Yrsa Sigurdardóttir's 2nd Icelandic crime novel

The last decade or so of the economic boom in Iceland saw the growth of a remarkable literary crime wave (especially for so small a country). Arnaldur Indridason is widely known outside of Iceland for his series featuring Inspector Erlendur and Yrsa Sigurdardóttir's second crime novel has just been published in English (translated by the late Bernard Scudder and Anna Yates), and I'm hoping that Árni Thórarinsson's urban noir novels, very succesful in Europe, will soon make their way into English (I may have to brush up on my French if there's not an English translation soon, since Thórarinsson is widely available in French translation). Sigurdardóttir's first two novels are matched opposites, in a way. They both feature attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, but they're more mysteries than legal thrillers. The pattern in both is that of an amateur detective thrust into an investigation by Thóra's involvement in a legal matter. But the first novel, Last Rituals, is a college novel as much as a mystery, and is set in an urban environment. Last Rituals has a serious gothic quality based on the subculture of "urban primitivism," myth, ritual, and sadism inherent in the plot. The new book, My Soul to Take revisits the Gothic realm and revivals of myth in contemporary life, but in a lighter, frequently comic, and rural vein.
Thóra is called to an isolated hotel-retreat designed to appeal to devotees of new-age mysticism (there's an "aura reader" on staff), because the owner of the hotel, her client, is claiming the locals who sold him the property owe him compensation because the site is haunted, and that fact wasn't disclosed in the sale documents. That unconventional legal matter sets a tone of skepticism (on Thóra's part) and comedy (on the narrator's) that continues through gruesome deaths, genuinely horrible events in the past, and Nazi connections (Thóra's German boyfriend says "God, the bloody Nazis…They always turn up sooner or later," a complaint I share, regarding crime writers' frequent resort to the German past). Where Last Rituals was ultimately a fairly straightforward (if somewhat louche) story, My Soul to Take is very complicated, with lots of red herrings (Thóra's client is accused of murder and she keeps coming up with alternative theories of the crimes) and lots of characters (most of whom seem to be suspects). The setting is a variation on the archetypal English country house, and the plot has some aspects of the locked-room mystery (because of a blocked road). Ultimately I found myself pulled along by the engaging Thóra, her mess of a family, and her lover Matthew (returning from Last Rituals) than by the twists and turns of the plot. The resolution seems to be simply one more of the various crime scenarios that have preceeded it, no more or less plausible than any of the others, though the climax is suitably wrapped in a foggy, atmospheric scene. A horrible crime that is shown in the first pages of the book is rediscovered at the end and resolved in a moving way. The Indridason books are more satisfying to my noir-inflected taste in crime fiction (as I expect the Thorarinsson novels will be) but Yrsa Sigurdardottir's two translated novels are a worthy addition to the Icelandic crime wave washing up on English-speaking shores, particularly in the character of Thóra and private life, very different from Erlendur's (as I mentioned in my review of Last Rituals). One minor point for discussion: the U.S. (at the top of this review) and U.K. (in the middle) covers for My Soul to Take offer very different views of the landscape and setting of the novel--does anyone have an opinion as to which is more effective or more appropriate?

The Adversary, by Michael Walters

There is a style in crime/detective fiction that I would call "ruminative," in which the characters re-think and discuss the crime and the investigation repeatedly without moving the plot forward, partly (I'm sure) to keep the reader engaged without making him/her flip back and forth to keep up with the characters and the story. Michael Walters's latest Ulan Bataar mystery, with Mongolian detective Doripalam and state security official Nergui, is a book in that style, and in this case what keeps the book from getting bogged down and repetitive is the eccentric and interesting characters, especially of the two main characters. Doripalam has been (as of the first book in the series, The Shadow Walker) elevated to be head of the serious crimes squad when Nergui is asked to join the security ministry as a sort of liaison between the security apparatus and the police. Nergui is a supercop, after a fashion, and he keeps getting involved in the serious crimes unit, to the frustration of Doripalam, who is having some difficulty asserting his control of the department in the face of his own relative youth and the constant interference/presence of his former boss. Doripalam's greatest virtue is his honesty, a rare commodity in an environment corrupted (earlier) by the Soviet system and now (in an independent Mongolia) by encroaching capitalist greed. In fact, the Western influence in Mongolia is a plague, for the Nergui and Doripalam, against which they struggle daily. In The Adversary, the plague is embodied in a crime boss that no one has been able to bring to court, but who appears in court (finally) early in the book because a not-too-bright, obese, nearing retirement, but well meaning detective, Tunjin, has falsified evidence. The falsification comes to light (because the villain has contacts in the police) and he goes free, setting in motion a series of events (and ruminations) that lead to deaths and abductions and a final surprise along the line. The plot is not the source of the novel's energy: things roll along for a long time without much progress in the investigation, until Tunjin becomes a fugitive and then (toward the end) the judge in the original trial is kidnapped, leading to a final confrontation with the crime boss (who has been offstage for much of the novel). It's the lively personalities that provide the interest: The judge is the first prominent Mongolian woman character in Walters's series, and she has a complicated past intersecting with Nergui's. Doripalam's difficult home life is explored more than in the first book. And Tunjin proves to be not so dumb, even if more often on the Keystone Kops rather than the SWAT team end of police effiency and competence. Plus the glimpses of Ulan Bataar and the Mongolian steppes are fascinating and vivid, the setting in itself being strong enough for me to recommend the book. See Maxine Clark's review here at Eurocrime for a more thorough description of the story and a more positive opinion of the plot, but like Maxine, I am anticipating further opportunities to spend some time with Doripalam and Nergui.

