Wallander: Jokern is one of the liveliest so far. There's a visiting cop, Frank Borg, who is more like an American loose cannon type cop (or perhaps a Gene Hunt-type) than is typical in this series or in Scandinavian crime fiction generally. Borg is implicated in the murder of a restaurant owner in Ystad and a theft from The Joker restaurant in Malmö, an establishment with organized-crime connections. There are numerous twists and turns in terms of the identity of the murderer, and Stefan (played by Ola Rapace) has a bigger role than usual (albeit showing him following the lead of the rogue Borg in an way that at first is unflattering to Stefan and ultimately career-threatening). Wallander (Krister Henriksson) is spiky in this one, frequently irritated by Stefan, Borg, and the organized crime figures in Malmö, as well as irritable toward his daughter Linda--perhaps in fact a bit closer to the Wallander of the novels than is typically the case in this TV series. There is a fleeting, comic homage to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Beck novels, or more specifically to the film made of The Abominable Man (retitled as Man on the Roof) by Bo Widerberg: Borg says to Stefan that someone they have under surveillance is always in uniform, like "that character in Man on the Roof" who even wears his uniform at home, off duty. Perhaps Borg is more likely to have seen the movie than read the book, but the reference to the film rather than the novel also pays homage to Widerberg's movie, recently singled out in interviews with Sjöwall as the only adaptation of the Beck character and the novels that was in her mind satisfactory. Jakob Eklund, as Borg, is rather prominently featured in the poster seen here--perhaps a better-known "guest star" in the series? Or just a nod to the character's importance in this episode, perhaps. This episode, and the series, are in any case highly recommended.

Piling on: my review of Rome Noir

The reviews that I've seen for the Italian entry in Akashic Books excellent city noir series, Rome Noir, edited by Chiara Stangalino and the estimable Maxim Jakubowski, were almost entirely negative. Bruce Grossman at Bookgasm, here, complains that almost none of the entries are actually crime stories, and A. Ross complains at Amazon.com that none of the writers are from Rome or are much interested in portraying the city. I have to say that I agree with both. Rome Noir is the first of the Akashic collections that I've been disappointed with. After Bitter Lemon's excellent translation of Giancarlo De Cataldo's Crimini collection, I was salivating over the possibility of another crop of stories by hitherto untranslated crime writers and new stories by writers who are already accessible in English. I read on to the end of Rome Noir, though it was a hard slog in many cases, hoping that the next story would justify my hopes. The collection includes several stories that are really science fiction, a number that are noir in the moodiness and language but without crime as the centerpiece, and the two by well known writers (to an English-language audience), Carlo Lucarelli and Gianrico Carofiglio, are short and perfunctory. Giuseppe Genna, whose interesting In the Name of Ishmael has been translated, offers a conspiracy tale in line with the sensibility of that book, and Marcello Fois, whose historical mystery The Advocate is available in English, offers a tantalizing tale of an interrogation across lines of generation and gender. The best of the stories is Antonio Pascale's complex, almost novella-like, tale of greed and genrifiation. Several others were at least mildly interesting, but not really memorable. All of the stories are well written, and the editors are to be commended for including so many women writers (5 out of 16, which doesn't sound like much until you start comparing that proportion to other collections of translated crime fiction). Several stories turn on sudden twists that seem tricky or contrived, and the "crime" in a couple of them is actually suicide. What I initially missed in the collection was the "placed" noir writing of Crimini and other entries in the city noir series, and what occurred to me later, while mulling over my disappointment, was that the collection gave a sense that the writers were more interested in "writing," in an intellectual sense, than in the genre to which they were ostensibly contributing. Not that good writing and intellectual writers cannot create great noir fiction (they can and do), but that seemingly these and certainly other writers who dip into noir without giving its history and terms due consideration (even in the violating of them) don't frequently achieve great noir or great fiction. Has anyone else read this collection? Any comments about it, or other volumes in the Akashic series, or other collections of noir short stories?

