Two by Gunnar Staalesen

Amon the originators of nordic noir, Gunnar Staalesen has not fared as well as some others in being translated into English. His ground-breaking Varg Veum series includes 19 novels, published at regular intervals since the '70s in his native Norwegian, but only 9 have been translated for English-speaking readers, sometimes with gaps of 8 or 9 years between translations.

Varg Veum is distinctive in a number of ways, perhaps not least because he is, to my knowledge, the only fictional private detective whose background is social work. And the novels frequently involve threatened children (as do, directly or indirectly, the two most recently translated). Plus Veum is ageing, closely tracking real time. By the second of the two new books he's 61, and showing the physical strains and limitations of his age (including slower recovery from the beatings that private detectives in noir fiction seem prone to get).

In Wolves in the Dark, Veum has been struggling with the sudden death of his lover. He has mostly been a more or less upright citizen, though living at the margins of Norwegian culture in his home town of Bergen, but in Wolves, he. has plummeted down and out . He had indulged in acquavit to the extent of experiencing numerous total blackouts, and his detective work has suffered. Now, in the frame of the novel, he has begun his recovery, largely through the help of a new relationship, but he stands accused of a terrible crime and must revisit some cases he had taken on in his drunken days to look for who might have framed him. These cases, and his own flight from the police back and forth across Bergen, are a civic and cultural portrait as well as a very complex story (whose various threads are finally more or less drawn together by the end). His flight from the police adds a breathless quality to the narrative which is not typical for this series (though there are always passages of danger and threat in the books).

Big Sister is a quite different story. Now that he is back on his feet, Veum is surprised by his new client, a long-lost half-sister, whose existence he was aware of but whom he has never met. She wants him to find her missing god-daughter, a college-age woman who has vanished. Veum dives deeply into several cases of sexual and physical abuse as well as drugs, plus unexpected strands of his own family history, as the book moves slowly toward a final surprise that seems a bit cinematic. Along the way, he has to contend with a biker gang (bikers are a particular staple of Scandinavian crime fiction) and a host of reluctant witnesses.

Veum's voice as narrator of his own stories is unfailingly self-aware, and grounded in both ethical standards and genuine concern for children and young people. His unique voice is one of Staalesen's major conributions to Scandinavian noir.

Black Swan Rising, by Lisa Brackmann

It says right on the cover that a black swan is "A highly unlikely event that has massive impact, and which seems predictable in hindshght," and Lisa Brackmann's new Black Swan Rising illustrates the idea in detail. the novel is part political thriller and part cautionary tale (of the dystopian sort), part "ripped from the headlines" and part vision of the near future. There are two central characters: first, Sarah Price, who has assumed a new identity to escape on-line harassment in her past and is now working as an intern for a congressman from San Diego who is running for reelection. The second is Casey Chang, a TV reporter who was the victim of a mass shooting and is trying to reestablish her life and her career.

The novel alaternates betwee the two threats, shooters in real life and haters on-line. and sets out the real and fictional threats from both arenas vividly, not only in the threats against the two leading women, but also against the electoral system and the society as a whole. This is a thriller that hits much closer to home than the average book in the genre: what is happening is not only credible, but as the book's title suggests, inevitable in the current political and social toxicity. The on-line threats described are simply reflections of what is happening in the cybersphere every day, every minute. The active shooter threat is an extension of what we see every day (in schools and on the streets and specifically in the social movements brought out into the light by the encouragement of our current political leadership--and we shoudl remind ourselves that it's not a single person who has encouraged these hate groups now, it's a large segment of the right both in power and around the country.

But Brackmann's novel isn't only dark and foreboding, it's also human and humane. The characters take us along this difficult journey through their compelling personal engagement with what's going on. And the action of the novel doesn't indulge in the cliches of the genre: The twists and turns of the plot are uniquely Brackmann's.

