The Monster of Florence according to Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

The new true-crime book by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi on the famous Monster of Florence case is not a definitive version of the serial murder case. The first half is a delineation of the crimes and the response of the Italian police and carabinieri to them. The second half is a sorry tale of the miscarriages of justice and downright stupidities of the police and the judicial system, extending to the persecution and arrest of the two authors of this book for, apparently, the heinous crime of proposing a theory of the crime opposed to that advocated by the detective in charge of the case (and now crime fiction author) Michele Guittari and some of the public prosecutors involved. The Monster case has inspired several novels and movies (including Thomas Harris's Hannibal and the movie based on it, a Magdalen Nabb story, and Laura Grimaldi's The Suspicion, not to mention several nonfiction books including the one Giuttari brought out just weeks before Spezi's own book appeared in Italy and the first of Giuttari's own novels). So the story, though not well known in the U.S. except for a recent network newsmagazine segment on Preston and Spezi, has been widely discussed and analyzed. What's different about the P/S Monster book is that it's about the mangled investigation and its consequences more than it's about the murders. And Preston is a novelist producing a non-fiction text, but with some of the sensibility of a fictional account. The account, though, becomes more and more about Preston and Spezi as they are targeted (spitefully, it seems) by the investigators. In a way, the last half of the book is a harrowing memoir more than investigative reporting--revealing not only the authors' difficulties but also a few really stupid things they do (given what they already knew about the police and judiciary involved in the investigation). So it's a hybrid, albeit a fascinating one. And it gives a perspective on Giuttari the novelist that makes me hesitate to continue to read that policeman/author's novels any further—Preston's acccount convinces me that Giuttari's experience as a detective does not, in this case, make him a reliable portrayer of the profession. Is that fair?

Andrea Camilleri, The Paper Moon

Newly arrived in English (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) is The Paper Moon, a Salvo Montalbano novel from Sicilian crime star Andrea Camilleri. As always, the prose is lucid and carefully controlled: We see everything from Salvo's point of view (though the story is told in the third person). The complexities of the tale involving a pharmaceutical salesman, his sister, his lover, and a second thread concerning politicians, the mafia, and drugs intertwine through Salvo's relations with his fellow cops (including the tongue-twisting Catarella), the police bureaucracy, and the seductive (in very different ways) sister and lover. And as usual, Salvo figures out what's going on just a step ahead of the dogged police investigation. There is a comfortable charm to these stories (not unlike the Botswana tales of Alexander McCall Smith) based on Salvo's irritable character, the comic relief of Catarella's attempts at speech, and the detailed portrait of the culture and cuisine of Sicily. However, beneath Camilleri's stories there lurks a dark and complex world of ruthless crime families and the tentacles they extend into the political and social life of Italy. The police cannot investigate some crimes directly, but only with elaborate fictions and misdirections that may or may not achieve justice or the prosecution of the guilty parties. So part of the particular charm of Camilleri's novels is an irony and an overt or covert violence that, together, give his books quite a sharper edge than Smith's Botswana tales. There is a kind of bitter comedy in the Montalbano novels that is lighter but of the same kind as can be found in Leonardo Sciascia (where the comedy is of dark and tragic proportions but the prose is nonetheless lucid). It's partly Salvo's own personality (emotions and appetites included) that gives a more accessible quality to Camilleri, in contrast to the more political and intellectual edge of Sciascia. The same can be said of the filmed versions of the two authors' books: Sciascia's novels have been made into existentially ominous crime films, and the TV series made from Camilleri's books is funny, entertaining, and revealing about the personalities as well as the criminalities of Sicily (as well as being very faithful versions of the novels, with a group of very effective actors impersonating the characters). In short, The Paper Moon is a vivid and justly anticipated continuation of a brightly written series with very dark undertones.

George Pelecanos, The Turnaround

The new Pelecanos novel builds slowly, delineating the consequences of the characters' bad choices 30 years in the past, through the first half of The Turnaround. In the last half, the pace picks up as the narrator brings to the fore the consequences of current bad choices.The narrative voice is vintage Pelecanos, a blend of interior monologues by the characters and a particular narrative point of view, a moral center within the mayhem and potential disaster that the characters are going through. It's both aspects of the narrative voice that make the author a distinctive voice in crime fiction today: the characters speak, in their dialogue as well as those interior monologues, in believable, class-conscious voices. And the narrator himself speaks with an ethical voice that passes judgment on what the characters are saying, doing, and thinking. There's no irony here: when a character lies, the narrator points it out. There's a sharp contrast between this style of writing and, for example, John McFetridge, who is on my mind because I recently read his two published novels set in Toronto (and placed as firmly there as Pelecanos's novels are placed in DC). McFetridge's narrator is not always ironic, in that the reader is not always privy to information that the characters are not (though the characters are busy concealing that information from us and from each other). But the story is carried by the voices themselves, rather than being balanced by a narrative voice providing a moral center. The result of the difference is that McFetridge keeps the reader off balance and builds considerable humor into the structure. Pelecanos lets us know what's going on and where it's all going, and only includes humor in the by-play among characters when they're joking with each other: he's otherwise serious about what's happening and what sort of lesson or conclusion should be drawn from what's happening. I mentioned bad choices, and that is frequently Pelecanos's focus, but always within a social context that explains (without excusing) the bad choices. Where The Turnaround departs from Pelecanos's previous work is in the pattern of violence: Most of his previous novels ultimately turn to revenge, exacted explicitly and violently at the conclusion, and with a clear line between the good guys and the bad guys, though each may be equally violent. The Turnaround is more ambiguous, which I'll get to in a minute. In my previous post, I mentioned the maleness of the narrative (another contrast with McFetridge, whose female characters are among his most interesting creations, always central to the story), and there's also a working-class focus: Pelecanos includes characters from all walks of life, but he's most interested in working people, and those who are struggling up into the working class. He tends to treat some groups as clueless, among them the wealthy and particular social types, including (in The Turnaround) a tendency to characterize Asians as shopkeepers who won't meet the eye of their customers. The result is an intensity of focus that drives the story relentlessly forward, and perhaps drives some readers away (those excluded, caricatured, or not interested in the ethical/moral center of the novels). That, I think, is one source of the tendency these days to say that Pelecanos is not so much a crime novelist as a novelist: he has perhaps sacrificed some segments of a mass audience in order to intensify the allegorical quality of the drama (no accident that one of his most recent--and best--novels is called Drama City, a title that is not just a joke about DC the city). The Turnaround is about a group of white youths who make a racist choice, to drive through a black neighborhood taunting a group of black youths standing innocently on a corner. The white boys' car reaches a dead end and they have to turn around to confront those they wanted to torment. Thirty years later, the black kids are suffering from the results of their own bad choice (beating one of the white kids and killing another), while the surviving white kids are now 50-ish and marked by the event in subtler ways. The plot is one of Pelecanos's most interesting (though I have to say I think the two previous books, Drama City and The Night Gardener, are his best novels so far, as complete pieces of work). When two of the black men approach the two white men for very different reasons, moral dilemmas give way to more immediate consequences. There are also side plots involving one of the black men who is attempting to take over a drug-distribution network, the families of the two central characters (one of the white men, Alex, who has carried on his family diner business but has lost a son in Iraq, and Ray, one of the black men, who has become a physical therapist at Walter Reed Army Hospital, both thus drawing the war and its consequences into the story). Toward the end, Alex is measuring a windowless building that he owns that, in other Pelecanos novels, would have been a killing floor where the characters already headed for collision would have met in violence: but in this case becomes something else: a turnaround for the characters and for the author (not to mention a late surprise, in a more "crime fiction" fashion that the book has up to that point prepared us for). The novel that begins with a death does indeed end in death, but at arms' length rather than first hand, from the central characters' point of view, though in plain and explicit view of the reader. Divine revenge, perhaps, in an unlikely form, with victims that belatedly call forth some sympathy--though Pelecanos is careful to invoke the neutrality of God with regad to human violence and war. This is the first of Pelecanos's novels to be published after the end of The Wire, the amazing HBO series that he was involved in as a writer. And some of the complexity of The Wire in plot and vision has affected the novelist. That change was perhaps reflected in the unresolved quality of the ending of his previous novel's serial killer plot, but is here reflected in different kind of resolution. And as always, there are echoes of the early novels in specific details (like a stereo shop) that make Pelecanos's work not only a portrait of working-class Washington DC and environs, but also a detailed personal universe.

