Leighton Gage's 2nd, plus a bit on genre

One comment on the emphasis I seem to be putting on sub-genres like the thriller and the procedural, in the light of some discussion of genre and sub-genre at Bouchercon last weekend. I don’t expect writers to be “pure” in their use of the lines I’m drawing--to me, the genre and sub-genre distinctions are only shorthand descriptions I can offer when I’m recommending a book to another reader: if you have a particular taste for one kind of crime writing, you may not be a big fan of another kind (and the trash talk about cozies in Bouchercon is really only the trash that one segment of the readership is talking about another segment). A propos of that discussion and Bouchercon: One of the distinct threads running through “Charmed to Death” in Baltimore was “the Kate Atkinson phenomenon,” mentioned on several panels and in the hallways—shorthand for the use by so-called literary writers of crime-genre tropes and techniques, with a sense of condescension toward the genre by the mainstream press if not the writers themselves. My next “read” is K.A.’s new book, so I’ll be reporting on the Kate Atkinson phenomenon soon--and hoping for some comments and discussion.
Today’s book, though is Leighton Gage's new novel, due out in January. Gage’s major subject, in his series featuring Brazilian federal police chief inspector Mario Silva, is the income disparities and associated ills in Brazil (and in the third world). In this second novel, Buried Strangers, the depiction of this social and economic problem is more diverse, crossing back and forth between urban centers in São Paula and Brasilia, favelas, and small towns. The first half of the book is more police procedural, the reader following various detectives and seeing what's happening as if watching over their shoulders, and the last half is more thriller, with the reader privy to considerably more information than the cops--with some return to the procedural mode toward the end. The story is told in a complex manner, shifting from direct investigation of a group of bodies buried in a jungle-like park, to independent investigation by a local cop of Japanese descent, to Silva's investigation of the missing son of his housekeeper--each plot moving forward in parallel (with frequent digressions into the back stories of various characters), and each story contributing social information and emotional depth to the novel as a whole. Gage's writing, amid all the main and side roads of his story, is clear and straightforward, careful to explain some facts of the local culture but at the same time using local language in such a way that the meaning is clear without translation (adding local color to the narrative). Silva and his crew (his nephew Hector and their associates Arnaldo and Babyface) are also becoming more fully realized characters, and the minor characters (good guys, bad guys, and bystanders) are a diverse and interesting group (I found the cast of characters in the first Silva novel a bit "black and white," desperate peasants and their supporters them versus rapacious landlords and their minions)--though there are some very evil people in Buried Strangers, we approach them slowly, allowing them some humanity before discovering what they're up to, and there's more of a range of innocence and complicity in the larger pattern of laws, corruption, greed, and desperation portrayed). When the thriller plot takes over, even a reader not attracted to that format (such as myself) is swept along into some characters and events familiar from thrillers past (I won't name them because that could give away too much, since these aspects are revealed only slowly, as the story moves foward). By then, there's enough depth to the story, and enough sympathy for the characters, that even familiar themes are well integrated into a fresh and complex tapestry. Certain aspects of Gage’s fictional world resemble both the Brazilian environment of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Inspector Espinosa stories (rampant corruption among the police) and Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti novels (rampant venality and incompetence among the higher ranks, with comic effect), but the particularly deep sense of amorality and ethical fog is particularly Gage’s own, and the comedy more of a running thread in the conversations among the characters, particularly the team of detectives. I have to say that I’m still more drawn to the procedural mode than the thriller mode of Gage’s writing (and in the field of crime writing as a whole), and I’m looking forward to the 4th Silva book, which Gage says (in an interview with Uriah Robinson on the Crime Scraps site) will be more of a “stone whodunit,” to quote Bunk Moreland of The Wire. But in the meantime, Buried Strangers is a vivid and entertaining thriller/procedural hybrid. I should mention that I recently gave a less-than-positive review to the first Silva novel, Blood of the Wicked--Buried Strangers may strike some readers, and Gage’s fans in particular, as very much like its predecessor in style and content, but the new novel seemed to me to be tighter, more focused on Silva’s crew, funnier (in the dark way appropriate to the horrors depicted), and more compelling--plus the awful crimes are off-screen, and perhaps more horrible for being left to the imagination, plus a bit less Silence of the Lambs than the torture scenes of the first novel.

Istanbul Noir

One of the latest in the Akashic Noir series, Istanbul Noir edited by Mustafa Ziyalan and Amy Spangler, more than holds up the quality standard of this excellent series. There are 16 stories, all original, all but 2 translated by the editors. Most of the stories in the international segment of the City Noir series have not been focused on police or detectives, and the Istanbul collection is entirely populated by marginalized people, criminals and others who have stepped outside social norms in various ways--the only cops are a retired torturer and a detective haunted by his family's Communist past (perhaps literally). The result is an underground portrait of the city and of Turkey, told in evocative, often poetic, and always compelling language. The two stories by non-Turks, Lydia Lunch and Jessica Lutz, and Amy Spangler,are equal to the rest but somewhat different: Lunch uses sentence fragments and breathless phrases strung together with commas to evoke a couple of horny tourists who encounter a deadly world traveller. Lutz enters the head of a radical Islamist who has justified to himself actions more associated with the Mafia than social or religious movements. Ismael Güzelsoy's "The Tongue of the Flames" is a surreal odyssey of double revenge, multiple murder, and madness. In Feryal Tilmaç's "Hitching in the Lodos," a laconic narrator describes the erotic encounter of a retired teacher and a young man, leaving one dead and one at the brink of an encounter with the justice system. "An Extra Body" by Baris Müstecaplioglu twists time and motivation in a tale of deception, error, and surprise (for the reader and the characters). "Black Palace" by Mustafa Ziyalan combines a serial killer and political revenge. In "The Bloody Horn," Inan Çetin tells a melancholy and moving tale combining revenge, guilt, and submission. The editors' introduction is particularly important in this collection, setting not only the historical but also the emotional context for the stories.

Bouchercon post

A bit of praise for Bouchercon in Baltimore. I went today--my first time (if only for one day). A great opportunity to re-establish contact with some folks (incl. Peter Rozovsky & Lauren Henderson), meet a bunch of folks I only know from blog-conversations and e-mail (incl. Declan Burke, Sandra Ruttan, Janet Rudolph, Brian Lindenmuth, Ali Karim, and J. Kingston Pierce), and meet some writers I only knew from their work (incl. Sophie Hannah, Declan Hughes, John McFetridge, Arnaldur Indri∂ason, and Scott Phillips), and glimpsed some other writers (Val McDermid, Lawrence Block, Dorothy Cannell, etc.). I saw some great panels, missed some other ones, and generally found the event rewarding. Kudos to the Crimespree folks, all the volunteers and organizers, and the always interesting city of Baltimore (even though I didn't make it to Faidleys for their fabulous crabcakes.

