Mystery and Tragedy: Neville and Fossum

The new novels by Karin Fossum of Norway and Stuart Neville of Northern Ireland have little in common (except for being works by two of the most prominent and accomplished crime novels working today). Both, however, demonstrate an inevitability in their motion toward a conclusion, and a tragic sense of character that determines the story.

Neville's So Say the Fallen continues the story of Belfast detective Serena Flanagan, the central character in two of his previous books. This time, she reluctantly takes on the case of the apparent suicide of a wealthy car dealer who was the victim of a car crash in which he had lost his legs. He and his wife had also in the recent past lost their young child in a swimming accident while on vacation in Spain, death and disaster seemingly following them around.

But details of the crime scene make Flanagan uneasy. Among the witnesses she interviews is the minister in whose church the dead man had been active, and Flanagan begins to gravitate toward him in her personal search for a way out of the miseries of her own life. As she comes closer to the preacher, we also learn the real circumstances of the death, in the portions of the narrative from the minister's point of view, and the alternating perspectives on what is and has been going on enlist the reader as a witness to a tragedy of ambition, deceit, ruthlesness, and despair. Flanagan herself navigates a difficult and finally dangerous path through the collapse of the lives of everyone involved.

Fossum's Hell Fire is also a split narrative, offering three perspectives on the murder of a single mother, Bonnie Hayden, and her young son, Simon, in a caravan parked on a corner of a Norwegian farmer's property. Inspector Konrad Sejer, Fossum's usual policeman, has no clues and simply keeps dogging the case and reinterviewing possible witnesses, hoping for a breakthrough.

The other two narratives follow the seemingly disconnected stories of the mother, who is working as a home help assistant, and another mother and son, Mass Malthe and her seemingly autistic (though the word is never mentioned) son Eddie, in his twenties but still living with his mother and almost completely dependent on her, through his own laziness and antisocial character and her indulgence of his habits.

We follow Bonnie on her rounds as she takes care of her sometimes troublesome and sometimes friendly clients, and we witness Eddie's on-again, off-again on-line search for the grave of the father that abandoned him and then died in a foreign country. The tragedy here also has an inevitable quality, but the emotions and personality traits that drive that inevitability are more subtle and claustrophobic than those in Neville's novel. We don't know what the circumstances of Bonnie's and Simon's death were until late in the novel, but from the beginning there is a sense of fatal loss and social failure that give the novel its tragic character. Fossum's novels don't adhere to a single structure, and Sejer is a more important character in some of them than in others (among those in which he's a character at all). Here he's a stand-in for the reader, a helpless witness to the catastrophe of two families.

Parisian noir

Frédéric Dard was a prolific crime writer in the 20th century who had a major series (173 novels) about about the invincible Detective Superintendent Antoine San-Antonio, and also other novels, some of which fit into the French noir category. One of these is Bird in a Cage, recently published by Pushkin Vertigo in David Bellos's translation.

Bird in a Cage is a twisty tale of a concentrated, tense return to a Paris suburb by an ex-con (the narrator), who has learned that his estranged mother has died. He stays in her apartment, visits a restaurant that had been held up by his mother as the height of elegance and expense, and there encounters a young mother and her daughter. He more or less follows them into a movie theater, and there begins a tentative relationship, assisting her with her sleeping child when they leave the cinema.

From there, the narrator is plunged into a labyrinth of a disappearing corpse, clues and even rooms that appear and vanish, and a tightening web in which he finds himself trapped. The novel ends with mysteries finally cleared up but destinies left hanging (we know what is probably going to happen, but not absolutely).

This is a classic crime novel in the French mode, reminiscent of film noir and dripping with the atmosphere of the mid-century era of noir's birth. It is claustrophobic, puzzling, and satisfying, a great quick read.