Beate Lønn's super power

Just a little tidbit, life imitating fiction or something like that. The characters in Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series are generally ordinary folks, but one police inspector, Beate Lønn, has a super power (one more suited to a police procedural than a superhero comic, though). She has (according to the author) a highly developed "fusiform gyrus" in her brain that makes it possible for her to recognize faces, even if only seen briefly and long in the past. A valuable asset for a cop. As a reader, I'm always skeptical of that sort of thing but there was a short article in today's Washington Post that (although it doesn't mention the "fusiform gyrus") does offer scientific evidence for Lønn's talent. Post reporter Shankar Vedantam writes that "in research being published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Harvard psychologist Richard Russell and his colleagues have shown that there is a third group of people whose face-recognition skills are unusually good...Russell and his colleagues studied four people with the unusual face-recognition skills, who reported being able to remember faces of strangers they had seen months earlier. Experiments showed that these people could recognize faces even if the features had been changed or distorted, and that they were significantly better at such tasks than average people." The research starts off by questioning the notion that there is the normal ability to recognize faces and there is prosopagnosia (a disability causing lack of facial recognition ability) as the only options for facial recognition. But the research reveals a spectrum of ability, all the way up to those with Beate's talent--reinforcing the realism of her role in the novels, scientifically no less.

Roundup of recent reading

I've been reading more than blogging lately, so this post is a catch-up. A commenter on a recent post about Peru reminded me that Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a couple of crime novels, and I read the most recent (I think) one, Death in the Andes. The novel is a puzzle but not a mystery: it's a maze of interspersed narratives concerning Vargas Llosa's character Corporal Lituma (also featured in his other crime novel), his assistant, several groups of people who are about to be murdered by the terrorist group Sendera Luminoso, and a couple who run a bar in the former mining town (now kept alive by a road construction project constantly interrupted by nature and war) that is at the center of the action. The story is clear enough, and certainly violent enough, but the biggest puzzle is what Vargas Llosa is trying to say about terrorism, indigenous culture, the European culture of the capital city, Lima, and so forth. There's a very interesting article on-line at another blog, http://ignaciolopezcalvo.blogspot.com/2008/11/going-native-indigenism-as-ideological.html, that clarifies Vargas Llosa's position in a very interesting and very detailed manner, dealing with Death in the Andes as well as other novels and essays. I have the other Lituma novel, Who Killed Palomino Molero, on my tbr pile and if I get to it before the library wants it back, I may have more to say about Vargas Llosa--but in the meantime I defer to Ignacio Lopez Calvo at the blog just mentioned. I also recently finished Come the Executioner, by M.S. Power, the author of the remarkable trilogy about the Irish Troubles, Children of the North. Come the Executioner also deals with the Troubles, and it's a mark of the genius of the trilogy and the somewhat lesser accomplishment of Come the Executioner that the newer novel seems dated, as if the times with which it deals are a long way in the past.
But it's still a very good novel of multiple betrayals and the miseries of competing police/army/occupation forces versus local and terrorist interests. But if you read only one book (or series) by M.S. Power, it should be Children of the North (though I have yet to read most of his non-Irish and non-Troubles novels, so I can only speak of part of his oeuvre). The third novel I recently finished is Walter Mosley's remarkable The Long Fall, in which Mosley channels classic noir fiction in Obama-era New York. Mosley's narrator and main character is Leonid McGill, a private detective trying to leave behind some of his own involvement with shady (even murderous) dealings involving organized crime and other unsavory elements of the city. McGill's troubled career is mirrored by his equally troubled home life, and all of the characters are interesting and believable. The plot is ripped from the annals of Phillip Marlowe and Lew Archer, though nothing about the story seems dated (there is a lot of hard-boiled dialogue as well as corrupt rich families, lowering mobsters, and so forth, but there's also the Internet, Wall Street traders, and so forth). But one of the main subjects is so-called "post-racial" America, in which Obama (at the time of the book's writing) could be running ahead of a white opponent for the office of the Presidency but the African-American detective still finds rampant racism. Mosley doesn't ignore what has changed since the era of his post-World-War-II L.A. detective Easy Rawlins, but he highlights what hasn't changed as well (both in racial terms and in terms of the possibilities of the hard-boiled detective story). Anyone who enjoys classic noir will be fully satisfied by The Long Fall (the title refers to McGill's dreams as well as other elements in the story). Apparently this is the first book in a new series, and I'm curious what Mosley will be doing with this character in the future, now that his bona fides have been established with The Long Fall.

political crime novel/satire from Peru

Though pitched by the U.S. publisher (Pantheon) as a Peruvian political thriller, Santiago Roncagliolo's recently translated Red April (the translator is Edith Grossman, which is our--and the author's--good fortune). But Red April bears more resemblance to the dark satires of Evelyn Waugh than to the average political thriller. As in Waugh, the central character is an innocent, through whose eyes we see almost everything, even though it's a third-person narrative (there are a few passages from another point of view, that of a very bad speller, as well as an epilogue by another character). Associate Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar has requested a transfer from Lima to his former home in Ayacucho, and the novel begins with his very bureaucratic report on the discovery of a badly burned body. In his zeal to push the case forward, Félix runs up against a recalcitrant police captain as well as the local military commander, both of whom fail to understand Félix's drive to solve the case. Both the police and the military are avoiding the case as best they can, until Félix's persistence forces them to take another tack: they push the prosecutor into a dangerous duty that he unexpectedly survive, and then they use him as a sort of cat's paw in the larger pattern of politics, revolution, and counter-revolutionary repression. This is all happening during Holy Week (a big celebration in Ayacucho) in 2000, as elections (which President Fujimori will steal), in a time when the revolutionary campaign of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path has been declared by the government to be defeated. Ayacucho, called the Seville of Peru, is between the colonial capital, Lima, and the Inca capital, Cuzco, and was also a center of the war between the government and the insurrection. Its centrality to all of Peru's political and religious stories is an essential quality of the novel.