The last (and first) of Wallander

After closing the books on his series of Swedish crime novels featuring Ystad detective Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell published a collection of five stories under the title The Pyramid, filling in Wallander's career from his beginnings as a cop in Malmö until the beginning of his first "published case," Mankell's first book, The Faceless Killers. In fact, the last story in the collection, also titled "The Pyramid," ends with the phone call to Wallander that begins The Faceless Killers. It's interesting that the dedication of the collection is to Rolf Lassgård, the Swedish actor who starred in a series of TV movies based on Mankell's books. Lassgård's Wallander is amazing--as Mankell implies in his dedication, Lassgård brings not only an uncanny "impersonation" of the character to film, he also brings to the character nuances that amplify Wallander beyond his already substantial presence on the page. Wallander is not a master detective, he's a flawed three-dimensional character whose private life is hopeless (he's particularly unskilled in dealing with women in his personal life) and whose investigations frequently plod along with little progress until one fact comes to light that leads rapidly to a resolution of the case. The prose is very direct, almost flat: short simple sentences in which Mankell seems to be striving much more for clarity than style. In the story collection, Wallander learns his craft mainly by making mistakes, demonstrating to his mentors that he might succeed as a detective only by his curiosity and occasional insights. Mankell shows Wallander's marriage detiorating (though his wife, Mona, is hardly more of a fully realized character here than in the later books, when she's absent), and shows a mentor named Rydberg, often later referred to by Wallander as his model for detective work (but again, Rydberg is not fully present. Wallander is as always front and center, even though the narrative is in the third person--it's his ruminations (almost literally) that make up the body of the stories and the novels, mulling over the facts of the case (and his own unsettled private life) again and again. The first two stories fill in Wallander's early career and marriage, showing both his mistakes in his first case and his empathy with a young African immigrant with whom he is trapped in a robberty gone wrong. The last three stories are very much in the milieu and style of the novels, with most of the familiar Ystad detectives in place and in character and Wallander as already the chief of the group (with the unrespected police chief, Björk, as usual only interested in public appearances). The longest story in the collection deals with a mysterious plane crash and several murders, including a pair of old ladies and a drug dealer, that finally come together in a coherent but mundane plot (that's praise, by the way--I prefer Mankell's more mundane stories to his more global, "high stakes" plots). Of the other stories, The Death of the Photographer is a puzzle regarding the dead man's personality and a secret affair, and The Man on the Beach is a puzzling murder that demonstrates Wallander's intuition as well as his methodical routines. These are very high quality police procedural tales very much in the style of (and with the quality of) Mankell's Wallander books. As you may know, Wallander's daughter and another cop have appeared in later Mankell novels (and Wallander makes a "guest appearance" in the daughter's novel), not to mention several stand-alone novels--but the Wallander books are his best, and will be the stories he's remembered for. And The Pyramid is a fitting sequel or prequel, depending on whether you think of it as the first or last of the series.

New Swedish crime: Roslund-Hellström's The Vault

Anders Roslund is a well known journalist in Sweden and Börge Hellström is a former criminal and an activist in the rehabilitation of young offenders and drug addicts. They've co-written two interesting crime novels, The Beast and the just translated The Vault (which was originally advertised under the title Box 21, which might have been a bit more appropriate to the content of the novel--for reasons I can't go into without revealing too much). The novels are published in English with the author listed as Roslund-Hellström, and neither has received quite as much attention as others of the recent Scandinavian crime wave, perhaps because the stories of both novels are complex and the message of each is pointedly social (in that respect and others, these books resemble the famous Sjöwall/Wahlöö novels of the '70s). The Beast is ostensibly about pedophilia and child murder, and that's what the blurb leads the reader to believe. But a good portion of the novel is actually about the ills of prison life, and when the child abuse plot runs out (even when the revenge tale of one of the parents of the murdered children runs its course) the prison story remains and is the source of the twist at the novel's end. The cops, Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist, are not actually at the center of the story, though they're thoroughly characterized, particularly the angry Grens, who's always listening to outdated Swedish pop music by his favorite singer. The Beast is good, but The Vault is a leap forward: it's one of the most ambiguous (morally and thematically) of all recent crime novels. The topic this time is human trafficking and sexual abuse, though there's also a substantial story involving two of the criminals from The Beast, a professional enforcer and a junkie, whose paths cross on the outside with consequences that are at once tragic and just (in a left-handed way). The prostitution/trafficking plot is pretty lurid, and leads to a hostage situation involving guns and plastic explosives that would have been the climax of most thrillers or crime novels, but here only leads to the real resolution, involving corruption, cover-ups, loyalty, deception, and considerable obstruction of justice. The clearest moral position, involving the ability of the victimized Lithuanian prostitutes to have a voice (even to have the most minimal life of their own), is frustrated first by the traffickers and then by the complicated machinations of Grens and Sunkivist (for very different motives--and even those motives are undermined in a surprise ending that is more effective than the one in The Beast. That final twist is tellingly told in a flashback, adding a gloss to the whole story in retrospect). The Vault isn't a pleasant story: Grens is difficult to like, though colorful and even tragic (the enforcer had caused his girlfriend, also a cop, to be brain-damaged many years earlier) but his anger is not endearing, much less his moral failings. Grens and Sundkvist are not merely investigating the crime, they are in different ways implicated in it, and we become implicated along with them. Part of why The Vault works better than The Beast is an effect of the subjects: we can hold the topic of child abuse and murder at arms length--the perpetrator is indeed a monster we don't need to recognize in ourselves. Though human trafficking may have become something of a cliche in crime fiction these days, it's also a more pervasive crime, along with the prostitution that feeds on that traffic, along with the abuse of women vividly portrayed in the novel. It's harder for us (for male readers at least, and perhaps not just for men, as the book makes clear) to dissociate ourselves from the crime or from the illicit acts of the cops--their moral failings are too easy to see as possible in ourselves. Roslund-Hellström deserve to be considered at the first rank of the Swedish and Scandinavian crime novels being translated today (and that's actually saying a lot, given the quality of Nordic crime fiction these days). Though perhaps not as subtle as Arnaldur Indridason's work or as vividly realized as Jo Nesbø's, The Vault is nevertheless one of the most complex and most effective crime novels I've read, and the dilemmas faced by the characters are deeply felt by the reader and deeply etched by the authors.

Blood of the Wicked, by Leighton Gage

When I don't like a book, I look for the reasons why. Blood of the Wicked, by Leighton Gage, came highly recommeded by several sites on the web, including International Thriller Writers (thrillerwriters.org), as well written and effective. I suppose it's more thriller than noir, which could be part of the problem since I'm more interested in the latter. However, it's set in Brazil (increasing my interest) and not in Rio (the setting of the very excellent Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza novels, the newest of which is about to be published in English under the title Blackout), but in São Paulo state, mostly in a small town. But there's just too much going on in the book for any focus to emerge--too many priests, too many cops, too many landless peasants agitating against the evil landlords. Plus too much torture (the most graphic of which is directed toward women). The cover of the book calls it "A Chief Inspector Mario Silva Investigation," but although Gage spends considerable time supplying a back story for Silva, the Chief Inspector really has very little to do with the story or its resolution. We know all along who's perpetrating most of the violence, and so does Silva. The details resolved as the story comes to a close are lurid but not very enlightening concerning the novel's chief target, the disparity between rich and poor, landed and landless in Brazil. Perhaps I'm not being fair to Blood of the Wicked, it may be suffering by comparison to Arnaldur Indridason's Arctic Chill, which is still on my mind. Arctic Chill is focused, intense, and atmospheric. Blood of the Wicked is unfocused, diffuse, and full of local color about the setting without adding up (to me) to a vital portrait of the place. Blood of the Wicked is part of a growing subset of international mystery/thrillers, written by Americans who spend all or a good part of their time in a foreign country that is the setting of their books. One factor that differentiates some books in this sub-genre from "indigenous" crime novels (at least if you compare Blood of the Wicked to Arctic Chill) is that the former sometimes explain a lot that a "native" novelist doesn't have to. That's OK, even necessary for foreign readers maybe, but in a novel, it can distance the reader from the setting and the action (even from the characters). Arctic Chill thrusts readers into its atmosphere, and we have to navigate the place through the eyes of the participants, reading between the lines and piecing together a portrait of Iceland. Gage gives readers a lot of information but we don't have to do any "investigation" of our own to piece together the scene--so we're not implicated in it ourselves, we're watching it like a movie or a TV show. Does that make sense? I could compare Blood of the Wicked to Garcia-Roza's books in the same way--although that Brazilian author does give the reader lots of walks through the streets of Rio, lots of corrupt cops and bad guys, lots of social evil, we're thrust into the middle of it without detailed explanation and because of that we almost become part of it, part of the investigation (and Garcia-Roza's cop, Inspector Espinosa is always at the center of the investigation, not at the periphery as is Silva, and is much more of a living, breathing character in spite of no back story being given). Maybe I'm beating a dead horse--I didn't like Blood of the Wicked, but is; should it be enough to just say that and not try to analyze my reaction?