Wake Up Dead, by Roger Smith

The story told in Roger Smith's new Cape Town noir novel, Wake Up Dead, is chock-full of violent acts, some casual, some sadistic, and a lot of it up close and personal. Smith provides a catalogue of the ways that characters in a crime novel might meet pain and death, from serial murder to gang violence to rape (of both male and female victims) to immolation to revenge both long-considered and of momentary impulse. A car-jacking as Joe and Roxy Palmer arrive home brings them together with the beautiful Disco and the ugly Godwyn, denizens of the Cape Flats slums on the prowl in the wealthy Cape Town suburbs. But the highjacking gives Roxy the opportunity for a life-changing act as well as bringing her on a collision course with Billy Afrika, a mercenary to whom Joe owes money (not to mention Disco's prison-loving gangter lover or rapist (depending on whose point of view), a would-be African insurgent leader, and a dirty cop determined to escape his dangerous Cape Flats beat. That's only part of the large cast, drawn from the various racial communities of the Flats (the somewhat less violent and definitely more scenic city of Cape Town only makes brief appearances here as the action spills over from the "informal settlements" and the more substantial communities still separated racially and financially from the city). The violence and the authenticity of Smith's novel remind me a bit of George Pelecanos's novels of Washington DC, but without the moral center that has become increasingly central to Pelecanos's novels. In that respect, the frequent comparisons of Smith's two novels to Elmore Leonard is more apt (and Smith shares not only the amorality but also the convincingly twisted plotting of that master of the crime novel). Wake Up Dead is one of the most violent books I've read in recent months, but also one of the most complulsively readable: Smith's style is clean and well-constructed, and his characters are convincing if not sympathetic, even when quickly sketched (inevitable with such a large cast). Smith frequently uses physical characteristics to indicate personality as well as to stitch characters into the story: the dirty cop at the center of the story is drawn as a grotesque, the tragic meth addict who has attracted the love of the imprisoned gang leader is transcendentally beautiful, Billy Afrika is covered in burn scars inflicted on him by that same gang leader in their youth in the Flats, Roxy is a former model, and so on--each character is drawn visually in vivid terms that reinforce their speech and actions, but their appearance has in each case also pushed them into their current way of life. That device is yet another way in which a crime story can be cinematic (see my previous post on Police, Adjective for more on this topic) and it's also an effective and time-honored literary device. Used poorly, it's a device that produces cliche, but used effectively, as in this case, it adds a visual and even metaphorical dimension to the characters. So, do I recommend Wake Up Dead? How violent does a book have to be for a reviewer to need to supply a warning? Are there crime novels that you've found unreadable, regardless of other virtues, if the violence is too much? And is is the responsibility of a crime novel to reflect the brutality of one of the most violent cities in the world (also one of the most beautiful)?

Inspector Coliandro and Inspector De Luca

MhZ Networks in the U.S. ran the first in a series of Italian police dramas drawn from an untranslated novel (Day of the Wolf) by Carlo Lucarelli, author of the very different De Luca and Ispettore Negro novels that have been translated into English. Coliandro is very different from either, it's a tongue-in-cheek TV comedy-drama about a young cop who thinks he's a super cop when in fact he's an inveterate screwup (in the first story, he's been demoted to running the supply room after arresting an undercover Carabinieri). The parody in the series can be seen even in the attached poster for the "pilot" episode's mannerism. In looking for info on Coliandro on-line, I discovered that there's also an RAI (Italian TV) series based on Lucarelli's De Luca novels (which follow a detective during and after the fall of the Fascist regime at the end of World War II). The "Chief Detective De Luca" series is a prequel, at least in the beginning, following De Luca's career as a cop in prewar Bologna, before the events of the trilogy (now a tetralogy in Italian, I think) of De Luca novels. The series website states that its period is 1938-48, which means that it will eventually catch up to the published novels. While the Coliandro series is amusing, and it's interesting to see Bologna from a cop's perspective (a TV cop anyway), it would be great to have an opportunity to see the De Luca series, which is a very good story as written in the novels.