The new George Pelecanos: first thoughts and a question

I'm reading The Turnaround, the new novel by George Pelecanos, and have a few comments to start off with--plus I have a question for other readers. First, I started reading Pelecanos's books about the time his third novel came out, and I thought then and still think that the early novels, the Stefanos series and Shoedog, were a brilliant update of noir, crime, and pulp fiction, completely rooted in place (the D.C. area). After those early novels, Pelecanos found his true subject: American men from their 20s to their 50s who are trying to live up to (or outlive) their fathers' expectations. And it is definitely men's voices that his novels portray. There are women in the books, but they're only portrayed in their relation to men, and even the narrator's voice (always in the third person) is an interior monologue from the male characters' point of view. That's not necessarily a flaw, it's just where Pelecanos's particular universe is located. And location is my question for other readers: I live a mile or two from Pelecanos, though I've never met him. Every day, I drive or take the Metro through Pelecanos country: the streets and highways of Washington DC and Montgomery County Maryland (particularly Silver Spring, an unincorporated "urban district" in the county). One of the special pleasures of reading Pelecanos's books is seeing my own neighborhood(s) through his eyes, in the context of a crime novel. Typically, I know the streets he's describing, can even pinpoint the location of, for instance, the Pappas and Sons coffee shop that's an important part of The Turnaround. My question is, do other readers find the "placed" or quality of being rooted in a place to be an essential part of reading Pelecanos's stories? And are there other takes on the basic dramatic situation that he returns to again and again, that search for the proper place of a male human being in the culture of America in the mid 20th and early 21st century?

McFetridge's Second

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere brings back some of the characters in John McFetridge's first book, Dirty Sweet, but as bit players. Everybody Knows includes more police procedural and more mob insider stuff than the preceeding novel, and splinters the point of view among a larger cast. In fact, different readers might identify different characters as the "protagonist" or most interesting character--McFetridge has made several of them central enough and interesting enough that no one of them takes definitive center stage (and a number of them are of "a certain age": McFetridge likes to foreground the thoughts and interests of people on the near and far side of their 40s). Perhaps the city of Toronto is more of a central character than anyone else (and the reference in the title, taken from a Neil Young song, is to current and former attitudes to the city). And where the characters in Dirty Sweet seem, as I mentioned in my last post, to be telling the novel's story to each other, in Everybody Knows, they are mainly lying to each other, and keeping the reader in the dark in ways that move the story forward in an indirect, meandering line. The indirection and the meandering are actually some of the author's strengths: the novel is about talking, and talk that both reveals and conceals not only the events but also the personal truths of the speakers. The "maguffin" is an Iranian immigrant who plunges to his death, onto the hood of a car occupied by a john and his "date." From that event there emerges a sequence of characters: a marijuana grower under house arrest (and her daughter and partner in the trade), several cops (of French, Native, Scottish, South Asian, and several other backgrounds, emphasizing the multi-ethnicity of the city), a prominent biker-gang member in from Montreal to shake up the local drug trade, several biker "hangarounds," a barge captain and his weed-growing partner, and more. The Montreal biker-in-a-business-suit (Richard), the grower (Sharon), the barge guy (Ray), and two of the detectives (new partners Bergeron and Armstrong) are the most frequent speakers (and points of view), anchoring the narrative's "sex. dope. immigration. gang war. filmmaking," as the p.r. from the publisher, Harcourt, would have it in this Toronto that might be "the new L.A. of crime fiction." Though the author is not constructing a traditional mystery or procedural with a "reveal" at the end, there are several surprises that, in retrospect, the reader will see as the logical undertone to the stories and lies that have been accumulating all along. This is a very cold-blooded bunch, including both those who end up dead and those who either get away or take control. McFetridge is building a running history of his city, something like Pelecanos is doing in D.C. or Deon Meyer in Cape Town, with characters coming in and out of focus over a number of stories and novels. And no matter how cold they are, they're good company for us and for each other (one of the things that McFetridge's cast of characters shares with the writer he's often compared to, Elmore Leonard). I for one am eager to follow their their further conversations and exploits.

John McFetridge's first

I was impressed with Declan Burke's endorsement of the novels of John McFetridge (at Crime Always Pays) and went looking for the 2 already published. I'm happy to report that on the basis of the first book, Dirty Sweet, I'm as enthusiastic as Declan. The comparison with Elmore Leonard is irresistible (even to Elmore Leonard, apparently): McFetridge shares with that master of the form a couple of characteristics: One is voice, the characters speak in language that seems less written than overheard. Another is that the plot seems to grow out of the characters, rather than characters being in service of (even trapped in) a plot, as is the case with some crime novels. Dirty Sweet is a novel of voices, multiple voices. Rather than a narrator telling a story, the characters seem to be telling each other the story (as much as they're telling it to us). Though the multiple characters do seem to be heading toward a climactic convergence, it's not a "climax" in the sense of a tightening web, it's an inevitable meeting of people whose interests focus on something they all want. The story itself is pure noir and very Canadian--the latter in a couple of ways. I don't know of any other country where the biker gangs have become the crime lords. The first time I read a Canadian crime novel featuring mafia-bikers, I couldn't believe it was based on reality, but then looked into the situation a bit, and indeed, the bikers have controlled crime in Canadian cities for quite a while. There's also a sense of Canadian identity, in the characters' discussions of Canadian-ness and Canada's successful products in world pop culture (movie-making, music, etc.), as well as the unavoidable topic of the behemoth on the border just to the south. It's more than just local color that I'm talking about: Dirty Sweet is a Canadian novel (and in particular a Toronto story) in the same way that "tartan noir" is a definable approach to crime fiction, for example. In other words, McFetridge isn't turning out pseudo-American crime fiction any more than he's imitating Elmore Leonard: his voice is original, lively, and addictive. The plot involves a woman who leases office space but happens to witness a murder (a Russian mob hit in bright daylight at a traffic light), the Russian mobsters who did the hit, an internet-porn businessman who happens to be the leasing agent's client, the Toronto homicide cops looking into the hit, plus the bikers trying to horn in on the Russians' business, the naked and nearly naked internet porn performers sitting around talking about their kids' TV viewing, a couple of Mounties, and more: all of the above with parts to play in the story, and all with his or her own voice and point of view. Watching (or, really, hearing) all of the above come together is a treat. I can only imagine that this would be a very difficult book to translate into an audio version, because there are so many voices, with such subtle distinctions among them, that a reader would/will need a lot of talent in portraying them individually as well as McFetridge has done on the printed page.

Comments on recent Crime Always Pays posts

A couple of recent posts on Declan Burke's estimable Crime Always Pays blog moved me to post replies. One is in regard to the speed and effectiveness of blogs vs. mainstream media (Declan's post was itself a reply to comments by Peter Rozofsky on his Detectives Beyond Borders blog). I'm quite happy to see my article in the new Mystery Readers Journal Mysteries Set in Ireland issue (a bit of a plug for myself there--but thanks are definitely owed to Janet Rudolph for accepting my humble offering); I certainly still stand behind anything I say in the article, but it's frustrating (as a blogger) not to be able to keep writing it--to include books published since I wrote it, changing opinions about some authors, etc. Writing a blog spoils one in terms of being as current as possible when an "article" is "published" (not sure if those words from the old-media world really apply to the blog-o-sphere). A blog is certainly a more immediate (if unjuried, unedited, and therefore less "published") venue, not only in terms of staying up-to-date, but also in terms of carrying on a conversation (from Peter to Declan and beyond).
And regarding my article, Declan Burke also aims a friendly diatribe at one of my comments therein, regarding a list of "Irish novels that aren’t exactly crime novels" including "Seamus Smyth’s QUINN (featuring a career criminal and a lot of even blacker comedy).” To wit, quoting Declan: "Glenn? I love you like a mother from another brother, etc., but I have no idea of how Hugo Hamilton’s Pat Coyne tales, and that of Seamus Smyth’s QUINN, ‘aren’t exactly crime novels’. Hamilton, you could argue, offers a crude but quixotic protagonist raging against the world at large, and one who could just as easily be a middle-management figure as an Irish police detective tilting at the windmills of Irish justice or lack of same. But QUINN (1999), a first-person account of a killer-for-hire, is one of the defining Irish crime fiction novels of the current outpouring."
Point taken: but I still think of Quinn as a farce or a picaresque comedy (with murders and other assorted violence) more than a crime novel--I guess it's something about the hit-man-narrator's voice that's very seductive and natural, but more in a comic vein. But maybe it's just not that productive to try to draw distinctions like the one I was (evidently in vain) trying to make: Quinn is certainly a novel of crime, and a very violent and very funny one at that--enough said? Comments?