Shane Maloney/Murray Whelan movies!

There are a lot of Shane Maloney fans outside of Australia, but I would guess that not many are aware that the first two of his novels (Stiff and The Brush Off) have been made into movies (directed by Sam Neill). The movies (made for TV--and apparently Australian TV is less inclined to censor certain language than is the case in the U.S.) are available in a 2-DVD package from a Canadian distribution company that also distributes the Taggart series from Scotland (if you've ever had a chance to see those) and some John Thaw series including Morse. The Shane Maloney DVD set is called Murray Whelan, after the central character of Maloney's crime/comedy/political series, the personal assistant/fixer for a minister of various portfolios in the Labor Party in Melbourne. The first of the two movies is faithful to the novel, Stiff, to a fault. Stiff is a good mystery novel with a political twist and a good deal of sarcastic and situational humor, but in my opinion, Maloney's series really hits its stride with the second novel, The Brush Off--and the same is true of the films. There's a little too much back and forth motion in Stiff, even a bit too much going on. The Brush Off is more coherent, more stylish (since Murray's boss is Minister of the Arts by now), and funnier (plus Murray gets a little more compensation for the violence he suffers). Maybe Australian readers and bloggers out there can let us know if there are more Murray Whelan movies in the works (or even already released), and how well received they were in Australia. Plus one more question--as I recall, the novels were about regional politics rather than national politics. That's not so clear in the movies--would the regional politics be assumed by Australian viewers because of the Melbourne location, or did the films perhaps "nationalize" the stories? In any case, if you have a chance, and especially if you're a Shane Maloney fan, the Murray Whelan DVDs are a lot of fun, and a very effective visualization/dramatization of the first 2 Maloney novels. (Now if somebody can only tell me how to get hold of the most recent Maloney novel, Sucked In, without paying a fortune in shipping...or for that matter whether there are indeed any more Whelan movies available in region-free, NTSC versions?)

Arnaldur Indridason: Arctic Chill, from Iceland

The new Erlendur novel from Arnaldur Indridason, Arctic Chill, has an overarching metaphor of frozen loneliness that pervades the story and also clarifies the character and motivation of the senior detective. Along the way, his fellow detectives Elínborg and Sigurdur Óli, also reveal more of themselves--particularly the latter (Elínborg's personality and private life have been illuminated a bit more in the previous novels in the series). And we also get the final act for the most sexually ambiguous character in crime fiction, Marion Briem, Erlendur's mentor--a retired detective who is never (as far as I've found) referred to with a pronoun (except for one possible reference in the current novel) and described repeatedly in ways that refuse to clarify that male/female given name. Marion, by the way, is said to mean "sea of bitterness," singularly suitable not only for this resolutely alone character and also for one of the chilliest (in terms of emotions as well as weather) of all crime series. In Arctic Chill, a boy whose mother is a Thai immigrant (his father, now absent, is Icelandic), is found dead in the snow near the apartment block where he lived. As is typical among some of the best Scandinavian police procedurals, the detectives are at a total loss, following theories of anti-immigration sentiment, pedophilia, and so forth, while being stonewalled by the family, the boy's school, and almost everyone they come into contact with. The investigation doesn't plod forward, it treads water, until finally a few threads appear that can be pulled, quickly unravelling the pattern. A second plotline, concerning a woman who has disappeared, overlaps with the murder investigation and also revives Erlendur's memories of his brother who was lost in a storm when he was young, a running theme in the series. And here, the lost woman, the lost boy, and other motifs recall a new metaphor from the first novel in the series, Jar City, of sinking along into a bog and being trapped there, yet another image of dread and isolation. One of the blurbs on the back of Arctic Chill calls this series "lyrical," and there are indeed powerful images and elegant phrases, but for the most part the language is simple and direct, another characteristic of some of the best Scandinavian crime writing. These are not novels of sweeping global crime plots or grand schemes. Erlendur and his cohorts are confronted with ordinary human frailties and must deal with them (and their own lives) with ordinary human skills. The result is some of the most involving and effective crime fiction anywhere.

Bateman's new one

One of the ironies of Colin Bateman's "rebranding" of himself with one name, "Bateman" is that his new novel Orpheus Rising appears in an Amazon search next to "Orpheus Rising: Batman", a comic from 2001. But we're dealing with Bateman, not Batman, here. Or maybe not. Somebody help me here: I've been following Colin Bateman since Divorcing Jack came out in the U.S., and there's no crime writer quite like him. Divorcing Jack and at least the first half of Cycle of Violence are among the funniest novels (much less crime novels) I've ever read. Among crime novelists of the comic persuasion, perhaps only the couple of books of fiction written by Dave Barry, set in Florida as is Orpheus Rising, compare. Naturally, not least because of the Florida setting, Carl Hiaasen comes to mind (and for some reason there seem to be more comic crime novels set in Florida than anywhere else, with the possible exception of Las Vegas--both Barry and Hiaasen have commented on that fact, I believe). Christopher Brookmyre also comes to mind, though his books shift the balance slightly more to the crime than the comedy (more on this comparison in a minute). Later books by Bateman concentrate more on the story and less on the humor than his first two books, but there is still a lot of comedy in most of them, among those I've read in any case. Which brings us to Orpheus Rising, the Bateman one not the Batman one. It's not really a crime novel, at least according to my loose definition but also according to Declan Burke's definition (if you take the crime out of the book is there still a book?). It's related to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, and maybe Orpheus Rising is as much a crime novel as The Third Policeman is (see various discussions about that classification of O'Brien's classic on various blogs and websites). What Bateman shares with O'Brien in this case isn't humor but death and the afterlife: both novels are ghost stories, really. And Bateman isn't really being funny here--he amplifies the strain of sentiment that's a common factor in all his books into an extended love story that is in itself quite effective (it's love that approaches obsession, really, that he's portraying). My wife actually read Orpheus Rising before I did--her only prior acquaintance with Bateman is the movie version of Divorcing Jack (a pretty good movie, not as funny as the book). Her reaction was that it's a strange book. I have to concur--stranger still for anyone who is expecting a "Colin Bateman" book. Or even a Christopher Brookmyre book--the publisher (Headline) seems to be looking for a tie-in with Brookmyre since the covers of this book and reissues of Bateman's other books have a suspiciously similar look to the typical (trademarked, almost) Brookmyre cover. Though Brookmyre did deal with the afterlife in the last (maybe the last?) Parlabane book, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks)--is there something about comic crime writers (or Celtic ones in any case) that eventually causes them to break out in metaphysics? In any case, I don't know what to say about Orpheus Rising: It's interesting, and I finished it so it does have its merits (I'm one of those readers who will give up on a book if I don't find it rewarding). But it's not what I hoped for in a new Bateman (and perhaps that's what Bateman had in mind). Any thoughts?

