A Spanish detective in Argentina

I read several of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's detective novels some years ago but never got addicted to the series. The plots are usually beside the point, and discoveries are often not made by the detective but simply stated in the narrative--the texture of the novels are far more important than the plots, which are devices for the exploration of the dark side of the modern world. On the strength of Andrea Camilleri's fondness for the novels, as well as the homage offered to Vázquez Montalbán in the "novel for four hands" by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos, I picked up what is evidently the second-to-last in the series, The Buenos Aries Quintet (the last is The Man of My Life, recently available in English). Private detective Pepe Carvalho is asked by his uncle to find a son who was a victim of the "dirty war" in Argentina 20 years previously and has been in exile in Spain ever since. The son belatedly decides to look for a daughter who was taken from him (when his wife was killed) and illegally adopted --disappeared as effectively as those murdered by the military government of those years. Off to Buenos Aires, reluctantly at first, Pepe is separated from his regular crew and his usual fare (food being a big part of this series). His new crew of damaged Argentinians who are more interesting than the regulars (to me, anyway). Carvalho repeatedly tells people that all he knows about Argentina is "tango, Maradona, and the disappeared." But as I mentioned above, the plot is not a straightforward (or even crooked) line from the assignment to the solution. We figure out where (and who) the daughter is long before the detective, and when she's found the novel takes little account of it. Much more important are the numerous ancillary tales and the main personalities (particularly Alma, everyone's love interest in one way or another) and the flock of auxiliary characters, who together draw a portrait not only of the conflict of left and right in Argentina but also the webs of conflict, deceit, and misery in the world at large. The text is full of tangos and poetry, food and sex, disguise and death. In an odd way when the novel reaches its most crescendo in a burlesque, macabre banquet among the members of the former (and still powerful) elite, The Buenos Aires Quintet reminds me of another big, baggy, overpopulated and satirical novel, Thomas Pynchon's first book, V. And as in V, the pleasure in reading Vázquez Montalbán's book is in going with the flow of the looping, overlapping stories as they reveal contemporary life, a troubled nation, and a vital people.

Irish noir thriller by Gene Kerrigan

There are some writers who seem natural, as if words simply flow freely into finished form: Elmore Leonard, maybe; and there are some writers whose work is professional, well structured: Henning Mankell, perhaps. But there are others who are both natural and professional, some of them coming from a journalistic background, like Gene Kerrigan from Ireland or Deon Meyer from South Africa. Kerrigan's first fictional book, Little Criminals, has both a seemingly careless plot, as meandering as Elmore Leonard's--but at the same time it has a tight overall structure so that at the end of the book, everything seems both inevitable and aesthetic. Little Criminals takes one of the pulp-iest plots in all of crime fiction, the same story as that masterpiece of the cheap paperback trash of early noir, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a book I've mentioned before: the kidnapping gone sour. But Kerrigan uses the pulp-y plot in the service of a portrait of the post-Celtic Tiger, Euro-centric, urbanized Ireland of today, in all its consumerist, un-quaint glory. Nobody in the book is entirely likeable, but it's a book you shouldn't pick up unless you're willing to stick with it for a while--Kerrigan will build up the tension until you have to keep going, you won't ba willing to stop. And just when you think you know what's coming, he takes a non-pulp sideroad into an intimate portrait of small town life, integral to the plot and at the same time affecting without descending into bathos. Yet the ending has something in common with No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a hollowness within the relief of the resolution, a desperation that comes only partly from the awfulness of the things that the characters have experienced. If you think I'm making too much of what is after all a crime novel well within the noir and pulp traditions, reconsider after you've read Little Criminals--this is a terrific book. I've ordered the sequel, but it doesn't seem to have been released yet.