Holy Week provides a structural and metaphorical frame and the corrupt government and the perhaps not-so-defeated revolutionaries provide a narrative metaphor linked to the larger history of Peru's conflicts going back to the Spanish defeat of the Inca empire. And the tone of the novel (which is comic in a very dark, Waugh-ian way) is provided by the ironic distance between Félix's sincere devotion to the letter of the law (more bureaucratic than ideological on his part) and the reality that the reader (but not Félix) can glimpse. Félix does learn as he goes along, but rather than becoming a hero, our original pity for him turns into something else as the political and personal environment in which he is trapped poisons his life. Félix is devoted to his mother (and there will be revelations about that relationship), he is isolated in the dangerous city he has chosen to live in, and his horizons are very narrow. The comic dimension rather than any identification with the character draws the reader along until the full impact of the metaphorical/political and even mythical dimensions deliver the novel's considerable impact. Red April is a good example of literary craft that embodies and extends a popular genre without condescending to it, and the novel is a substantial achievement at all levels (literary, satirical, crime novel, thriller), making its demonic conclusion all the more effective. As an aside, it's interesting that the U.S. cover uses a quiet (though very red) symbol of Ayachucho's Holy Week while the Spanish edition uses the collision of Catholic and indigenous cultures in a more graphic way--I'm actually not sure which I prefer...

Argentine literary thriller by Guillermo Martínez

Guillermoo Martínez's The Book of Murder isn't really a crime novel, in spite of the title (and the marketing). It's full of literary references (mostly to Henry James, although also to a number of other trendier European authors and philosophers), and it's about the literary novelists favorite subject: literary novelists. No problem with that reflexive fixation, though it's what has so far stopped me from reading the highly praised The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño (also not a crime novel). The Book of Murder is really more of a horror story (and there are references to Poe), with the not-uncommon theme of the vengeful author whose writing prefigures actual murders--handled here (at least) without the lurid sensationalism sometimes attached to the theme. A young novelist hires a transcriber when he breaks his hand, Luciana, a young woman who usually works for a better known writer who happens to be out of the country, to take dictation as he works on his current novel. The young novelist is contacted 10 years later by Luciana, who says that the older writer blames her for the death of his daughter and has been conducting a campaign of revenge against the transcriber's whole family. Most of the novel is a series of monologues by the young writer, the young woman, and eventually the older writer (another feature more common in both horror tales and literary fiction than in crime fiction). Two things in the novel's favor: it's short, and its conclusion does achieve a certain chilling effect (which I won't describe, but it relates to the parallel novels by both of the writers and to the older writer's suggestion that an alter ego, a muse, has been "dictating" his story about revenge in advance of the sufferings of the Luciana's family. But this is a self-conscious "text" rather than a more transparently naturalistic narrative as found in, for example, the work of Gene Kerrigan (to name just one recently read author). Not a bad thing, in itself, just a different sort of thing. Martínez is also the author of the The Oxford Murders, which includes serial murder, mathematics, and arcane symbology: a combination that reminds me more of The DaVinci Code than crime fiction, but perhaps someone can suggest whether it's worth considering for the tbr pile.

Håkan Nesser's Woman with Birthmark

Håkan Nesser is known for building a complete fictional world (as Ed BcBain did in the 57th Precinct novels, set in a fictional “Isola”). But there’s another example of “world-building” in Nesser’s newly translated Woman with Birthmark, the kind of reconstruction of reality that a killer engages in when he/she rewrites the rules of civilized society and justifies his/her actions. Nesser’s killer’s reality also recapitulates a common pattern from the art world, in what is called "outsider art." Again and again, in middle age, a previously average person experiences a crisis of some sort (the death of a parent, usually a mother, is the most common event), and afterwards, the individual is seized by the necessity to create something, often a total environment (like Howard Finster's Paradise Garden), sometimes endlessly repeated works of art like whirligigs or paintings. Usually not thinking of themselves as artists (at first anyway) they create a kind of alternative reality, in contrast to their previously “normal” lives. Nesser's Woman with Birthmark presents just such a pattern of crisis and “creative” breakthrough, but in terms of a serial killer. Breaking from his usual pattern, Nesser gives the reader access to the killer's mind from the beginning, though not giving the killer's identity. At the death of her mother, a woman conceives a series of revenge killings that give her not only a sense of purpose but a transcendent satisfaction with explicitly religious and sexual overtones. We also get glimpses of the rather more ordinary lives of the victims, who nonetheless have their own “alternate realities” in terms of events they intend to keep secret from their wives, friends, and associates (and it is that secret reality that makes them vulnerable to blackmail and murder). Inspector Van Veeteren and his crew (whose personalities and investigative styles are given here in more detail than in some other Nesser books) are faced with making sense of the killer’s reality, in order to anticipate what is going to happen next. Nesser's usual wry wit is very much in evidence, as well as Van Veeteren's prickly and idiosyncratic personality. We know more about what’s going on than the police (the only mysteries for the reader are the exact circumstances of the event that provides the murderer’s motive and the exact progress of her murderous plan), so we can observe closely as the detectives try to piece things together. They do not make progress by sudden insights or even discoveries. They plod patiently on and very gradually more information is provided to them, as often as not through no effort of their own. That is the classic “method” of the police-procedural novel, but highlighted here by the amount of advantage that the reader has over the detectives. The plot itself is unremarkable, nonetheless, the novel moves swiftly forward, partly through Nesser’s frequently comic portrayal of the lives of the detectives and partly simply through his seemingly effortless prose. Nesser’s storytelling is layered with his invented world and the more concrete literary and cultural world: Van Veeteren, for example, makes a passing reference to a famous French film that he thinks might parallel the killer’s motive, without explaining the reference to the reader. But such nuggets in the narrative are not academic or pretentious, they simply add texture and depth. The ending is not something out of a thriller or even a mystery novel: the events instead take on a certain inevitability, referred to by the killer as “a sort of dark poetry.” In spite the dark theme and philosophical overtones, the novel has the lightness of tone that is a distinctive quality of the Van Veeteren series (there is even a joke about Scandinavia, as if to indicate that the world of the novel is somewhere outside that geographic zone, in spite of the author’s Swedish background). To say more would be to spoil not so much the plot as the texture or experience of the story. But I should emphasize that, lest let my suggestion of the philosophy in the book put anyone off, the story is brisk and well told, its deeper overtones embodied in interesting characters, lively conversations, and murderous intentions.