Akashic Noir Series: Paris Noir

Paris Noir, edited by Aurélien Masson (director of the Série Noire series at Gallimard), like all the recent Akashic Noir collections from cities outside the English-speaking world, presents the reader with a certain melancholy pleasure. A pleasure, because the collections are uniformly valuable and enjoyable samplings of crime writing from Havana, Paris, Istanbul, and so on; melancholy because most of the writers have not been otherwise translated, and these stories are all we are going to get any time soon. Only two of the writers in Paris Noir have had full-length novels translated, as far as I know: Chantal Pelletier (whose Goat Song was published by Bitter Lemon) and Didier Daeninckx (who had several novels published by Serpent's Tail a few years ago). On the basis of the other stories here collected, the standard of crime fiction unavailable to non-French readers is very high, at least as high as what is available in English already. There's another "Paris Noir" collection, as you may know, published by Serpent's Tail and edited by Maxim Jakubowski, reviewed here earlier this year. The Jakubowski volume included a number of English and American writers, with others translated from the work of French writers (including one of the best crime writers around, Dominique Manotti). But Masson's collection is entirely French, 12 stories that are deeply embedded in the city, not ostentatiously but casually revealing streets and alleys tourists don't see, places nonetheless in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and other monuments. The Revenge of the Waiters, by Jean-Bernard Pouy takes a group of waiters on a tour of the city in pursuit of an old man they used to see every day but has now disappeared. Politics and crime and philosophy intersect along the way, as one might expect in this most philosophical of cities. Christophe Mercier's Christmas story draws a weary private detective into a dark tale drawn from film noir and classic gangster movies. Romance is important in a number of the stories, in unexpected ways: a chauffeur and a prostitute in Marc Villard's tale, an old man and a young foster-grandchild in Dominique Mainard's. And an unflinching portrayal of violence and violent men is another common characteristic, particularly in stories by DOA and Salim Bachi. But violence, love, and weary souls are intertwined inextricably in all the stories, in often poetic and always interesting ways. This is a first-class collection of stories, and a tempting morsel of what's going on in French in crime fiction.

The Big O's Big U.S. Release

About 15 months ago, I published a review of Declan Burke's The Big O here, and on the occasion of the Big O's Big U.S. Release, I'm pasting a slightly reduced version of the review here below. I cut the last line of the review ("I highly recommend The Big O, and wish for the sake of its potential readership that it soon finds wider distribution--in the U.S., for example...") becaues that new distribution is thankfully upon us. One thing that's changed about the book since its original release can be summed up in another line I cut from the original review, regarding one of the book's surprises, the revelation of the title's meaning--no surprise now, since the fine cover of the U.S. version explains the title immediately and graphically. I don't know if the new cover is an image photographed specially for this book or came from stock photography (increasingly the source for book covers, as has been noted on several blogs with reference to different books using the same imagery), but the new cover is quite striking--Congratulations to all concerned, on the cover as well as the release next week.
The Big O moves out of the classic pulp-noir territory of Declan Burke's first novel, Eight Ball Boogie, into a kidnap caper with style and plotting more like Elmore Leonard (or maybe Donald Westlake) than Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The narrative is actually mostly dialogue: even the non-dialogue sections, if you look closely, are internal monologues by the various characters. The voices are snappy, and the novel is divided into short sections, each from the point of view of one of the characters. The result is a kaleidoscopic narrative that moves forward at a rapid pace--and the result is also quite funny, in the way that Leonard's novels are frequently funny: expectations are overturned, characters move inexorably toward an unforeseen climax, and we glide past unbelievable coincidences without hesitation. None of these characters are master criminals, and the attraction of some of them for others is that of ordinary men and women. The Big O is, ultimately, a crime farce of the first order. The violence is postponed, riding along with the converging characters and plot lines until the ending that, though impossible to entirely foresee, seems inevitable once you've gotten to it. The plotting seems casual, unplanned, with the random pattern of life--but looking back, the story is as tightly structured as a jigsaw puzzle. I may not be making myself perfectly clear, here, but The Big O is a lot of fun, hence the earlier mention of Westlake--the elements of the plot lock together as the story moves forward with an increasingly comic effect (as, for example, the plot of Pulp Fiction moves forward), and the "blackout" quality of the short sections and alternating voices adds an additional liveliness. I frequently talk about the settings of crime novels, and this one has a carefully ambiguous setting--sometimes it seems like Ireland, but not clearly or overtly so. Sometimes The Big O's story could be happening in the U.S., except that some idioms are clearly not U.S. English ("chemist" for what would be "drug store" here, among other examples). The ambiguity works effectively with the technique of the novel, though, focusing our attention on the progressively complicated story rather than on a definite setting.

Åsa Larsson's The Black Path (Rebecka Martinsson #3)