A new Swedish noir-policier-mystery

Åsa Larsson runs a big risk with her new (new in English anyway) The Blood Spilt, the sequel to last year's Sun Storm (which I reviewed at the time). Like the earlier book, Spilt deals with a damaged lawyer from Stockholm who returns to her family home in Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden, near Finland and Lappland (the Lapps call themselves Sami now). And like the previous novel, this one begins with and centers upon the murder of a priest. The risks that Larsson runs are in simply duplicating the plot of a successful crime novel, in becoming pigeon-holed as the author of "religious noir" or some such thing, and in creating a sense that she is simply repeating herself, with nothing else to say. But Rebecka Martinson, the damaged Stockholmer in both books, is changed now, changed by the experience of the first book (not so common in series novels). She is poised at the precipice of a new life (and she's pretty negative about her old one). The priests, too, are very different--the founder and central preacher in an evangelical cult in the first, the parish priest in the Swedish national church in the second (as in England, the king of Sweden embraced Protestantism and created a national church, Lutheran in Sweden's case, but unlike in England the church has lost its government subsidy--one of the topics of The Blood Spilt. It is as if Larsson set out to show that it's not only the far fringes of organized religions that foster rivalry and hatred. On that subject, one of the comments I've had on this blog asked whether the Swedes are obsessed with religion, given the number of crime novels translated from Swedish dealing with the subject. Like most of Europe, Sweden is almost completely secular--but there are two strains of religion (those in Larsson's two books) that go back over a hundred years--the conformist and the nonconformist or fundamentalist. And in rural or small-town Sweden (the setting for Larsson's novel as well as those by Mankell that deal with religion, including the first with Linda Wallander as a main character), religion is far more important than in the cities, as is true in other developed countries. But back to Larsson, The Blood Spilt is in several ways better than its predecessor--the collective aspect remains (the point of view, always in the third person but focusing on an individual's perspective) shifts between Rebecka, the two cops who carry over from the first book, and several townspeople in the circle around (or in opposition to) the murdered priest--who is in this case not only a woman minister, not so rare in Sweden but not entirely embraced by the townspeople, but also a feminist. The Blood Spilt is more of a feminist novel, in fact, than any other recent crime novel that I can think of (that's a positive assesment, not a criticism). Larsson's novel is very atmospheric, regarding a small town in the far north as well as the enclosed world of this particular small town on its own and as it represents small town life everywhere. There are no absolutes here, in spite of the liturgical "mcguffin" of the book: neither the townie nor the villagers have the high ground, neither the irreligious nor the pious, neither the villagers nor the wolf (herself a central character). The novel is primarily texture and ambiguity, in fact--the plot moves forward glacially (again, that's not a criticism--it progresses like another Swedish book I admire, Kerstin Ekman's much longer and more oblique Blackwater. Larsson measures up to the ammbitions of Ekman's literary crime novel, without sacrificing the pleasures of the more direct (and shorter) genre of crime fiction. I may have some more to say about The Blood Spilt as I mull it over, and if anyone wants more of a plot summary let me know. Suffice it to say that it's a novel savored with pleasure rather than read at breakneck pace in an attempt to get to the final resolution.

China according to Chief Inspector Chen Cao

Qiu Xiaolong's new novel about crime in Shanghai, A Case of Two Cities is, on the one hand, open and straightforward almost to the point of callowness; on the other hand, it is completely ambiguous and unresolved. Those opposite reactions are a natural result, perhaps, of dealing honestly (as much as is possible) with contemporary China. The title is itself a bit misleading: the story begins in the city of Fujian, then moves to Shanghai, then on to Los Angeles and St. Louis (not coincidentally the city in which the author resides (he teaches at Washington University). As usual, there is a lot of poetry in the text, and a lot of reference by the characters to precedents in Chinese history, legend, and literature. Every decision, evidently, is referred back to the millennia of China's past, rather than to a direct analysis of the situation currently at hand. That constant referenceis added to a certain stiffness of language (perhaps an equivalent for a more formal "style" in Chinese language and culture, as compared to the West). Together, the history and the stiffness give these novels a texture completely different from the usual noir fiction, or even the typical mainstream mystery: neither the cops nor the Triad mobsters talk like Mike Hammer or th denizens of a Jim Thompson book: formality and indirection reign. There's also a good bit of flirtation between the sexes in the new book, though Inspector Chen remains almost without sex drive, so moral and careful is he. All of these comments might be taken as negative criticism, but the new book is almost as effective as a story as the first three in this series--and at least as effective as a portrait of today's socialist-capitalist-corrupt China. I found myself pulled along by the story, while at the same time frustrated by the brittle texture of the interrelationships among the characters (a number of whom are brought back from previous installments, including the U.S. marshall who was a sort-of love interest for Chen in an earlier book. A corrupt official who has fled to the U.S. has left behind a web of corrupt connections, and Chen is assigned by a high party official (still active though technically retired). Chen decides that those at the center of the group are too powerful to be approached directly, so he takes an indirect approach, interrogating those at the periphery--with disastrous results (his actions are revealed to those he is investigating, and a former friend of his is murdered). Then his investigation is seemingly derailed by another assignment, related to his career as a poet and translator--an assignment that will take him out fo the country, to the U.S., as the leader of a literary delegation. Int he process, mucch more is revealed about the state of business and politics in today's China, as well as the intricacies of relations between Chinese and American professionals.