Dark Times in the City, by Gene Kerrigan

Gene Kerrigan's new Dark Times in the City is slightly less tightly structured than his first two crime novels, Little Criminals and Midnight Choir but shares with them (and with writers like Elmore Leonard) a natural but unexpected flow of events and a natural alternation of comedy and moral dilemma (like life). There is a sort of "flash-back" section that explains and clarifies some of what's been going on, and the whole plot has an inevitable quality without seeming like a clockwork-machine. The Celtic Tiger has disappeared and Dublin's criminals have had to adjust to new, straitened circumstances. The cops, though always present in some sense, are more marginal in this book than in the first two. Danny Callaghan, not long out of prison, steps into the middle of a gang murder that has nothing to do with him and launches a series of events that will threaten him and everyone around him (ex-wife, barowner friend/employer, and even peripheral acquaintances). Gangster Lar McKendrick (from the earlier books) makes another appearance, as well as the gangster whose cousin was killed by Callaghan (the incident that put him in jail). The plot twists and turns repeatedly, overturning every cliche that the reader thinks is appearing on the horizon, with Callaghan always coming back into focus. Callaghan is the closest thing to a "hero" or even a central character in Kerrigan's hitherto crowded and morally ambiguous fictional universe, and he's likable and capable without ever becoming an action-hero of the sort that populates any number of thrillers. Such characters are capable of unbelievable feats of martial arts skill, but there's nothing unbelievable about Callaghan or anyone else in the book. Just as one example, I've mentioned a couple of "buried-alive" plots in recent posts, and that trope recurs in Dark Times in the City, but in a fashion that is totally believable (unlike the burial and revival in The Girl Who Played with Fire, which the reader just has to accept as inevitable and as a natural part of the romantic-thriller quality of that very popular Swedish novel). Kerrigan uses a clean and uncluttered style of writing to tell a true and fast-moving story. Dark Times in the City lives up to Kerrigan's own very high standard of crime writing: urban neo-noir of the very highest rank.

April in Peru

No crime today, just vacation. Here I am standing nervously above the precipice in Machu Picchu, with the peak of Huayna Picchu in the background. If you want to see more of our vacation photos, there's a sample here, or you can navigate to aprilinperu.blogspot.com. I didn't find any Peruvian crime writers--if anyone has any clues about that, please let me know.

A.C. Baantjer

If you do a Google search on the name of Dutch mystery author, for some reason a number of authors show up, including Leslie Charteris, Peter Lovejoy, and Ellery Queen--all accomplished authors (or collectives, as I think Queen is not so much a single writer as a small industry). And all are on the formulaic side of crime writing, as is, in his own way, Baantjer. I recently read two of the Baantjer novels (DeKok and the Dancing Death and DeKok and the Deadly Accord), and enjoyed them but found them rather limited and occasionally irritating (his detective, DeKok, is frequently referred to with the phrase "the gray sleuth," an epithet right out of the Greek epic). There are also some things I don't understand: Although apparently DeKok's name is actually spelled DeCock in Dutch, the detective repeatedly explains his name as "with kay-oh-kay." I suppose that in English, DeCock suggests that famous soft-porn author immortalized by James Joyce, whose characters often refer to Paul de Cock as a writer of dirty books. Does Baantjer repeatedly have his character say the equivalent of "with See-oh-see-kay" in the original Dutch, or is it an affectation of the translations? Perhaps somebody can offer some ideas on the subject. The older editions of his novels, such as the ones I have read, also suffer from production decisions--lurid and somewhat amateurish yellow covers and overly bold type that can be a bit hard to read. And like some other detectives (particular those in the formulaic end of the spectrum), DeKok relies on informers who become running characters with somewhat two-dimensional personalities, primarily bar-owner Little Lowee. All of that aside, the prolific Baanjter (a former detective at the Warmoes station, near the famous Amsterdam red-light district) has a lot of stories to tell and tells them with efficiency and with little flash: he is a direct and skillful storyteller. Plus his ongoing survey of Amsterdam is perhaps the best historical guide to the city in the last half of the 20th century, giving more details than other Dutch and non-Dutch authors who have focused on the city (the ones I've read anyway). So I can't quite decide about Baantjer. Should I read any more, beyond these two and others I've read in the past? There are certainly enough of them to keep me busy, but them Simenon also was very prolific. Baantjer occasionally refers to Warmoes station as the "Dutch Hill Street," referring to the famous U.S. TV series, but the DeKok share little with the show except their effective realism (though the TV reference gives perhaps another clue to Baantjer's skill and appeal--not only have the books been turned into Dutch films, they also have a TV-like appeal, partly due exactly to the formulaic quality I've been talking about, perhaps). So what do you think? More Baantjer for my increasingly tall and tottering tbr pile? Just a small p.s., I haven't posted in over a week because I've been in Peru--I'll post my snapshots (to another blog) if anyone's interested (I'll give the url later on).

