Swansea Terminal

The sequel to Robert Lewis's The Last Llanelli Train is already out in the UK and will be out soon in the U.S., from Serpent's Tail. Swansea Terminal isn't about a train station: Robin Llewellyn, the down and out private investigator of the earlier novel is all the way down and all the way out now. The first part of the novel seems to be treading familiar literary territory, the extreme alcoholic, with all the attending pathos and dark comedy: familiar from Charles Bukowski to Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor books. Both those effects are here in abundance, but Lewis adds an ironic structure andn a crime plot that together give a shape to what is often (in books on alcoholics) shapelessly emotional. I must admit that I almost quit the novel when it seemed as if Llewellyn would stumble from bar to bar and humiliation to humiliation for the whole book--no matter how well written (and Swansea Terminal is indeed very well written) an alcoholic haze is not that entertaining or enlightening. The structure is provided by Llewellyn's last case as a private investigator (which he shirks) and by his sorry life history, in the form of the son he abandoned years before. In both cases, where the plot is going is not where you think. The humor in this novel (much touted by the publisher) is of the very dark variety, and comes more from the ironic plot structure than from banter or comic situations: the conversation and the playing out of events are uniformly bleak. But when the crime aspect of the story kicks in, in the second half, Llewellyn's miserable life history moves toward an almost epic quality (though remaining resolutely down and out). There's a passage worth quoting that provides the logic and the self-loathing inherent in this most noir style of noir: "ironically, down here, in the land of the lawless, as guarded and dishonest as it is, there is a lot more nakedness in your relationships with those around you...Sometimes, I guess, you can feel some wisdom in your disillusionment, some truth in your corruption, that others who do not suffer the same way are missing. You can tell yourself that society can only be seen properly from underneath." The quote goes on to provide further illumination the noir portrait of the bottom of society (it's page 151). There's also a telling comment concerning Llewellyn's membership in a select society, the terminally ill: "We call them courageous because they terrify us." At the end, Llewellyn's struggles and his outlook on life takes on the moving comic resignation of Beckett's characters. One aspect of the book that narrows its scope is the lack of women (even the bottom layer of society is not exclusively male, after all). The one woman character, whom Lewis ultimately calls a "our Cathleen ni Houlihan," a telling critique of modern Wales, perhaps, is portrayed in unrelentingly negative terms. The missing female characters provide an excuse to compare Lewis's Welsh noir with that of John Williams, whose cycle of Cardiff novels is a much more diverse portrait of the underclass, male and female. While Williams is more interested in a cast of characters, Lewis providews a practically apolyptic vision from a single character's narrow point of view. Both are interested in much more than genre fiction, and both challenge the conventions of crime fiction in interesting ways.

Question about Bill James

Bill James's Harpur & Iles novels are indirect, satirical, and bleakly comic forays into an alternative reality based on the gritty cities of England. Beneath the novels' brittle, Wodehouse-like surfaces, is there some truth about contemporary life? Truth about crime fiction (and literature in general) abounds in these short novels (the characters are constantly referring to literary greats, and the narrative manipulates the standards and cliche's of crime fiction mercilessly. But regarding a "higher" truth, it struck me while reading the new (in the U.S., anyway) novel, Girls that beneath the mocking tone, the artificial language, and the stylized characters (all of which are great fun) there's also an emotional truth, as much for the villains as the heroes (if anybody can tell one from another in this morally skeptical series). James's invented slang spills over from the dialogue into the narration, especially when the gangsters are speaking to one another: Manse Shale's bad grammar is replicated by the narrator in the early dialogue between Shale and Ralph Ember (one of James's inimitable creations). When Colin Harpur is talking to his daughters (and much of the novel follows his dialogue with them), he's correcting their grammar constantly (especially his younger daughter, Jill), and the narrator is on his toes as well, as if not to offend the sensibilities of the otherwise rough-around-the-edges detective. But what Girls is about more than anything else is the reality and the essential nature of the emotional ties between all the parents and children among the central cast of characters. The emotional truth is buttressed not by sentimentality but by the very skepticism (almost cynicism) of everything else going on in the novel. Harpur at one point quotes Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent, a book with much indirection in its narrative but with powerful feeling at its heart. If Conrad's story is tragic and James's novels are comic (to quote Girls about itself, "very darkly jokey") that's perhaps a measure of the distance between our world and Conrad's, leading perhaps to the notion that there is sociological truth as well as emotional depth to James's comedy.

The Sinner, by Petra Hammesfahr

Petra Hammesfahr's The Sinner, recently published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, reminds me of a couple of other German-language writers, Ingrid Noll (consistently described as "Germany's queen of crime," and Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Jelinek's perverse family dramas have the extreme exaggeration of satire, and Noll's novels combine perversity, murder, and ordinary family life. Likewise, Hammesfahr's novel begins with a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Cora Bender's clod of a husband (he resenbles some of Jelinek's male characters in that respect) wants sex every Friday and Saturday night, but Cora, who previously submitted willingly, has suddenly begun to dread the episodes. Her life falling apart, she plans an elaborate suicide, but just on the verge of that act, everything changes. A murder launches Cora (and we the readers) into a long, circuitous trip through her miserable childhood and the false front of her current life. And throughout her repeated interrogations, especially those with local police chief Rudi Grovian, Cora tells elaborate lies to cover up her motives and the truths that even she is not quite able to grasp. Those lies, and the long road that Grovian takes to discover what's really going on (against his own interests and against the advice of his colleagues) are the texture of the novel, and that texture is what sets The Sinner apart from the novels of Noll (whose sordid tales are more straightforward) or Jelinek (who is never much concerned with three-dimensional characters). The lies, of course, betray one of the characteristic motifs of modern fiction, the unreliable narrator (and Cora indeed narrates part of her tale). Cora is a spectacularly unreliable narrator, not honest even with herself (unable, in fact, to be honest with herself). Her family's poisonous history and ultimately both salacious and tragic outcome are revealed slowly and indirectly, the reader never sure what's a lie and what is narrative truth. The effect is startling and involving, though there are to me some false notes. For one thing, Cora's sister, a key actor in the family drama, is at first barely human, reduced to a lump of birth defects--but suddenly she's talking (and talking trash), a shift that Hammesfahr does explain, and one shift among many in this very indirect narrative, but a better sense of the infants development would have added some realism to that section of the story. Plus there are a number of coincidences that are ultimately drawn together into a coherent story, but strain credulity along the way (and to achieve full impact, the reader needs, indeed to strain for some sort of credible story amid all the misdirection). The Sinner is an unusual kind of crime novel, in which the "sin," if you will, that we think we know about becomes something quite different. Perhaps this is a book for fans of Patricia Highsmith or Stephen King (comparisons made by the publisher) more than those of the kind of noir or police procedural we are more familiar with under the heading of "crime fiction," though Hammesfahr has achieved something more complex than either of those writers, in terms of the manner of the telling and the circuitous life story of her main characters.

Another Peter Temple

Identity Theory (or In the Evil Day) is Peter Temple's international thriller, a quite different book from his police novels (like The Broken Shore) or his gambler-lawyer-detective series (beginning with Bad Debts). Identity Theory (to use the U.S. title) has little to do with Australia, being mostly set in Germany. The plot is basically a double strand, one following a South African bodyguard (whose client is killed, leaving behind a videotape and documents) and an American emigre and former journalist who is now working for a very contemporary company that mines information for clients from spurned husbands to dodgy corporations. The American's past (he was kidnapped by terrorists in Lebanon) and the South African's documents create a web-like story that is only revealed slowly, in snippets that for a very long time don't make much straightforward sense. The information gathering of the American's employer is the model for the splintered narrative, in a sense: the reader has to put things together along the way. Both the main characters escape shadowy murderers and fine unlikely lovers, and both (along with the novel's dialogue and violence) are believable and compelling. And the pursuit of information is a very contemporary take on the LeCarre spy novel, on the one hand, and the political thriller, on the other. Paranoia (confirmed by the story's resolution) replaces a more elemental social pessimism that is evident in Temple's noir novels (particularly The Broken Shore, with its meditations on racism and economic depression in rural towns). Depending on your taste, you will like Identity Theory or The Broken Shore--the thriller and the crime novel seem to appeal to different readers. Both sides of Temple's oeuvre are effective, though from my personal perspective, the crime fiction side of his career is depper and more effective (though his take on the thriller is at the very least interesting).