Mind's Eye, by Håkan Nesser

Yet again, we have reason to regret the translation of excellent crime series out of order. Laurie Thompson's excellent translations of 2 later novels in Swedish writer Håkan Nesser's series featuring Chief Inspector Van Veeteren appeared before Mind's Eye (literal translation of the title would be more like The Wide-Meshed Net), the first in the series. I for one wish I could go back and start the series anew with Mind's Eye--starting with the first book gives a better sense of who Van Veeteren is, a better exposure to Nesser's wry sense of humor, a better introduction to the locale (Nesser's novels are set not in Sweden but in an imaginary North-European country that is a composite of the Scandinavian countries, Holland, etc.)and what would be for me a better introduction to the series. Mind's Eye bears comparison to the police-procedural tradition of Maj Sjöwall/Per Wahlöö, even more so than other current Swedish crime series--the sometimes cranky relations among the policemen, the indirect routes to the discovery of the perpetrator, and the social basis of the criminal situation all relate positively to Sjöwall/Wahlöö more so than the more recent 2 Nesser novels that have been translated (which deserve positive comparison to the likes of Friedrich Glauser not to mention Janwillem Van de Wettering--Nesser's detective is apparently named in homage to the Dutch crime writer. In terms of the setting, this first introduction to Nesser's unnamed country fills in some of the background and raises an interesting comparison to that other great fictional setting, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct. Nesser stakes out a whole country, rather than an island metropolis, but it's a less urban and more diverse setting, giving Nesser more leeway in creating landscapes, but also calling for a very different approach (larger distances, different terrains rather than theater districts and tenements). With other series published out of order, it's a plot that bridges novels that gets garbled (as in Jo Nesbø's books) or back story not explained (as in the Petra Delicado series recently discussed here, or in the case of Manuel Vazquez Montalban's early Pepe Carvalho novels are only now becoming available in English) or references to earlier crimes that the reader won't "get" (in numerous cases). With Nesser's books it's more a matter of perceiving the territory within crime fiction that the author is staking out, including the precurser's that I've mentioned as well as introductions to character quirks and ongoing motifs (like the badminton matches running through Nesser's series). (I should mention that one writer, Liza Marklund, actually wrote her series out of order, beginning to lay out her character's back story with the second Annika Bentzon and continuing to fill in until her story caught up with that first novel, The Bomber.) We now have a fuller sense of what Nesser is doing, and a fuller appreciation of what he has accomplished: the Van Veeteren series is one of the cleverest and most enjoyable of the Scandinavian crime wave, and my earlier cavilling about his novels being "placeless" because of the invented setting is hereby withdrawn: with Mind's Eye, I'm convinced.

2 from Serpent's Tail: Mehmet Murat Somer and Derek Raymond

Notes on a couple of new (in the U.S.) releases from Serpent's Tail Press: The Prophet Murders, by Mehmet Murat Somer, and I Was Dora Suarez, by Derek Raymond (the 4th in the Factory series, recently reprinted with new covers). The Prophet Murders is a campy serial killer tale told from the point of view of a transvestite Istanbul club owner. Transvestites whose real names are the same as the prophets recognized by Islam are being murdered in ways appropriate to the stories of the prophets. This is a classic amateur detective story, with the obvious difference of the twin milieux: contemporary Turkey and a gay transvestite subculture. A couple of other Serpent's Tail series come to mind as comparisons: the novels of John Dale, veering into gay territory in Australia, and those of Mark Ramsden, steeped in the culture of fetishism and S&M. Not too surprising that all of these would find a home at Serpent's Tail, which specializes in alternatives to the mainstream. Somer's book is funnier than those others, in a very camp way (though not quite as broad comedy as La Cage aux Folles, which is referenced in the book, along with a lot of other pop culture from Turkey and around the world, plus crime and mystery classics). The unnamed narrator's point of view is the source of the humor, the indignation concerning the crimes, and the tight focus on the subculture (though everyone he meets seems to be gay, bi, or in the closet--is there really so much gay goings-on in secular-but-becoming-more-Islamic Turkey today? All we hear from over here is repressive goings-on like the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk and others for anti-nationalist statements.

In I Was Dora Suarez, Derek Raymond's detective-sergeant-narrator is recalled to The Factory, after being sacked in How the Dead Live for assaulting a colleague (among other things), to investigate the axe murder of a young woman and her elderly landlady. The opening chapter details the murders (along with a third one) explicitly and in sickening detail from the point of view of the killer, but it's clear from the narrative interpolations that the detective is inhabiting the mind of the murderer just as he will later inhabit Dora Suarez, through pure empathy and the fragments of her diary. The contrasts among this most hard-boiled policeman's personality, the violence of the crimes, and the tenderness with which he regards the victim is quite powerful. Yet more evidence of the debt we owe (and the lessons that might be still learned) from this master and innovator of noir. Another of Serpent's Tail's specialties is keeping classic noir novels in print, along with new examples of the genre, and we can only be grateful for their efforts with respect to all these niches and the richness of the alternatives they provide in contrast to the blandness of the common run of best-seller and genre fiction.

Casablanca Noir: The Final Bet, by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

Billed as the first Arabic-language procedural to be translated into English, Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The Final Bet is a crime novel of the new Morocco. There's a temptation to compare The Final Bet to the crime novels of Yasmina Khadra, which (though written in French) were the first Arabic police procedurals to arrive in the U.S. But Khadra's novels follow a policeman trying to cope in an Algeria that is falling into chaos in the face of fundamentalist challenges to the government. Hamdouchi's policeman is coping with the collapse of the Moroccan era of repression and police brutality known as the Years of Lead, meaning that the cop can no longer simply beat confessions out of a suspect. In addition, the real detective in this novel only emerges toward the end, in the person of an attorney who manages to solve the crime and save his client (in an almost Perry Mason-ish fashion). But rather than Khadra or Perry Mason, the most accurate comparison is, I think, with Leonardo Sciascia, whose lucid, short crime novels were a means of investigating Sicilian and Italian injustices. Hamdouchi's book is similarly clearly written, short, and straightforward, lacking only Sciascia's ironies. And Hamdouchi is seeking not only to delineate social injustice but to propose a solution, the right of the accused to be represented by counsel during police questioning. The plot follows the case of a young Moroccan man, Othman, married to a much older French woman. Othman is unfaithful and is the sole beneficiary of his wife's estate, so when he discovers her stabbed to death, he's the logical suspect, the person who stands to gain most from his wife's death (a death that, in fact, he'd been yearning for). Stated directly, the plot does suggest Perry Mason, again. But when Othman contacts a former classmate and legal reformer, the mystery becomes linked to the larger social issues. The message, though, doesn't overwhelm the story: it's only emphasized in the last chapter and in an Afterword by the translator (Jonathan Smolin), who gives the political background to the story. As a novel, The Final Bet is a quick and enjoyable read, a bit lighter than Sciascia or Khadra and perhaps a bit more hopeful about the positive resolution of the larger social ills addressed--as well as being more mystery than noir, for the most part. Sciascia's aforementioned irony and Khadra's pessimism arise from the skepticism and despair in the face of intractable problems larger than the immediate story at hand. Hamdouchi's book is a welcome glimpse into the Moroccan milieu and its criminal justice system, and as a bonus, the dustcover design is more striking than the average crime novel (and is even carried over into the design of the hardcover underneath). Plus there's a creeping sense of noir darkness in the implications of the Moroccan past showing through the cracks in the current climate of reform.