Dead Joker, by Anne Holt

The latest Hanne Wilhelmsen novel by Anne Holt is one of the most intense. Cecilie, her life-partner, is ill, and Hanne is confronting uncomfortable realities at home and at work. When a prosecutor phones the police to say that his wife has been decapitated while he was forced to watch, a series of events is set in motion: the man whom the prosecutor saw murder his wife turns out to be dead, a suicide some time before the murder. With a deceased suspect, the attention of the police naturally turns to the most logical alternative, the prosecutor himself. What follows is an unconventional puzzle mystery that will involve another murder, a murderer who is also a victim of child abuse, a ring of abusers and a ring of vigilantes, and a reassessment by Hanne of everything and everyone in her life.

Holt's novels are more focused on the lives, both inner and social, of her police characters than some in the Scandinavian crime wave, and sometimes the personalities of the detectives can be a bit distracting, imho. But in Dead Joker, the puzzling case and the personal disasters of the lead detective (though in no way parallel) add up to more than the sum of the parts. The end is in some ways inconclusive, but in its emotional truth, entirely satisfying.

A detective's beginnings

Cara Black's Aimée Leduc series has delivered, in 15 volumes, interesting characters, enticing views of Paris, intricate plots, and thrilling conclusions. In the 16th, Murder on the Quai, she delivers all that plus Aimee's "foundation myth," the story of the origins of her profession, her partner Rene, her dog Miles Davis, and her fraught family history--plus the wartime resistance, Nazi gold, and more.

Aimée makes a charming gamine-detective, just at the beginning of developing her skills as a detective. We also see her father firsthand, and get a glimpse of the story of his death, frequently referred to in the series. Plus we get a brief glimpse of Aimée's mother, also a frequent source of internal conflict for the detective throughout the series. But in all cases, the shift in perspective from the recent past (all the Leduc stories are set some 10 years or so before their publication date, giving the key source of her detective agency's income, data protection and computer security, an air of quaintness) to the birth of the running plotlines of the series.

And in a series of further flashbacks, we see firsthand what Aimée glimpses in her research into the execution-style murder of an old man on a Paris quai: a wartime story but not the usual tale of the French resistance. This tale is not of heroism but of greed, jealousy, and opportunism. The resolution of Murder on the Quai is not so much a "whodunit" reveal but the sordid revelation of the continuation of those sleazy human traits into the present-day of the novel.

If you already know the Leduc novels, this one is a must-read. If you don't, it would be an entertaining intro to the series, though you will miss a good deal of this book's charm, which resides in the discovery of a familiar character's origins.

Of fire, sex, and the blitz: Henry Green's Caught

Henry Green's 1942 novel Caught has all the elements of a thriller: a volunteer fireman in London at the start of World War II, the kidnapping of his child, the scenes of bombing and destruction. But Green (not his real name, but he was indeed a fireman in London during the blitz) undercuts the heroism and thrill at every corner. He tells the story in scraps beginning with the end of the kidnapping, when Richard Roe's son is rescued from a mentally ill woman by her brother. Unfortunately for Row, the brother turns out to be his superior officer in the firehouse, later.

But later and sooner are all mixed up, as the narrative moves back and forth through the first year of the war, before the blitz, leading up to a final conflagration and death that are not at all what a conventional novel would provide. Green, though, was not at all a conventional writer. His books (most of which lack dramatic events such as those that frame Caught) dissect sex, class, and daily life in twisted prose and oblique dialogue that together create both comic effects and a tapestry of the everyday.

Sex, one of the constants in Green's work, is a key element of Caught, as the fireman, stuck in a waiting pattern, find solace where they can, with women quite willing to find their own solace in the absence of their husbands or lovers called up for the fight. Neither the sex nor the loneliness (or even the love) are romanticized: Green has the jaundiced eye of a satirist, but he does have sympathy for his characters. The cruel end of Caught, in which the beginning of the bombing is told second-hand by Roe to his wife, sent down to the country with their rescued son, with an inadequacy that he fully recognizes and a cognitive dissonance that he doesn't. The cruelty isn't in the turmoil of war, which from Roe's perspective is thoroughly disjointed and unheroic, but rather in his insistence on telling his wife (an unwilling witness), and in the manner of his telling. Even the sympathy we may have for this unheroic hero is undercut, in Green's dark view of human interaction (dark but funny, in prose that somehow manages to be both heavy and light at the same time). Green was a unique writer, and Caught is a unique novel of war, love, conflict, and human interrelations.