Catching up with Glauser

With the fourth of Friedrich Glauser's Swiss "policier" novels now available in English and the fifth soon to come, I've gone back to catch up with the third in the series, Fever. Glauser has been called the Swiss Simenon, but his Sergeant Studer is quite different from Maigret. Studer is a loner (though more of his colleagues appear in Fever than previously), and he's a ruminative detective, reconsidering the evidence again and again. And in Fever, Glauser also adds some Sherlock Holmes into the mix, as well as some of Holmes's predecessors and competitors. Fever is in a way an adventure novel, full of clairvoyance, identity changes, an heiress and her doomed family, and so forth. The Gothic elements are carefully controlled, so that the novel is in some ways both an hommage and a parody of the detective-adventure stories of the previous century (Glauser and his Studer being from the years between the World Wars). The conclusion of Fever even suggests that this tale is the author's way of giving his character a chance to fulfill a childhood dream of the Foreign Legion (for the novel takes us from Paris to Basel to Bern and to the North African desert (with thrilling stops in between). The first two Studer books, Thumbprint and In Matto's Realm, were rather claustrophobic, set in a small town and an ominous hospital, with Studer's ruminative (rather than deductive) method adding to the sense of the stories' narrow confines. But in Fever, with the opening up of the story and its setting, Studer's method is helpful in simply keeping track of the cluttered plot (beginning with the death of two old ladies, sisters, in Basel and Bern, and with the mysterious priest who seems to be the key). And as might be expected in a tale that hovers close to parody, there is more humor in Fever than in the earlier books, and more about Studer's home life (his wife Hedy, though hardly a major character here, is a delight). Glauser was plainly enjoying himself, spreading out from the more philosophical In Matto's Realm into a more literary and comic mode. And so, eventually, on to the rest of Glauser...thanks to the U.K.'s Bitter Lemon Press.

The Wire: A Novel for Television

Reviewers (not to mention P.R. flacks) keep calling HBO's cops-in-Baltimore series The Wire "A novel for television," so why not review it as a novel (even though the last episodes of the fifth and final season haven't aired yet). In its first season, The Wire seemed to be about drug dealers, and it was a gritty drama that was totally convincing in its invented dialect of "the corner" and its portrait of Baltimore at street level. There's the requisite white detective (to pull in the mass audience, I guess), whose foolish conscience kicks the whole thing off (by mentioning to a judge that the biggest drug dealers in town, the Barksdale crew, aren't even on the police department's radar). But very quickly, the series leans heavily on an ensemble cast that is mostly black, dealers, politicians, cops, detectives, and the kids on the corner (the "retailers" of the drug industry). It's an immersive environment, and you gradually learn the language and begin to sort out who's who and what's happening (since the writers and producers don't spoonfeed the audience, thereby heightening the impact of the whole). The ruthlessness of the drug trade continues in the second season, with the addition of a second plot concerning a container-load of dead women, shipped by traffickers into the port of Baltimore. The port plot, though, has more to do with the dying port itself, and the mostly Polish union members that are being brought down with it. As one of the actors from the series's drug plot said in an interview, everyone thought this story was about the drug trade, but the second season made it clear that David Simon, who created the series, had nothing less in mind than a portrait of an entire city. But before we begin to think that Simon and his series was abandoning the projects and Baltimore's mean streets, the drug trade is still a major plotline, and we return to it in a larger way in the third season, which ostensibly deals with city politics. The first three seasons form an almost classical tragedy, within the drug plot especially, as the principals of that story (Barksdale, his nephew, and his chief lieutenant and business manager, Stringer Bell--played by the brilliant Idris Elba as as an ambitious MBA-type moving himself and his business toward its logical place within the corporate economy) rise up to meet the threats to their dominion from a ragtag crew of detectives and the other dealers in town (who ultimately join together in a cartel someting like OPEC). The tensions between childhood friends Barksdale and Bell, as the gangsta and the businessman, plus the ominous intrusions of a freelancer-predator named Omar and the attempt by Barksdale's nephew to escape the family business, rise beyond the confines of crime-TV to nearly classical tragedy. And as the series contues beyond the crescendo of the first 3 seasons, some themes and plots carry forward, into the seasons ostensibly dealing with the schools and with the media, with new and old faces personfiying aspects of the essential story of the city.But any description of the series should also take into account that there is considerable humor, especially in the interplay among the detectives and the larger arc of the police struggle to keep up with the street trade (as well as some grand ironies of ethnic identity, bureaucratic competition for power, and frailties of character). The series could not have carried its audience so far without its grim sense of humor, only one of the virtues brought to the excellent stable of writers, including some proponents of noir like George Pelecanos and Richard Price. Calling The Wire a novel for television is not quite accurate: as is appropriate for any story taking place over a long period of reading or viewing, it has a baggy quality more like Dickens than a tightly plotted crime story, but then Simon's ambitions are also approach those of Dickens more than a garden variety crime story. But The Wire does share with some of the best crime fiction a success in portraying a particular place and people under stress (think of some of the best of current Scanidinavian or Australian or Irish crime fiction) and should for that reason alone share shelf space with the cream of contemporary noir (printed or filmed), and in its realization in vivid writing and production and striking, natural performances, the becomes something unique in the admittedly not too competitive field of succesful Noir TV. I should add that, unlike (for example) the excellent and venerable but quite different Law & Order series, The Wire presents a problem for the dedicated fan: There are some events within the plot that can be very painful to watch, especially if you become involved with the characters and even more if, re-watching episodes or the series, you know they're coming. This is not a series you can pull off the shelf and casually dip into, because of that painful aspect as well as a continuity that presents problems to picking up the plot in the middle and especially for someone starting the story in the middle, having not seen the first season (several people I know have tried that, only to get lost in not only the complexities of the story and characters but even in the language spoken in various of the show's subcultures). Those drawbacks, though, only attest to the courage and the accomplishment of this exceptional "novel for television."

anthology #2 Paris Noir

Maxim Jakubowski's collection, Paris Noir, suffers a bit in comparison with Crimini, the anthology of Italian crime fiction recently reviewed here. Paris Noir's stories are shorter than those in Crimini, as well as slighter. Whereas a number of the tales in Crimini are long and complex, most of those in Paris Noir are short, slice of life or perhaps glimpse of misery tales. And while Jakubowsky's ten-year-old London Noir (perhaps the founding volume of the recently burgeoning collections of city noir stories) was an exploration of (then) new British crime writing, Paris Noir is mostly Anglo-American writing by established writers like John Harvey (also in London Noir), Sparkle Hayter, Stella Duffy, Jerome Charyn, Scott Phillips, and Cara Black (all of whom have Paris credentials and the last in the list having a running series based in Paris). Some of the best of the stories are, indeed, by French authors, most of whom are not known in the U.S., and the best of them is by the estimable Dominique Manotti. Manotti's tale is terse and oblique, coming around to its point only in the last sentences, revealing a dark side of Paris's life and politics (I only wish it were longer and more fully realized, since I'm a big fan and impatiently awaiting her forthcoming Lorraine Connection). Romain Slocombe tells a tense serial killer tale from a threatened woman's point of view (though the actual crime in the story is not what's expected). Dominique Sylvain's Heat Wave weaves contemporary events in French culture and history with wonderful wordplay that is in a way the subject of the story--the crime is almost incidental to the reader's experience; this tale of interplay between a cop and his new partner (and between the cop and his desire for his psychoanalyst) is perhaps the most satisfyingly complete (in an aesthetic sense) of the stories. Actually, the incidental quality of the crime is fairly common in this collection. John Williams, author of a couple of enjoyable and informative books on American noir fiction as well as several novels and a story collection that stake out his own territory in crime fiction (a melancholy exploration of the subculture of musicians) contributes a circular story of male sexuality in its bohemian variant. John Harvey's tale, also from the musical underworld, follows the decline of its hero into addiction, surely a tale of criminal waste of promise, but without the usual framing devices of noir. The only long story in the collection is by Michael Moorcock, who is known more for literary fantasy than crime fiction, and his story here is a metafictional, comic farrago, a grand guignol of direct and indirect references to the literature of crime, the geography of Paris, and alternative history. The story is entertaining and clever, but doesn't really have the tension or intensity that one might expect from noir. Barry Gifford's Nadja is a retelling, in the mode of parody or travesty, of Surrealism maven Andre Breton's famous novel of the same name--fun and even chilling, but not a crime story, really. Nocturne le Jeudi, by Scott Phillips, is an elegantly written slice of life that takes an ordinary-life approach, giving an existential twist to crime fiction by focusing on his central character's guilty glimpse of a possible crime rather than on the crime itself. Sparkle Hayter's Deus ex Machina, on the other hand, exploits the conventions of the crime story and the new realities of Paris in a roller coaster from suicide to murder to resolution that is quite simply a lot of fun to read. Stella Duffy's contribution is an affecting monologue that reveals the narrator's secrets and the story slowly and subtly, amplifying the emotional impact of the crime when it is finally made clear. Duffy's and Hayter's very different stories would make Paris Noir worth the price of admission, and a few of the others (Manotti's and Phillips's in particular) are up to that standard. If not quite as substantial a collection as Crimini, Paris Noir is still an interesting and diverse snapshot of noir writing touching on the city of lights.