Bleak families: Inger Frimansson's sequel

The Shadow in the Water is the sequel to Swedish crime writer Inger Frimansson's disturbing Good Night My Darling, published in the U.S. last year. The body count is lower in the sequel, but the menacing atmosphere remains. The Shadow in the Water includes murder, suspicious police, kidnapping, assault, and even a haunting, nameless pet raven (plus the natural world as mostly an antagonist rather than a haven), but the book is oddly hopeful, leading to something like redemption. Frimansson is interested in the psychological effects of violence, not just in the immediate aftermath but in following years. The surviving characters from the earlier book are 6 years older, around 50 now, and they're joined by new lovers as well as descendants of some of those who didn't survive the first book. Good Night My Darling moved back and forth in time as well as among the characters, but The Shadow in the Water mostly moves back and forth among the minds of a diverse group of characters: Justine (the seriously troubled soul at the center of the first book), Jill (whose best friend died in the first book), Micke (whose father died in the first book), Tor (whose wife died in the first book), as well as Justine's lover and his associates at the hotel where he works. In all, the point of view is splintered among about 7 voices. All of them miserable to some extent, but their misery is enveloped in a sense of threat rather than gloom, threat being much more interesting for a reader than gloom. Violence lurks behind each of the characters, each of whom is damaged in his or her own way. Jill, perhaps the most normal of them, is the stable center of the novel: she is less marked by guilt than her dead friend Berit, though both of them tormented Justine when they were schoolgirls, and Jill's job is portrayed in a very interesting way (she's a sort of boat-traffic-controller on the lakes and canals around Stockholm). Jill is leading Tor toward something like acceptance of the disappearance of Berit (only Justine knows she's dead). But each of the other characters moves toward dealing with psychic damage and pain. At several points, Frimansson remarks on the fact that the presumably weaker member of a couple is actually the stronger, a sentiment and a word that recalls a short play, The Stronger, by Strindberg, the great Swedish playwright. But where Strindberg's point is based in gender resentment (embodied in the male character in his play), Frimansson sees the contradiction in the stronger/weaker dichotomy in more positive terms (a marker of the distance we've traveled since Strindberg's day). I have to assume that Frimansson intends for us to reflect on gender roles in general and Strindberg in particular--not to mention that Strindberg disciple, Ingmar Bergman, with whom Frimansson shares a reliance on psychological distress for dramatic effect. But The Shadow in the Water, while hardly comic, reaches for the succor of ordinary life in the face of extraordinary stress and pain: Where Good Night My Darling erupts in weirdness and violence, The Shadow in the Water observes the outer edges of violence and weirdness and the human capacity to achieve something like normalcy, through age, through the ordinariness of daily life, and even through further violence. It's an oddly enthralling novel, leading the reader to a point rather different from where we expected to be going, and rather different from that of the average crime novel.

Australian cop movie (or art film): Matthew Saville's Noise

Is it easier (or more permissible) for a film to achieve the status of art than for a crime novel to reach for literary heights? I'm wondering because I've just seen Matthew Saville's film Noise, from Australia (which has been making the festival rounds and is now being shown by Sundance Channel in the U.S.)--and reader beware, I can't continue this discussion without revealing a key fact about the ending of Noise. The movie begins with a mass murder on a subway train, with a single survivor-witness, then continues with parallel plots concerning the investigation of that event and the experiences of Constable Graham McGahan, a uniformed cop who begins experiencing tinnitus and having blackouts and spells of deafness. That beginning and the related plot recall the very best of both books and films in the police and detective genres. The soundtrack (really sound design) is very effective in tightening tension while suggesting McGahan's auditory difficulties. The look of the movie (by cinematographer László Baranyai) is simultaneously gloomy concrete suburb and beautifully framed wide-screen (even in the substantial part of the story that takes place within a travel trailer that has been set up as a police post). McGahan, after trying to get soft duty because of his fainting spells, gets stuck in that trailer as the officer on duty on the night shift over Christmas. He has to deal with his hearing problem, boredom, a hostile drunk, a mischievous retarded boy, an even more hostile citizen who has gotten into a bar fight after an argument about the mass murder, and the arrival of the mass murderer on his doorstep, so to speak. In spite of the seeming complication of the plot, the film is subdued, even quiet (in spite of the sound as mentioned above). The understatedness of the story's surface and forward motion is part of the quality of "art" that I was referring to at the beginning of this post, along with the unresolved quality of the ending, which is a resolution only in the sense of the coming together of the elements of plot and metaphor that have gone before. The fear of the survivor of the mass murder (she discovers that the murderer knows who she is) leads her to McGahan along with all those other characters (and McGahan's girlfriend) in a sudden eruption of violence as senseless as the original murder (but perhaps not directly related to it). Not entirely satisfying as a crime fiction, the movie is a vivid and complete work of art. Is it easier to accept that a movie can be a good (if perhaps incomplete) crime story and also a work of art than for a crime novel to achieve literary ambitions without seeming pretentious? Has anyone seen Noise, and if so, do you have opinions about whether it succeeds as a noir story or as an art film? For me, it's the visual and aural dimension of the film that keeps the art and the crime story suspended together, without seeming to condescend to genre fiction (as so often happens when a "literary" author attempts crime fiction). It's perhaps the collective nature of the creation of a film that makes the composite of art and noir possible (paradoxically, since we think of a work of art as a solo production, generally). If a novel ended with metaphorical rather than literal clarity, we might not accept it as a satisfying crime novel, or might dismiss it as pretentiously literary. Is it the relatively compact experience of a 2-hour movie versus the commitment that a 200 or more page book presents to the reader? Would we expect a multi-part TV series to reach more completion than Noise does, after many hours and weeks of watching? With all these questions in mind, and the cautions about plot resolution, I highly recommend Noise to lovers of film and of crime fiction. The only crime film that I've seen recently that comes close to Saville's achievement is the film version of Indridason's Myrin (by Spanish-Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur).

Twisted Noir from Italy: Gianluca Morozzi's Blackout

I you will pardon a short digression into the language of Poststructuralist and Marxist literary theory of the 1980s, Gianluca Morozzi's novel Blackout (recently translated by Howard Curtis and published by Bitter Lemon Press) is "overdetermined," in the sense that rather than a single, straightforward series of related incidents there are a large number of influences underlying a single event. So little of what's actually going on in the story is revealed (while so much is apparently being revealed) that I could not until the very end understand why the story has been made into a "Major Film" as the cover of the paperback announces. Rest assured, all will become clear. It's actually difficult to say much about the plot without revealing too much (though the reader will figure it out a few pages before the ultimate revelation, as the author may well have intended). Three unrelated people converge on an elevator in a high rise in the deserted city of Bologna on the weekend of the August Bank Holiday. We know from Aldo Ferro, is a sadistic serial killer as well as a bar owner and a self-styled ladies' man. We learn a bit less about the other two at first, Claudia (a cocktail waitress whose girlfriend is out of town making a movie) and Tomas (a boy who is about to run away with the girl he met on-line). Their interactions once stuck in the suspended box are tense and not totally predictable (though also not startlingly original) for the central part of the narrative: panic, heat, thirst, personality clashes, despair. There are a few interludes developing further the "back stories" of the characters and the plot and also delaying the resolution of the tension in the elevator, and adding complications to a narrative that starts out as a serial killer thriller, becomes a psychological thriller, adds in a ghost story and a star-crossed lovers plot, and then ties it all together with a completely different plot that I'm not going to reveal here. As I said, overdetermined, and I don't mean that as a put-down--Morozzi's novel ultimately adds up to more than the sum of its parts. What seems for a while like a disappointing though occasionally lively and funny novel of one sort turns into a lively and entertaining satire of itself and of popular culture generally. While there's at least almost enough of the several thriller and sadist plots to satisfy lovers of those genres, the unexpected shift in the plot takes it all to another level. Just as the reader gets over the excitement of being sucked into the sudden and rapid resolution of the stuck-with-a-serial-killer-in-an-elevator story, there's a brief lull and, as Monty Python used to say, "now for something completely different." Overall, Blackout is very enjoyable. I found the two sides of Aldo's personality a bit difficult to reconcile (he's a bon vivant on the one hand and a sadist on the other--aren't serial killers supposed to be moody loners? But maybe that's only on TV shows: remember that Bundy was a charmer and the BTK killer turned out to be a popular church elder, and then there was perhaps the most vicious of all, Gacy the clown). If Tomas and Claudia seem a bit less vivid, they're supposed to be plain, ordinary folks in an extraordinary situation. And Claudia in particular turns out to have depths beyond a mere screaming-girl-victim from a slasher film (though slasher films are also evoked here). All in all, a much better story than I expected even halfway through the book--so stick with it. I don't know about that "Major Film," though--it seems to be removed from Italy and who knows what other changes will be made before it's out there in the movie theaters...