Thanks are due to Barbara Fister (maven of the Scandinavian crime fiction site, homepages.gac.edu/~fister/scandcrime/) and to Maxine Clark (blogger extraordinaire at petrona.typepad.com/) for their thoughts on the intercultural (and particularly Sami) aspects of Åsa Larsson's recently translated The Black Path (see their comments appended to the previous post here). The Black Path stakes out some of the same territory as a couple of other Swedish crime novelists: Henning Mankell (in the confluence of a small northern city and international--in particulr African--conspiracies) and Stieg Larsson (in the investigation of corporate malfeasance and the involvement of a genius/clairvoyant young woman/outsider). Åsa Larsson uses these elements to good advantage, in some ways better than those other Swedish writers, in developing further her series based around lawyer Rebecka Martinsson. As in the first two novels in the series, Rebecka is not always at the center of the action--in fact, Rebecka is probably the most de-centered central character in any crime series, Scandinavian or otherwise. In The Black Path, she's on stage less than 20% of the time, in my guess--one among many voices in what I've previously called a collective novel (meaning that various voices are heard and all contribute to the social context of the story). Other prominent voices here include detective Anna-Maria Mella and her partner, Sven-Erik Stålnacke, various of the mining company executives in the story, a half Indian woman raised by Sami foster parents, a bodyguard at the mining company, and others. But the story begins and ends with Rebecka, first in recovery from a mental breakdown precipitated by the ending of the previous novel and last in taking a step toward a life decision that has been eluding her for the entire series. Rebecka is now a prosecutor in Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden, and as such she becomes integrated with the police process in a way that was not possible in the previous novels, in which she was part private citizen and part corporate/part defense attorney. The story moves forward in a tandem fashion, as Anna-Maria investigates the murder of a woman found in an ice-fishing "ark" (with Rebecka's help) and as various actors in the drama reveal their lives in flashbacks and interior monologues. The method works very well for the most part, although those monologues risk marginalizing the police investigation, particularly toward the end of the book. There is a thriller-like conclusion (calling up another prominent Scandinavian writer, Jo Nesbø, whose crime novels have thriller aspects), with Anna-Maria as more central than Rebecka (unlike the first two novels in the series), but the police are at the edges of what's happening, and know (even at the end) less than the reader knows (as he/she has been privy to the thoughts and visions not only of characters living in the present and recalling their past but also the clairvoyant visions of Ester, who is at the periphery of the story until the very end, when she's seen to have been living in the future all along--you'll have to read the book to see what I mean). The spiritual dimension that has been probed by Larsson in previous books in terms of organized religion here appears as a mysticism rooted in but traveling beyond the Sami peoples of the region). The Black Path is admirable, and as I suggested in my previous post, better (in my opinion) than the first two Rebecka Martinsson books, but I do have a little trouble with that marginalization of the cops (and Rebecka as well) that I mentioned above. It's not that the story has eluded the author's grasp but that that it has eluded the grasp of the characters--Larsson is very much in control of her material all the way to the end, but there are so many different elements converging at the end that a number of them seem to miss one another rather than meshing, with characters escaping (almost) into Ester's dreams as well as into those shadowy international conspiracies. All that makes it a very interesting book, but not a book that has the clockwork clarity at the end that I remarked in Allan Guthrie's Savage Night. Åsa Larsson is staking out an entirely different kind of story-telling, perhaps more akin to the confusion and uncertainty of real social and political and the actual criminal justice system. In fact, the more I weigh The Black Path in my mind as I reflect on it and write about it, the more I appreciate what Larsson has accomplished. Which leads me to echo and misquote art critic John Perrault (who said that writing about art is a great way to think about art): blogging and conversing in the crime-fiction blogosphere is proving to be a great way to think about what crime writers are doing and what crime fiction does and can accomplish in terms of both fiction writing and the relationship of the genre to contemporary life.

Question for Åsa Larsson fans

I'm reading Åsa Larsson's newly translated Black Path, which deals obliquely with an issue that one would think would be central to any crime series about the far north of Sweden: ethnic diversity. Of the Swedish crime novels that have been translated, it seems that only Kerstin Ekman's deal with the interface between Sami and Swedish populations. Though The Black Path does bring up the issue, it's a bit difficult for readers of the translated version, or at least readers not familiar with common names in the populations involved, to quite catch the nuances. Some of the characters in Larsson's novel are clearly Sami (or were raised in that community), others are Finnish (in terms of language at least), but the Sami cross the Swedish/Finnish border, so perhaps some of them (what we would have called Lapplanders formerly) use Finnish and Finnish names. So can anyone clarify for me what role the Sami/Finnish/Swedish distinctions play in Larsson's novel? Or at least who in the novel comes from Finnish and Sami backgrounds? Just to be clear, I think The Black Path is a very good book, better perhaps than the first two in Larsson's series--I just can't quite catch how this particular subtlety of language, names, and culture (which very evidently deepens the novel's texture) works exactly. My review follows soon, and I promise any advice I get on this subject will be duly credited.

Frozen Sun, by Stan Jones

The Nathan Active series by Stan Jones follows the career of a young Inupiaq State Trooper in Alaska, who was raised by adoptive parents in Anchorage but has been posted to the Bush town of Chukchi, where his birth mother lives. If that scenario makes you think "soap opera," you'd be mistaken. The clueless outsider who is nevertheless native "Eskimo" is a perfect vehicle for the investigation of the fault lines between Alaska's various peoples, through the lens of crime fiction. Nathan is a city boy with a strained relationship with both his birth mother and his adoptive family, trying to adapt to the Bush while also trying to get posted back to the city. The first two novels in the series, published several years ago by SoHo Press, follow Nathan in the Bush town and in the Alaskan wilderness. Frozen Sun, the new book, published by Alaska's Bowhead Press, follows the Trooper to Anchorage and an island fishing camp, in pursuit of a young woman who went missing years before. An astute reader will spot some plot elements before the story gets to them, but Nathan's emotionally damaged character, his relationship to both natives and whites in Chukchi, the evocation of life in the Bush, and his tentative attempts at romance are all very appealing. The language of the small town is also very well evoked (in the same way as the Outback language of a similar cultural faultine in Adrian Hyland's Diamond Dove/Moonlight Downs)--for example, Nathan and the other Inupiat townspeople rarely say "yes" to anything, using "I guess" instead. The flavor of the language is portrayed, without any artificial dialect in the speech. And the Bush is never idealized: in Frozen Sun, the descent of a village woman into tawdry homelessness on the streets of Anchorage is central to the story. Nathan's approach to finding her is indirect an conflicted at every point. He makes rookie mistakes (consistent with some of his mistakes concerning local customs in the earlier books) with both the case and his girlfriend. Frozen Sun is, like the first two Nathan Active stories, a subtle, vivid, and effective crime novel that deserves a wide readership: and I for one am looking forward to a new addition to the series, Village of the Ghost Bears, promised for 2009.

classical unities and crime fiction

I've just finished Peter Craig's Hot Plastic, published a few years ago. The novel shares a good deal with Jim Thompson's great The Grifters, but I didn't like Hot Plastic very much. I'm wondering why it didn't satisfy, though I usually find grifter novels appealing. One thing that occurred to me is that it violates a modern version of the classical unities, while The Grifters does not. Aristotle said that tragedy should not violate three rules, unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. That is, one main action or plot with few subplots, one setting, and a time-frame of no more than 24 hours. Obviously, the modern novel violates those rules in all but a few cases (Ulysses, for example), and some forms of the novel (the picaresque, for example) violate all the rules most of the time. But keeping those rules in mind nevertheless provides focus for fiction as well as drama, but crime fiction actually adheres to the rules more closely than a lot of so-called mainstream fiction (think of those family dramas covering four generations and three continents). The biggest difference between The Grifters and Hot Plastic is that Thompson maintains enough of the unities to give the novel a sharp, while Craig's novel is more of a picaresque or romance, following several characters through a number of adventures that don't follow a common plot though they eventually lead back to a kind of repetition of the original situation. Hot Plastic has more of the structure of a mainstream novel, following the relationships of the characters more than any coherent story. Fine, if that's what you're after, but to me it suits the crime genre less well. Even when a crime novel covers a large-ish frame of time; to use just 2 famous examples, Roseanna by Sjöwall & Wahlöö or Faceless Killers by Mankell stretch a police investigation over a considerable time and numerous false leads, but the doggedness of the investigator and the concentration on a single crime maintain a unity of story or action. Adrian McKinty's Bloomsday Dead obviously derives its unity of time from Ulysses, but many other crime novels, from the famous Fast One by Paul Cain onward, adhere to a tight time-frame. And when subplots seem to be more important or as important as a main plot in a crime novel, there's a coherence provided by those plots moving toward a common endpoint or in their relation to an investigation or a crime (as in false leads). Unity of place is possibly the most adhered to of the rules in the kind of crime fiction that I like best (that is to say, localized stories rather than globe-hopping thrillers). So what do you think: Are crime novels Aristotelian? Or should they be?