Brackmann's previous two series, one set in the gaming and art worlds of China, the other a more straightforward pair of noir novels set in the drug trade of Mexico, the southern and western U.S.,  establish the writer's conversational narrative voice, which continues in Black Swan, but the new novel has more urgency and more contemporary impact, as if this is a novel that Brackmann had to write. I don't know of any other book that captures the actual social and cyber threats to democracy in the U.S. so effectively. We can hope for more, whether a sequel or a new angle on our times in future books.

Sjöwall & Wahlöö, The Locked Room

I was a big fan of the Maj Sjowall/Per Wahlöö Martin Beck novels when they were first translated in the 1970s in the U.S., and at the time my favorite was The Locked Room, the 8th of the 10 books. I had reread all of them a few years ago, but recently had occasion to listen to the audio version of The Locked Room recently and was surprised how funny it is (at least when listened to)--sometimes int he ironic way that all the Martin Beck books are funny, but also in a broad comic way. This is one of the most tendentious books in the series, in terms of its indictment of the Swedish so-called "welfare state" of the time, with the narrator occasionally veering into invective against the injustice and neglect that elsehwere is effectively potrahed in the crimes, victims, and even criminals (sometimes) in the series.

The set-up is straightforward: A woman proceeds toward a bank in Stockholm, robs it, and kills a bystander almost by accident. The reader will not revisit this bank-robber until very late in the novel, though the police will focus on a couple of other bnnk-robbers at length.

Afte rthe robbery, we turn to the return of Martin Beck to active duty, after the senior detective of the national homicide squad had been shot in the previous novel (Man on the Roof, very effectively filmed by famed Swedish director Bo Widerberg in 1976--inientally, The Locked Room was not included in the excellent Swedish series based on the Martin Beck books, only appearing on film in the '90s in the German film Beck: De Gesloten Kamer).
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Beck is assigned what everyone thinks is a lost-cause cold case, to give him something to do: A classic locked-rom murder (everyone except Beck thinks it's funny that Beck, who never reads crime fiction, has been assigned such a classic mystery novel premise). At the same time, the rest of his squad is investigating the bank robbery from the novel's first pages, but they pursue the notion that a gang of robbers that they have previously been unable to catch (but whose identities they well know) perpetrated this crime as well. One of the results of their pursuit is the spectacularly failed raid on the gang's hideout, a comic catastrophe that is more Keystone Kops than police procedural.

When the solution to both crimes finally arrives, the criminals don't exactly come to justice, at least not in any conventional manner. But the novel's conclusion is satisfying in several ways: in its ironies, in its endorsemenet of the lives of those at the bottom of Swedish society, and in the private life of the usually doleful Beck. In the end, this is no longer my favorite Beck novel (perhaps The Fire Engine That Disappeared currently holds that title), but is a reminder of the very high standard that this series set for  crime fiction in Scandinavia, and indeed everywhere else.

Swedish noir: The Tunnel, by Carl-Johan Vallgren

Most of the Scandinavian crime wave is made up of thrillers and police procedurals, only occasionally reaching the bleak potrayal of life in the streets that is typical of noir. Carl-Johan Vallgren reaches for noir, basing his two (so far0 novels featuring ex-junkie Danny Katz in a difficult landscape of heroin, disfunctional famiies, life on the streets, sexual deviance, and exloitation. The Tunnel, the second in the series, also focuses (almost equally) on two former friends of Danny's, from his junkie days, Eva, now a prosecuting attorney, and Jorma, a career criminal.

The novel actually begins with a failed armored car heist, in which Jorma is involved. Jorma spends most o the rest of the book seeking who is responsble for the betrayal that led to the robbery's failure and the murder of a friend, also involved in the robbery. Danny, a computer expert and former intelligence office, is involved in both the investigation of his own Jewish background and in the murder of a friend (a drug dealer) and the disappearance of the dealer's girlfriend. Eva becomes involved when Danny asks her for information relating to the drug dealer.