Italian noir by Michele Giuttari

I don't know of another crime series written by as senior a detective as Michele Guittari, former head of the "squadra mobile" in Florence. His novels are based in part on his experience as a detective, and give insights into investigative procedure, but he also has a tendency to gravitate toward big conspiracies and standard plot devices. I have to mention as well that he evidently persecuted a pair of journalists with an alternate view of a real case that is part of his plot in his first novel, A Florentine Death, jailing one and kicking the other out of the country for the crime of contradicting the cop's theory of the Monster of Florence case in both his police work and his own book on the case. In A Florentine Death, Giuttari offers a serial killer (an unavoidable cliche, it seems, in crime fiction) as well as an overarching conspiracy that's not (quite) as grandiose as that of the Da Vinci Code. In the newly translated A Death in Tuscany, the crime is more ordinary, the murder of a young girl who is possibly an illegal immigrant, and the conspiracies that are offered are less grand (one involving the Mafia, naturally, and the other a group of Freemasons. The latter stretches credulity a bit (though the Masons have frequently put in fictional appearances of a conspiratorial sort) and also reaching for a couple of increasingly common cliches of crime fiction, the trafficking of women and girls and the circle of paedophiles. Some of these prove to be more important to the plot than others. The chief of the novel's squadra mobile, also named Michele and also stationed in Florence, begins the investigation into the girl's death in spite of the appearance of an accidental overdose, but as that story progresses he gets sidetracked into a second case involving the disappearance of an old friend, Massimo (also a character in the earlier novel). Along the way, he runs afoul of Masonic webs of influence, jealousy between the police and the Carabinieri (who have jurisdiction over the case of the missing friend, whom they suspect as a conspirator in another murder), and various cops and prosecutors whose toes he has trodden upon. The group of detectives in the squad, who were mostly just sketched in in the earlier novel, are more fully shown in this one, partly because the second plot line keeps Michele busy enough that his crew takes over the original murder case. And the setting is glorious: not only Florence but the marble quarrying region from Pietrasanta to Carrara and the beaches along the nearby coast. Giuttari has a tendency to repeat certain phrases (such as one to the effect that there are no coincidences) and to include a lot of busywork on the detectives' part (not necessarily a flaw, if you're into the procedural side of things). The ego of his hero (and presumably the hero is a stand-in for the author) is immense, but at least he's not on-stage quite as much in A Death in Tuscany, giving the reader and the other characters a bit of breathing room. After a lot of nose-to-the grindstone investigating, conspiracy theorizing, and worrying about the fate of the missing friend, A Death in Tuscany moves to an ending with two separate but related "exciting conclusions" that work well as a kind of double coda to the police work along the way. A Death in Tuscany is part thriller, part police procedural, and part ego trip. I think I'd be less insistent on the "ego trip" part if it wasn't for the Monster of Florence difficulty, which is highlighted in a new true-crime book by those journalists that Giuttari tried to jail or discredit (The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi). So I'd say that A Death in Tuscany is worth reading for the pleasure, and for the insight into an author with a lot of police experience and with a tragic flaw of his own, in the violence of his insistence that he is right about the Monster case (his theory featuring the same kind of conspiracy that he features in his fiction).

The other Carlo Lucarelli

I'm taking a break from reading the new Michele Giuttari novel, A Death in Tuscany, to dip back into the first series by Carlo Lucarelli to find its way into English, in the exceptional translations by Oonagh Stransky. Lucarelli's series set at the end of World War II has been much praised recently, occasioned by the completion this year of the Commissario De Luca trilogy in translation (from Europa editions)--and that new attention made me wonder how the series featuring Ispettore Grazia Negro in contemporary Bologna would fare in comparison. Rereading Almost Blue, I found that I appreciated its quirkiness more this time around. Quite different from the war trilogy, the story is structured around the experience of a blind character who listens to a radio scanner, on which he can pick up not only police signals but also cell-phone conversations. The novel itself is made up of voices, in narratives from the point of view of Grazia, the deaf man, and the mysterious serial killer, along with voices overheard on the scanner, the voices of the other cops (frequently disrespecting Grazia), and others. Each of the voices is distinct, and the novel, as a result, is a kind of jigsaw puzzle. Two of the voices are striking and surreal: the blind man has a color sense based entirely on sound (he was blind at birth and has no sense of what sight is like), and the killer shifts in and out of hallucinatory visions concerned with the possession of his body by monsters. The resolution of the threat that the killer poses to the public, to Grazia, and to the blind-listener derives from the interior, hallucinatory reality of the killer rather than from a deus-ex-machina rescue (which is the rather disappointing resolution of the plot of Day after Day, the second Grazia Negro novel). Lucarelli's style is totally different here: showier and more concerned with description of setting. The characters are also "brighter," compared to the more subdued characterizations and dialogues of the De Luca books (the more drab quality suits the war and post-war years of the De Luca books, and the almost televised quality of the Grazia Negro books suits today). One thing about rereading a 10-year-old novel, though, especially one that wore its technology on its sleeve as Almost Blue does)--life is changing very fast, making large chunks of the narrative seem dated (almost historical): noisy modems, e-mail downloaded from Eudora, and that radio scanner's access to e-mail (though Grazia notes that the GSM phones already in circulation in Italy at that time were immune to the scanners). But for a glimpse at the literary dexterity of Lucarelli in a couple of his various incarnations (he also hosts a sort of "Italy's Most Wanted" TV show, among other careers), Almost Blue offers a dazzlingly different experience from the De Luca books (and taken together, Almost Blue and Day after Day offer a vivid reading experience not unlike watching contemporary European crime films); if a bit less complex in their social and political portrait of a society, they portray Bologna more fully than most of the few other examples we have in crime fiction (such as Night Bus, which zips through Bologna too rapidly to give much detail or Aurelio Zen's visit to the city, which is fun but superficial).

Kemal Kayankaya redux

The most recent Kayankaya novel by Jakob Arjouni, Kismet, was released in English translation by No Exit Press recently (translation by Anthea Bell--I should remember to credit the translators more often). All of the Kayankaya novels channel the spirits of Marlowe and co.--Arjouni's detective stories are some of the purest examples of the hard-boiled, smart-mouth detective still in circulation. All the Kayankaya novels also deal to some extent with the ethnic diversity of today's Germany, which has accelerated as the novels have been released (the earliest books were written before unification, I believe). And Kayankaya himself is a native German of Turkish descent, a fact that colors his daily life in many ways, particularly in the reaction he gets from various people along the way in his investigations. In Kismet, there is a dizzying array of Albanian, Bosnian, Turkish, and German gangs, and the victim of an extortion attempt, a Brazilian restaurant owner, is the "maguffin" that sets the story in motion. Kayankaya and his friend Slibulski attempt to help the Brazilian but are forced into firing their weapons at the mysteriously silent, bewigged, and face-powdered extortionists are killed. The detective's attempt to discover who his victims were and what's going on lead him into the shifting sands of the gang culture of Frankfurt. Along the way he keeps getting beaten up (a normal feature of his investigations) and finds an innovative though destructive way to escape being murdered--in the process of which he acquires a new client: a young Bosnian girl whose mother has been forced into the service of the Croatian gang Kayankaya is pursuing. The girl, Leila, hires him to find her, and the pursuit of her quest as well as his own pursuit of the Croatians brings him full circle, in a plot twist that dramatically highlights the consequences of violence (as well as affirming the detective's alliance with the noir tradition). In the plot's twists and turns, in the wisecracking voice of the narrator-detective, in the vivid portrait of Germany today, Arjouni gives us a striking portrait of the tribalism underlying European nationalisms today. Arjouni is the author of several novels outside the Kayankaya cycle that are concerned with literary subjects and with the culture of rootless youth, but to me the Kayankaya novels are his most effective platform for not just crime fiction but his larger literary ambitions as well. I would say that no one can claim to know what's going on in crime fiction or in the ongoing development of noir and detective fiction in particular without taking Arjouni into consideration.