Political noir

I read several of Paco Ignacio Taibo's earlier crime novels (featuring the sometime detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne) some years ago and then lost interest. Taibo's detective stories aren't so much "noir" as satirical and magic-realist. The author is using the detective form to comment on politics and contemporary life in Mexico and beyond. But I was curious about his most recent crime story since he co-wrote it in alternating chapters with a real-life revolutionary, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas still fighting in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Marcos's chapters are suprisingly comic (as well as tendentious and political, more what you would expect). Taibo's chapters are as comic as we might expect, but also political and critical. Both halves are "metafiction," drawing in authors and characters from beyond the novel's world--particularly both Spanish writer Manual Vazquez Montalban and his Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho (Vazquez Montalban, also a poltical novelist using the crime genre satirically, died recently and The Uncomfortable Dead is in part an obituary or hommage). As metafiction, magic realism, politics, and satire, this "novel by four hands" is not that satisfactory as noir fiction, but its politics are actually very much in line with noir: the neo-liberal bad guys of The Uncomfortable Dead are the same as the evil developers of Chinatown and numerous noir novels and films. The novel ends not with a victory over evil but with a partial revenge against the evil that the authors see as permeating society as a whole. If a couple of bad guys are removed from action, it's only a drop in the ocean of evil. Belascoaran turns from murdering one bad guy to playing head games (or subversion, perhaps) with numerous unidentified "Moraleses", Morales being the protean bad guy or guys of this book. I can't say I'm motivated to go back and catch up with the other tales of Belascoaran (though in spite of its tendentiousness I enjoyed this book), but I am motivated to go back to the novels of Vazquez Montalban (who also inspired the Montalbano novels set in Sicily)--more on that series later.

Older Scandinavian noir and some upcoming titles

While waiting for several new releases of European noir in translation and a new Qiu Xiaolong novel about Shanghai, I went back to reread a Norwegian noir novel called The Butterfly Effect, by Pernille Rygg. I wanted to see whether it might be worth seeking out the second of Rygg's novels about sort-of private detective Igi Heitmann, and couldn't remember the first one all that one (other than that it had some passing resemblance to Smilla's Sense of Snow, a novel I didn't care much for). The Butterfly Effect actually has a VERY superficial resemblance to Smilla (a clinical/scientific setting for part of the book, a young female central character, the Scandinavian setting). Rygg's Igi Heitmann, though, is a believable character rather than a magic-realist cypher. Not that Igi has your everyday problems, unless you're a failed scientist whose detective father was just killed, whose first client apparently committed suicide, and whose husband is flagrantly gay. Igi goes up against the power structures of the psychiatric establishment, the police force that crushed her father's professional hopes, and the financial power of the developers raping the city of Oslo (according to Rygg). More Chinatown than Smylla, in other words. But at every stage, the narrative is low key, Igi is three-dimensionally human, and the story is tragic but believable. I've sent for a copy of the second Igi book, The Golden Section. Meanwhile, upcoming reviews here include The Uncomfortable Dead (co-written by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas, Mexico), the aforementioned Qiu Xiaolong novel, a couple of Irish police procedurals, and new translations of noir fiction by Åsa Larsson, Helene Tursten, and some other surprises.

Scottish noir (literary) fiction

I guess one reason I didn't connect with the Rebus novel (by Ian Rankin) that I was reading last week was that I was simultaneously (and coincidentally) reading another novel about Edinburgh, Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn, a sequel of sorts to her earlier Case Histories. One Good Turn is an amalgam of a literary novel and a crime novel--there are repeated references to Matryoshka dolls in the book, setting up the notion that the intertwined stories in the book are nested like the dolls. But in fact, the plot is more like a snake eating its tail, a looping of twined narratives whose interrelationships only become obvious at the very end. It's as if a bunch of characters from literary and popular novels (Maeve Binchy comes to mind, or maybe Alice McDermott) find themselves plopped down in Edinburgh amid a series of violent acts growing from the road rage incident at the beginning of the book. With a good crime novel (or a good novel) there can be a sense of elation at the end, an emotional release with the completion of the circle or the resolution of the story. Though Atkinson doesn't quite wrap everything up in a neat package, she does deliver that kind of literary satisfaction--without stenting on the crime story, the noir elements, or the considerable humor with which her story is laced. One Good Turn is a big step forward from Case Histories: more complex, more coherent (once you get to the end of the book), and more satisfying--plus the humor is more overt, inducing not just smiles but laughter. And One Good Turn is also a step up from the average crime novel (without condescending to the genre). Atkinson shows us why reading about crime is so enjoyable: we're reading about ourselves at our limits--the limit reached when our actions and desires are taken to their ultimate conclusions.

Having trouble with Ian Rankin again

Can somebody help me, regarding Ian Rankin's novels? I repeatedly see blurbs for his books that describe them as "noir" or dark thrillers in any case. But I'm currently reading Resurrection Men, to see if I like Rankin's books any better than I did early on in his career--but I don't. Am I reading the wrong ones? Do I have false expectations? I've seen a bit of the 2 different BBC series about Detective John Rebus (two very different actors in the part, the most recent far the more accurate about the character), and they're OK. In fact, the novels read like a TV movie. Plenty of to and fro, but not much insight or emotional investment--I don't really care about the characters or what happens to them, nor about the investigation (I like police procedurals, when they're well done, but the Rebus books hardly seem to be about procedure--Rebus is more often relying on his "connected" informants than doing anything on his own. I originally had a hard time with Rankin because I was reading Peter Turnbull at the same time--and his Glasgow was a lot more interesting to me than Rankin's Edinburgh. Turnbull is more interested in ordinary people--Rankin is always getting involved with the top brass and the big gangsters. Turnbull's background as a social worker coming out, perhaps. But Turnbull's reputation seems to have faltered and Rankin just keeps going and going. So help me out--am I just wrong? Is there any point in my finishing Resurrection Men?