Killer Deal, by Sofie Sarenbrant

Killer Deal is a new Swedish crime novel, the first in an apparently popular series to be translated into English. The setup is interesting (a family is in the midst of separating, and becuase of that selling their house. After an open house the husband is found dead. There's also a nice twist at the end, creating an unexpectedly open conclusion. However, I just could not get into the book--it's too suburban, almost small-town cozy. There's too much intertwining of the detective's life and the people involved in the case, as if everyone in this part of Stockholm is separated by considerably fewer than six degrees. 

The writing is OK, geared more to best-seller than literary status, and the characters are believable. But there are lots of subgenres in crime fiction, and I guess not all of them appeal to all of us. And it's definitely a window on a suburban way of life quite different from the setting of a lot of the Scandinavian crime wave.

Two by Lola Smirnova

Lola Smirnova's Twisted and Craved, the first two novels of a trilogy, apparently, offer enough crime, misery, drugs, alcohol, sex, and even occasional pleasure for a dozen crime novels, but these are not really crime novels (despite the excess of crime, especially crimes against women, in them). Instead, Smirnova has constructed an episodic fictional memoir by Julia, who with her sisters Natalia and Lena, depart from a difficult life in Ukraine into an even riskier world of sex work, primarily nude dancing and sometimes prostitution. They are not being trafficked, they are entering into contracts more or less with their eyes open. And the sisters, each in her own way, are looking for a home life, with or without romance--in some ways the novels are the antithesis of romance fiction.

The story begins with an S/M scenario and then flashes back to the beginning of Julia's story. The sisters travel first to Luxembourg and then to Turkey, encountering many, many unpleasant men, across a range from customers in a strip club to rapists. Julia descends into drug addiction, and her sisters try to save her and eventuall succeed, returning to Ukraine and decide to start a new life as entrepreneurs, starting, with their mother's help, a beauty salon.

Craved, the second book, begins with a new temptation to leave their new life (the salon isn't doing all that well) for Cape Town, South Africa, for a new gig as dancers. At first, they find the new situation easier than their European experience: prostitution is now assumed to be part of their job, though that practice lurks always below the surface as the underside of their work. Each sister finds a patron, even in Lena's case a husband (something she has been searching for all along) but love is not part of the equation at any point. But while Julia finds her own patron in a seemingly kind Arab prince, things begin to spiral out of control for all three: even the truths that they had assumed about their parents and each other start to dissipate. By the end of Craved, things are very bad, and a sequel will need to dig Julia nad her sisters out of a very dark place.

There's a lot of sex in these books, but nothing even remotely sexy. But Julia's tale is compelling, and the story moves quickly along, pulling the reader into the net into which the sisters have themselves become entangled. This is a new kind of noir, not following any of the rules of the genre but conjuring up the true core of noir fiction's vision of contemporary life.

Two important Norwegians

The principle characters of two of the most prominent Norwegian crime writers, Anne Holt (author of the Hanne Wilhemsen series, set in Oslo) and Gunnar Staalesen (author of the Varg Veum series, set in Bergen) in a recently translated novel by Holt, The Lion's Mouth, when Wilhemsen runs into her old friend Varg in a cafe. It's only a passing moment, a kind of homage from one writer to another, as we can see in The Lion's Mouth and in Staalesen's recently translated We Shall Inherit the Wind.

Holt's novel is immersed in Norwegian political machinations and scandals when the prime minister, scarcely 6 months after she had taken office, is found dead in her office. The investigation, not by the senior cop Hanne, because she is in America on a sabbatical until almost halfway through the novel, but by her friend Billy T and, of course, everyone else in the Norwegian police and security services. There is also a three-decades-old scandal, uncovered recently and under investigation by a commission headed by an old friend of the prime minister, dealing with an unusual number of babies who died in the year 1965.