But Eva has her own demons, including a failed marriage (and her failure to be an adequate parent), her addiction to casual sex, and a difficult (to say the least) relationship with her boss. As all the threads are slowly drawn together (int he first two-thirds of the book) the stage is set for a violent, sexually twisted (~a la 120 Days of Sodom), and breathless rush to a consculsion. Finally, at the end. Dany once again confronts his family history and Jewish roots, and the story (and perhaps the series) comes to an emotionally crashing conclusion.

This book is a difficult read, first because of the shifting perspectives, second because of the disgusting sexual violence lying behind muh of the plot. But for fans of Swedish crime fiction who have been craving something darker and tougher, this will be an essential novel.

Icelandic noir TV series

Iceland hardly seems like a breeding ground for noir fiction, since it’s a small country that the rest of the world knows mainly for its volcanic activity, hot springs, and cold climate. But the country has a famous serial killer, Axlar-Björn (though he was executed in 1596) and has in recent years experienced some of the conditions that foster noir: rapid change and increasing instability and inequality. In fact, Iceland was one of the poorest nations in E

urope until, during WWII (known afterwards to to Icelanders as the Blessed War), it was invaded and occupied by foreign powers (England and the U.S. At the end of the war, the occupiers left behind considerable infrastructure that began the modernization and enrichment of the country--leading up to the financial crash in 2008 and the slow rebuilding since then.

There has been a flowering of crime fiction from Iceland in recent years, beginning with Arnaldur In∂ridason’s dark police procedurals featuring Erlendur, of which Jar City (written in 2000) was the first translated into English (in 2005)  and made into an excellent film in 2006 by Iceland's most famous director, Baltasar Kormákur. A number of other writers, mostly natice Icelanders, have followed Arnaldur into globalcrime fiction circles.

a trend that has in more recent years resulted in a suddenly visible crime television boom, several series having become available on streaming services in the U.S.and beyond. One of them, Lava Field, even refers to that 16th-century serial killer. Lava Field deals with murder in a remote location, near a small town in which the lead detective has roots. There are a lot of interesting characters, not the least of whom is a woman who is a former athlete and new cop who becomes a key investigator in the case. There are also many views of the country's bizarre landscape. Lava Field was, at least until recently, available on Netflix

One of the factors in Lava Field that is typical of Icelandic nor TV is an emphasis on both the troubled personal lives of the main characters and the pursuit of the criminals. A series known both as Court and Case (the former in its first season, available on Walter Presents, the latter in its third season, which was available on Netflix and will perhaps show up again as a new season on WP), develops largely in the disastrous rise and decline of a lawyer, once unjustly jailed, then gradually undercutting his successes in the law with alcohol and bad personal and professional decisions. Both available seasons are excellent, but the version known as Case

on Netflix, is particularly compelling.

Baltasar Kormákur. is the force behind Trapped, a claustrophobic series based in a fishing town int eh far north of the country (the BBC ran the series, and it was, and may still be, available on Viceland in the U.S.). Trapped deals with a ferry that arrives in the northern town at the same time as a headless corpse, and the police sequestration of the ship in order to investigate the murder leads to multiple unfortunate consequences, for the police chief, the mayor, the boat captain, and many others. The series is beautifully made and features intense and impeccable acting.

Another Icelandic series, Cover Story,  (also known asThe Press) is available (2 seasons so far) on Walter Presents int he U.S. This one, despite the serius crimes and turbulent lives of the main characters, is not quite as heavy as the other three mentioned above. The scene is a newsroom, which provides some opportunity for comic moments largely (but not entirely) missing from the other series. In this one, the main character is a woman reporter trying to raise her two kids mostly alone, while becoming more deeply involved in murder, financial crimes, and anti-immigrant violence.

IN early 2017, the murder of 20-year-old Birna Brjánsdóttir as she walked through Reykjavik late at night after a night out, brought home to Icelanders that the blossoming of noir in their country is not an entirely fictional phenomenon--though it's still a safer country than its fictional output would suggest, the seeds of noir have taken root in real conditions and crimes.