Camilla Läckberg, The Preacher: part Cain & Abel, part Elmer Gantry

With her second novel, The Preacher (translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray and published by Harper Collins in the U.K.), Camilla Läckberg takes us into the true "heart of darkness": the family. There are stock scenes of family annoyances that are reminiscent of writers like Maeve Binchy, such as Erica's relatives (Erica is the writer who is the central character of this series set in Fjällbacka on Sweden's western coast, though Erica is mostly sidelined and pregnant in this book); her relatives and then another group arrive on her seaside doorstep and expecting to be waited on hand and foot. Erica is now living with her cop boyfriend, Patrik, whose current investigation is triggered by the discovery of a young woman's tortured body. But the host of characters swirling around Erika, Patrik, and the murder include members of a family estranged from one another in the wake of their father's favoritism (the father is the Preacher of the title) and an earlier set of murders. Plus Erika's sister, who escaped an abusive husband in the first book int he series, seems to be falling back into another nasty relationship while not having completely escaped the first. The plot is more of a pure police procedural than Läckberg's first book (which centered more on Erica and her work as a non-fiction writer and researcher), but the story doesn't have much forward motion. Not to say the book doesn't move along nicely, which it does, but that little is discovered by the police until the last 50 or so pages. Until then, the interest is mostly carried by characters who verge on the Biblical (Cain and Abel are specifically invoked) along wiht a bit of Romeo and Juliet, a bit of almost Faulkerian "Southern Gothic" (Northern-Southern Gothic in this case) and quite a bit of Elmer Gantry. In fact, the Preacher of the title signals quite a bit of anti-clerical, not to say atheistic, sentiment that I for one find refreshing in a popular novel--more of the "Northern" than the "Southern" in its Gothicism. We find out a lot more about the other cops in Patrik's station, too, some of them not very good cops, some downright bad cops, and several workmanlike--all fairly vividly drawn. I suppose more than any other Scandinavian crime novelist, Läckberg resembles Mari Jungstedt, since the family life of a central female character is important to both, though not always central to the story. Both set their novels in summer resort areas (though 2 very different resort towns). But if you appreciate Jungstedt, Läckberg will probably also appeal. In spite of the somewhat static plot, The Preacher includes a novel motive for a serial killer, and most of the torture is off-stage, with just a few glimpses into the minds of the torture victims (a short enough glimpse that the crimes are less in-your-face and at the same time not completely convincing). But overall, I recommend The Preacher as another interesting entry in the Scandinavian Crime stakes.

The Betrayal, by Gillian Slovo

Not exactly a Forgotten Book Friday entry, but an 18-year-old thriller about a past that we should not forget: Gillian Slovo writes mystery novels featuring amateur detective Kate Baeier as well as stand-alone novels, including two that deal with the end of apartheid in South Africa. Red Dust (2000) a legal thriller set in a rural court during the era of the truth and reconciliation process and Betrayal (1991) about the last gasp of apartheid, just before the release of Mandela from the Robben Island prison. Slovo says that Betrayal was actually finished just before Mandela was released, and the novel is poised at just that moment, when everyone in the country and beyond knew that change was coming but no one quite trusted that the change would mean the real end of apartheid. The Betrayal is a very subtle post-Cold War spy thriller, and there's not one betrayal: there are lots of them, at every turn of the plot. One of the main characters, Rebecca, is an ANC activist in exile--she is leading a tribunal charged with finding out if Alan, a white South African who is also an ANC activist (in fact, a member of the military wing), is a traitor. Rebecca says toward the end of the book that the certainty that had driven away all gray areas during the struggle against apartheid "had gone and complexity had taken the place of its endless simplifications." No one can be certain if the various betrayals are based on ideology or jealousy or sex. No one's motives are pure. Alan and his girlfriend Sarah (an English woman who has also joined the movement) are both in Johannesburg on separate missions when the novel begins, and Alan has discovered a team of traitors when he is seen by Peter, another ANC soldier who already hates Alan, walking in a neighborhood where he shouldn't be and seeming to pass a note to a police operative, setting in motion that tribunal headed by Rebecca. Meanwhile, a police captain named Malan, a true believer in the apartheid system, is pursuing Alan and other ANC soldiers, and is suffering both from cancer and from a superior officer who seems to be undermining him. All these forces criss-cross their way toward a conclusion, revealing ulterior motives and hidden pasts, and when the real traitor is finally revealed, his identity is less important than than the understanding that the reader has gained into these characters and the realities that they've had to deal with during the long struggle. And two of the strengths of the novel are its anticipation of the long struggles yet to come, after the end of apartheid, and the three-dimensional female characters intimately involved in the web of political and personal struggles. The Betrayal has not been rendered obsolete by history; in fact, its honesty and its suspension at exactly the point of imminent historical change make it a fascinating prelude to the equally honest and complex Red Dust and perhaps to the current complexities of a splintered ANC and the new South Africa.

Mygale (or Tarangula) by Thierry Jonquet

Mygale (or Tarantula, in the U.K. edition), French crime novelist Therry Jonquet's first novel to be translated into English (by Donald Nicholson-Smith) begins like a series of short stories. Seemingly unrelated tales of 4 (or perhaps 5) people who are trapped in different ways in prisons not of their own making. The stories will, of course, come together gradually (the final one in an almost impossible-to-believe coincidence that is necessary not only for the plot but also the author's philosophical point). And it is a philosophical crime novel, in a very French sense (partaking as much of The Story of O and Georges Bataille's novels and theories as it does of Sebastien Japrisot (the French novelist whom perhaps Jonquet most resembles). It's no surprise that Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar, rather than, say, Quentin Tarrantino, is making a movie from Mygale. The novel is short and it's mostly narrative rather than dialogue, the narrator giving the stories from the eyes of each of the victims except one, who is addressed as "you" throughout his portion of the book. The tight narrative makes it difficult to say much about the story without giving too much away (and I would not recommend reading even the blurbs on the back cover--best to come to the story with as few preconceptions and as little prior knowledge as possible for full enjoyment of the tale and its structure). But if you're looking for something like Pierre Manchette, or Dominique Manottie, or Fred Vargas (there's no one quite like Ms. Vargas), this is not it.
It is instead an elegant, disturbing, and gender-bending tale of torture, rape, a bank robbery gone badly wrong, a fleeing criminal, prostitution, revenge, and misery, moving rapidly through its 128 pages. The English, French, and American covers reproduced here give some sense of the nature of the story, whose conclusion is surprising in some ways and philosophically inevitable at the same time: it's a high-concept crime novel, and it's very well written--but probably not for everybody.