German gothic from Andrea Maria Schenkel

I have a question for those familiar with the range of German crime fiction. It seems to me that crime fiction in German is more likely to be in the category of psychological thriller than police procedural or detective story (the prominent exceptions that I know of are the excellent detective novels of Jakob Arjouni and the single cop story thus far translated by Pieke Bierman). The recently released translation of Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm is both an illustration and an exception to the psycho-thriller sort of thing that I'm referring to. I've also discussed a number of other German thrillers in earlier posts. Schenkel's is different from the others in its transformations of what in the U.S. would be called "Southern Gothic," basically the straitened lives and exaggerated relationships of rural people, and the folk tale tradition that in English is mis-named "fairy tales" (I think in German they're called "Märchen"--correct me if I'm wrong). The Murder Farm has the inevitability and spookiness of Märchen from folk tales through the Grimms. It's told in short chapters that alternate between witness testimony and third-person interior monologues from the point of view of various witnesses or bystanders to the murder of a whole family on a remote farm (after a first chapter from the point of view of an unnamed former resident of the nearby town who is returning to find out what happened, when the police failed to resolve the matter--the witness testimony that follows is presumably collected by him, and perhaps the narratives are surmised by him, but the source is vague). The jigsaw-puzzle effect is very suitable to the horrible crime and the Gothic setting, and the testimony chapters are just long enough (longer and the narrow points of view of some of the speakers might have gotten tedious--at the length Schenkel gives them, their fascinating). What emerges is a not-very-optimistic view of human nature in general and of the post-war era in particular (the events occur 10 years after WWII). Not as dark as, say, The Painted Bird, but reaching toward a view of evil as an inherent possibility in human life and society (even in small groups). The flyleaf blurb says that the ending is "shattering," a somewhat inflated pitch for the resolution of the plot: I'd say "convincing," in laying the blame on the individual responsible, but in a tone similar to that of the novel as a whole rather than reaching a new emotional pitch. So: you readers of German crime, let us know: is The Murder Farm (or Petra Hammesfahr or Ingrid Noll) more typical of German crime fiction than Arjouni or Bierman?

Iain Levison's hybrid crime thriller

Dog Eats Dog, a new novel by Iain Levison from Bitter Lemon Press, defies conventions in a number of ways. Levison, a Scot, moved to the U.S. and after working around the country now lives in North Carolina. This novel, though, was first published in France, as Une canaille et demie. The novel is part Elmore Leonard (a laconic style and off-hand, comic plotting and character development), part Donald Westlake (hopelessly botched bank robbery), and part Don Delillo (college professor wants to make his name as a sort of Hitler apologist, a device used by Delillo to great effect in White Noise). A female FBI agent is on the trail of the escaped bank robber, who has holed up in the college professor's house. Stated bluntly, it almost sounds like a Key Largo, Cape Fear kind of thing, but Levison manipulates this well-worn territory in his own unique way. At every turn, expectations are overturned. For example, the FBI agent is fed clue after clue by the narrator, but she's in the middle of a mid-life (and professional) crisis and the normal progress of the thriller plot, along the line of those clues, is nullified. The professor both fears and admires the thief, not something unusual in these sorts of plots, but the inevitable confrontation doesn't happen the way you might expect. The conclusion doesn't either, the characters each coming to a resolution in unexpected ways. There are a couple of flaws, particularly in the way academic publications or .45 automatics work, but overall Dog Eats Dog is funny, breezy, and effective.

A new (original) Petra Delicado

Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett's first Petra Delicado crime novel, Death Rites, has just been released in English (after the second and third books in the series). The annoyance of having access to the books out of order is balanced in this case by the pleasure of discovering some of the details of the life of the Barcelona inspector and her sergeant-partner, Fermín Garzón, that were a bit confusing in the novels published so far. It's a cliche that partners in cop books (and movies and TV shows) hate one another at first, but Gimenez-Bartlett's take on this chestnut is interesting because the characters are interesting. We find out more about Petra's two marriages and Fermín's one, along with the early stages of the relationship of the two cops and the sergeant's living arrangements (which will be further developed in Dog Days). As the two learn to work together, they pursue a serial rapist who marks his victims with a circle of wounds, but their investigation is frustrating and they're one step ahead of the press and the police hierarchy, who would be happy to see a woman detective fail (and be sent back to her posting thus far in the Barcelona police, the documentation office). The rapist is pursued in true police-procedural fashion (rather than puzzle-mystery fashion), but when the plot shifts to murder, readers may realize who the killer is before the cops do--but the puzzle is less the point even in the murder plot than the procedural and the personalaties of the pair of police investigators. Plot not being so much the point of these novels, I'm less motivated to reread the next two books in the series than I have been with some crime novels published in translation out of order. But I'm happy to have this first installment both for the pleasure of clarifying who Petra and Fermín are and how their relationship developed, and for this further evidence of the skill of the author. Like Gimenez-Bartlett's other novels, Death Rites is frequently funny but investigates dark corners of social and interpersonal life in post-Franco Barcelona, giving glimpses of that fascinating city. Her main characters are vivid and eccentric, and Petra's voice (as the first-person narrator) is a fascinating blend of a 40-ish European woman's feminist, intellectual, insecure, determined, and even sentimental traits. Petra, her macho-but-open-minded, near-to-retirement partner, and the quirkiness of the plots make these books (as with a number of others published by Europa editions) some of the most interesting and enjoyable examples of recent European crime fiction. Gimenez-Bartlett's books are quite different (and in interesting ways) from those of the other and more famous practitioner of Barcelona crime, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, whose early novel Tattoo will be coming out soon from Serpents Tail.

Crime in Singapore

The notoriously crime-free island state of Singapore (equally notorious for executing or caning some of thse who do practice criminal trades there) is the setting for the first in a new series of "Asian Crime" fiction from a Singapore imprint, Heliconia. Singapore has actually been the scene for a few other crime novels, from Foreign Bodies, by Hwee Hwee Tan (which mixes crime, post-adolescent angst, and even spiritual awakening) to the comic novels of Gopal Baratham (two of which have been published by Serpent's Tail) to the post-WWII street kids of Ming Cher's Spider Boys to the criminal (but not really crime-novel) enterprise of Paul Theroux's Saint Jack (a book said to be banned in Singapore itself). The new book, Shamini Flint's Partners in Crime, is a legal mystery, as was Foreign Bodies, and both novels also share a split perspective anchored by a single woman who is a young lawyer. Flint's lawyer, Annie N..., is mixed race (her actual cultural background obscured by that partially concealed family name), giving her a certain ability to negotiate among the various racial groups in the complex culture of Singapore. I'm including the older cover for the book, which highlights the author's own cultural mix as well as the plot of the story, rather than the newer one, which merely features an orchid and an abbreviated signature. Annie becomes involved in a murder investigation when she is called to a late-night partners' meeting at the law firm where she has recently been made partner, to find the head of the firm bludgeoned to death at his desk. The rest of the book is primarily a series of character studies, conducted much as a police investigation would progress: by a series of interviews and dialogues. The partners, all of them suspects, gradually reveal their own character flaws, sustaining the narrative without quite creating the suspense or anticipation expected in a crime novel. In that sense, Partners in Crime is more of a mystery, less a procedural or noir sort of crime fiction. The notion of "unlikely suspects" applies more to the romance between Annie and another lawyer than to the mystery, though it's difficult to anticipate the solution to the puzzle. But the unlikely romance is actually a bit of a cliche, as is the final confrontation. Nevertheless, the novel is professionally done, moving along in short "takes," each from a different character's point of view (the Sikh detective, his young Chinese assistant, and several of the lawyer-suspects, who are mostly English ex-pats). And the Singaporean setting blends the wealthy ex-pat community with the lives of the professional policeman and his working-class assistant, Filipina maids, male prostitutes, etc. etc., within the glitz of Orchard Road and Raffles Hotel, the old graveyard of the book's original cover, and the bars and boardrooms of the city-state. The book was a little hard to get, and not cheap, but I enjoyed it, and will I happily add it to my short shelf of Singapore crime. Heliconia is evidently coming out with a crime in Malysia next, which could be interesting...

