Brian McGilloway's Little Girl Lost and some other stuff

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

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

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

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

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

Trackers, by Deon Meyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man

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

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

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

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

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

Out of South Africa: Killer Country by Mike Nicol

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

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

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

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

Two new Italian crime novels

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

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

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


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

Phantoms of Breslau, by Marek Krajewski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Requiem for a Gypsy, by Michael Genelin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death on a Galician Shore, by Domingo Villar

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

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

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

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

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

Finnish noir in German: Silence, by Jan Costin Wagner

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

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

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

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

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

Garry Disher's Wyatt

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

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

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

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

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

The Leopard, Jo Nesbø

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

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

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

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

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

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

crime, cricket, murder, and marriage

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

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

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

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

Brunetti #20: Donna Leon, Drawing Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

The Magician's Accomplice, by Michael Genelin

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

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

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

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

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

The 5th (and last?) Commissario Trotti novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Killing Redux

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

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

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

The newest Aimee Leduc

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooklyn Noir and my mistake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translator on board

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

Allan Guthrie, Hard Man (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

South Pacific Noir: Graeme Kent's Devil-Devil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Icelandic noir/political/police procedural

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Werner Kettenbach's The Stronger Sex

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

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

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

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

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

Håkan Nesser: The Inspector and Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roslund & Hellström, Three Seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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