Island of the Naked Women, by Inger Frimansson

The title of Inger Frimansson's 3rd novel to be published in English (translated from the Swedish by Laura Wideburg) suggests a soft-core porn movie until the narrative offers an explanation: Shame Island, where the farm family at the center of the story pastures its cattle, supposedly earned that name because in earlier times women accused of adultery were taken there, naked and with no food, and left to die. That explanation of the title suggests a feminist subtext for the story that never materializes (though there are various sorts of mistreatment of women, overt and subtle). What the reader does get is part psychological thriller (but without the neo-Gothic atmosphere of the earlier Good Night My Darling and its sequel, Shadow in the Water) and part tragedy. Island of the Naked Women does share a "world" with the earlier two novels: there is one character from those books who pops up here briefly. But most of the story takes place a bit further outside the city (the first two novels were suburban--just at the edge between the city and the country). This novel instead alternates between the genuinely rural (a farm, the closest a human group gets to the rhythms of nature) and the completely urban. We learn gradually, rather than all at once, that Titus is a literary writer who has recently published a succesful crime novel and is having difficulty coming up with a sequel. He has returned to the family farm to help out when his father has been injured in a fall. Titus hasn't lived on the farm since his Icelandic mother ran off with another man, taking Titus with her. The father's now-partner Sabina (in the past we would have said common-law wife) is about Titus's age has a learning-disabled adult son, Adam, with a talent for singing Elvis songs, a talent encouraged by a Hardy, a handyman with an attitude and a shady past. Ingelize, a former schoolmate of Titus's, offers him a part-time job working with horses, along with a cabin where he could write in solitude. Even at the start, the scenario suggests betrayal and tragedy. For better or worse, the Elvis angle is barely developed, though Adam does have several key roles in the story and the rotating point of view is occasionally occupied by him. The story builds slowly to the betrayal and to violence (which at first we do not know to be real or imagined), at which point Tobias returns to the city, to his writers' block, and to his girlfriend Marit, with whom he has an increasingly troubled relationship. The characters are not likable, particularly, but the reader has considerable sympathy for them, especially Sabina, Marit, and Ingelize (I couldnt' quite figure out why any of them would have much to do with Titus). The story presents effectively the ease with which murder may occur and the immense consequences that can ensue, both literal and psychological. Titus doesn't write psychological crime novels like Frimansson, he seems to be writing fairly conventional detective stories. In fact, he seems to be condescending to the genre that his own life is now embodying (which is a clever way of reinforcing the "reality" of the novel). The tragic tone of the novel builds slowly, with numerous excursions into farm life and basic bodily functions, toward a descent into the darker aspects of human emotion. The novel is modern in many ways, but also suggests the rural novels of Knut Hamsun and other European writers in the early to mid 20th century. Frimansson's palette has deepened and broadened with Island of the Lost Women, into the depths of the noir tradition.

Out of the past, plus more recent Swedes and bloggers

Published in 1935, The Three Coffins (aka The Hollow Man), a mystery novel by the prolific John Dickson Carr ( master of the locked room mystery) includes a somewhat meta-fictional discourse by Dr. Gdeon Fell, one of Carr’s running characters, on mystery fiction. Fell begins by proposing that the characters in the case he’s working on are fictional characters in a mystery novel, which of course they are): ““Because … we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.” Fell also says to the group surrounding him that if anyone doesn’t want to listen to his discourse on the locked room mystery, he “can skip this chapter.” Carr’s analysis is structural, investigating all possible locked room situations and all possible solutions to the puzzle—and his graph of the form does account for one of the best (and least clichéd) of the locked room mysteries that will appeal even to readers (like myself) who are not really enamored of puzzle mysteries: The Locked Room, by Sjöwall and Wahlöö—as well as being a challenge to all current and future writers to find some means of murder and escape that Carr does not anticipate (that will be difficult—he’s very thorough). One of the interesting points that Fell makes in his lecture is about the criticism of crime fiction: Fell says that when you complain about a story or the solution to its mystery, “If you do not like it, you are howlingly right to say so. But when you twist this matter of taste into a rule for judging the merit or even the probability of the story, you are merely saying, ‘This series of events couldn’t happen, because I shouldn’t enjoy it if it did,’” proposing a rule that in fact protects the novel in which the sentence is printed (which includes a lot of improbability) from attack. But Fell goes on to explain what he means at length, but basically he’s saying the same things that a number of bloggers have been saying: don’t condemn a crime novel simply by attributing it to a sub-genre or even complaining that it performs some of the clichés we associate with a particular form (e.g. the locked room, the cozy, etc.).