Anne Holt, What Never Happens

What Never Happens (The Final Murder in the U.K.), the second of Anne Holt's Norwegian crime novels, has arrived in English, following last year's What is Mine (Punishment in the U.K.). I had some problems with What is Mine, but the new book is very satisfying, onn several levels. What Never Happens takes on the most clichéd of all popular crime plots, the profiler-and-serial-killer plot, and turns it inside out. There is an element of literary legerdermain, almost of metafiction, that I can't go into without giving the plot away, but even before that aspect of the book kicks into gear, Holt undercuts the profiler plot by turning it into a domestic conflict--Johanne and Adam, the FBI-trained profiler and high-profile cop of What is Mine, return and are now married. In addition to the strange daughter Johanne brings to the marriage, they have just given birth to a baby daughter, and Adam is supposed to be taking some paternity leave. But someone begins killing celebrities, Adam returns to work, and Johanne is asked to help with the case. But the stresses of having a new baby intertwine with the stress of the case and Adam and Johanne bicker and fight through almost the whole story. One of the charms of What Never Happens is the very real, tense but also comic portrait of a family under both normal and abnormal stress. As in the earlier novel, the point of view shifts between Johanne, Adam, several other characters, and the murderer (whose identity is only made clear late in the story), but the narrative from the murderer's point of view (which I found distracting and unnecessary in What is Mine) works pretty well here, leading gradually toward the final "reveal." And where What is Mine ends with a series of climactic coincidences, What Never Happens undercuts a reader's expectations (and the conventions of the serial killer plot) at every turn, right up to the final pages of the book. The contrast between the complex murder plot and the very ordinary (but tumultuous) family life of the principals is very effective. Several narrative sections from other characters' points of view seem beside the point and simply distracting, but each one eventually ties into the overall narrative, like pieces of a puzzle that is not a clockwork machine but a varied and believable social pattern, with overtones of politics, show business, and literary crime. The U.S. (and Norwegian) title, What Never Happens, resonates in the motives of the killer, the lives of some of the victims, and ultimately the way the plot works out (and doesn't work out). All in all, a very dark, sometimes funny, and finally complex crime novel that satisfies on many levels--a substantial addition to the Scandinavian crime wave.

Past and Future crime fiction

As I read various crime fiction blogs, reviews, etc., that I've mostly been talking about recent publications here, with occasional glimpses backward. But there are numerous (and currently relevant) international crime titles that I read before starting a blog and I have every intention of going back to re-read some of them to refresh my memory enough to write something about them. The first that come to mind are the first two Carlo Lucarelli books to make it into English: Almost Blue and Day after Day, which are quite different from the recently completed translations of the De Luca trilogy. My memory is that they are more like a TV cop show (though a good one) whereas the De Luca books bear up to comparison with the best of crime films (The Conformist comes to mind, of course). Another pair of exemplary crime novels I haven't read recently are the two Jean-Pierre Manchette novels that have been translated, Three to Kill and Prone Gunman (Thanks to Eurocrime and The Rap Sheet for initiating discussion of Manchette once again). Manchette's politics remain relevant (something Peter of Detectives Beyond Borders pointed out in his review of the last De Luca novel by Lucarelli, posted at Words Beyond Borders) and Prone Gunman is a distillation of all that is exciting and interesting about crime fiction. Three to Kill I remember as being more conventional, but this is a good time to go back and revisit both. There are a number of new books, too, awaiting attention here: A Florentine Death (by former Commissario Michele Giuttari, who not coincidentally persecuted a couple of reporters for pursuing a different line of inquiry on the famous Monster of Florence case than Giuttari himself was pursuing in his day job as a cop or his moonlighting as a writer. Giuttari actually threw the journalists into jail, accused them of involvement in the murders, and kicked the American journalist of the pair out of the country. Should all that (which made it into a U.S. TV network's evening magazine news program) color our reception of Giuttari's novel? Also: the new novel from Norwegian Anne Holt, the most recent Jakob Arjouni detective novel from Germany, a new addition to the very short list of crime novels from Singapore, and the 3rd policier by Barcelona-based Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett (though this new translation is based on the first of her crime novels, in order of their original release). A rich assortment of crime reading--both present and past.

The last Magdalen Nabb

The last Marshall Guarnaccia novel by Magdalen Nabb has recently been posthumously published, and it is with pleasure that I say the book is Nabb at the height of her powers. The Marshall of the melancholy countenance, eyes tearing up in the sun as always, is confronted with what at first seems an ordinary death, the murder of a young mother in her home, perhaps a burglary gone bad--but a crime that the Marshall knows will become complicated, because it has taken place in a wealthy household at the edge of Florence. Wealth and power are always unwelcome complications for the Carabiniere NCO. The crime will present the Marshall with an abundance of problems, indeed, though not what he originally thought. The book's title, Vita Nuova, comes, of course, from Dante. The reference is ironic, since Nabb's book deals with sex rather than love (the topic dealt with in Dante's book), but also direct, in that the Marshall is forced to confront the possibility of embarking on a new way of life. As is usual in the series, the narrative is nearly stream of consciousness, in the third-person but carefully confined to the Marshall's point of view (at least one of Nabb's novels departs from this form, but most adhere to it). This carefully controlled narrative form is perfect for telling stories of Florence's neighborhoods (especially the vicinity of the Marshall's Pitti Palace station), through the sympathetic eyes of an acculturated outsider (the Marshall is Sicilian but has been in Florence for a long time now). His voice, his internal conflits, even his self-deprecating manner with others (and even himself) are a perfect foil for the tourists, bureaucrats, mannered aristocrats, petty criminals, and shopkeepers that populate Nabb's Florence. Through Guarnaccia, Nabb reveals not only the crime (slowly, through his dogged efforts rather than through ratiocination) but the life of the city (beyond the museums and monuments, among the people that live along the narrow streets and up in the surrounding hills). In Vita Nuova, we soon know that the grieving family is not what it originally seemed, and an often cliched plot concerning sex slavery is developed (subtly and at arms length, more through the Marshall's concern for individuals caught up in the plot than through salacious direct narration of events and encounters)--but only at the end are the threads brought together in the Marshall's realization of what really lay behind the murder. As is also usual with Nabb, some elements of the story are not quite settled satisfactorily (though not in the frustrated-by-bureaucracy fashion of Donna Leon's stories), while other elements are ended with the improving lives of some characters. The mood of Nabb's books is often very dark, and the mood of her hero is almost always melancholy (those dark glasses of his seem as much to protect him from society's blunt truths as much as the sun that he is "allergic" to)--but there is always some compensation for him and for the reader in the Marshall's return to the respite of his family life, and the author's portrait of the families disturbed by crimes both horrible and petty. I started reading Nabb's books from a bit of nostalgia for Florence, where I lived for half a year, many years ago, but her books are richly rewarding on their own, both as crime fiction and as a portrait of a unique place, whether you recognize that city from your own experience or only from the author's loving portrait.

my secret previous existence

I recently discovered that I had a previous life. Almost seven years before I was born, I apparently had a story published in Sinister Stories, one of the infamous pulp magazines of the 1940s. The contents page appears at the right, followed by an image of part of the first page of the story, and then, in case you haven't figured out what sort of magazine Sinister Stories was, there's an image of the original cover (which suggests, to me, the sadistic scenes of the original Flash Gordon movie serial--one of my fond memories from early TV, which re-ran the old serials endlessly).

I didn't run across an original copy of the magazine--Wildside Press has been bringing out reprints of some of the classic pulp mags. And I haven't been able to find anything else about that "Glenn Harper" who was the author of what is, in fact, one of the less lurid (though no better written) tales in the collection. Many, if not most, of the writers in the pulp mags used assumed names that they might only use once, or might adopt as a running nom de plume. If I'd actually had "Death Loves My Wife!" published in a mag with an S&M-kinky cover like Sinister Stories, I might not have used my own name, either--the cosmic joke is that it IS my name.