Ken Bruen's Ammunition

When the BBC wanted to do a show about ruthless, brutal cops, they went back in time 30 years or so for Life Mars (currently airing on BBC America). Ken Bruen achieves the same result in a single character, Brant, in today's British police force. The Brant series is my favorite among Bruen's books--though the Jack Taylor series is more serious and dark in tone, the Brant stories are funny, violent, and quick. Brant, however, seems to be stuck in a melancholy mode in the latest book, Ammunition--as if in mourning for his favorite author, Ed McBain (whose books the Brant series resemble not in the slightest, except for the ensemble cast). Brant hardly breaks a sweat, mostly influencing others (particularly Detective Falls, still suffering from the consequences of her appearance in previous books). The detectives now seem to fully detest each other, and the plot is overpacked (numerous strands of events effect each of the detectives in different ways), but loose. None of the Brant novels is tightly plotted, but Ammunition is almost like a placeholder between the previous couple of books (Calibre and Vixen) and whatever is coming next for the survivors of Ammunition. Still, Bruen's text moves along briskly as usual, and with considerble dark humor. Brant and his cohorts still get my vote as Bruen's most substantial (and most reliably amusing) contribution.

New anthologies #1: Crimini

Anthologies of noir fiction seem to be popping up all over the place--after Serpent's Tail's London Noir there was a long dry spell until Akashic started its city noir series--and now there are duelling international noir anthologies. Serpent's tail has a Paris Noir and evidently Akashic is coming out with one too, following its succesful entry into the international noir anthology with Havana Noir. And Bitter Lemon has the excellent new Crimini, edited by Giancarlo De Cataldo, which differs from the other anthologies in that it's a translation of an Italian anthology, unlike the Paris Noir or Havana Noir titles, which were collections of newly translated pieces, brought together by the English-language presses. Whatever has caused this burst of anthologization, it's a boon for readers, giving glimpses of writers who are as yet untranslated as well as new stories by writers we are familiar with and writers who are just beginning their careers. Crimini meets the high standard set by Havana Noir (which I reviewed a couple of months ago. The editor makes the point in his brief introduction that one of the few common threads in the stories is the recognition of the new Italy's population diversity. In the first story, indeed, this diveristy is a source of much comic effect: Niccolò Ammaniti and Antonio Manzini "You are my Treasure Chest" achieves aa place in the very small group of hilarious noir stories, evoking one of the blackest of black humor tales, Terry Southern's Flash and Filigree, as well as Carl Hiaasen's Skin Tight. The second story is one of Carlo Lucarelli's Bologna-police stories, focused on a young female cop's dangerous dilemma, and it has a nervous energy even tighter than his novels. I'm a fan of Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels, but the non-Montalbano tale here is a bit of a disappointment, a five-finger-exercise, really, more than a fully fleshed-out story. Massimo Carlotto, on the other hand, manages to pack a whole novel's worth of plot and character into a story on the other side of the law from his novels that have been translated so far, which deal more with fugitives and with Alligator, his underworld detective, and his crew of misfit investigators. A cop whose wife wants to kick him out, whose female partner wants to get him into bed, and whose snitch has just been murdered pursues a Croatian gang of gunrunners. The ensuing mayhem is a fully realized noir novel in miniature, and quite different in tone as well as cast of characters from Carlotto's other translated works. Marcello Fois also contributes a tale that is quite different from the psychological thrillers he has so far been known for in English translation: his story is a police procedural and also the closest thing to a traditional mystery in this collection. His Inspector Currelli is almost Holmes-like in the end, though very much the noir detective (struggling against both criminals and the police bureaucracy) for most of the story. Most of the stories in the anthology by writers less well known in English-speaking countries are also fully realized and satisfying tales. The editor's own story is a whimsical romance masquerading as noir: the mix of Italian and immigrant characters is subtle, with villains and heroes/heroines in both categories. Teresa's Lair, Diego de Silva's story, is a political and psychological drama, investigating the difficulties of contemporary society for both the young and old participants. The two remaining stories both deal with show business and popular culture. Sandrone Dazieri's The Last Gag follows a fallen idol, a comic actor and alcoholic now running a nightclub, as he becomes an investigator on the trail of his former comedy partner's murderer. For a story rooted in comedy, Dazieri's tale is quite dour, but with a substantial plot twist at the end. Giorgio Faletti's The Guest of Honor begins with the comic banter of the first-person narrator, a tabloid journalist, but turns gradually darker as it investigates celebrity and identity through his pursuit of a vanished star. The collection as a whole benefits from De Cataldo's choice of fairly long an definitely substantial stories. While hardly a complete survey of Italian crime fiction, De Cataldo's choices provide enough of a survey to let us see what we're missing, as well as how some of the voices we know fit into the overall Italian crime scene. Crimini is a highly recommended and quite entertaining contribution to the current crop of anthologies (and to the pool of crime fiction translated into English, as a whole).

Peter Temple's Jack Irish

The first of Peter Temple's Jack Irish books, Bad Debts, is quite different from his better known Broken Shore. Like another Australian, Garry Disher, Temple is quite prolific and, also like Disher, he shows considerable diversity among the different strands of his writing. Disher's police-procedural series is, like Temple's Broken Shore, complex, socially conscious, and complex. Whereas Disher's noir series focused on a professional thief is straightforward or linear in comparison, Temple's Jack Irish series is complex in a different way from his Broken Shore: There's a lot of plot, for one thing. Bad Debts combines Irish's avocations (woodworking and gambling) with his day job (as an attorney whose law license is a cover for what is essentially detective work somewhere between McDonald's Archer books and Parker's Spenser novels. But Temple also includes grand property scams à la Chinatown, a child abuse ring à la so many novels and movies that it's impossible to pick just one comparison, and a horse-racing scam that reminds me of John Hawkes's remarkable The Lime Twig (if you haven't read that, it's a treat--as long as you don't mind language that's always moving sideways and a plot that moves forward more by mood than narrative--among literary novels of crime, The Lime Twig is one of the best). Amid all that plot, Temple adds some flourishes to the more predictable plot twists--a character that any habitual crime-novel reader would expect to end up dead doesn't, though many others do. And a plot point that is so obvious that the reader will be screaming at Irish to go back and figure it out turns out in an unexpected way (I could almost see a little malicious grin on the author's face when he turned my expectation into something else). While more conventional than The Broken Shore, Bad Debts nevertheless draws the reader in to each of its several strands, inluding the extremely complex racing scam, the machinations of which could only be clear to someone who spends way too much time at the track. And the Australian setting (physical, social, and political) is drawn vividly. I'm looking for the rest of the Jack Irish books, as well as Temple's other non-series books.