Police, Adjective

Calling a crime novel “cinematic” usually means that it’s graphic, with lots of scene changes and action. Corneliu Porumboiu’s new Romanian film Police, Adjective (which ran here recently in the E.U. Film Festival and is now in a few theaters and on pay cable) turns that notion of cinematic, as well as the structure of the police procedural, on its head. The plot of Police, Adjective is minimal, there are mostly long, quiet and nearly static camera shots, and the story is told almost entirely visually in the beginning (in perhaps a more genuine sense of “cinematic”)—in slow shots of uneventful surveillance, though at the end the structure flips over and the story is carried almost entirely verbally, in two written reports that the camera pans across and in two encounters at the very end in Cristi’s boss’s office (up to then Cristi has been avoiding the boss). Cristi is a plain-clothes cop in a small city in contemporary Romania, assigned to do surveillance on a teenager who has been denounced as a drug dealer. But Cristi (and the viewer) only see the target walking back and forth from school and standing in a schoolyard with two friends (the denouncer and a girl) smoking. Several times, Cristi goes into the schoolyard after the 3 have left and scours the ground for cigarette butts, so he can test them for hashish, a telling instance of the lack of glamour and action in what Cristi’s life as a cop actually amounts to. Most reviewers remark on the patience required of the viewer: in one scene Cristi telephones someone who was supposed to meet him in her office at the police station, and she tells him she’ll be there in 10 minutes. After a moment of watching him standing in the hallway, we begin to fear that it will actually be 10 minutes before we see her arrive—an entirely different sort of “real time” than, for instance, Jack Bauer’s 24. The plot turns on the cop’s reluctance to bust the kid on a petty charge that will nonetheless send him for jail for up to 7 years and ruin his life. Cristi’s wife is a schoolteacher, who corrects his grammar when she happens to read his report, and the boss lectures Cristi pedantically (using a dictionary) on the meaning of “conscience,” “police,” and other words. So this very visual movie is about words, and how they have consequences (even how they create or corrupt moral dilemmas). One reviewer compared Police, Adjective to the more eventful (but still slow-paced) The Lives of Others, comparing the moral dilemmas of that film’s Soviet-era German setting to the post-Soviet, bureaucratic morality of the new film. The comparison is apt, but the slowness of Police, Adjective will probably prevent it from being as popular as The Lives of Others has become, but Porumboiu shows that a great deal can be accomplished with minimal means, if an audience is patient enough to follow his story through to the end.

The book I referred to in my last post...

OK, the consensus seems to be that bad books should get bad reviews. The book I was referring to claims to be a best-seller, though not of the Dan Brown level, and it's about 5 years old. It's Liz Allen's Last to Know, a first novel, and the reviews from the Irish papers are excerpted at Amazon as follows: "'Gritty and engrossing' -- Irish World 20040618 'This well-researched crime thriller turns the spotlight on a world that most of us will be grateful never to visit.' -- Irish Independent 20040529 'A terrific read ... the plot sweeps along, never missing a beat ... we might even have a Minette Walters in the making here. More, please.' -- Irish Times Weekend Review 20040612 'Deftly plotted, the book bristles with the pace of a good news story ... It would be a crime not to read it.' -- Ireland on Sunday 20040613 'All the compelling elements of a bestseller' -- VIP 20040613" I should have instead relied on Critical Mick, whose review granted Allen points for research and for the authenticity of the criminal and police activities (but deducted points for the constant anal rapes reurring throughout), but also decries the coincidences and cliches (see his review at http://www.criticalmick.com/criticalmick_last_to_know.htm). What bothered me more than the incredible coincidences (which as Mick we see long before the characters do) is the bad writing--I expected more from a journalist: but then it seems that bad writing (see Dan Brown and many others) is a requirement of bestsellerdon. Last to Know is pulp-y without honest immersion in that sub-genre, and ambitious without the talent to do for the material what other Irish journalists-turned-crime-authors have done in more recent books. Please, if anyone has an alternative opinion about this book (or can explain the reviews in the Irish papers--are they misquoted? carefully excerpted from perhaps more honest reviews?), please let me know. I think I'm going to donate this one to the library, if they'll accept it. Is that too brutal a review? Mick recommended it, with massive reservations, in the end. I'm afraid I can't, regardless of authentic details...

Do you review badly written books? bad books? Do you publish bad reviews?

I'm about halfway through what is without doubt the worst crime novel that I have read (or tried to read) this year. It's a book that languished in my tbr pile, and when I finally got around to it, it has emphatically not been worth the wait. My dilemma is, do I identify the book, or review it honestly? What do you do with a bad book (full of cliche's of plot, character, and language, characters without distinctive voices, pointless intrusions and repetitions by the narrator, and so on)? Should the crime reviewers/readers of the blogosphere pass over bad books in silence, or call them (and their publishers) to account? My usual practice is just to stop reading and pass judgment with silence. Is that the best way? Does anyone want to know the novel I am slamming without naming?