At times, this is a political thriller something like that other giant of Norwegian crime writing, Jo Nesbø, or perhaps the Swedish writer Leif GW Persson, but the tone of Holt's writing is quite different. She alternates gritty and hard-nosed investigation with some light-hearted, even childish, behavior on the part of Billy T and others, injecting a bit of the atmosphere of a cozy mystery into this otherwise more noir and urban tale.

Staalesen's hero Varg is a private detective whose career started as a social worker, and he often investigates the disappearance of children (as in the case he mentions when he runs into Hanne), but in We Shall Inherit the Wind he is asked to find an adult male who has disappeared just before finalizing a deal to build a wind farm on a prominent site above a fjord. We learn a lot about the politics of clean energy (rather than Norwegian national politics) as well as the machinations of families involved in one way or another with the site of the proposed wind facility.

The book begins with Varg's girlfriend, near death in a hospital, and circles back to the story in which she is led to that hospital bed. The tone is very dark, due in part to that framing device, but there is also a lot of violence, threats of violence and even a crucifixion, lending an apocalyptic air in line wih the Biblical title of the book. But Varg, who is also the narrator in this series, is an affecting example of the tragic hero outlined by Raymond Chandler's famous essay on hard-boiled fiction, while also being humane and vulnerable (very much in character with his original profession). 

It's appropriate and amusing for Hanne and Varg to meet, in Holt's bit of metafiction, but they otherwise don't have a lot in common: Varg is immersed in the dark side of urban life, with rarely a moment of respite, while Hanne diverts her (and the reader's) attention with more settled relationships in her own life and in the lives of those around her. Between the two writers, they describe the whole range of the rich vein of Scandinavian noir that is unique to Norway.

Harri Nykänen's Behind God's Back

Harri Nykänen is one of the most prominent Finnish crime writers, with two series that have begun to be translated into English: one features Raid, a hit man (and the basis for a widely-shown TV series), and the other features Ariel Kafka, a Jewish cop in Helsinki, in a police force (and a city) with a small Jewish population. Both of the Kafka books published so far also feature elements of cultural and police interaction between Finland and Israel.

Kafka doesn't actively participate in the Jewish community, but is drawn back into it when a prominent Jewish businessman is assassinated in the doorway of his house, to which he has retreated in fear of some unknown party that has threatened him. The Jewish connection is not the only focus of the investigation (and not the only reason Kafka is assigned to the case), but ensuing discoveries and events continue to reveal connections to the community and to Israeli politics (as well as to Ariel's own brother, whose business is implicated in a shady load obtained by the dead businessman).

Nykänen's Kafka books lack some of the dry wit that characterizes his Raid books (which are in part a migration of tropes of Westerns to contemporary Finland), though some of it remains (in, for instance, one of Ariel's coworkers who is obsessed with Native American culture, a sort of crossover with the Raid series). But Ariel's narration is a lively rendition of the police procedural mode, and the occasional chase scenes (one involving a killer escaping via kayak), shooting incidents, angry witnesses, and violent encounters are all lively events taking the reader momentarily out of Ariel's monologues.

I'd like to see more of Ariel's work with broader themes in Finnish culture and crime, but perhaps Nykänen has something new for Ariel in the pipeline.

Gianrico Carofiglio, A Fine Line

The series of legal thrillers set in the Pugliese city of Bari, by Gianrico Carofiglio, depend more upon the voice of the central character, Guido Guerrieri, than on plot or mystery--fortunately Guido is fascinating. He's a lawyer who's not too certain about his profession but comfortable in his life, his city, and his relationships with co-workers, his ex-wife, and his evening companion, Mr. Punchbag (Guido is a former boxer who keeps his hand in both in the gym and with his in-home punching bag, with which he sometimes carries on one-sided conversations).

In the new novel, he begins by discussing with a police friend a recent scare caused by the false diagnosis of a fatal illness. But the shadow of that experience is quickly set aside when a judge who is a former law-school classmate approaches him about a suspicion that the judge is being investigated for corruption. Guido accepts the case, and a double plot ensues. While Guido goes through the labyrinthine Italian legal system (which we learn a lot about ), his investigator (a young woman named Annapaola Doria, who is a former cop, a motorcycle enthusiast, and a source of attraction for Guido, something he is ambivalent about).