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A brief word about Anita Nair's A Cut-Like Wound

Some time ago, I reviewed Anita Nair's second novel in the Inspector Gowda series, Chain of Custody, not having read the first in the series, the acclaimed A Cut-Like Wound. Chain of Custody seemed to include any explanaations necessary, so that it was OK to start with the 2nd book. Now, having read A Cut-Like Wound, I see that I was wrong. Most of the main characters, especially Urmila, who seems to be his mistress in the 2nd novel, but whose connection to Gowda is much deeper, a link only clear in the 1st novel.

A Cut-Like Wound deals with transvestism and transexuality, but Nair is careful to draw the character of the novel's violence from a person rather than a community. The violence of Chain of Custody is more pervasive, rooted in the trafficking of children, but in that novel the traffickers are personalized in the character of a conflicted young man who is one of the prominent voices of the novel.

Both are significant, involving, and convincing crime novels: but start with A Cut-Like Wound, please.

Beside the Syrian Sea, James Wolff

James Wolff's Beside the Syrian Sea is a peculiar spy novel/thriller focused on the effort of a runaway intelligence analyst who goes to the Middle East to try to rescuehis father, who has been kidnapped by Daesh/Isis in Syria. Jonas is both clever and desperate, but he has no field experience in the spy world. He mostly proceeds by lying to everybody and revealing only snippets of the difficult truth of his mission.

He's clearly out of his depth in the complexities of Beirut, and his own British government is trying to stop him from getting involved (after refusing to pay the ransom that Isis demands). He contacts an alcoholic priest (who is a bit of a character out of the novels of Graham Greene), luring him into collaborating on his task by lying and involving not just the priest but the one person in the world that the cleric cares about. Jonas also falls in with Hezbollah (in some of the darker passages of the first part of the novel).

It takes a while for Jonas's plan to become clear, and begin to actually develop, and then it moves quickly but not in a straight line The story is always compelling, but frequently claustrophobic in its focus on Jonass on less-than-clear mind. This is an unusual, and unusually well-written, spy novel, aimed squarely at the grim realities of our current world.

Hunting Game, by Helene Tursten

I've read most of Helene Tursten's Irene Huss novels, and seen the Swedish TV series, so it was interesting to see that she has a new lead character for a new series: Embla Nyström of the mobile unit of the Gothenburg police--younger, single, and a boxer instead of a jujitsu champion. I regret to say that I lost patience with the novel itself, Hunting Game. The setting is an annual moose hunt on private property, among a group of residents and guests who indulge in this hunt during the season every winter. But other than Embla, I didn't find the characters terribly compelling, or perhaps it was the claustrophobic environment of the cabins and the hunt itself that caused my problem.

Another reader of many of the Huss novels has gotten tired of the soap opera of Huss's family life, and Embla certainly solves that problem. She is independent, and though part of a team, this novel isolates her from the other cops because she's part of the hunt and knows a lot of the people involved. When the cops do get involved, after one of the hunters disappears, she is still on her own most of the time, right up to the high-threat conclusion.

Another difference from Irene is Embla's willingness to doctor the evidence and bend the truth (not that that sort of proffssional deception is beyond Irene, but Embla is particularly blatant in an incident I won't describe since it would be a spoiler).

So I enjoyed Embla, and the set-up of the moose hunt was interesting, but ultimately I didn't sympathize with the hunt or the other characters--more Embla please, but please, not out in the forest hunting game...

Weeping Waters, by Karin Brynard

One of the reviewers of the original South African edition of Weeping Waters, by Karin Brynard,

called the author "the Afrikaans Stieg Larsson," but the comparison is way o ff the mark. Even the author's own tribute to Deon Meyer, the most prominent Afrikaans crime writer, doesn't really illuminate Weeping Waters very much. Brynard's novel made me think of both Zoe Wiomb's David's Story (for its evocation of the Khoi-San people of South Africa) and Gillian Slovo's Red Dust (for its examination rural post-apartheid South Africa): but Weeping Waters doesn't imitate either of thos ebooks.