Olen Steinhauer: noir or formula?

I'm looking for some opinions about Olen Steinhauer. I've been reading his recent Liberation Movements, and it fits into a nexus of other "international noir" books that I've read, in several ways. Like the works of Swedish author Håkan Nesser's Van Veeteren novels (such as Borkman's Point, reviewed here in 2006), Steinhauer's novels are set in a fictional country (in Nesser's case, it's a vaguely "north European" nation, somewhere between Holland and Sweden, in Steinhauer's, it's an East European nation under Communism). That fictional country thing had kept me from reading Steinhaier before--I prefer to get a glimpse of a real city, a real place, in reading crime fiction--that's one of the principles on which this blog is based, actually. Like the Berlin trilogy of Philip Kerr (there's a 4th novel now), Steinhauer is exploring life under a totalitarian regime under which he never lived. But for me, Steinhauer's unnamed country is not as believable as either of the above--and for me, his portrait of the "evil of Communism" has a kind of American triumphalism about it. In this latest novel, he doesn't just show the shoddiness of the classic Trabant automobile of the East, he feels he has to show a public plaza littered with them. In fact, in East Berlin, on the one occasion when I visited the Communist East, there were plenty of Trabants--all running, all parked in an orderly fashion in the public squares. There's plenty of misery and horror to portray under Communism without taking cheap shots at something you don't have personal knowledge of. In fact, Trabants are a sort of collector's item in the East now--Communist nostalgia, I guess. I'd like to hear your opinions about Steinhauer's fictional country in these novels. The books are well enough written--constructed fairly tightly--except that he feels it necessary to use an X-files plot element, extra-sensory perception (in particular, precognition), to work out the kinks in his plot. It also seems to me that his characters are not so fully drawn as Kerr's (I have the same complaint with Nesser, but Nesser's characters are at least not Communist stock characters, which some of Steinhauer's are). Steinhauer's novels are, I guess, more thrillers than noir--is it too much, then, for me to expect the fatalism (embodied, one hopes, in well realized characters and plots) that is a hallmark of noir? In any case, instead of that kind of fatalist, dark tale, Liberation Movements seems to be a brittle tale of evildoers and unfortunates--a melodrama, in other words.

dark polish novel (maybe not "noir")

I mentioned a Polish novel of the 1960s in my previous post: Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. Pornografia has the bare bones of a "cozy" mystery plot: in the waning days of WWII, as the Nazis are retreating across occupied Poland, two friends (Witold and Frederick) travel to another friend's country house. They become fascinated by two adolescents, one the daughter of the house, the other a young orphan (a boy of about the same age as the daughter) who is staying with them. The group travels to the nearby home of the daughter's fiancé's family, and while there, the fiancé's mother (a devout Catholic) shows a strange fascination for the atheist Frederick. But in the evening, while the mother has gone to the kitchen, there are the sounds of a struggle, and the group finds the mother stabbed to death and a young interloper with stab wounds and bite wounds. The matching stories of the interloper and a kitchen maid suggest that the mother of the house attacked the interloper with a knife, and bit him savagely, before he got the knife away from her and killed her. But enough mystery surrounds the event to puzzle the most astute detective. Did she attack him? What was the boy doing in the house?
But the cozy plot disappears in a haze of another plot, this time a thriller closer to the spy genre: The group does not turn the murderer over to the police--they imprison him in the house and then return with him to the previous country house. And then the partisans demand that Witold and Frederick carry out the assasination of a traitor. From there, the plot goes further off the rails, according to a logic that is alien to either of the genre plots--a logic fully prepared for from the first pages of the novel. Whereas in the usual mystery or thriller, the fiction mimics life more or less adequately, in this novel life imitates the genres, more or less adequately. Gombrowicz is a "thesis" novelist, though of a peculiar and comic sort. He wants us to examine the structures (genres, even) through which we make sense of life as it comes at us day by day. What he is after is close to the "moral" of an existentialist novel of previous decades, such as might have been written by Camus or Sartre. Or perhaps a "nouveau roman," such as might be later written by Robbe-Grillet (who also did detective stories, of a sort). And the thesis is overlaid with the atmosphere of eroticism (and violence) implied by the novel's title--albeit a very (very) peculiar, second-hand eroticism also related to Gombrowicz's thesis (which has to do with youth versus maturity). This is an important book, one of the key accomplishments of the mid-20th century, by a writer with much to add to 20th century philosophy and art. The genre plots are not looked down upon, they are a simple structure on which to build the language and the thesis that are the writer's concern--but without which there is nothing he can say. In other words, this book is philosophy-as-story, or story-as-philosophy. There is no linear "meanning," only a portrait of our time, through the twin lenses of the mystery-thriller and Gombrowicz's own unique point of view. And, believe it or not, there's a recent movie version of the story, which I've ordered but haven't seen yet...