Kennedy's Brain

Paranoid novels share with satire or parody the ability to infect reality. If you see a very good parody or lampoon of a politician or a celebrity, it's difficult to take that person seriously again. In Thomas Pynchon's great early paranoid novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, the author stitches the reader into the conspiracy with threads of recognizable reality. Henning Mankell's Walander novels frequently turn on a global conspiracy of one sort or another (from murdering Mandela to provide an excuse to reimpose apartheid to bringing down the banking system through the software controlling the global network of ATMs). But Kennedy's Brain, his most paranoiac novel, fails to deliver its intended punch--perhaps because, as he states himself, the novel is motivated by anger. There are certainly great possibilities in a story about the drug industry and AIDS, but Le Carre's novel about the drug industry is much more affecting, for all its misdirection, than Mankell's more straightforwardly told tale. Le Carre, in The Constant Gardener, plants hints, often visual images, that gradually build into a convincing indictment of big Pharma. Mankell follows Louise, his archaeologist and mother, as she tries to piece together the logic of the death of her son, through his papers on the Kennedy assassination and hints dropped throughout her investigation of a secret life that her son concealed from her. Through his hideaway in Barcelona, his father's hideaway in Australia (the men in this novel are always running away or engaging in malicious exploitation of the Third World), and ultimately an AIDS mission in Mozambique. I won't provide any spoilers about what she finds, or how the novel reaches a conclusion of sorts--but the paranoia and despair that she goes through lead to a kind of pessimistic activism, perhaps where Mankell intends to leave the reader. But the text is undramatic, even through the many disappearances and murders. The text is repetitive and tendentious, and Mankell's strategy of repeatedly having his character reach dead ends prevents the reader from being stitched into the story in the manner I describe as Pynchon's. The sentiments of Kennedy's Brain are inarguable, and the author is to be commended for his uncompromising portrayal of an African point of view, as well as African misery (the most affecting character is Lucinda, the African prostitute that becomes Louise's primary contact with her son's past. But Louise herself never quite ingratiates herself into the reader's attention, and few of the murders give rise to much horror or sympathy (though there's plenty of horror in the AIDS mission. Mankell's less angry, less tendentious novels are much more dramatic and involving.

Peter Temple has a distinct style, a kind of in-medias-res effect that extends from the plot to the sentence structure. The Broken Shore reads as if it were the third or fourth novel in a crime series, when in fact it's a stand along novel. Details from the past of Senior Detective Sergeant Joe Cashin, who is at the center of the story and at the focus of the novel's third-person point of view. At first, I thought I had missed some earlier episodes in Cashin's career, but when I realized what was going on, the splintered quality of the story and its style became clear. Indirect dialogue, leaving much as simply understood, forces the reader to interpret and to make suppositions--or simply to go with the flow. It's as if at all points, the reader is overhearing a conversation in progress, and people and incidents referred to in passing without explanation will only be clarified at some other time. Singo, for instance, is referred to several times in the first half of the novel, but who that is is not clarified until the second half, and then only slowly. The story is also told indirectly, as Cashin discovers the people and events connected to the beating of a wealthy man in his own home. Cashin is himself "damaged goods," on a sort of leave from his Homicide job, assigned to a small station in Port Monro. In spite of having roots in the community (the old ruin he lives in belonged to an ancestor who died while trying to dynamite the place), he remains an outsider: able to be an observer to the racist attitudes of the white community to the Aboriginal community living in a nearby settlement. Cashin in fact has Aboriginal cousins, though he lacks any personal or social sense of solidarity with those other outsiders. There is powerful but understated imagery in the book, regarding the "broken shore" of the title, but the novel is primarily "dramatic," rather than poetic--the emphasis is on dialogue as well as some indirect internal monologue on Cashin's part. The conversations that move the story forward are ironic and oblique, especially in in the sometimes joking, sometimes aggressive talk among the cops. Once in the flow of the book, the reader is tied into the narrative (interpolated into the story) through the necessary effort of keeping up with the pace of the dialogue and with the gradual unfolding of the truth. The resolution of the story is a bit conventional, given the indirect route getting there. Again, there is some suggestion of a novel in a series in the way things are resolved, but not quite--as if leaving something for the next book. But the buzz around the book is deserved, regardless of any conventional elements, because of the quality of the writing and the clear portrait of racism in its most casual an its most destructive manifestations. Does anyone have any recommendations about which of Temple's stand-alone or series novels to seek as a follow-up?

December reading

While I've been waiting for some new crime novels from Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, I've finished a couple of big books that are only sort-of crime fiction as well as the first two of Theresa Schwegel's police novels (I'm waiting for the 3rd one, which promises to be her best so far). The big books are Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (the police detective and the gangster are surrogates for bigger issues that finally bring the twin narratives together at the end--a very good novel, but be prepared for a long haul if you start on it) and Gentlemen, by Klas Östergren (which claims to be part thriller and part spy story, but is actually a meandering satire about Sweden in the '70s--an interesting excursion of you're interested in Swedish culture and literature, but not a crime novel at all). Schwegel's books are interesting in several respects: most crime novels are about detectives or civilians rather than uniformed cops, which is Schwegel's "beat." Her books resemble Wambaugh's or those of John Westermann (whose Long Island cop stories are better than the reviews on Amazon would indicate). Schwegel's tales are also set in the North Chicago neighborhoods where I once lived, an extra bonus. Her stories are cynical (or realistic, if you wish) and involving--bringing the daily dilemmas of working police to the forefront (instead of serial killers or human trafficking or the other standard fare of the run-of-the-mill police novel in the U.S. I'll report on her new Person of Interest when I get hold of it. In the meantime, I'm finally catching up with the much-reviewed and highly recommended Broken Shore by Australia's Peter Temple--more on that later.

Wyatt's 2nd and 3rd, by Garry Disher

The 2nd of Garry Disher's Wyatt novels is like a Southern Gothic (I compared Kickback, the first volume, to classic Westerns a couple of weeks ago). Wyatt wants to get the money back from the mob, called the Outfit, that hijacked his heist in Kickback, but needs to get a bankroll. Leah, a contact in small-town Australia, offers him the possibility: a payroll carried by a small armored car company that travels around the smalal towns in her area. Wyatt sets up a team, involving one slimeball and a slow-witted man right out of Sanctuary or No Orchids for Miss Blandish. But, as usual in this series, things go wrong. Wyatt jis supposed to be a master thief, or at least a master planner, but his glory days are behind him and he can't "get good help" anymore--his hijack is hijacked and he's on the run again, moving into volume 3, Deathdeal, which reunites him with the woman who set up his job in Kickback (and who double-crossed him then).

At the end of Deathdeal, Wyatt is telling himself that his luck can't get any worse, as he heads into a casino--but throughout the first three novels of this intriguing series, his luck couldn't be any worse. That brings out aspects of his character that we wouldn't see if his life was going according to plan, a big job now and then to finance travel to distant, quiet places. Instead, both his resourcefulness and his ruthlessness are on display. If volume 2 reads like Southern Gothic, volume 3 is like a pulp detective novel, something by David Goodis or maybe Charles Willeford--the people surrounding Wyatt are venal, greedy, vindictive, and often stupid. And as in classic noir, the characters with redeeming qualities are often convicts or other down-and-outers. The social portrait that Disher gives us is bleak and depressed, and described in terms that are more direct and grim than the more sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of the same social scene in his other crime series, featuring police rather than thieves. Disher has such control over his voice and his technique that we accept each of these very different series on its own terms, and though I find myself more drawn to the police precedurals, I'm still trying to get hold of the rest of the Wyatt books.