Friedrich Glauser, The Spoke

The last of Friedrich Glauser's Sergeant Studer novels emphasizes the Swiss author's common ground with Simenon's Maigret novels, but with Glauser's own meandering style and odd poetry. Ably translated by Mike Mitchell, The Spoke deals with a body found during the wedding of the Sergeant's daughter and his young protege Albert, in a hotel belonging to a sweetheart of Albert's youth. Neither Studer's methods nor the plot of the novel is straightforward, but a contemporary note is struck in one element of the resolution, which deals with predatory lending practices. Set between the world wars (when Glauser was active as a writer), there are some dated aspects of the story, particularly in the author's and the sergeant's attitudes toward women. But there is also a richness of language (without any floweriness, since Glauser also shares a directness of syntax with Simenon) and a rich portrait of rural Switzerland and its dialects. The Spoke is a bit more sedate and introspective (on the sergeant's part) than the two previous Studer novels, resembling the first in the series (Thumbprint) more than any of those in between. And there is really no other crime writer quite like Glauser. Don't be misled by his biography (the addiction and the time in an asylum): his stories are clearly written and composed, but with an oddly off-center quality to both the sergeant's thinking and the style of the writing--creating a totally distinctive voice and an unusual treat for readers looking for a change from the usual crime fiction fare of either the past or present variety. Bitter Lemon Press deserves much credit for bringing Glauser's five novels into the English-speaking world, and also for the distinctive, striking covers of all five.

Allan Guthrie's Savage Night

Two Way Split and Kiss Her Goodbye, Allan Guthrie's first two novels, are pure neo-noir. Savage Night is a bit of a departure (I haven't read his third novel, Hard Man, so I can't speak to that one). Savage Night is a blacker-than-noir, splintered story that calls forth comparisons not only with James M. Cain or Jim Thompson (Guthrie's title is taken from one of Thompson's odder novels) but also varied branches of literature from Magnus Mills's fables or Charlie Williams's backwater noir to the revenge tragedies of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur. Savage Night is a clockwork, each of the disparate elements (big and small) of the novel gearing inexorably toward one another, something like Pulp Fiction but with even more inexorability. The story starts near the end, with one of the murders that link the Park family and the Savage family, who are quickly becoming (and exceeding) the Hatfields and McCoys of Edinburgh. (I had dinner with the descendants of the Hatfields and McCoys in Kentucky a few years ago, but that'sa story for another time). At first, a reader might well wonder why he or she should be interested in these doomed lowlifes, Guthrie's dramatis personae. But I quickly became enthralled by the twists and turns of the back and forth plot, which takes on an inevitability as it moves forward (and backward, and then forward again) and also has the character of a comic farce in spite of all the bloodshed. Small details that seem like no more than colorful character development come back as essential elements of the story. Sudden shifts and bizarre situations (such as a brutalized naked man with a blanket hanging off him like a cape brandishing a saumurai sword), funny though they are, have a perfectly logical relation to the plot. Another very violent and very funny novel, Graeme Gordon's Bayswater Bodycount comes to mind, but Savage Night is more tightly structured and written. Guthrie's style in Savage Night is at once simple and complex, dumping you into the plot with no background or explanation, keeping the language straightforward, and offering a persistent reader the rewards of discovery as the story accumulates rather than developing in a linear fashion. This is an impressive novel and at the same time a lot of fun--right up to a poignant ending in which the story is sublimating into the air rather than reaching for a pat conclusion.

The Likeness, by Tana French

The Likeness, Tana French's sequel to her blockbuster first novel, Into the Woods, has mostly been reviewed positively, but often with some reservations. It is, like its predecessor, a long book for a crime novel (over 450 pages), and it's based on a central conceit that has to be (for some readers, with difficulty) swallowed whole for the book to be appreciated. The first person narrator, Detective Cassie Maddox, moves the story along slowly, mostly in narrative rather than dialogue (though there's plenty of talking, aimed more at character development than plot). The premise is that a dead woman resembles Cassie so much that she's asked to go undercover to impersonate the victim, to live in a group house with her four best friends, literature students at Trinity College in Dublin. The leap of faith required by the reader is that this impersonation is even remotely possible--although French makes her ability to sustain her relationship with those friends somewhat more believable than her ability to maintain the victim's teaching and research duties at Trinity. Cassie's narrative voice and her character are interesting, and a novel featuring her as the central character was something I have been looking forward to since reading Into the Woods last year. But I have to admit I was disappointed. My problem is that the characters seem shallow and immature, friends clinging together in a tight community rather like characters in young-adult fiction (a band of outsiders rebelling against the "real world" of their parents. The adolescent quality of the friendship is captured in a quote from one of the circle, speaking to the others: ""We used to tell one another everything…Didn't we? Or is that simply the way I remember it? The five of us against the world, and no secrets, ever." The Likeness is essentially a coming of age story, but French's Cassie is a bit old for the role. And Cassie makes some difficult-to-swallow errors of professional judgment: concealing key facts or evidence at several points for no readily discernible reason. A couple of reviewers have related French’s novel to Donna Tartt's The Secret History, because of both novels' focus on tightly wound (in more ways than one) circles of academic youths (as well as their mostly banal academ-esque conversations). The comparison with Tartt is an apt, and to me not positive, one. But I did keep reading, a testament to the French's writing skills, though I can't resist quoting a line from the novel that is something less than skillful: "'Where have you been?' Daniel hissed." Maybe I'm just being picky, but how do you hiss the line "Where have you been?" If anyone thinks I'm being too hard on The Likeness, please let me know--meanwhile, I'm turning with a sigh of relief to Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, which I picked up at the same time as The Likeness.

Jar City film and A Little Trip to Heaven

It's good to hear (courtesy of Declan Burke at Crime Always Pays) that the film adapted from Arnaldur Indridason Icelandic noir police-procedural novel Jar City is getting some theatrical distribution. It ran on the Sundance Channel cable TV network in the U.S., as a consequence of its success on the festival circuit, but more people deserve to see it (I reviewed it here on March 8th of this year). It does stay fairly close to the novel in outline, but its biggest strength as a movie is the director's total control over not only the scenario and actors but also the color and sound. It's a very bleak setting: this is not a tourist's view of Iceland, it's the underside and the underside of a very cold place. Perhaps the closest relative, in film terms, is some of Aki Kaurismäki's early films based in Finland. But as a pure crime story, Jar City (released on the Sundance Channel under its original Icelandic title, Myrin). The director, Baltasar Kormákur, had previously done a crime story that updates James M. Cain in interesting ways: A Little Trip to Heaven is a tour de force for actor Forest Whitaker, but also a bleak tale of violence at the fringes of Canadian society (significantly, the film is like Jar City set in a very cold climate--perhaps a key element of the director's filmic world view). A Little Trip to Heaven, which is easier to find than Jar City, deals with an insurance adjustor's investigation of a death that at first looks like a traffic accident and later turns into a murder case that subsumes everyone involved. With significant overtones of Double Indemnity, Kormákur carefully makes his own mark in the differences from that noir standard of film and fiction. The relationship between the insurance adjustor and the woman in the case is obliquely similar to the Cain story, but in a bleaker and edgier direction. And, as in Jar City, the tale is told laconically, without spoon-feading the audience. But unlike Jar City, taken from a novel in a crime fiction series, the ending of A Little Trip to Heaven is more about an existential theme in the story than the resolution of a crime (the twists and turns of the crime having been made clear just before the end). Jar City was a bit more to my taste, but if you like the backwoods noir of Cain or, more recently, Daniel Woodrell, A Little Trip to Heaven is a pure example of the genre, with added philosophical ambitions, textural design and direction by the filmmaker, and some excellent performances.