Rules for reviewing crime fiction have recently been proposed by Maxine at Petrona and by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise (probably among many others), and I’ve mentioned a couple of times that any opinions I give regarding genre or sub-genre, etc., are only meant to suggest whether a reader might like or not like a particular book based on whether he or she likes that particular kind of mystery novel, etc. But Carr has anticipated us by 60-odd years, and in a careful and lively manner. His character, Fell, also gives more credit to Anna Katherine Green, one of the pioneers of the field, than any other writer/critic (real or fictional) that I’ve seen (she was active 50 years before Carr), among other recommendations to his listerners (or readers). All that said, The Three Coffins is a bit too much of a puzzle mystery for me, though it’s a “cracking good yarn,” to use a phrase that might have already been obsolete when Carr was writing. The novel is about a group of men interested in ghosts and illusions; when one is murdered (in a locked room) and the chief suspect is also murdered (in plain view and leaving no tracks) a great deal of discussion ensues among the murdered man’s circle of friends (including Dr. Fell) and the estimable Inspector Hadley. Many scenarios for the crimes are suggested and shot down by forensics as well as speculation, often by surprising new revelations of fact and character, as well as a dramatic story that gradually unfolds regarding someone rising from a grave (a device that recently popped up in (Warning! Spoiler Alert—sort of) a very popular Swedish novel just published in the U.K. and not yet out in the U.S.
The warning by Fell (or Carr) not to judge the probability of a plot device like that applies to the Swedish novel (and to me): I found it pretty preposterous, though I neither mentioned the device in my review (as a spoiler) nor judged the novel badly because of it (and I’m happy to have my opinion reinforced by so auspicious a historical and critical source as the famous Mr. Carr/Dr. Fell. None of the above, of course, means that we can’t be critical about crime novels: just that we should be careful to differentiate between our own taste and a universal judgment; a distinction that will still allow us to talk about writing that is more effective (or less), and novels that achieve more (or less) within the structures of the crime novel or fiction writing or story telling (along the lines suggested by Maxine and Kerrie, perhaps). Carr’s novel is frequently comic, turning as it does on not only the conventions of crime fiction but also on a transitional phase (at the time) between Victorian and modern fiction-writing styles. While Hammet & company were looking forward (and are thus seem more modern) Carr looks back (and seems more traditional/Victorian), but he’s well aware of his position, and he’s having fun with the genre (not only in Fell’s speech but also in similar ways throughout the book) and with his audience.

Brazil's Elite Squad

During the Washington DC leg of his recent book tour, Leighton Gage said a couple of things that illuminate Brazilian crime fiction as a genre. One was that there isn't a highly developed tradition of crime fiction in Brazil: most best sellers are self help books. Brazilian author Patricia Melo's In Praise of Lies, reviewed here a couple of months ago, shows a crime writer turning to self help writing in order to make it big--reinforcing Leighton's comment about the book trade in the largest South American country. Another thing he mentioned was that if you want to get a picture of the country, you can't do better than the recent Brazilian film Elite Squad (Tropa de elite, directed by José Padilha). I picked up a copy of the DVD, and it's a powerful, difficult-to-watch crime story told in a documentary style (somewhere between Battle of Algiers and The Wire). We follow two rookie police lieutenants, Neto and André, who discover the rampant corruption in the Brazilian police. Looking for something better, they end up in the "flying squad" type unit of the movie's title: part SWAT, para-military, and above corruption. The film's narrator is Captain Nascimento, who is desperate to find a replacement for himself so he can get out of the dangerous and demanding unit. André is getting a law degree and witnesses the casual acceptance of the drug gangs by his fellow students, who buy from them as well as getting permission from the drug lords to operate a social service organization in their favela, or slum. The rookie goes through a series of disillusioning experiences that separate him from these privileged students, driving him into a radical position as a cop as ruthless as the drug lords (there's considerable parallel between the violence of the bad guys and that of the good guys, which reaches an extreme (in both cases) at the end of the movie. There has been some controversy about the movie glorifying or justifying the violence of the police against the poor, but that argument is actually raised by the students in a way that doesn't trivialize the argument. In fact, the parallel drawn between the violence on both sides (and the acquiescence of the "civilians" in both the favelas and the rich districts) is carefully maintained. This is a skillful portrait of a society at the edge of chaos, at the point that Yeats envisioned in his most famous poem: things are indeed falling apart and the center is not holding. Corrupt cops are personalized in a direct and often comic way, as they compete with one another for territory in various protection rackets. The movie is not for the faint-hearted. We are lulled into the sense that the violence is not going to be that bad, and then we are hit with the full grim reality of violence. There's also a "boot camp" section when the rookies are put through training that is both macho and disgusting. But a tamer vision of what's going on wouldn't be as convincing emotionally. Thanks to Leighton for the recommendation, and I can pass the advice along (with fair warning).