Brynard uses the form of the police procedural rather loosely, as one element of her lengthy (just over 500 pages) story of a family torn apart by illness and misunderstandings, of the indigenous people of South Africa (a very complicated story, examined at lennth in various passages of the book), of fear and racism among the white farmers underthe new regime, and of a lonely cop exiled into a rural town that he has difficulty understanding or coping with.

There is a violent murder (and references to even more violent murders, white supremacist preachers and farmers,  there's traditional culture and history, and there are the murder victim's haunting paintings. The central characters include the cop, the victim's journalist sister, the victim's farm-manager (of indigenous background), and various other cops, farmers, devvelopers, farmhands, and others. The story can be repetitive, but never drags: the repetitive elements spiral toward a violent conclusion that highlights the country's struggles with inequality, history, and rapidly changing society afte rthe fall of apartheid. Of the substantial number of crime writers in the new South Africa, Brynard is one of the most ambitious in scope, but her style is straightforward, always focused on the reality of the characters' lives.

2 by Mick Herron

Mick Herron has two new books out, both dealing (as is usual for Herron) with the British secret services, though (as is also usual for Herron) in unusual ways, especially in one of the new books. The more usual of the two is London Rules, the latest entry in the "Slow Horses" series, featuring a band of disgraced MI-5 agents working in a seedy building far removed from the security services headquarters By now, we know the pattern of the books in this series, and London Rules fulfills our expectations: from the atmospheric opening to the twisty plot, the disdain with which the headquarters stff regards the "slow horses," in the Slough House exile that gives them their name, and in the ultimage though costly engagement of the slow horses with the current threat. The formula is still enjoyable, though the twists and turns are to be expected now (the surprises were a major part of the enjoyment of the first novel, Slow Horses), and Lonodon Rules has a bit of a suggestion that the series may be drawing to a close soon, not least in the unlikely reappearance of one of the most appealing characters from Slow Horses.

The other new novel, This is What Happened, is rather different, not least in how the secret services figure in the plot. There is an unexpected kidnapping wiht an unexpected outcome, a dystopian tale, a dogged investigator without any official portfolio, and a claustrophobic atmostphere that remains regardless of the sudden shifts in point of view (and the sudden shifts in the reader's realization of what actually is going on). Though not as comic as the Slow Horses series, this stand-alone is vintage Herron, and an interesting departure from his usual style, not least in the closed-in quality of the setting of a good part of the book.

Two recent Japanese crime novels show a double view: American genres seen through the distinctive lens of Japanese culture.
The first, Seicho Matsumoto''s A Quiet Place is in an old-fashioned psychological noir mode like some of Patricia Highsmith's non-Ripley novels. A husband discovers, on his wife's death, that she has been frequenting a hotel that is nowhere near her usual territory. Investigating, he becomes obsessed with the idea that she has been having an affair, and then obsessed with the supposed partner, a man whom he begins to follow. The violent consequences and the psychological weight of the violence are inevitable, and the inevitability is a big part of the narrative. That's pretty standard territory for noir fiction in the U.S. in the '50s and 60s, but the dated quality of the plot is compensated, for a Western reader, by the glimpses into the distinctive qualities of Japanese culture, such as the dizzying series of obligations and debts surrounding a funeral, funeral gifts, etc.

The other, Tetsuya Honda's Soul Cage, is a police procedural in the mode of Ed McBain, though the lead character is a woman, an ambitious cop who struggles with the hostility and/or affection of the other cops in the elite murder squad. The tone is light rather than heavy, with the cops' banter and jealousies takeing up a large part of the narrative, but the crime itself is distinctive and interesting, traced back through a series of flashbacks with a distinct flavor of Japanese culture (particularly in the construction business and the gang world). Again,  one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the day-to-day portrait of Japanese life--for instance, when the cops need to rush off to a crime scene, they almost always go via public transportation...

A glimpse into other cultures is not the only reason to read international noir, but noir is an excellent genre for getting glimpses like these. The intensity of emotions in books like A Quiet Place offer more than superficial character portrayal, and the street life of books like Soul Cage give a better view of the larger culture than a domestic drama can.

And now where are we?