Slide, Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

The new Hard Case Crime book by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr picks up (in more ways than simply plot) where the previous one, Bust, left off. The pulp end of the crime fiction spectrum is so stylized, in the pure form of the genre, that an author constantly risks tipping his story over into parody. Most of the Hard Case Crime series stays tantalizingly on the "serious" side of the line, but Bruen and Starr, this time, shift joyfully over into the "comic" side. There are in-jokes in abundance, with Bruen appearing as a mugging victim and copies of Bust and other Hard Case books lying around as set decoration. Presumably, the 2 authors wrote alternate sections of this 2-pronged story, with Bruen contributing the Irish serial killer plot (one of his specialties) and Starr the modern entrepreneur gone to seed plot (definitely his specialty)--but in both cases they've turned their usual style up a notch, obviously having fun with the terms of the genre as well as their own previous works. Max, the entrepreneur of the (mostly) New York story, thinks he's tough when he tries to talk "street," which he does idiotically badly. Slide, the would-be serial killer, does an equally bad impression of Al Pacino in Scarface. The two female characters, Angela (from Bust) and Felicia (a stripper, of course) have in common that they have spectacularly bad judgment when it comes to both men and money. The plot is fairly simple: Max (the entrepreneur held over from Bust) wakes up in an alcoholic haze, somehow having landed in an Alabama motel. Discovering the joys of crack, he recruits his Southern contact, an unbelievably naive, Bible-thumping young dealer, as his supplier for a new career as a New York crack dealer. Meanwhile Angela, having fled to Ireland after Bust, falls in with a sadistic but not-too-bright would-be serial killer (whose nickname is Slide) and follows along on his crime spree from Dublin back to New York, where the two stories will inevitably collide in mayhem. Bruen's sections (I'm guessing, but it's pretty clear) are a combination of his Brant and his Taylor series, but freed from any constraints regarding violence, sexism, and self-parody--I've never been a big fan of the Taylor series (though I've always liked the Brant books), but the seriousness of those previous novels (even Bust) is clear when compared with the wild comedy of Slide. Parody can be a lot of fun, but there's a risk that comes along with it: can the reader ever again take pulp-noir fiction seriously after experiencing its comic travesty in a book like Slide?

Kickback (Garry Disher), crime, westerns, etc.

I finally got my hands on some of Gary Disher's Wyatt novels, which are very different from his more recent police procedurals. Wyatt is on the other side of the law, but the novels are also on the other side of a border we might draw between "noir" as a traditional form (going back through Jim Thompson to the pulp detective novels of the 30s and 40s) and the contemporary crime novel. Plus Kickback, the first of the Wyatt novels, makes an explicit comparison between cowboy fiction and crime fiction (perhaps in part a nod to the early career of crime great Elmore Leonard, but certainly a link to the Western genre in fiction and film). First of all, names: Wyatt and the Younger brothers; plus the solitary quality of Wyatt's life, and the fact that (like so many classic Westerns) the story exploits a changing social pattern (Wyatt complains of changes from cash to electronic and plastic money, a change that is cutting into his business as a burglar/thief--in the same way that modernization provides the background to a host of cowboy stories about the "end of an era" as the cowboy lifestyle came to and end, or even the land wars in the Western U.S. that caused that change). Even the businesslike thief versus the "cowboy" recklessness of Wyatt's antagonist, Sugarfoot (another Western reference, explicit in the novel--if anyone remembers the TV series of that title). The novel, though overlaid with the cowboy metaphor, is a classic caper-plus-the-mob story, with even a bit of Mike Hammer (revised for modern audiences--though I won't go into that parallel too much, since it would give too much of the story away). Wyatt is doing small jobs leading up to a moderately large one, while being pursued by that Sugarfoot character, who feels Wyatt wronged him on one of the small jobs. The key figure in the big job is Anna, who engages Wyatt emotionally as well as professionally and sexually. That emotional attachment suggests for a moment Disher's later work, when the more stylized world of pulp-noir will give way to the more complex milieu of the contemporary crime novel. Disher, a prolific writer across a number of genres, has something in common with Ed McBain, who under several names produced detective stories, the template of all modern police procedurals, and gritty literary novels about life in the modern city. As with the later books of McBain (or, for that matter Graham Greene) the genre fiction and the literary fiction come together in Disher's more recent books. While the Wyatt books are tersely written in a very effective way, and are leavened by humor and emotion, they're basically (on the evidence of the first one, and I'll revisit this theme when I've had a chance to read some of the later ones) caper stories of a high order, comparable to the "Richard Starke" novels featuring the master thief Parker (as detectiveswithoutborders has pointed out in some detail). With the Challis/Destry books, Disher enters the realm of those crime novels that satisfy fully in the terms of both the genre and the larger literary world (though there's still a bias against crime fiction, especially series fiction, in certain quarters of the literary world). It's unfortunate that the Wyatt books are so inaccessible to readers outside Australia, but if serious readers haven't discovered the widely available Challis/Destry books, they have only themselves to blame.

a Sophie Hannah preview

Sophie Hannah's new crime novel (her third) is scheduled for release in the U.K. in early February. It's a hybrid, and the combination is highly unusual: the novel is an amalgam of a paranoid-threat thriller, a comic harried-housewife novel, an emotionally-damaged-cop novel, and a couple of other things. One of the substantial accomplishments of this book is that it remains funny even as the reader realizes that what he or she has been laughing about is at the same time the heart of the very tense threat-plot. There are several elements in the story, separated by narrative style. The first person narrative is that of Sally, who is at her wit's end trying to cope with two jobs, a clueless husband, and a couple of demanding young children--and suddently seems to be pushed into the path of a bus. Cleverly paired with Sally's narrative is a diary by a woman who was found dead in a bathtub (her daughter also dead, in another tub). The diary's narrative is an extreme version of Sally's, puzzling the police in its negative (even violent) thoughts about the child that the diarist, a stay-at-home mother, was raising until they died. The police have mostly accepted the idea that the mother drowned the daughter and then slashed her own wrists, after dosing them both with a date-rape drug. But Simon (the detective who, along with his Sergeant-partner and sort-of love interest Charlie, are the running characters in Hannah's series) can't see it as a murder-suicide. The police strain of the book is told in the third person, mostly but not entirely from Simon and Charlie's divergent points of view--the other cops are differentiated by various characteristics but never really as alive as Simon and Charlie (or Sally and Geraldine, the dead mother). And Sally sees Geraldine's husband, Mark, on TV, but she knows that the man she sees is not the "real" husband, since she'd had a brief affair with Mark during which he'd told her all about Geraldine and their daughter (while she's complaining to him about her own family situation). Hence the paranoid plot--if this is Mark, who was it she spent a week with last year? And if she knew the real Mark, who's the guy on TV--and did one or the other of them just try to kill her? All of that sounds complicated, but Hannah is very good at keeping all the plots going--and as the tension increases, she's also good at building up the reader's interest only to suddenly shift into one of the other plots. There are elements of this book that refer to genres that I don't care much for (the cozy or traditional mystery, the threatened-woman thriller), but Hannah uses the cops to bring everything together in what is not quite a police procedural, and not quite the new-wave crime novel, and not exactly a "literary thriller," but her own form combining all the elements above. She even manages a bit of postmodernist metafiction (without being obvious or obnoxious about it): part of the plot depends on the diary being an unreliable narrative, but also on the detectives finding its author a believable character--the detective, within the story, acting as a literary critic to pass judgment on the quality of the writing of a segment of the book he's a character in... In some ways, The Point of Rescue reminds me of the much more low-key crime novels of Kate Atkinson, but in the end, as good as Atkinson's novels are, they're more literary works than crime fiction per se. Hannah's novel is more effective in depicting a crime and giving the reader a sense of the characters' endangered state, while at the same time seriously (though often comically) engaging serious issues (particularly the damaging expectations heaped upon women in family situations--the beginning of The Point of Rescue is indistinguishable from the beginning of a literary novel on that topic, even beyond the attempt to murder Sally, right up until the police narrative takes over and the extreme version of Sally's story, in the diary, casts that more conventional harried-mother story into stark relief. I highly recommend The Point of Rescue as an enjoyable crime novel that is at the same time funny and involving, and still manages to tackle serious social issues. One word about the "series" aspect: at first, the relationship of Simon and Charlie seems so complex and their history already so fraught with difficulties that a reader might think starting with the most recent of Hannah's three crime novels will be confusing--but in fact, the reader ultimately has all the information he/she needs to follow not only the plot of this book, but the plot of the Simon/Charlie relationship as well (you just have to be as patient in following their story as in pursuing the crime and motherhood plot).