Philosophical noir from Italy

Andrea Canobbio gives the alert reader a clue about his intentions in The Natural Disorder of Things when he gives one of the characters, a Polish gardner with a literary background, a name that is a composite of the two great Polish philosophical novelists and playwrights, Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz. The murder plot of Canobbio's novel is a McGuffin (do I have that spelled right?) in reverse--not a seemingly casual element of a story on which Hitchcock (it's his term) hung a mystery plot for a movie, but a plot on which Canobbio hangs an existential inquiry. The novel is not an allegory, something that will reveal the author's systematic philosophy, an approach that Canobbio shares with the equally oblique Polish authors I mentioned. Canobbio's approach isn't symbolic allegory but a maze--specifically a garden maze that might be constructed by the garden designer at the center of the novel--but a maze with no center and perhaps no exit. Claudio Fratta witnesses a murder that might be called "overdetermined," to use a word from the Poststructuralist philosophers (the man that Fratta has been watching (for reasons we don't learn until later) is essentially killed twice, by being run over first by a van with unrevealed drivers and then by a car driven by a woman with whom Fratta becomes obsessed. The novel progresses in events that will only be explained in later passages, as if a maze is being followed blindly or an onion is being peeled. The revenge demanded by Fratta's family after being bankrupted by a predatory lender, the affair between the previously solitary Fratta and the woman (who becomes his client), the man who is possibly (and possibly not) her husband, Fratta's brother and nephews, and Fratta's neighbor and his dogs, bred to have stripes (in particular a striped Doberman)--all these elements intertwine not to solve the initial murder but to precipitate a mirroring event that to some extent resolves Fratta's life, or at least brings him to the end of a chapter. The novel can be frustrating in its herky-jerky progression, and is perhaps too much a drama of ordinary life (rather than a crime story per se) for many fans of noir. But it has prodded me to pull out Gombrowicz's "thriller," Pornografia, which I'll report on as soon as I've re-read it. I'm looking for other suggestions, if anybody has some--as I'm in a dry spell for reading that's relevant to this blog. There are a number of books being translated for publication in the spring of 07, but not much new is available right now. Maybe I've missed something, though--any suggestions?

Tartan noir with a heart of gold, sort of

Denise Mina's new novel, The Dead Hour, is the most purely noir novel she's written, and one of the most purely noir novels I've read recently (other than that other Scot, Alan Guthrie, whose 2 novels so far are pure throwbacks to the pulp heyday of noir). Is it something in the air up there? But at the heart of Mina's noir world there beats a doggedly optimistic heart, instead of the depressive, alcoholic, desperate soul at the center of most of noir fiction. Her heroine, cub reporter Paddy Meehan, is struggling to be a subject not an object, as she put it, and her feminism as well as her career struggle are carried on with a determined air that is comic in intention rather than in result--Mina is not making fun of Paddy's optimism (or her weight problem), she's using it to build a 3D character, lust, atheism, family loyalty, professional determination, and poor choices all included. Paddy's positive attitude is at odds with the overall noir atmosphere, at first glance. But it is Paddy's character, in all its ordinariness, that makes this novel work as "pure noir"? And why do I say that about this book and not the previous Paddy Meehan novel, Field of Blood? The separate strains of the new book are each bloodier than the other, and each grounded in working class reality rather than in the family drama of Field of Blood. The Dead Hour reminds me of a Swedish crime novel: not the obvious comparison with that other "intrepid reporter" (that phrase actually occurs in The Dead Hour, in a comic way) in Liza Marklund's novels, but with The Princess of Burundi, because of the milieu of a small town, which is what Mina's Glasgow seems like here, including a mechanic who is involved personally in the crimes. I'll say it again: it is the ordinariness of Paddy and her milieu that make the novel work as noir--Marklund's heroine is practically a superhero by comparison, and the crimes she investigates are big. The implications of Paddy's investigation are big, bigger than the police are willing to investigate, but the actual events, bloody and violent as they are, are the stuff of urban reality rather than thriller fiction. The escalating crimes, the sense of threat experienced by several characters, and the guilty dread of one ordinary person (not Paddy in this case, but an addict) who is forced to kill a thug in a particularly gruesome way, all add to a classic pulp plot, raised oddly to another level by Paddy's personality--because she's not a cliche (though the plot does contain a few of those). And the "real Paddy Meahan," a bigger factor in Field of Blood, plays an important role here nonetheless, in a small cameo with consequences for the story rather than an intertwined sideshow, more the case with the earlier book. I have to say I was surprised by how much I liked The Dead Hour.