Where in the world...

Motion, in three recent novels

I've recently read three crime novels that have a lot of movement, back and forth across Paris, Galway, and the Italian peninsula. In two of them, the motion is a bit dizzying, and in the third it's punctuated by conversations that are perhaps more dizzying than the physical movement.

Cara Black's Aimee Leduc is frequently portrayed in movement, across the particular arrondissement of Paris in which her current novel is set. But
in Murder in Saint-Germain, the crisscrossing of that neighborhood and across several plotlines seems to be motion for its own sake, rather than activity that keeps the plot moving. Still, for fans of detective Leduc, the book has its charms, as well as some forward motion in the overarching plot of Aimee's personal and family life.

The movement in Ken Bruen's The Emerald Lie seems more gratuitous. Bruen's plots sometimes meander, for sure, but this novel seems more to lurch. The murders and murderers are quickly dealt with and then the perpetually down-and-out private detective and former Garda Jack Taylor veers off toward another one--without influencing the action very much himself. What The Emerald Lie has to offer is Bruen's distinctive voice, his constant references to other crime writers, several distinctive characters we meet along the way, and what pleasure the reader may take from seeing how the author can manage to take Taylor even further on the road to dissolution.

The Second Day of the Renaissance is a belated sequel to Timothy Williams's excellent series of novels set in northern Italy, featuring irritable Commissario Piero Trotti. In the new novel, he's retired, but a series of events brings some of the cases in the earlier novels into the story. Trotti travels from his foggy home town to Florence (where he meets a young girl at the train station, an encounter that has repercussions later), Siena (where he has a long and often oblique conversation with a Carabiniere officer who tells him that there's someone trying to kill Trotti), to Rome (where his god-daughter and a former colleague are getting married) to Bologna (fleeing from a killer but inadvertently leading the violence toward his own daughter). There's a lot of dialogue in the story, much of it indirect (Trotti is not an easy person to engage in a conversation), along with considerable discussion of Italy's troubled past (particularly the "years of lead," when the international rebellions of 1968 threatened to spiral into terrorism, in the north, and  the mafia was resurgent in the south. No one would say that Trotti is good company, through all this, but the reader will nonetheless care about him and his fate as well as that of all those who are near him. And the reader will also learn much about the Italy beyond the monuments and tourist attractions.

Denise Mina's new The Long Drop

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/macho-centric-denise-mina-takes-on-classic-noir/

Jassy Mackenzie, Bad Seeds

My review is at Los Angeles Review of Books

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/despair-and-hope-jassy-mackenzies-south-african-noir

Anita Nair, Chain of Custody

I'd like to hear from someone who's read Anita Nair's first Inspector Gowda book, A Cut-Like Wound, which I haven't read. I recently finished the second in the series, Chain of Custody, which picks up the story after his assistant is recovering from injuries he received in A Cut-Like Wound, and a good deal of the story revolves around his recovery and other threads from the earlier novel. Not that it's difficult to keep up, when starting with Chain of Custody: Nair is careful to include new readers in the story.

Set in Bangalore, Chain of Custody deals with the trafficking of children, in particular a young girl who is the daughter of Gowda's housekeeper. The story shuttles between the Inspector's daily life (the investigation, his wife who has reappeared in his life, his mistress) and the point of view of a young man who works for the traffickers. Gowda's life only skates above the dark underside of the story, while the trafficker provides the heartless underbelly.

The result is dark but frequently amusing, providing a glimpse of Bangalore and India today along the way. Is A Cut-Like Wound a similar blend?

Donna Leon: Earthly Remains

Donna Leon's new Guido Brunetti book follows the typical/atypical pattern of the series, developing slowly toward an ambiguous ending, with familiar and unfamiliar elements along the way. In Earthly Remains, as in some of the earlier books, we are immersed in an aspect of Venice not commonly available to the tourist: in this case woeing (Venetial style) among the outer islands of the laguna.