Australia according to Garry Disher

It's obvious from the beginning of Garry Disher's Chain of Evidence, recently released in the U.S., that Disher is in control of his material. There's not a false note in this compelling book that nevertheless remains tied to the day-to-day-ness of crime and criminal investigation. Chain of Evidence is, like Grace Brophy's The Last Enemy (previously reviewed here) published in the excellent SoHo Crime series. And, as in Brophy's novel, the point of view (always in the 3rd person) shifts among a number of characters. But unlike Brophy's narrative, Disher's remains distant from the point of view of the suspects and even potential suspects (apart from the short first chapter, the original crime from the anonymous perpetrator's point of view--something that has become a standard feature of the crime novel). We are privileged to hear what the primary characters of the novel (Inspectors Challis and Destry) are thinking, as well as several other investigators--but the narrative stays with the investigators, which is important in a police procedural. There is a narrative irony, as so often in crime fiction: we see clues that the police are missing; but these are viewed through the anonymous narrator's eye, not other characters. And even this detail of narrative irony is handled in an interesting way by Disher: frequently when the police get around to that already-revealed-to-the-reader clue, it is a case-breaking revelation and a success for the main character of the story. Disher is much less melodramatic: a clue (glimpsed by us in the original crime and on a victim's refrigerator door) is uncovered, but only as one more piece of evidence that, on its own, will not convict the child-predator at the center of this book. The frustration of the police in amassing a case that will, indeed, hold up is a driving force in Disher's book (something missing in Brophy's, which is structured more like a traditional mystery, interested only in revealing the identity of the killer). There's also a passage that highlights the noir credentials (rather than those of a cozy mystery) of Disher's brand of police procedural: in the narrator's voice but from the point of view of detective Ellen Destry, we get a view of modern society: "We admire rapist footballers, own plasma TVs we can't afford, grow obese and vote to keep out strangers. Our fifteen-year-olds get poor educations and move on to senseless crimes, addiction, jail time or deatah behind the wheel of a stolen car, and if they make it past fifteen they can't find work. A great, banal sameness defines us, making us mostly soporific—but nasty if cornered. We're vicious with paedophiles, probably because we produce them." That point of view is sympathetically carried through in Disher's portrait of the underclass in South Australian housing projects and small towns (a big part of Chain of Evidence). The social, even sociological, quality of the narrative reminds me of the novels of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, which I've often held up as a model for effective noir police procedurals. Disher captures the society that produces the criminal classes, the milieu that spawns the individual criminals and causes the depression of the cops that retain a conscience. His novel is an achievement to be appreciated and a valuable and enjoyable addition to the genre. We become personally involved (and implicated) in the several strains of Chain of Evidence: the child molester, Hal Challis's vanished brother-in-law, and surrounding events and characters that reflect and amplify the pain and anguish of everyone involved on both sides of the law. Chain of Evidence makes me want to go back and re-read the Challis-Destry books from the beginning, and also to wish for access to Disher's other crime books.

Grace Brophy's The Last Enemy

I know it's not fair to start of a review with a complaint about what's really a technical matter, but the editor-side of me comes out when there are a lot of proofreading errors in a book. Grace Brophy's new series set in the Italian hill towns (mostly Assisi, in the first book) has a lot of them: Names are routinely misspelled (a character named Giulio is often referred to as "Guilio," another named Giuseppe is as often called "Guiseppe," Giorgio is frequently "Georgio": maybe the proofing system has a problem with names beginning with "g," though there are other mangled names as well. Maybe the publisher, the estimable SoHo Crime imprint, was in a hurry to get the book out, but it's very irritating. The Last Enemy also has some of the characteristics that I've referred to as "tourist noir": Americans are included as characters (primarily here the victim), the English text is peppered with Italian phrases for local color (not usually done with translations from foreign-language crime novels, and it actually does add local color, so I'm not complaining), and a "cozy" plot transferred to the exotic localed (though here with a substantial dose of political cynicism à la Donna Leon). There's a crime at the beginning, then the detective begins eliminating the many suspects while battling his personal enemies in the bureaucracy, aided by his trusted cohorts, as the point of view shifts from one character to another. That last point, about point of view, is particularly an issue with The Last Enemy: When the detective, Commissario Alessandro "Alex" Cenni, arrives in the household of the victim, each of the characters is focused on, his or her history and thoughts entered in turn. It's almost like one of those lists of characters found in translations of big Russian novels, or the massing of characters for the concluding confrontation in a country house mystery. The point of view continues to shift as the novel moves along, mostly among the police but also among other characters--that sort of thing goes on in "noir" police procedurals, but typically the focus (and the reader's attention) is a little more carefully controlled. The event at the center of the novel's atmosphere is a grim-looking Good Friday processional through the streets of Assisi, penitents dragging crosses, accompanied by the hooded figures carrying memento mori as portrayed on the novel's cover. But that scene, and the mood it might convey, are off-stage, while the reader is whisked from the palatial digs of the would-be Italian royalty to the police station, to the cemetery (similarly not very spookily evoked, though Italian cemeteries can be wonderfully strange by Anglo-American standards). There is a behind-the-scenes advantage in Brophy's method--we get to see beyond the Assisi of the tourist buses into the private homes of the wealthy as well as the middle-class (and even working clsas and immigrant populations) of the city and the surrounding hill towns. But there are irritating tics on the part of the detectives: Cenni assumes from the corpse's facial expression that she was not in distress at the moment of death, and further from the obviously staged rape scenario that the killer is a woman: these assumptions are surely the stuff of melodrama rather than crime fiction of the grittier sort that in other places Brophy clearly has in mind. I wanted to like The Last Enemy, and will probably pick up the projected sequels, but I'm hungrier for translations of some of the Italian noir fiction that, on the basis of what has become available so far, is collectively a more substantial addition to the crime canon.

Dibdin's second-to-last

Not being a Dibdin fan (something about the writing has always irritated me), I'd noticed the publication of his last novel--but instead picked up the previous one when I noticed reviews that talked about Back to Bologna more as a comic novel than a crime novel. One of Dibdin's satirical targets is semiotician-novelist Umberto Eco, surely too easy to lampoon these days both for his novels and for semiotics as a postmodern profession past its prime. For some reason, the scholarly literary references (even in fun) in Dibdin's novel seems forced, whereas a passing reference to Italo Svevo (without mentioning that author's name) in Carofiglio's The Past is Another Country seemed natural and unforced--simply a shorthand description of the character's state of mind, in terms that would have come naturally to the university-educated character himself. As italian-mysteries.com has pointed out, Dibdin also indulges in a bit of insider humor by naming two characters with, alternately, the first and last names of the chief characters in his chief "competitors" novels (those of Magdalen Nabb and Donna Leon. Which leads me to the topic of Italian crime stories written by Americans and Brits who live (or have lived) for a time in Italy. The temptation is plainly difficult to resist: setting a novel in Venice or Florence (or all over Italy, as Dibdin does) is clearly more appealing (and probably more marketable) than setting it in Akron or Bradford. For readers of noir, perhaps Akron or Bradford would be more appropriate settings, though. I've referred to this phenomenon in its more egregious manifestations as "tourist noir," though Leon and Nabb lived in Italy long enough to escape that title. Dibdin did live in Italy for some time, but I believe he wrote the novels from a safe distance, in Seattle. Much of the comedy (and the plot) is derived from portraits of celebrities (the semiotician is balanced, in the plot-thread concerned with him, by an equally lampooned celebrity chef) and other "big" people, rather than from the life in the streets that I find more appropriate fodder for crime stories, even comic ones. See, for instance, the very funny crime novels of Donald Westlake, focused on small time criminals, not presidents and media types. Maybe I just have a tin ear for celebrity satire, or maybe it's not a format that translates into the crime genre very well. Regardless, there isn't quite enough crime to balance the comedy in Back to Bologna, and though there are several appealing new characters (including a lampoon of a private detective, a curiously naive Albanian immigrant--though she says she comes from Ruritania, the comic-opera locale of her favorite novel, also the source of her student-lover's name--and some local cops) there are a few too many characters and subplots, so that the whole thing comes off as a shallow skimming of the possibilities of Bologna (better seen in the excellent Night Bus, which manages crime and humor in Bologna in big enough quantities to far outshine Back to Bologna). But Dibdin's Bolognese book does have some things to recommend it: his brief descriptions and evocations of Bologna are apt and colorful. And when the narrative finally settles down briefly into the investigation of the ostensible crime (the murder of a football-club owner) the dialogue among the cops and Zen's progress through the city are a suggestion of the crime novel this might have been. But the crime and the investigation collapse under the farce and the metafiction (the Eco character proposing to write a crime novel called Back to Bologna, starring a detective named Nez...). Flavia the Ruritanian herself refers to the plot as "silly intrigues," so perhaps Dibdin the metafictional author was himself aware of the shallowness of the farcical elements of his plot.