Carofiglio's skill as a writer is evident in his ability to hold the reader's attention without resorting to weapons, corpses, and other typical plot tropes of the crime genre. Here we have only the judge, the shadowy (and mostly off-stage) world of organized crime, from which the accusation of corruption arises by means of a criminal informant, and Guido's careful manipulation of the legal options open to him. Guido is not only good company, as a narrator, he is also an effective conduit for the forces at play in a social realm that includes many dark paths among the pleasing vistas of Puglia as he travels from Bari, where he and the judge are based, and Lecce, where the legal case will be heard. This series is not a travelogue/crime novel, though. The Italian setting is important, it is not as much a part of the novel's core as is the case in, for instance, the Camilleri novels. Instead, the reader gets a vivid sense of a fascinating character and the milieu in which he operates as an attorney. I highly recommend the whole series and the most recently translated episode is up to Carofiglio's high standard.

Lisa Brackmann's latest

I enjoyed Lisa Brackmann's China-based series of postmodern thrillers, but I've also been waiting Getaway, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Getaway is a pure noir thriller about an innocent abroad, a widow whose husband turns out to have been a crook, and whose getaway to a resort town leads her into a breathless getaway of a different kind.
impatiently for a sequel to her

The sequel has finally arrived: Go-between, and I hesitate to say anything at all about the plot because the twists and turns start immediately and carry on until the final pages. Most of the book is set in Houston, and Texas is an appropriate setting in many ways, not least because some classic noir (including some of Jim Thompson's stories) has happened in Texas (the fictional as well as the actual state).

Go-between features a range of topics and backdrops, from a northern California riddled with marijuana dealings of legal and illegal sorts, airplanes (also a factor in Getaway), for-profit prisons and state-run ones, nonprofits that may or may not be sinister fronts for corporate greed, and the failure of wealth and privilege to protect against the encroachment of violence and misery. Brackmann sets up a series of threatening situations from the beginning of the book, and the plot unravels from there as the heroine attempts to salvage something of her life. The pace is fast and the threat palpable, though some readers (one spoiler alert ahead) might find the last few pages a bit anticlactic after the considerable build-up of tension.

On Danish authors Kaaberbøl and Friis

The power of the series: the authors’ creation  of one of the most distinctive  characters in contemporary fiction.

My review is Here.

 @LAReviewofBooks 

Argentine Queen of Crime

Betty Boo is Claudia Piñeiro's best book to be published in English so far. Like Nurit Iscar, her heroine in this novel, Piñeiro is the "Argentine Queen of Crime," but unlike her heroine, Piñeiro has not turned away from crime in favor of "serious" fiction. Instead, she is exploiting the norms of crime fiction to investigate serious issues of not only crime but also the contemporary way of life in her homeland and the wider world.

Betty Boo is in part a satire of the decline of newspapers, exemplified by a Jaime Brena, a writer who has been supplanted on the crime desk of his paper, El Tribuno, by the "crime boy," whose idea of investigative journalism is to do a search on Twitter and Google. When a prominent citizen is murdered in the gated community of La Maravillosa, his throat cut in much the same way his wife had previously been murdered, the editor El Tribuno (and Nurit's former lover) convinces her to move into La Maravillosa and send daily posts to the paper from within the community that is the scene of the crime.

So Brena the supplanted crime editor and Nurit, the former crime novelist (she gave up writing when El Tribuno published a damning review of her "straight" novel), along with the crime boy and Nurit's circle of friends are swept up in a widening spiral of murder, influence, and privilege. The resulting story is frequently funny and always compelling. Piñeiro has worked some of these same themes in her previous books, but here all of her interests come together in a story that is both satirical and engaging. Betty Boo is hands down the best book I've read so far this year.

Stan Jones, Tundra Kill

The most recent novel in the Nathan Active series by Stan Jones, set in the town of Chukchi in the north of Alaska, offers a lot of native culture and Arctic life. Jones's books always use native language and the distinctive quality of life in a small town of blended native and outsider peoples (and Nathan himself, adopted out of the culture as a child and now returned as a cop, is thought of locally as half-native, but learning. He's now attached to Grace Palmer, the emotionally wounded woman from an earlier novel, as well as her adopted daughter.