Colin Bateman's Mystery Man

Dan Starkey, the anti-hero of Colin Bateman's series crime novels (he also writes stand-alones) is a feckless magnet for murder and mayhem, especially as played by David Thewlis in the 1998 movie of the first Starkey novel, Divorcing Jack. The unnamed narrator and central character of the new novel (the author has re-christened himself simply Bateman) conjures up visions of Starkey and Thewlis but to an exaggerated extreme: we learn gradually, and with accelerating speed, that the monologist-narrator is hyper-medicated, allergic to everything, afraid of human contact, paranoid, and has read far too many crime novels. There's a whiff of metafiction--the narrator is the owner-operator of No Alibis, a bookstore in Belfast specializing in crime fiction, and there really is just such a store, in the exact same location, though reportedly the owner bares absolutely no resemblance to Bateman's hero--and the varied plot includes a great number of punctured crime-fiction cliches as well as numerous references to classic and current mystery fiction (as well as a very funny portrait of a certain Irish literary figure who has begun issuing crime novels). A private detective whose office is next to the fictional bookstore disappears, and his clients start asking the bookshop owner for assistance in locating, among other things, a graffiti artist painting insulting comments and a pair of leather trousers purportedly lost by a dry cleaning shop. Then he's lured (very reluctantly) into the case of a missing woman who is the wife of a publisher (of literary rather than genre works) and sets off on a very paranoia-inducing trail that includes a couple of beautiful women (one of them a jewelry store clerk that the narrator has been for some time spying on), Nazis, Holocaust survivors, dance teachers, a useless bookshop clerk, book fairs, an auto dealership, a police detective, a car chase, and a writers' retreat. Along the way, Bateman has a lot of fun with the conventions of the mystery genre, the relationships among writers, publishers, and readers, and the nebbishy character of the lustful, aggressive, shy, obsessive-compulsive hero-narrator. The book is fairly long (just over 400 pages) but the type is very big (approaching the Large Type font for the visually impaired) and moves very quickly from an "amateur detective" story to the thriller plot and at the end, a tantalizing hint of a different kind of story altogether. Bateman's last novel, Orpheus Rising, was magic realism rather than crime fiction, and in the new one, he has come back to crime with a comic vengeance (most of the vengeance seemingly directed toward the standard techniques of crime writing and toward the narrator himself). Reportedly, Bateman is at work on a sequel titled Day of the Jack Russell, and that title gives a flavor of the hijinks as well as the reflexive quality of Bateman's crime writing (whose subject is crime writing) in what may be a new series. Good news, since Mystery Man is the funniest crime novel since Bateman's own Divorcing Jack and Cycle of Violence.

The Arms Maker of Berlin, by Dan Fesperman

The latest post-cold-war thriller from Dan Fesperman portrays, as one of the characters says, characters who are "Modern Germany made flesh, in all its macabre and tragic grandeur." He does manage to suggest some of that burden of history in The Arms Maker of Berlin, but without portraying the city in as concrete a way as I would have liked (Berlin is a fascinating place to visit, whether in person or on the page). There's a lot of motion in Fesperman's book (characters moving back and forth across the Atlantic, up and down the east coast of the U.S., and across Europe, not to mention across time, in numerous flashbacks to WWII), and a lot is revealed to the reader before the investigator at the center of the book, historian Nat Turnbull, figures it out. There are moments of suspense, lots of Nazis and former Nazis now embedded in Germany after the fall of the Wall, and some interesting material about the White Rose resistance movement in Hitler's Germany.

But is it just me: are the Nazis a tired motif by now? Hitler and his minions have certainly been rich territory for fiction (almost too easy as a source for tension and threat). Nazis figure in the book I'm reading next, too, Bateman's Mystery Man--but I suspect Bateman will be using them in a not entirely straightforward fashion. Fesperman's Nazi hunter/historian is propelled by the arrest of his former mentor into a rat's nest of police, FBI, and spies and ultimately into the intimate past lives of that mentor and a crowd of Germans and Swiss whom he encountered in wartime Bern. The flashbacks deal with a German mini-Krupp industrialist who manufactured war materiel for the Nazis and for all comers after the war (along with coffee makers): his youth and bad choices during the height of the war are the engine that drives the plot and the historian's search. The reasons given as to why anyone would care anymore about the industrialist's past are plausible but not really developed (why flesh out the Iranians, the Pakistanis, and the nuclear weapons parts when there are Nazis to be pursued, right?). The novel was pretty good, in spite of my frustrations with it--I was propelled along to the finish. And it makes me want to go back to Fesperman's Sarajevo detective (in Lies in the Dark and Small Boat of Great Sorrows) as well his excursions into other parts of the world in a couple of more recent novels--to see whether my jaded attitude toward WWII plots is getting in the way of an appreciation for this obviously gifted and well-informed novelist.

Spinetingler Awards Short List

I was surprised and pleased to learn that I've made the Shortlist for the Second Annual Spinetingler Awards in the Reviewer category (click here to see all the categories and nominations). I'm honored to be nominated, and in the company of such a distinguished group of reviewers, too (Ali Karim, Larry Gandle, Lesa Holstine, Karen Chisholm, and myself)! If you'd like to vote in any or all categories, click here, and there are links to all the nominated stories as well. And many thanks to everyone at Spinetingler magazine (in its new home at bookspotcentral.com)!

Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator (and a murder)

Amara Lakhous's novel, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is a portrait of a group of immigrants and Italians in a piazza in Rome, but in a series of eleven brief monologues, Lakhous accomplishes much more. The monologues are all concerned with the disappearance of Amadeo, a translator suspected of the crime by the police, and the monologues are each accompanied by an existential "wail" by Amadeo himself. In structure, Clash of Civilizations resembles Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm (reviewed here last year): the monologues have the character of testimony, about the murder of a bully called The Gladiator in the titular elevator (which is also the source of disputes among the various residents of the house, arguments that will be very familiar to anyone who has lived in a co-op style apartment building). But their testimony also has a gossipy character that reveals a lot about the speaker as well as the community as a whole: and each speaker is characterized effecively through a few characteristics given in his/her own testimony as well as through the eyes of the other characters. And Amadeo's wails reveal not only his own character and his relationsn with the rest of the community but also the basic themes of the book: immigration, memory, language, and a person's sense of place or home. The real mystery of the book is not who the murderer is (though the solving of that mystery is withheld until the final testimony, that of a police inspector): the real resolution is the gradual discovery of who Amadeo is, and the discovery of his own tragedy. Curiously, both the Clash of Civilizations and another (very succesful) book published by Europa Editions (Elegance of the Hedgehog) end with a similar incident that arrives out of the blue but nevertheless provides a resolution. It's impossible to describe that incident (or to say much about Amadeo's identity) without giving away too much, though. What I can say is that Lakhous's book is a brief, quiet, often funny, and ultimately poetic commentary on our globalized world, brought into focus through his concentration on the interaction of a small group in a very particular place.