New Carofiglio novel

The Past is Another Country is a "stand-alone" crime novel by Gianrico Carofiglio, already known in English-speaking countries for his excellent, somewhat low-key series of legal thrillers set in Bari, on the east coast of Italy. The new book starts out something like a Patricia Highsmith novel, with Giorgio, a law student, coming under the influence of Francesco, a stronger personality who teaches Giorgio how to make money by cheating at cards and lures him further and further into Francesco's shadowy world. But what for the first third of the book seems to be a story about a gambling scam takes a sudden shift in the second third, when Giorgio's first-person narrative begins to alternate with a third-person narration about Lieutenant Chiti, a young detective with the Carabinieri. Forget Marshal Guarnaccia and the Carabinieri barracks of Magdalen Nabb's novels set in Florence: the paramilitary police in Carofiglio's novel are fiercely competing with the regular national police for big cases and their interrogation technique is to begin beating a suspect immediately upon catching up with him, ceasing only upon confession. There is also a distinct class difference between Chiti and his men (something also seen in Nabb's novels); Chiti is a product of officer's school, whereas the other men in his unit went straight from military training to the streets. In following Chiti, we learn about a serial sexual molester who has been beating and forcing fellatio on a series of young women; the Carabinieri have caught some of the cases and Chiti is under pressure to solve the case before the national police do. That process, and Chiti's own demons, occupy his sections of the rest of the book, alternating (loosely) with Giorgio's story, in which it becomes clear that Francesco is a "user" in the sense that he takes control of Giorgio without allowing the weaker young man any choice in what they do or when. Then the story departs from gambling, for the most part, concentrating on Giorgio's descent into a pointless, directionless way of life (whether under Francesco's influence or after being dropped by him). It's less suspense or mystery that drives the story than a fascination with seeing how low Giorgio can be dragged. There's a framing device, in which Giorgio is confronted by a woman whom he does not recognize at the beginning of the novel, setting the narration into motion--and, effectively, the woman returns at the end, her identity revealing the distance that Giorgio has traveled, in the story's events and in intervening years. It's an interesting story, effectively told, though without the sympathetic quality provided in Carofiglio's other books by the engaging personality of Guido Guerrieri, his running character in that series. The Past is Another Country is more noir, quite different from his other books, and a valuable addition to the cluster of Italian crime fiction available in English (rather than Italian stories by U.S. and U.K. writers who live or travel there, of which there has always been an abundance--more on that topic in my next couple of posts).

Word Verification, I'm afraid

Sorry folks, for anyone who wants to post a comment to this blog--I'm getting so much spam as comments that I'm going to have to install "word verification" for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience, I guess it's a fact of life on the web today...

New Italians next

Some new Italian crime novels are in the queue for the next reviews: The Past is a Foreign Country by Gianrico Carofiglio (his first non-legal novel), the next-to-last Michael Dibdin/Aurelio Zen novel (somebody explain the appeal of the Zen novels to me, I just don't get Dibdin, in spite of the appeal of his "tour of Italy," setting the novels all over the country), and the first in a new Italian series by a non-Italian, The Last Enemy by Grace Brophy. The Carofiglio review will follow in a couple of days.

patience of the spider, andrea camilleri

Normally, when a crime novel or series is made into a film or TV series, the novel is far more rewarding, richer, and definitely a more immersive experience. Not always. In the case of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series, the Italian TV series based on it (in which Camilleri has retained a role), the filmed realization is so rich, the setting so convincing, and most of the actors so closely identified with the characters they portray that the films are at the very least an accurate representation (even an alternate realization of the characters and the stories) that seeing the films after reading the stories is fine, but reading the stories after seeing the films is like reading the same novel twice, or perhaps more accurately, reading the screenplay after seeing a movie.

Part of the reason for the unusual appeal of the films is that Camilleri's style as a writer is simple and direct, the characters drawn skilfully in a few strokes and the stories not unnecessarily complicated. The films are also understated, relying on the incredible Sicilian setting and mostly understated performances (with some exceptions--the desk sergeant in Montalbano's unit is the incomparable and almost incomprehensible Catarella, played by Angelo Russo in a performance that dances along the edge between impersonation and lampoon). Luca Zingaretti doesn't look like I imagined Montalbano, not even like Camilleri described him, but he so embodies the role that he's indistinguishable from the character, while he's acting the part (just as he's the embodiment of evil in the wonderful late "prequels" in the La Piovra mafia series from Italian TV). The Patience of the Spider is a typically indirect story, a crime that is not what it seems and a resolution that is not a genre cliche. The novel is, like all the Montalbanos, short, about the same length as those classic Maigret novels or the classic American noir fiction of the 40s and 50s--easily read in a couple of sittings. The great Leonardo Sciascia's Sicilian crime novels are also short, direct, and economical--maybe it's a Sicilian virtue, as well as a throwback to some of the classics of crime writing. Montalbano is, as usual, devious in his use of the media and sympathetic in his attitude toward citizens who may not be strictly remaining within the law (as with a rural woman who sells eggs as well as herself). Livia (his usually absent girlfriend) is present more than usual, to the dismay of Montalbano's housekeeper (one character missing from the TV series) and the occasional disruption of the detective's peace of mind. I won't reveal any more about the plot, and have probably said enough about the series to make it sound tempting--if you haven't seen the TV series, there's a peculiar public tv channel in the U.S. that runs them, and it may be available on your local cable or satellite service under the names MHZ Networks or MHZ World Vision (it's worth checking it out).

Irish crime series

Both seasons of Proof, the Irish TV crime series, are about the interface between industry and politics in the new Ireland, the scene set by the economic miracle of the Celtic Tiger, integration into Europe, and new immigrant populations. The first series emphasized the political side of the equation, and the second series the commercial side (though the two series are equally cynical about the outcome of that particular marriage in the modern world). Both series are, incidentally, widely available as multi-zone DVD sets of 2 DVDs each. The second series has a stylistic tic that is both effective and irritating: a constant reference to the Dublin Spire, a new monument in the place of the infamous Nelson Column on O'Connell Street near the equally infamous central post office, a building at the heart of Ireland's Easter Uprising in 1916. The Spire is a peculiarly contemporary monument, in that it doesn't monumentalize anything in particular, and was designed not by an artist but by an architect. Proof returns to images of the Spire at all times of day, in all sorts of weather, in close and distant views, showcasing the abstracted geological motifs etched into it's bright metal surface as well as the impressive height of its needle rising high above today's Dublin. In the end, it is an impressive symbol of the sleek contemporary city that hides the ugly racism, corruption, and criminal indifference that are the subject of the series itself. More on the spire in a minute. The series: Two stories intertwine and ultimately come together. An African immigrant trying to operate a small shop in Dublin is harassed by anti-immigrant-skinhead-nationalists, resulting in the death of her child in an arson fire. And an out-of-work scientist who has set up a meeting with Terry Corcoran (played by Finbar Lynch) but is pushed into oncoming traffic in front of Terry's eyes. Meanwhile, Terry's ex-girlfriend Maureen Boland (Orla Brady) is investigating corruption in a drug company that's about to be taken over by an American conglomerate. Terry is a sort of Jack Parlabane relocated to Ireland (see Christopher Brookmyre, if you don't know Parlabane) and deprived of his near-superpowers and most of his sense of humor. He stirs up trouble, gets lectured by the police, and tries to save everyone that's under threat from the authorities, the skinheads, the Americans, the Irish hitman and his drug-company boss, etc. The show is a little formulaic, but better than most of what's on U.S. and U.K. TV, and it's great to get a tour of contemporary Dublin's seedier side. On the non-seedy front, back to the Spire--more than any other monuments I can think of, it resembles the Eiffel tower (both in its nonreferentiality and in the way it wears its technology on its sleeve) or the Washington Monument, here in DC. But the obelisk form of the Washington Monument has certain triumphal associations, and as you may or may not know, the Washington monument was originally designed as a temple surrounded by huge obelisks, but the plan ran out of money after only part of the first obelisk was completed. The stub of the monument stood on the Mall for many years, until a parks department employee unilaterally decided to finish that obelisk and let it go at that. The Spire is equally abstract, but with even less reference (it's not about O'Connell or the Easter Rebellion heroes, though located in the vicinity of those historical figures' memorialization along the same street). The tourist-eye view of the Spire as seen in Proof is probably the Spire at its best--if anyone reading this review lives in Dublin, and therefore lives with the Spire, let us know what you think of it.