Beginning of Kate Atkinson's detective "series"

When I saw reviews of Kate Atkinson's new novel, One Good Turn, featuring a detective named Jackson Brodie, I picked up a copy of the first book about this character, Case Histories. I'd read a "postmodern" novel of hers before, Emotionally Weird, which also includes a detective character, named Chick, in her "metafictional" universe. Emotionally Weird is funny, clever, and effective as a novel or an essay on the novel, but it's not crime fiction. Case Histories is and is not crime fiction. It reads like a cross between the "serious" fiction of a novelist like Anne Tyler (with close focus on quirky characters, their families, and the misery therein) and an English cozy mystery--with an overlay of the urban noir novel. Brodie's detective work is essential to the development of the plot, but hardly on center stage most of the time. It seems to take him a very long time to get started on his investigation of the 3 intertwined "case histories." He never gets around to one of them, the solution to which is right in front of him. Case Histories is not as much about crime as about emotional ties and about the destructive behavior of some people who should be nurturing those ties. But its not a book about misery, it's about coping, and there's a liberal dose of wit to leaven things. One Good Turn sounds, in the reviews, like a combination of Case Histories and Emotionally Weird, taking the complexities of Jackson Brodie's first appearance to a new level. I'm looking forward to it. Anybody have any comments about Atkinson, Jackson Brodie, or "serious" novelists venturing into crime fiction?

Word about "young adult" novels

Maxine recently added a comment to my post about Denise Mina, saying that she'd heard that Mina's new series about Paddy Meehan, cub reporter, was being packaged as a "young adult" novel. The story of the first novel (and evidently the second) certainly fits that category, as a coming-of-age story in personal and professional life. But that's also the case with Liza Marklund's series, at least in the first two novels and really all along as Annika, her own cub reporter, rapidly climbs the career ladder. Both series are perhaps a bit dark for the young adult category, though books for children can certainly be very dark. In terms of genre fiction, I think of science fiction as a whole as fitting neatly into the young adult category (possibly because I read science fiction when I was a kid and a teenager, and haven't been able to read any of it since, except maybe Phillip K. Dick and Alfred Bester). But the "noir" genre seems as a whole too world-weary for the young adult category. Maybe that's why Mina's Paddy Meehan might fall into the genre--in spite of a bleak setting (both her city and her family), Paddy is ultimately pretty optimistic.

Kernick and Harvey--briefly

I've been looking forward to Simon Kernick's new book, A Good Day to Die, because in it he resuscitates his murdurous ex-cap Dennis Milne, his most interesting character so far. I also picked up the newest John Harvey, Darkness and Light, featuring his post-Resnick detective, Frank Elder (as usual, Resnick has a cameo). Both books were disappointments. The Kernick novel has all the elements of a good read, but it somehow drags even through the fast and violent scenes (of which there are many, as usual). The denouement is predictable, a cliche really. And the narrative is very repetitive, between recapping the plot and Dennis's constant soul-searching. The Harvey novel is also pretty dull. The plot itself is interesting enough, but I could never really get interested in any of the characters. Elder seems a pale echo of Resnick, though it seems we're in for more of him, if the preparation for sequels in the last pages is any evidence (preparation that involves finding an excuse for an ex-cop to be constantly brought back into investigations--in spite of his often-stated desire to be left alone in his Cornish retreat). Darkness and Light just plods along, professionally written but slow even for a police procedural. All in all, this has been a disappointing week of reading.

a bit more on Haas, plus Denise Mina

I realize that there was a bit more I intended to say about Silentium, the film made from Wolf Haas's detective novel of the same name. Silentium capitalizes on several aspects of Austrian culture (and specifically that of Salzburg, where the story is set): music festivals, tourist overlooks (a mountain precipice above the city), and the Catholic church. I already dealt with the latter in the previous post, but the use of both other elements (tourism and music festivals) is as important (and as mordantly funny) as the story's sly references to the church.
But on to other things. On the occasion of the release of Denise Mina's second Paddy Meehan novel, I finally got around to reading the first in the series, Field of Blood. One of the unique and interesting aspects of the book is Mina's use of the narrative of "the real Paddy Meehan," a figure whose biography is explained somewhat, along with the author's relationship to him, in an afterword. Paddy the second, the young aspiring journalist, is in many ways the sister of the main character in Mina's first series, the Garnethill trilogy (but without that character's history of abuse--or overt abuse anyway--the abuse of children by well meaning families is a major theme of the new series). Paddy's story is a bit a coming-of-age novel, a bit of Glasgow local color, and a bit the intrepid cub reporter tale. But Mina is very skilled at creating the characters and through them, and the "real Paddy Meehan," she manages to hold together all these elements in a compelling story (a bit more direct and a bit less obliquely Gothic than the Garnethill books).

Wolf Haas and Austrian noir

Every now and then there's a chance to get a glimpse of the "crime culture" of other countries and languages, things not normally available in the U.S. and in English. The currently touring 2006 European Union Film Showcase includes Silentium, a film made by Wolfgang Murnberger from a series of novels by Wolf Haas featuring Brenner, a seedy private detective played in the film by the sad-eyed, scruffy Josef Hader. The film is very dark, very funny, and full of references to films (North by Northwest, Butch and Sundance, and on and on), religious imagery, and twists on crime cliches. There's a car chase in the spiral driveway of a parking deck that is marvelous and dizzying. At one point, the hallucinating Brenner becomes a "player" in a foosball game, a very well done, very funny, and at the same time horrifying bit of film. The religious imagery is mostly Catholic and mostly very funny (hard to describe without coming off as blasphemous--satire is often hard to describe without losing the bite. This little glimpse of Haas's fiction makes me hungry for more of what my lack of German makes inaccessible--I can only hope for another film showcase or future translations. I highly recommend this series (film or book, though I only have experience of the former) to those who can read German, those with access to Zone 2 DVDs, or especially to those looking for translation projects.