Adrian Hyland, Moonlight Downs or Diamond Dove

The U.S. title is Moonlight Downs, and the original Australian title is Diamond Dove, but whatever you call it, Adrian Hyland's first crime novel navigates with aplomb some difficult territory. First, his central character (and narrator) is Emily Tempest, a young woman--not easy for a male writer to speak convincingly in a female voice; second, Emily is half-aboriginal (or First Australian, I'm not sure what the correct terminology is--a lot of the terminology used in the book is language used by whites to describe blacks, accurate depictions of outback language but hardly a clue as to how the people would themselves prefer to be described by outsiders). And much of the book deals with the native culture of the outback, both among the actual native cultures and the colonial settlers (miners, ranchers, etc.) who have by now been there long enough to establish a sort of native culture of their own. Other Australian writers have touched on European/Aboriginal relations but this is the first to make it here to the U.S. that is so immersed in the culture (Hyland knows the outback and its cultures firsthand). The novel is, appropriately enough, not a straightforward mystery or crime plot, but also, fortunately, not an attempt to take on a pretense of being a "dreaming." Hyland chose his narrator well: she's able to navigate among all the cultures and is an outsider (and therefore an observer) to all of them. She's also a sort of bull-in-a-china-shop, not always looking (or considering) before she leaps into a situation that she doesn't' fully understand, thus kicking up disputes, and even deaths, with her actions. But the novel is also thick with texture (without laying it on too thick): it's a story, not an anthropology text or a Carlos Castañeda kind of thing. There's mysticism in it, but it's included among a kaleidoscope of views about what's happening. The story progresses slowly, more in characters interacting with one another than in an investigation (in spite of the "Emily Tempest investigation" tagline on the cover of the U.S. edition). Emily has just returned to Moonlight Downs, the camp in the outback where she grew up, and she wants to find out who killed the local elder who was a kind of patron for her in her youth (and also the father of her best friend of those days, Hazel). Emily is outside the network of "skin names" by which the society is organized, but is an adopted daughter of a sort. Everybody thinks a local wild man/lunatic committed the crime, but Emily's not so sure, and in provoking the police to investigate a white rancher's possible involvement, she kicks over a hornet's nest. She does do a bit of investigation, but that's not really what moves the story forward or solves the crime. The reader stays involved because of the web that Hyland weaves with the elements of the tale: the characters, Emily's very particular (and narrow) point of view, the cultural frictions and land disputes among whites and blacks, the dreamings and taboos of the indigenous culture, the breakdown in both that culture and the European one in the face of drought, sun, alcohol, violence and a host of other difficulties. Even the characters portrayed negatively remain sympathetic in some ways, and always interesting (except for some rowdy characters from the seedy town nearest the camp. The Australian title of the book refers to Hazel's dreaming, not a casual feature of her life but an essential fact of her place in the universe, and thus an essential feature of the novel, skilfully maintained as a consistent metaphorical thread by the author. When Emily finally discovers the identity (and motive) of the killer, there's a dramatic and violent denouement, the only really action-oriented part of the book, but a satisfying wrapping up of the various themes and images that have brought us to that point along with her. This is a quite different sort of book than the crime novels of Garry Disher or Peter Temple or Shane Maloney, the best known of the Australian exports, but it stands comparison with all of them in its language, its evocation of a particular (and particularly Australian) culture, and the dramatic hold it has on the reader. A question: The Australian cover is more "Australian" in referring visually to the dreamings and to the place, Moonlight Downs, though the Australian title refers to the dreaming in particular. The American cover refers to some creatures in the story, but the title refers to the place. Which is more effective as a cover, or a depiction of the contents? I have to say that, to me, the Australian cover conveys more about the contents of the book and the American cover makes it seem almost like a Western (indeed a quality of the book shared with some other Australian crime novels, as noted elsewhere in this blog and others).

Forgotton-books-Friday: Sin Soracco's Edge City

Patti Abbot (http://pattinase.blogspot.com/) is inspiring a number of writers and bloggers to write about a “forgotten novel,” and she’s posting their articles or links to their blog posts on the subject. She asked me to dig up a forgotten book for her August 22nd edition of the forgotten books, and here’s what I came up with:

There are a number of writers today who are using the noir genre in creative and original ways, but there are fewer who have a truly original voice. Sin Soracco’s 1993 novel Edge City is one of those rare originals. There is little to compare it with, Jack O’Connell’s compelling and almost Gothic noir fantasies of the rustbelt are the only crime novels that come to mind with even a roughly similar voice. Edge City is a convict’s fever dream of her first few days on the outside. It’s a wild, fast ride (too fast for complete sentences, sometimes—fragments flow quickly past the reader’s eye) from Reno’s release from prison to her meeting with her parole agent to her fleabag hotel room to the weird and wonderful Club Istanbul, all the way to her involvement in dirty politics, drug deals, and murder. She’s a skilled thief who got caught, who recognizes an old friend (a Native American woman who’s reinvented herself as a Middle-Eastern belly dancer) and veers off into a world of noir imagination. The post-industrial setting in which the Club Istanbul is located is never named, but it’s obviously at the edges of San Francisco, beyond the tourist zone. The premise, a sleazy bar that features resident musicians and belly dancers instead of a sound system and strippers, a visiting hip Arabic-punk band backing up an egomaniac male belly dancer, and an owner who is an art columnist, is as high concept as Jack O’Connell’s radio subculture, porn theater, and freak-show comics (and the imagining of those high-concept settings and the immersion of the characters in them is the talent that Soracco shares with O’Connell). Both Soracco and O’Connell give us a vision of a noir hell—in Soracco’s case an infernal illusion of freedom experienced by the paroled convict. Soracco’s previous novel, Low Bite, is a novel of the prison itself. Fair warning: the plot of Edge City nervously tightens to a fever pitch of theft (of objects and information) and murder, and then quickly unwinds, like the stories of Elmore Leonard or John McFetridge; the plot is less the point than the deliciously dark and anxious language and atmosphere. In the New York Times review that greeted the publication of Edge City, Marilyn Stasio said of Soracco that “there's fire in her garish portraits of the damned souls who inhabit her apocalyptic world.” I’ve been hoping over the years for more of Reno, or a sequel featuring another apocalyptic world, but the only appearance of Soracco’s fiction that I’ve found is a short story in the recent San Francisco Noir collection published by Akashic. In that anthology, Soracco gives a short third-person monologue in place of an author’s bio. It reads, in part, “She makes up her life from whatever’s around—if there’s nothing handy, she goes somewhere else. The center remains steady: the intense visceral pleasure of stories. She says, ‘One day our stories will bring the bastards down.’” A fitting description of the texture and the underlying impulse of noir fiction.