What Tundra Kill adds to the mix is aother artifact of Alaska's history and culture: a female governor with national ambitions and a folksy style: not Sarah Palin but a later (and current) governor cut from the same cloth. There is considerable Palin-esque satire in the earlier segments and in the governor's Palin-esque language throughout. But the plot actually turns on the death of a local man in a still-frigid incident: he was apparently run over by a snowmobile. Afte rthe discovery of the body, the plot actually moves back in time, to a visit by the governor, who asks for Nathan, now the chief of the newly reconstituted local police (he was formerly a state trooper), to be her bodyguard as she tours the area (her original home) on the occasion of her husband's participation in an annual dog-sled race.

The governor and Nathan get stuck in a snowstorm when their plane is forced down (the plane incident is a thrilling piece of writing, I suspect Jones has some knowledge of flying in the Arctic). When we return to Chukchi and the investigation of the death-by-snowmobile, the threads of the plot begin to tighter around Nathan, constricting his ability to conduct his search for the killer as well as his job and his relationship with Grace.

The result is an effective combination of crime story and satire, which moves surprisingly deeply in a sexual direction, because of Grace's difficulty in achieving a normal sexual relationship with Nathan (because of her past trauma) but also for other reasons related to the current plot. The Nathan Active stories are always lively and interesting, as well as offering plots wholly consistent with the Arctic location: plus they have not come along frequently enough--one can hope for another new one before too long.

Helsinki Homicide: Darling

I haven't read all of Jarkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide series, but the current one (Darling, translated ably by Katriina Kitchens) is focused less on Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamӓki than on his team (in comparison to the ones I have read). The result is very good, right up to the end (which I found a bit rushed and a bit more brutal in a casual way than anything that had come before). I kept thinking of Ed McBain and the 87th Precinct books, in the way that Sipila handles the shifting point of view and the broadened focus on the characters.

The cops are interesting and well differentiated from one another, and along the way another interesting character, defense attorney Nea Lind, also becomes an important aspect of the story. The plotting is also off-beat in an interesting way. When a mentally handicapped adult woman is found dead, the police focus in on a group of men (including the caretaker in her apartment building) who hang out together in the Alamo Bar; each in turn had been exploiting the dead woman sexually. But the police focus in on the caretaker, who quickly confesses, but also asks specifically for Lind as his attorney. The case seems closed early on, with the police simply  consolidating the evidence.

But Lind and a reporter who reluctantly picks up the story, at her editor's insistence, begin to pick away at the case, leading up to the violent conclusion (which is, as it happens, what it takes to convince the police about the truth in the case).

A quick and entertaining ride, if a bit bumpy at the end (imho). 

Mick Herron, Real Tigers

My review of Mick Herron's Real Tigers is up at Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/an-operational-advantage

Divorce Turkish Style, by Esmahan Aykol

Esmahan Aykol's Istanbul novels featuring Kati Hirschel, crime fiction bookseller and amateur detective, are a bit unconventional. Kati occasionally speaks directly to the reader, and her narrative is full of details about Istanbul and its citizens, of all classes (that detail is one of the most striking things about the series), but the crimes and even the investigation can be a bit difficult for the reader to pin down. I the newest, Divorce Turkish Style, there's a dead woman who was perhaps (and perhaps not) murdered; there's a Thracian separatist group and rapacious industrialists at odds over the pollution of a Turkish region; and there are several very complicated families (not least the unofficial "family" of Kati, including her roommate, the Spanish Fofo and her cop friend Batuhan).