Last of the Carvalho stories

Offside is not the last of the Pepe Carvalho novels by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, but it's the last one I've read (I read them all out of sequence, for no very good reason). Offside is typical of the series in some ways (Pepe's concern with food, the appearance of the regular characters as well as mention of some characters from previous novels, cynical and unresolved ending) but untypical in others (satire on professional football/soccer, death of a running character, more than usual concentration on the urban transformation of Barcelona, and lack of a corpse until two-thirds of the way through the book). The plot is in fact very unusual even for the crime fiction, speaking generally, much less for this unconventional crime writer: the story hinges on the appearance of a series of anonymous notes declaring that "the center forward will die at dusk", the Spanish title of the book. But who the target of the assassination is to be, and the identity of the writer of the notes is very unusual--the reader suspects long before the end that the center forward that Carvalho is hired to protect is not the one who will die, but the reason for the death threats is completely unexpected (was to me anyway). Everyone who has not read the novel should turn their heads away for a moment and plug up their ears: the notes were written by a character who wishes to make a poetic statement, not a criminal one. And another thread of the novel, concerning two junkies that all the other characters keep running into, seems to be related to the plot in one way, only to end up being related in another, as they fall into the midst of a plot to frame (rather than kill) that center forward. Although I don't understand football/soccer enough to appreciate the evident satire, even that part of the story (carried forward through conversations and lectures by the characters who are involved in the two clubs at the center of the book) is nonetheless funny. And Carvalho's frustration (nearly despair, really) at the end of the book is profoundly presented to the reader, as is frequently the case in Vazquez Montalban's works. I wouldn't say that Offside is the place to start with Carvalho (I think in fact that I should have read them in the order they were written, after all), but it's a living document of crime fiction, urban planning, post-industrial culture, the comic detective novel, the new Barcelona, and other things as well--wrapped up compactly in an entertaining novel.

Last entry in current Scandinavian crime wave

There are more Scandinavian crime novel's coming in the spring (and at least one non-Walander Mankell book that I haven't read) but for now, the recently translated Frozen Tracks by Åke Edwardson is the last in the string of Nordic noir novels that I've been posting about recently. I liked this one better than the two earlier ones by Edwardson that have been translated, because of the considerable tension built up in Frozen Tracks as the police doggedly pursue a couple of possibly related cases. Frozen Tracks illustrates a principle of the mystery or crime novel that I've mentioned before (the novel moves forward by delaying the resolution rather than marching toward it) but also a distinctive feature in the genre: there's no corpse until very late in the novel. That second, distinctive, feature helps Edwardson build tension through the first, universal, principle of delay: the children under threat in this story remain under threat, rather than showing up early on as candidates for autopsy. The daily lives of the cops (which I've mentioned several times as an element that I think many crime novels, including Edwardson's, concentrate on too much) are here used effectively as extensions of the primary plot (glosses, if you will, on the primary thread, which has to do with families and their ills). But the tension in the novel is very frustrating in its reliance on dramatic irony (the theatrical device in which the audience knows more about what's going on than the actors). Very early on, we see (through a policeman's eyes) a key clue to the resolution of the central investigation, but the police themselves do not return to that clue for a few hundred pages. Similarly, we see a good bit of the action from the point of view of one of the perpetrators, so that we know more about what's going on than the police. But there is an inexorability about the criminal's progress as well as that of the police that draws the reader on, almost breathlessly, to the rapid (almost abrupt) conclusion in the last chapter. The plot: two crimes; several young men walking alone are attacked with a blow to the head from behind--they neither see nor hear their attacker; and several children are briefly abducted and then returned to the vicinity of their daycare facilities. The police are clear about the significance of the attacks on the young men (though none of the blows are fatal), but the children are the only witnesses to the child abductions, and no one is sure that they are telling the truth rather than fabricating stories. Only as the abductor escalates his pattern do the detectives move into high gear. There is a bit more teamwork in Frozen Tracks than I remember in the earlier novels featuring Edwardson's Gothenburg detective, Erik Winter, and in that feature of this novel as well as the social conscience of the book, Frozen Tracks reminds me a bit more of the Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels of the '70s (that's a good thing, I would say, though the Scandinavian crime writers must find that comparison both inevitable and annoying). the tone is a bit different from the S-W books, which are in their own particular way very pessimistic and dark (they are among the most noir of police procedurals). Edwardson keeps more of a balance between the sunnier and more shadowy aspects of society and the family, possibly more suitable for today's reader but in a way less philosophical or less "deep" than their predecessor. But lacking any unlikely discovery of unpublished S-W books (or Maj Sjöwall's unlikely return to the roman policier), Edwardson will do very well as compensation.

Barcelona and Pepe Carvalho

I still have Offside to read, but have worked my way through all the rest of Manuel Vazquez Montalban's Carvalho books (such as have been translated in any case). The earliest (or earliest to be translated) is The Angst-Ridden Executive, the closest of the novels to the end of the Franco regime and the first glimpse of the pessimism or disillusionment with democracy in Barcelona that characterizes the series as a whole. Carvalho's previous life in the CIA is also explained here a bit more fully than in later novels. First one and then another executive of a multinational corporation are killed, and there are hints of both corporate corruption and political collusion (plus ça change, as the French say). If later novels (and in particular An Olympic Death) bemoan the redevelopment (or destruction) of the city for the Olympics, the earlier ones, in particular The Angst-Ridden Executive, provide plenty of evidence that the city needed some cleaning up. Executive includes a hint of the metafictional quality of the series: a film director interviewed by Carvalho (one of the angst-ridden and deceased executive's friends) describes a film he'd like to make--and the plot is that of a later book in the series, Southern Seas.



In that book, one of the more philosophical in the series, a rich developer dreams of escaping to the South Seas, but instead goes underground in a seedy housing development that he built himself. Themes of bourgeois guilt, Marxist sympathies, and the real interests and points of view of the working classes are portrayed with empathy and specificity as elsewhere in the series, but in Southern Seas with exceptional clarity and sadness. There's a bit of animal cruelty in this book that you can smell from a mile away, when the animal is first introduced--adding an element of sadness that Vazquez Montalban will return to again and again, even in references to this specific animal, in later books. Another example of returning characters and themes occurs in An Olympic Death (which does not in fact deal directly with the Olympics at all, but with the demolition and construction leading up to it--and that only tangentially). In that book, a beautiful woman asks Carvalho to find "the man of my life," which is the title of the last Carvalho novel--and the woman (as well as the young woman at the center of Southern Seas) returns both in the "present" of that novel as well as in excerpts from the earlier books.


For a notorious book-burner, Carvalho demonstrates great respect for his fictional milieu. Two more comments--one about milieu and, first, one about the book burning. It originally shocked me when Carvalho pulled a book off the shelf and began tearing it up for kindling. Now, a bit older myself, I understand the impulse on several levels. While constitutionally incapable of destroying a book myself, I feel the same weight of a library carried forward through the years, and some of the same weariness with the published philosophies and discussions that I once found essential. The other comment, about milieu: some of the real places that Carvalho visits no longer exist, and others have changed. Barcelona is still a beautiful city, though it has lost some of the character that Vazquez Montalban treasured and portrayed. It's quite interesting to read the novels during and after a visit to Barcelona, because a historical, even geological, layer of the city's life and history are revealed behind and beneath the tourist-crowded plazas and buildings that embody the city's charm. Vazquez Montalban provides not a tourist guide to Barcelona and Catalonia, but a portrait that is at once narrow and in great depth. I'm motivated to go back to the other Barcelona crime novels that I've reviewed here to see if any will capture a view of the city that measures up to Vazquez Montalban's, even in part.