Brunetti falls into a trap he has created for himself and as a result finds himself taking an unexpected vacation, staying by himself in a villa some distance away from the city, a house belonging to one of his wife Paola's relatives. The caretaker finds out that the detective is interested in spending some time out on the lagoon rowing, and begins a series of excursions that tax Brunetti's muscles but not his ptience (and not the reader's, although there is more about rowing in this particular style than we would have thought we wanted to know). This is a side of Venice way beyond the calle and campi, instead among burds and reeds and especially bees (another major topic of the book, both in the process of the detective's vacation and in the working of the plot.

Of course, there are twists involving a death in the present and a violent incident in the past, as well as currption of a new sort for a series that has often explored corruption. In addition to the faxing natural glories of the region, we also see the industrial mainland, as well as the bureaucracy and the family life for which the series is renowned.

All of the Brunetti books have a dark, pessimistic core, but some are more bleak and some more hopeful. Earthly Remains earns its gloomy atmosphere with a complex portrayal of human nature along with its detailed exploration of nature itself at the edges of Venice's glorious and its dark corners. Leon's strength as a writer is to inveigle the reader with language that seems casual and unforced into following down the book's twisty and twisted path.

Karo Hämäläinen: Cruel is the Night

There is a locked-room mystery quality to Finnish author Karo Hämäläinen's first novel to be translated into English, Cruel is the Night, along with an homage to Agatha Christie, toward the end. But the best part of the novel is a black comedy told from the varied points of view of the 3 participants, two couples, Robert and Elise and Mikko and Veera, at a dinner party in the London high rise occupied by Robert and Elise.
The first two monologues, by boyhood friends Robert and Mikko, and pompous and self-absorbed, qualities that are immediately punctured by Veera's monologue, from outside their self-centered maleness. The Rashomon quality continues with an additional thread about the survivor of the reunion that has brought the couples together (we aren't supposed to know, presumably, who this survivor is, but the language hardly leaves any doubt). So we don't know who the survivor is, or how the presumed deaths of the other 3 occurred, but the mystery isn't really maintained as a driving force of the book, which remains a fairly static series of interrelated blackouts that reveal the interrelationships, obvious and not, of these 4.What draws the reader on is more the comic but emotionally loaded interplay, revealed not only through the dialogue at the party but also through flashbacks to their past, some of which deal with the death of Robert's girlfriend, in their youth (Mikko and Veera became a couple almost by default, as friends of Robert and the doomed girl).
So this is a novel about murder, but not a mystery really. Instead it's a very dark comedy, sometimes witty and sometimes wildly farcical. Forget the slim thread connecting the book to the mystery genre and enjoy the ride.

Repost: Heda Margolius Kovály's Innocence

-       Reposted from the late lamented site The Life Sentence, now offline

-        Down Prague's Mean Streets:  Heda Margolius Kovály, whose well-known memoir of the Holocaust, Under a Cruel Star, was first published in 1973, also published one crime novel in Czech, Innocence: or, Murder on Steep Street, in 1985. According to her son, who wrote the introduction to the new English translation, Kovály modeled her book on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories, which were among the many books she had translated into Czech from English and German. But the Chandler connection is a bit misleading: Innocence is an intriguing reimagining of the crime genre in the context of Prague in the 1950s. Kovály does take from Chandler a focus on the real conditions of the lives of her contemporaries, but Kovály’s Prague in 1952, under Soviet totalitarianism, is a very different place than Chandler’s 1940s Los Angeles, under corrupt, bankrupt capitalism.

-        The style of Kovály’s book shares more with Czech literature of the 1970s: The philosophical meta-fictional prologue could have been spoken by one of Milan Kundera’s characters. But Innocence suggests most particularly a novel by Zdena Salivarová, Summer in Prague. Salivarová’s famous husband, Josef Škvorecký, also wrote detective stories, but his honest policeman is quite different from Chandler’s characters or, for that matter, Kovaly’s. Both Innocence and Summer in Prague have a lightness of touch in dealing with difficult material and both focus on young women whose lives are stifled by the overbearing state. Innocence does include elements of crime fiction absent in Summer in Prague: two murder investigations frame the novel, whereas the only death in Salivarová’s book is accidental (the result of social conditions rather than murder per se); but the real engine behind the misfortunes that befall the central characters in both is the unfeeling apparatus of the all-powerful state.