Kati insinuates herself into the dead woman's family as well as into the lives of other people associated, sometimes tangentially, with the victim (who was an environmental activist), frequently in cafes around the city. The puzzle of the crime doesn't develop slowly toward a resolution: the situation remains totally fuzzy until it is clarified rapidly toward the end. This structure might be frustrating or boring in another writer's hands, but Aykol brings it off effectively through her attention to Kati's voice. Kati is never totally serious, always uses crime-fiction references in a way that is only half-serious in her pursuit of the truth, and always has her personal life on the front burner (she's currently without a lover, but keeping her options open, for example) and always in pursuit of the particular pleasures that keep her in Turkey rather than in her ethnic homeland, Germany.

The series isn't exactly cozy nor is it noir. Kati is always front and center, and a reader will know immediately whether he or she wants to spend a few hundred pages with her (as I have done with each installment). And the covers, by the way, are beautifully designed.

The Gun, Fuminori Nakamura

Fuminori Nakamura uses different strategies in each of his crime novels, but in each case his concerns are philosophical, rather in the manner of Albert Camus's The Stranger (I've also seen Nakamura compared to Mishima, but I don't know that Japanese author's work well enough to judge the aptness of the comparison). In The Gun, a character/narrator not unlike Camus's existential hero is not isolated socially but has a problem with attachments, perhaps a result of his childhood and adoption, but the problem seems so deeply rooted that it is perhaps simply how his brain works. He is a sociopath of a sort, with little or no empathy for the women he has sex with, his friends and neighbors, or the possible victims of his ultimate crime.

What becomes the focus for his attention and attachment is a pistol that he finds, next to a body (likely a suicide). Taking the gun muddles the scene for the police, who do not classify the case as suicide because no weapon was found. But for the narrator, the gun becomes at first simply the focus of his fascination: it is a beautiful machine that must be cared for, respected, and hidden. But gradually the function of the weapon also becomes part of his fetish.

Along the way, several encounters provide a counterpoint to the gun: his closest friend, a female fellow student, and a woman he meets for casual sex each demonstrate the narrator's daily life of little affect, ambition, or interest. He is in a way a blank canvas on which the gun has been inscribed.

The conclusion that the story seems to be inevitably approaching in the last half of this short book is suddenly subverted and twisted into a sudden explosion of violence of a different sort than the narrator had intended, providing a more satisfying portrait of the character and his situation than a more straightforward ending could have. This is an intense, claustrophobic, and effective noir/philosophical thriller.

Håkan Nesser, Hour of the Wolf

Hour of the Wolf, one of Håkan Nesser's Chief Inspector Van Veeteren series, isn't new (the English

translation appeared three years ago) but is only reaching Kindle format in the upcoming months (which is the impetus for my current review). the Van Veeteren books are set in a fictional "Maardam," something like Ed McBain's fictional Isola. Maardam is an amalgam of northern European countries, with place and family names that suggest Holland, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark (oddly, nothing sounds very Swedish except for some cultural references--perhaps in the author's original Swedish text, Swedish names wouldn't have sounded "alien" enough to create the sense of a new place/no place. Another distinctive feature of the series is that the central character, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, retires to help run an antiquarian bookstore, early in the series.

Hour of the Wolf is a first-class police procedural, with the team of detectives taking center stage, and Van Veeteren thrust into the investigation because his son is one of the first victims of a crime spree that begins with a hit-and-run accident. Van Veeteren's grief is a central motif of the book (though the cop and his son had long been estranged, something established at the beginning of the series); but the retired chief inspector also exhibits his intuitive method, as he shadows the police investigation and provides key insights.

The story alternates among the detectives, the retired chief inspector, and the killer, a skilfully handled kaleidoscope that ceases in the final chapters as the police are left with several difficult matters to sort out, leading to a strangely metafictional section in which the current chief inspector (rather than the retired one) travels to New York (which is of course the model for McBain's Isola) from the fictional Maardam. The effect is strange, but well handled--as is the final resolution, going beyond the mere identification of the killer.