Affairs of State, by Dominique Manotti

Dominique Manotti sets each of her crime novels in a particular historical milieu of late-20th-century France (she is, after all, a professor of economic history), and the most recent novel to be translated into English (by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz), Affairs of State, is set in 1985 and deals with the political and social conditions of the late Mittérand administration. The main characters (among a large cast) are Noria Ghozali, a North African female cop (doubly unwelcome by other officers) and François Bornand, a pro-American leftist who is a behind-the-scenes advisor to the president. The plot (far too complicated, or perhaps intricate is the word, to summarize here) deals with the international arms trade (specifically involving Iran, under an embargo at the time because of the Iran-Iraq war), a high-end brothel, competition among police and intelligence services, murder (deliberate and accidental), and the impossibility of prosecuting certain people for crimes ranging from prostitution to murder (because of their political influence). This is the first of Manotti's translated novels to feature a woman in a leading role, but the blurb on the cover, "Featuring Investigator Noria Ghozali," is a bit misleading--Noria is a constant thread through the story but there is really no single "main character" much less hero. Noria, however, is the one character who learns from the sleazy process of politics, crime, and investigation--I don't know if there's a series based on her, but it wold be a strong counterpart to Manotti's series featuring Daquin, a sometimes brutal cop who is none too straight in terms of his sexuality or his police methods (though Daquin is more of a central character in those books). Affairs of State is very French, but also resonates with dirty politics and specific historical circumstances (trade with Iran also featuring in Reagan-era U.S. politics in complex and not very savory ways). It's a terse, short book with few sympathetic characters and with sudden changes of direction and no simple or pat conclusion. And it's one of the best crime novels to appear in 2009 (though my copy didn't arrive until a few days before 2010). Manotti demonstrates how a crime novel can effectively incorporate social events and political realities without sacrificing the story, as well as how a noir story can deeply investigate social circumstances. Arcadia, the publisher of the EuroCrime series in which Affairs of State appears, seems to be changing its covers at the last minute these days. The two that appear here are the one on the copy I received (the map of Africa composed of guns) and the one advertised (the one showing a woman who appears to be a corpse). I would have preferred the one advertised, I think, for its restrained color (the African map is black and white) and its oblique relation to the events of the story (Africa is even more oblique, but definitely involved).

Black Tide by Peter Temple, from Australia

Black Tide is Peter Temple’s second Jack Irish novel (there are four in the series, not all available presently in the U.S.), published originally about 5 years ago. The novels about Australian attorney Irish are complex, in this case mixing plotlines (all from Irish’s first-person point of view) concerning his negotiations between two gangsters, his participation in a horse-racing scheme with several shady friends, his investigation into the disappearance of the son of a friend of his father, the waning and end of his relationship with a TV announcer-girlfriend, and his avocation as an apprentice carpenter. Unlike some crime novels with complex plots, these stories do not all coverge—instead of clever plotting, Temple’s use of complexity gives instead the “reality effect,” a sense of life’s (and real people’s) diverse experiences—along with a great deal of oblique and slangy dialogue (some of which is very local). The reader flows along with Irish until one of the plots comes to the front, as the “thriller” promised by the novel’s publicity. Irish is no superhero, he’s a lawyer with a marginal legal practice and a lot of shady friends, but in this book he falls into a plot that could have come from a more conventional thriller, featuring international arms trade, money laundering across international borders, ruthless agents, and corrupted government officials. But Temple’s reality effect keeps the story grounded. In the Irish novels, Temple doesn’t take up the big social issues that he addresses in his excellent The Broken Shore, but Black Tide is not in any way a lesser novel—its focus is simply more closely on characters who are unfailingly real and interesting. It may take a reader (at least a non-Australian) a while to get into the book because of the intricate speech patterns in the dialogue, but once the ear is attuned, the story flows forward in ways that are involving and increasingly rapid. There is no easy or clichéd plotting but there is enough action on all fronts to justify the “thriller” category. The two images are the U.S. and the U.K. covers of the most recent paperback editions.

A Wallander film and the power couple of Swedish crime

First, the gossip: I discovered yesterday that Stefan Lindman, a character introduced in Henning Mankell's Return of the Dancing Master who then reappears, having moved to Ystad, in the novel Before the Frost and in the Swedish TV series based on ideas (rather than books) by Mankell, is played with a certain smoldering intensity in the TV series by Ola Rapace (in the center of the movie poster reproduced here)--who happens to be the husband of Noomi Rapace (a publicity photo of this power couple of Swedish crime appears below). Ola Rapace's birth name was Pär Ola Norell, and I'm curious whether the non-Swedish-sounding name "Rapace" was a choice that both of them made when they were married, or if it's simply a name one or both of them was "assigned" by a publicist--anyone know? On to the movie: Wallander: Blodsband (inexplicably called The Black King in the English title) ran on the MhZ network last weekend. It's one of the better in the Wallander TV series starring Krister Henriksson as detective Kurt Wallander and the late Johanna Sällström as Linda, his daughter. We see the murder of a woman on a boat, then follow an investigation that leads to a communal farm and to an old flame of Linda's. A further death suggests a serial murder is in progress and also suggests a link to an escaped criminal and an armored-car robbery. Kurt is more stable (lonely but not angst-ridden) in his personal life and more strict in his conduct of the investigation, but Linda shows some of her past difficulties with depression as well as some lapses in professional conduct. The plot is conventional enough, but the series characters continue to be interesting (we learn a bit more about Nyberg, the "CSI" of the team) as well as the commune's inhabitants, and the scenery here is of the bleak-Swedish-winter variety (not a tourist postcard).