-        Kovály’s novel does begin with the kind of murder one finds in Chandler and American noir generally, but it’s a red herring: the child-murderer who would have been a serial killer in a conventional crime story serves as a counterpoint to the real serial killer, whom we discover only later. The murder at the beginning announces the book as crime fiction and introduces the characters around whom the action will take place: a police detective, Captain Nedoma, and an usher in the Horizon movie theater, Helena Nováková. The crimes with which the book is really concerned occur later, toward the middle of the book.

-        The focus of the narrative is split among several of the women working at the movie theater, plus a few policemen: in addition to Nedoma, Lieutenant Vendyš (who ultimately replaces Nedoma as the book’s primary investigator) and a satanic figure, Vojta Hrůza, from the secret police (according to the notes, his last name means “dread“ in Czech). The central character, though, is Helena Nováková, who had been working in a publishing house, until her husband (a planning official) was falsely arrested by a paranoid government, branding her, by association, as an enemy of the state. She feels fortunate to have been offered a menial job as an usher in the movie theater, but is mainly preoccupied with her jailed husband’s dilemma. The most important of the other women working at the Horizon are Marie Vránová, a young woman seemingly only interested in having a good time, and Mrs. Kouřimská, an older woman who is carrying the burden of more than one secret life.

-        Helena’s interior monologue, devoted to her despair and the solace she seeks in her hope for her husband’s release, is the only first-person voice we hear. In the depth of her despair, “The solitude separating Helena from other people was starting to distance her from inanimate things as well, stealing into her brain, where every thought floated unanchored into the void.” Her loneliness leads her into a tentative relationship with a stranger who primarily foreshadows the relationship that her despair will lead her into with Hrůza, who presents himself as a friend who may be able to help her husband. There are several other seductions: Marie has an affair with the married Nedoma and Mrs. Kouřimská, in addition to her private sexual proclivities, also has a relationship with Hrůza, providing the opportunity for his original introduction to Helena.

-        It is the two policeman-seducers who precipitate, in very different ways, the deaths at the center of the story, one of which, the “murder on Steep Street” of the book’s subtitle, Vendyš will investigate throughout the second half of the novel. The Lieutenant, though, is an ordinary cop who seems incapable of penetrating to the dark heart of the crime, as the narrator notes in an image that recapitulates the novel’s central setting in a theater: “Steep Street was like an empty auditorium after a performance, with Vendyš the late-coming spectator who could only guess what had taken place.“

-        The investigation leads not so much to the truth behind a murder (though a resolution of a sort is achieved) as to a revelation by a confessed killer about the underlying subject that provides book’s main title, innocence, especially in the context of life in a police state:

-        “No one can do a thing to stop people like Hrůza…They’re like earthquakes, or the plague. But they could never inflict so much misery if it weren’t for…the little helpers who try to convince you it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing wrong with a little snitching…They make evil seem like a natural, trivial thing…they blur the line between guilt and innocence, till eventually you accept it and murder just seems like an accident with nobody to blame.”

-        In the trivializing of evil lies the link between Kovály’s Holocaust memoir and Innocence, as well as the dark undertone that makes her crime novel so distinctive and powerful.

-        The book ends with a coda, a conversation between a shadowy fat man who had crept into the Horizon earlier, and an even fatter man, who together seem to be the actual spies whose actions had caused government’s paranoid suspicion, which in turn ruined Nováková and her husband. The two fat men untangle, from their particular point of view, the skein of guilt that runs through the book’s deaths and betrayals, and one of them refers to the possible justice in some afterlife: “I just hope it isn’t like here. Because if we got what we deserved for everything we did in our lives, they’d have to just cancel heaven, straight up.” That pessimism echoes the novel’s epigraph, from Hemingway: “All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”