Spies and revenge from Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry, The Mulberry Bush

Mysterious Press

Charles McCarry’s well regarded spy fiction is noted for the clarity and assurance with which he depicts not only the spy trade but also the them-or-us oppositions of historical and cold-war espionage (not for him the gray areas of LeCarre’s maze of spies and counter-spies). But his new stand-alone The Mulberry Bush (not a part of the multi-generational saga of must of his spy fiction) starts in full post-Cold-War mode, with the unnamed narrator and central character cultivating a spy in Argentina who is providing useless information about long-retired revolutionaries. But almost immediately the story shifts into another mode, one that has less in common with the range of current spy fiction and more in common with one of the classics of American intelligence, Roger Hall’s World War II era memoir You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger. McCarry has drawn a portrait of the training of intelligence agents that I recognize from my own very brief and totally undistinguished experience in counterintelligence: not since You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger has anyone so deftly portrahed the blend of the ridiculous, the momentous, and the self-obsessed that characterize the training and conduct of spycraft.

Hall’s 1957 memoir covers the final years of the World War II era OSS. The book, out of print for a number of years but brought back into the light of day a few years ago by the Naval Institute Press, has been widely read among CIA employees and was (when I was there) the most-circulated book in the library of the Army intelligence school. McCarry’s book shares with Hall’s a smart-ass narrative voice that is frequently comic but self-centered to an extent that the reader is wise not to take anything he says totally at face value. The narrators also share an ostentatious false modesty about their athletic abilities as well as a less than total dedication to the intelligence agency for which each works. Hall is simply not a professional spy. He ended up in the OSS for the same reason I ended up in Army Intelligence: it was a less unattractive option than alternatives like infantry. McCarry's unnamed narrator, though, has a more serious motive for becoming a spy. He wants to destroy the (also unnamed) agency that humiliated and expelled his father, who discredited himself as a spy by indulging in pranks that are very like the ones that Roger Hall gleefully remembers from his own career.

After his recruitment and training, the narrator spends five years in the field, as a special operations agent (that is to say, he's arranging assasinations rather than cultivating spies), but when it becomes obvious that his cover has been compromised he returns to Washington. Once there, he has little to do, beyond studying Russian (with an eye toward future assignments) and look for his estranged father. After a single encounter, before his father's death, he begins to plot a revenge on the unnamed institution that had betrayed him, in particular the Agency’s Headquarters staff. He finds the ammunition for his revenge plot in the very attractive Argentinian spy that we met in the opening pages, Luz Aguilar, who he thinks will lead him to the radical associates of her “disappeared” parents who may still be in contact with Russian intelligence agencies that, in the days of the Soviet Union, were the major support of left-wing movements throughout Latin America.

Having accomplished his goal of insinuating himself first with the Argentine left and thene with the Russians, the narrator shuttles back and forth among clandestine meetings in the major cities of Europe and South America, including Buenos Aires, Helsinki, Berlin, Bogotá, and Bucharest, but the city hs evokes most concretely is Washington DC (one of his clandestine meetings occurs outside a café I can see from my office window). This is not the Washington of high politics, but of the mundane life that can be so easily exploited as cover for the movements and actions of spies of all stripes.

If the story of The Mulberry Bush sounds complicated, it is. The narrator needs the assistance of Luz (who burns with her own heat of revenge), his handlers at the Agency (Tom Terhune and Amzi Strange, old hands implicated in his father’s failure), Luz's foster father Diego, a Russian spy named Boris (among other agents on all sides of the post-Cold-War map), and others. All in aid of a complex effort to discredit the Agency by means of the false defection of Boris (who may already in fact be an American “asset”). The book's plot is circular, rather than linear (as the title’s reference to a child’s song/game suggests: both the spy trade and the narrator’s revenge plot are enlessly circling games with no end point. Second, there's no such thing as a mulberry "bush," the mulberry is a tree; nothing here is what it claims to be. The narrator continues chasing the ghosts of his own father’s life in a tightening spiral that leads to a violent ending, echoing the fate of Luz’s parents and offering a final glimpse of what the narrator calls a “worldwide fellowship” of trators lying behind everything that has happened. All of the complexities leading up to this ending are deftly kept under control by the narrator’s clever and personable voice (not unlike Roger Hall’s), as if he were sitting next to you relating over dinner his jaundiced but entertaining vision of the world we live in and the intelligence agencies that use their intricate tradecraft to exploit our hopes and fears.