Basically, the story is about a man whose wife is seduced by her dead former husband, who tries to drown her--she's saved by the hero who makes her recognize her love for a living husband, and he pulls her (nude, of course) body out of the water. The rest of the stories in the collection range from heavy-breathing Indiana Jones sorts of things to monsters and some sexist violence such as is suggested by the mag's cover. It's interesting to have this vivid reminder of why the designation "pulp fiction" was once an insult, though there's little actual sex depicted. Even the segment of pulp fiction that I read in the mid-20th century (mostly science fiction) and in my later years (more the Jim Thompson kind of thing) ws pretty lurid, especially in the way it was packaged, but it's interesting to see the more disreputable end of the spectrum in all its dubious glory, even if one of the tales bears my name.

A Swedish crime novel of a different sort

Among the very large crop of Scandinavian crime novels being translated these days, there is one that stands out as completely different: Carina Burman's The Streets of Babylon: A London Mystery. The translator is the aptly named Sarah Death (her translation is lucid, fortunately--perhaps the most exemplary aspect of this publication, particularly apt since the novel deals with the subject of literary translation). The title gives away part of the novel's difference: it's about Victorian London, at the time of the great world exposition (early in Victoria's reign). The narrator/author (I'll come back to that designation in a minute) is a Swedish author of popular novels (so popular that she is recognized repeatedly in the novel by her English fans) is the oddly named Euthanasia Bondeson (the oddness of her name is remarked upon in the novel, but still strikes me as silly). Euthanasia's young niece and traveling companion, Agnes, disappears not once but twice, the second disappearance setting the novel's plot into motion. On a trip to London to see the world's fair and the famous Crystal Palace which housed it, the disappearance of the author's niece instigates a search for her through slums and fine houses, among transvestites, titled artists, prostitutes, and so on. One of Euthanasia's fans, the chief detective of Scotland Yard, resists Euthanasia's attempts to play amateur detective, but ultimately appreciates her talents in that area. Of course, there are inevitable echoes of the Whitechapel murders (not too explicit, fortunately) but the fate of Agnes proves to lie elsewhere. The whole plot is cheerily told in a style that is part potboiler and part an excuse for the charming and eccentric authoress to gather material for her own next book (hence my earlier use of the term narrator/author to describe her). There are numerous literary references (Dickens and Wilkie Collins make an appearance, Euthanasia reluctantly reads a novel by one of those "Yorkshire sisters," and is ultimately won over (could it be Wuthering Heights that she's reading? Jane Eyre? It's not quite clear--if you recognize which it is, please let me know). The whole thing is charming, but the believability quotient is pretty low, resulting in a lack of much sense of threat concerning poor Agnes's plight. And in the end, Euthasia is sailing away for future adventures and (presumably) further Carina Burman novels, suggesting that she has in mind a kind of travelogue of the mid-19th century world, in the form of potboiler novels starring our intrepid amateur detective. I understand that The Streets of Babylon is popular in Sweden and beyond, and I at least was interested enough to finish it (and I appreciated the occasional glimpses of Sweden in that period--a few years before the birth of August Strindberg, whose novels were the topic of my own doctoral dissertation, as it happens). But I don't really go to crime fiction for "charming," even if the charm is contrasted (as it is here) with the dark and dangerous aspects of society at the time. For me, Burman's charm quotient overbalances her social conscience and even the slums seem to gain charm from Euthanasia's presence there. A novel that, perhaps, is not digging in the muck but casting perfume over it. Too sweet for me. Anybody have a varying opinion? I'd love to hear a defense of this odd (to me) Swede.

Carlo Lucarelli's Via delle Oche

The last installment in Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy is out in English translation, and as glad as I am to have a chance to read it, I regret that this is indeed the last installment. The De Luca novels are short, swift incarnations of a swiftly changing era in modern Italy, the end of the war, the partisan control of the countryside, and the post-war elections (which set the tone for much of Italian history since that time). De Luca is in part a portrait of an actual detective that Lucarelli met while doing academic research (the actual encounter is outlined in a preface that accompanies each of the De Luca novels). The real cop served the fascist government, the partisan resistance, and the post-war government without seeing any contradiction in his shifting loyalties. De Luca, on the other hand, can't eat, can't sleep, and is constantly threatened in this last installment with the consequences of his association with the political police of the former fascist government. In a series of short chapters introduced by headlines from contemporary newspapers, De Luca investigates an apparent suicide in Bologna that leads to the legal brothels of that city. We find out a great deal about the brothel business and about the complex and violent politics of those years (communist, nationalist, Christian Democrat). De Luca tries to operate simply as a cop, without reference or preference regarding the politics in the streets and within the police, but he is stymied at every turn. It is to Lucarelli's credit that though the specific references to politicians and parties unknown to a foreign reader who is not an expert in Italin history, the events and difficulties that De Luca lives through are ultimately clear (as clear as they are to the obstinate and unaffiliated detective, at least). The solution to the mystery is hardly the point, it is De Luca's own plight and his dogged attempt to fight the attempts to keep him from investigating that carry the story forward, as well as the beautifully drawn portrait of Bologna and Italy in a complex and troubled time. I'm tempted to go back and read the trilogy again, as a single novel (and even all three don't add up to the length of some contemporary crime novels), but each of the 3 books is really self-contained, a snapshot of a distinct slice of society and time, in Rome, the countryside, and Bologna, under the shifting political realities. And De Luca doesn't really develop as a character through the series: he is in fact curiously opaque and uninvolved. He is a device, though a fully human one, that casts a light on his surroundings and reveals the truth without revealing much of himself. His inability to sleep or eat (and his consequent drowsiness and stomach pains) are less character traits than metaphors for a person and a people stressed and strung out by the effort of remaining human in inhuman times. Not that the stories are heavy with metaphor and dread: there is considerable humor surrounding the humorless De Luca, and considerable humanity. The books are terse jewels of crime fiction, and are entirely different from Lucarelli's other novels in translation (which are excellent in an entirely different, perhaps more cinematic, way).

Denise Mina's Slip of the Knife/Last Breath

Denise Mina's most recent Glasgow novel featuring Paddy Meehan (Slip of the Knife in the U.S., The Last Breath in the U.K.--somebody explain to me the title change between the 2 editions...) contains all the elements of a thriller/potboiler: The English secret service, Irish nationalists (pre-Good Friday), the assassination of a naked, hooded victim, the release from prison of a child-murderer, and a ruthless murderer on the loose (along with various heavies in supporting roles). But as we have come to expect from Mina, the novel is less consumed by all these thriller trappings than by the family drama in Paddy's life, shifted forward several years. Paddy is now an established columnist (having gone through her "dues" as a copy boy and junior reporter in earlier installments of the series) as well as an unwed mother. Her complicated Irish Catholic family (a minority position in the social hierarchy of Glasgow) has list its timid patriarch, unsettling what had been a tense balance of forces, her brothers are off in England, her sister is in the convent, and until Callum Ogilvy (child murder from a previous novel and cousin of her former boyfriend) is released from prison and Paddy's former lover is murdered, Paddy is perched at the edge of the good life. But these events push her back into chaos, personal and professional, and give her a new role: fierce defender of her young son. That mother-son relationship is the center of the novel, rather than the plot itself: this is not a novel of action but of character portraits of tense, threatened people (well drawn and entirely believable). The text is introspective or ruminative, even when the narrator's eye strays away from Paddy. The tone and the structure are drawn from tragedy, a tradition and a tone that pervade the book (underpinning the character- rather than plot-driven narrative), though with frequent comic touches, especially in the dialogue among characters. Noir fiction tends toward tragedy--I suppose thrillers and mysteries tend more toward the romance (certainly an ancient form, though not quite so much as tragedy) in formal terms. But like much crime fiction, Mina's tragic noir stops short of the murder rate of classical tragedy: some, at least, of the main characters are still standing at the end: Slip of the Knife has an almost sunny ending (if Mina's regular readers can imagine such a thing) in spite of the murders and attempted murders (some of them with surprising perpetrators and accomplices. There's almost too much plot in Slip of the Knife, but Mina's tone and characters are so carefully drawn and controlled that the novel never slips into cliche--and after all the whole Paddy Meehan series rests on the thriller-like career of the "real" Paddy Meehan, who appears again in this novel as a leitmotif of "our" Paddy's now succesful, though still troubled, professional and personal life.