Athens noir and Greek politics

Petros Markaris's newly translated Che Committed Suicide covers some of the same territory as recent Irish crime fiction: what happens to revolutionaries when the revolution is over (whether they won or lost). Markaris's likable Inspector Haritas was shot at the end of the previous novel, and is on sick leave for most of this one (and he and his wife are getting on one another's nerves). The very public suicide of a former activist (and former prisoner in the Greek Junta's military prisons) on TV gets Haritas's interest, but the police aren't paying any attention until after two immigrant laborers are murdered and a second suicide of a former comrade in arms, also public. Ten days after the first suicide, a biography of the dead revolutionary appears--and a week after the second, another biography appears, from a different publisher but the same author. Are more suicides on the way? Haritos's replacement as head of homicide believes the claim of responsibility by a right wing, anti-immigration group, but Haritos can't see how the group would have forced the two public figures to kill themselves in such a public way. Most of the book, all told from the Inspector's point of view, shows him going back and forth among family members and business associates of the two suicides, while also talking the case over with his daughter and her fiance and an informant in the press and a former communist. He also drives his ancient Fiat around Athens a great deal, and there's a lot of detail about his routes--not the scenic Athens by any means (the city sounds hot, dirty, treeless, and crowded)--rather like George Pelecanos's tours of Washington DC's underside. It's a long book and it develops slowly, but the characters hold a reader's interest, and the plot is very unusual (how, indeed, is someone induced to commit suicide publicly?). The denoument is believable, sad, and political--if you've never seen the movie Z, see it now for its own merits and for the background it provides to Markaris's tale of ideals, ideals lost and betrayed, lingering faults in a society that has healed only on its surface after a turbulent repressive past, and families at their best and worst. Somewhere along the way, Arcadia Books' EuroCrime series changed the cover from the graphic that appears above to a night shot of the Acropolis with a noir street scene below it. I think the graphic is a better representation of the novel, but the contrast of the night streets and the bright Acropolis is also effective (reproduced at the top of the review, though it may be a bit hard to see in this small version). What do you think? Which would tempt you into picking up this very interesting book?

Varg Veum at the movies: Buried Dogs

The lastest Varg Veum film to run on U.S. tv (on the unconventional MhZ Network) made me curious about the novel from which it was taken, since the credits at the beginning state that it is "adapted freely" from the original by Gunnar Staalesen. None of the Veum movies shown so far corresponds with any of the books translated from Norwegian into English, though, so I will be left wondering about the relationships between the books and the films. Buried Dogs (I'm not sure what the title refers to) deals with Norwegian politics, and it seems to be the same nasty mess as politics elsewhere. A candidate for the head of a right-wing party comes to Veum saying that someone is threatening her and that the police won't do anything. Veum, seemingly because of the anti-immigrant stance of her party, refuses the case. But when there is a botched assassination attempt on her rival for head of the party (his wife is shot by mistake), Veum gets interested and works with her to unravel the original threat and the possible new threat. Her party is meanwhile playing hardball, trying to squeeze her out by manipulating sympathy for the candidate whose wife is in a coma after the shooting. The final resolution is more of a twist and counter-twist than is usual for the Veum stories (I think my wife figured it out, from the hints left hanging at the end--I'll supply her theory for anyone who wants to hear it), and there's a bit more back and forth between Veum and the police (sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile). A viewer has to pay a bit more attention to this one, as most of the plot is carried forward in the lengthy conversations among characters, somewhat difficult to follow in the subtitles unless one is paying close attention. Buried Dogs would perhaps be better seen in a movie theater, with fewer distractions and bigger subtitles, than on the TV in the living room--but beggars can't be choosers, and the broadcast of this series is a welcome opportunity for fans of international crime fiction and film. P.S.--the actor playing Varg, Trond Espen Seim, is scruffier even than in the earlier films, his hair limp, badly cut, long, and dirty. His scruffiness doesn't really fit my image of Veum from the books, though otherwise he is excellent in the role (tough but sympathetic). Does anyone else have an image of Veum different from what you can see in the film poster above?