More on Wallander and novels out of order

With regard to the recent publication of The Man Who Smiled, which was actually the 4th novel in Henning Mankell's crime series about Kurt Wallander in Ystad, Sweden, we had some conversation about why so many of the Scandinavian crime novels are arriving in English out of their original sequence. Before I started The Man Who Smiled, I went back to the previous novel, The White Lioness (the 2nd novel published in English, though it was the 3rd of the novels), which I hadn't read since it was new, and then I continued with Sidetracked, the novel that follows after The Man Who Smiled in the original sequence. That's a pretty big dose of Mankell in a relatively short period of time. And doing that has reinforced my impression that the novels, effective though they are, are also very formulaic--almost as much so as the paintings of Wallander's folk-artist father (always a sunset, with or without a grouse). The rhythm of the novels is determined by the lack of evidence in the police investigation--the cops are spinning their wheels for half or even more of the book. Usually, the criminal makes a few "cameo" appearances (though that's not the case with The Man Who Smiled, and the criminal conspiracy at the heart of The White Lioness is much larger than a cameo, in terms of the amount of the narrative it occupies. Reading the novels close together emphasizes that the stories are narrated rather than dramatized. That is to say, even though there's plenty of dialogue, most of the text is description of Wallander's thoughts, summaries of events or discussions not directly narrated or described, and details of the painstaking investigation. For those of us (myself included) who are addicted to the procedural as a form, the Wallander books can be very satisfying. But the formula can get a little old with frequent repetition--the appeals to the dead mentor, Rydberg; the hated press conferences; the use of dates at the end of chapters as a dramatic device. There are, of course, also references to things that happened (in the detective's private life as well as previous investigations) before--but these have a "reality effect," reinforcing the realism of the story in the same way as the endless back and forth through the streets of a small town in Southern Sweden do. But, to make a comparison, the novels of Mankell's Swedish compatriots Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö perhaps used their own formula in a more supple way. The formulaic elements in the S&W books had to do with the character of the detectives, the comic elements of the series, and the running portrait of the welfare state gone to seed (also a running element with the Wallander books). The only irritating element of the S&W formula that I can remember (and I recently read through that entire series one after the other, all 10 books, without getting tired of them--it's like a very long movie) is the constant use of the chief detectives name as a whole: it's always Martin Beck, never Beck or Martin (except in other characters' dialogue) or even Inspector Beck. Just Martin Beck again and again (but perhpas a minor irritant). The S&W books are also shorter, so there's less formula called for (and more plot) per page. The procedural elements of both series are quite prominent, very important to the structure (and the pleasure) of the books. Wallander will definitely do, in the absence of S&W's Beck, only brouht back to life in a Swedish TV series that has gone beyond the original books (which has also happened with the Wallander series in 12 or so films not based on the books). But at the same time, the comparison makes me nostalgic for that great series, and regretful that there are only 10 (I know, I know, the authors never planned for more than 10, but if Wahlöö hadn't died young, meybe...).

New-ish Wallander novel, and translations out of order

Maxine posted a response to one of my recent entries, complaining about translations of crime novels that are done out of order. The recently published The Man Who Smiled, by Henning Mankell, is a case in point. This was actually the 4th of the Inspector Wallander novels, between The White Lioness and Sidetracked. And in fact, the second novel in the series, Dogs of Riga, was also translated out of order. The excellent Swedish TV films taken from the series also appear to have come out out of order (and with the plots of the books intermingled and changed, so that events from one book appear in a film taken from another one, etc.). All this is very confusing. I'm assuming that publishers in the U.S. and U.K. want to either capitalize on what they think is a better book later in the series, or perhaps to characterize the series in a way that the next one in line doesn't quite do (for instance, Dogs of Riga is a sort of thriller rather than a police procedural per se, though the procedural form does dominate that book as well). Even more irritating, to me, is the practice of starting the translations in the middle of a series, perhaps leaving the early books untranslated or published as if they were "prequels." By the way, Liza Marklund is apparently responsible for her series being out of order: Studio Sex (a salacious title taking advantage of the Swedish word for six) is a prequel to The Bomber, her "Stockholm Olympics" novel--she's filling in the backstory for her character. But back to The Man Who Smiled: this novel stays more tightly focused on the police investigation than any other Mankell novel except the first, The Faceless Killers. When the investigation plods, so does the novel; when the cops go back over the same ground again and again, so does the narrative. So if you like the police procedural (and I do) then you'll like this entry in the series. If you prefer a more straightforward crime plot, or entry into the mind of the criminal, then this one is not for you. The only glimpse beyond the detective's point of view (though there's a 3rd person narrator) is at the beginning (as is usual with Mankell's books), when an old man who is afraid flees what it is he fears in his car, is mysteriously killed--though the police afterwards think he died in an accident. Wallander is lured back from the brink of retirement (more on that in a minute) by pleas from the dead man's son that it could not have been an accident--but Wallander only answers the plea when the son is himself murdered (unmistakably this time). The clues lead to a powerful man who is mostly (and effectively) offstage. Though the ending is perhaps just the reverse--the final confession is a bit stagey. But overall, it's an effective novel in following how the truth is uncovered when we are all sure who the killer is, but not how he can be proved guilty. One aspect of the Wallander series that is typical of Scandinavian crime novels generally (and distinctively) is the law-abiding and even politically correct quality of the police detectives. Wallander is shattered by an event in the previous novel, in which he killed a man (clearly necessary but nonethelss guild-inducing for Wallander). He worries about drinking and driving (a theme going back to the first novel) and other social crimes. In fact, the Scandinavian fictional detectives seem to be the most socially responsible of all crimem heroes or anti-heroes. I guess it's so ingrained in the culture that the chain-smoking, heavy-drinking noir detective is not possible in the context of Scandinavian culture (except in the case of Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo's Norwegian detective, who is so spectacularly alcoholic that he is the aggressively anti-social exception).

Emigre Noir: Kerr, Limon, and Giovinazzo

There is a distinct genre of crime fiction that I'm calling "emigre noir" but might just as well be called "tourist noir." The writer may be American or English, but the detective (usually) and the setting are European or Asian. Sometimes the setting is evoked in an interesting way but the writing or the story aren't quite true or compelling (Colin Cotterill's Southeast Asian series, as well as the Bangkok series by John Burdett, the Aurelio Zen books by Michael Dibdin, and the Venetian novels of Donna Leon fall into this category, to me), sometimes everything is evoked beautifully but the novel is more a mystery or a "cozy" than noir (much as I like Magdalen Nabb's series, and as gloomy as her hero is, they really fall into this category).

But occasionally the milieu and the story are both evoked within a dark, noir sensibility. Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy starring Bernie Gunther, former cop and now a private detective in the Nazi era, are now joined by a sequel, "The One from the Other," that extends Kerr's insight, that the perfect setting for noir is WWII Germany, into the postwar years. This time the settting is mostly Munich, with excursions to Vienna (another perfect city for noir) and the German countryside--all devastated by war. We may see what's coming before Bernie does, but the plot is nevertheless full of twists and turns. The survival of Nazis into the postwar economy is the topic, as well as rapacious capitalism (always a part of the Nazi picture, after all). Bernie is hired to verify that a war criminal is dead, so that his wife can remarry, but soon he's in the thick of personal tragedy and professional disaster. It's hard to say more without giving something away--suffice it to say that Bernie's narrative is always full of the wisecracking, smartass repartee that is a throwback to classic noir film. If you like your noir in that vein, and sometimes I do, this one is Kerr at top form.
Martin Limon's series about George Sueno, American MP in Korea, always keeps to the ground that Limon knows firsthand, the military base and the surrounding Korean community of entrepreneurs (mostly bars and whores). In the Door to Bitterness, Limon uses a hackneyed plot (gun and badge stolen from cop) to explore the difference in cultures between the GI and the surrounding Confucian/Korean culture of the family. The cliche of the basic plot takes a bit away from the story, but the logic behind it is satisfying and convincing.

Last but not least is the closest of my current crop to being tourist noir. Buddy Giovinazzo takes the New Jersey mob on a trip to Berlin, where they try to muscle in on the largest construction site in the world, Potsdamer Platz after the fall of the wall. It's a great idea, and mostly it works. Tony, Giovinazzo's hero and narrator, is an enforcer who lands in the middle, between the Turks and the Russians who are trying to control the construction projects, as well as the Germans of both Eastern and Western varieties, and even his own uncontrollable psycho partner. The writing sometimes slips into "writerly" excess, with metaphorical language that is a bit too much, but another of Giovinazzo's devices works surprisingly well--Tony slips with no warning into the story of his life leading up to this assignment, and the result is a cinematic style that well suits the material. He predictably and tragically falls for a German girl that he really should not be attracted to, against the background of hyperviolence that he finds himself reacting to simultaneously with callous disregard and newfound distaste. The mob novels I deal with in this blog are typically of the non-U.S. variety (such as the various crime families in Izzo's densely portrayed Marseilles), and it's refreshing in an odd way to get the good old Sopranos-style mob in an exciting new venue. I haven't enjoyed a mob novel this much since reading Jim Cirni's Long-Island mob books. Although Cirni stays within comic distance of reality, and Giovinazzo veers off into a kind of satirical fairy tale by the end of the book.