Glenn Harper
internationalnoir.blogspot.com

More forgotten books

I was going to post some more forgotten books yesterday and today but as I looked through them or regurgitated them from my brain I discovered that some of them would just as well stay forgotten. Still, there are a few I thought about that deserve at least some mention, before I post my "forgotten book" tomorrow as part of Patti Abbott's ongoing Friday series on the subject. 1. Only By Mistake, by P.J. Kavanaugh is a thriller of the 39 Steps variety (the book The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan, not the movie by Hitchcock, which is quite different). A city guy is on the run in the country, in this case on the run from an IRA man and hiding in a cottage on a Scottish island. Kavanaugh is a poet and critic, but doesn't condescend to the thriller genre in Only By Mistake. But it's a period piece in its portrayal of the IRA, in its politics, and in the language and plotting. So only to be recommended if you like the Buchan sort of thriller, and a '50s sort of plot and setting. 2. Madame Solario is an anonymous novel published in 1956 and reprinted several times since (the author, Gladys Huntington, has only recently been revealed). The novel was in its day notorious enough in Europe that a French book was published with the title "Who Wrote Madame Solario," with all sorts of speculation. The various paperback reprints, pitching it variously as a romance novel, a historical romance, a sex romp, or a Henry Jamesian novel of intrigue among the international visitors to an Italian mountain retreat. It's actually a comedy of manners with very ominous overtones, set before World War I in a genteel decadence that is about to collapse. There's a Russian with a gun, a notorious adventuress, a young, callow Englishman, and a wonderful and palatial hotel that apparently still exists in Northern Italy. It's a great read, if you're up for that sort of thing, with an unusual narrative structure (first and last sections through the eyes of that callow Englishman, middle from the p.o.v. of the omniscient narrator), a very indirect style, and a slow pace that builds the romantic comedy and the barely contained violence at the same time. Not a bodice-ripper romance novel and not a thriller, but a subtle, complex story of sex and the roles open to women in a repressive society. 3. I also thought of mentioning the novels of Timothy Watts, about whom I hadn't heard anything in a long time. I was a big fan of his first two books, published by SoHo Press, Cons and The Money Lovers (noir thrillers about capable con men and ex-cons caught up in plots they don't understand, kind of James M. Cainwith a contemporary, Elmore Leonard, edge to the hard-boiled formula. But I see that in addition to a third novel, Steal Away, from a few years ago, there's another one, Grand Theft, from just a couple of years ago--so I guess Watts's books don't really qualify as forgotten.

Forgotten on my bookshelf: Francis Carco's Perversity

This is forgotten book week here and elsewhere around the web: I’ll be posting my official “forgotten book” of the week on Friday, but in the meantime I’ve been thinking about some forgotten books, and looking around my bookshelves, I discovered a book I had forgotten I owned, Perversity, by Francis Carco (a pseudonym of Francois Carcopino-Tupsoli, a French author of some literary renown). Perversity is a 1920s portrait of slum life in Paris, written with a lot of underworld slang that is ably translated or transformed by Jean Rhys (an amazing and very dark writer in her own right), though the translator is listed as Ford Madox Ford, her mentor and lover (see Rhys’s novel Quartet or the movie based on it). None of the other translations of Carco’s books have been so fortunate and the colorful language of the streets is reportedly lost in them. I have the original English-language edition of 1928, but Black Mask recently reprinted one of the paperback editions, which should qualify the book for consideration as a crime novel, or noir, or pulp.

J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet has posted a quote by G.K. Chesterton, "The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life." Carco’s book certainly contains a sense of the poetry of modern life, though entirely from the darker end of the spectrum. The French literary establishment certainly understood what we would call crime fiction in the way described by Chesterton: that is to say, as more than simply popular literature, but there are a number of French literary novels of crime or the underworld that have been received on this side of the Atlantic as pulp (see the various paperback covers of Carco’s books attached herewith, as well as a similar cover for a French paperback of another of his novels).

When I took Carco’s book down off the shelf, I realized that I’d never actually read it, though I’ve been carrying it around as we moved from place to place for at least 25 years (it was given to me by an artist and friend in Atlanta). I discovered a bleak portrait of the underclass, portrayed as violent and almost subhuman, except in the liveliness of their language. Carco’s Perversity is a dark ride into the lives of 3 individuals whose prospects and horizons are very limited: a prostitute, her brother, and her lover, all confined to a tiny slum apartment that is the primary setting. Perversity is not a pleasant read, except in one’s appreciation of the writing and the translation, which are both lucid and direct. Maybe perversely (no pun intended) the brutality of the book and the writing were an antidote to the overly intellectual writing in France at the time (or the literary experimentation profusely demonstrated by The Eater of Darkness, which I reviewed yesterday), and therefore was regarded as literary because of its very un-literariness (perhaps a lesson we should all take to heart in current disputes over the literary worth of crime fiction, as in this year’s Booker Prize flap). The volume translated by Jean Rhys also includes a short story about a knife that is better in a lot of ways than the novel itself, about a punk who decides his knife is not the his weapon of choice.

Truth be told, the bleakness and near-bestial quality of Carco’s work is hard to take in large doses, better sampled perhaps in the story. Though there’s quite sufficient parallel between Perversity and the American pulp fiction to justify those paperback covers for Carco’s U.S. publications. American pulp, though, is frequently leavened with comedy of an intentional or unintentional sort plus straightforward descriptions of violence and intrigue. What distinguishes Perversity from genuine pulp is perhaps the intensity of his grim portrait, with no comic relief and a long, grim buildup to a couple of short bursts of violence: so if its unliterariness is what makes it literature, maybe its very darkness keeps it from being truly noir? And maybe Carco "Americanized" his name to suit what he and his audience thought of as a brutal, American style of writing, thus making it more interesting to the French (as in all the American pulp novels made into French movies by intellectual filmmakers over the years)? In any case, maybe this is a book best forgotten or at least filed away among the forerunners of the modern crime novel.

Forgotten books: The Eater of Darkness, Robert M. Coates

There's been a lot of stuff in the blogosphere lately about forgotten books, and my own entry on the subject will be appearing in the series that Patti Abbot is publishing on her blog, pattinase.blogspot.com, But First! as they say on those late-night TV commercials, I have a few thoughts on some other forgotten books that are at least loosely in the crime genre. The first and possibly most forgotten is The Eater of Darkness, by Robert M. Coates, which had a hardback edition in 1929 and a paperback edition in 1959, and that's it. The book has a lot in common with Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, which is often listed by writers and bloggers as a crime novel (more of a ghost story, really, but that's for another time). Both O'Brien's and Coates's novels also have something in common with the estimable Declan Burke's web novel, Gonzo Noir, published on his blog, Crime Always Pays. What they all have in common is literary experimentation based on pulp- and crime-genre themes and tropes. In the case of the earliest of these three, The Eater of Darkness is the story of Charles Dograr, a young American who returns from France to New York and meets a strange old man who has invented a sort of laser-like death ray. The old man tricks Charles into pulling the trigger, after a fantastic description of the ray penetrating buildings and people as it is focused by the old man on his intended target. From there, Charles becomes infatuated with the power of the weapon and helps the old man plan an elaborate bank heist that will use the weapon to remotely kill the armored car guards and bank employees and anyone on the street during the heist. Along the way, Charles becomes involved with a young woman related to Charles's first victim, a beautiful woman who has been watching him from across the street, an elaborate plot twist or two involving the bank job and other things, and the woman he left behind in France. The plot seems to be strictly in parallel with thrillers of the novel's day, and even much crime fiction that has been written since--except that the exposition is wild and unpredictable and the conclusion, while quite different from the famous ending of The Third Policeman (recently endorsed by the TV show Lost), takes the same liberties with a straightforward story. The Eater of Darkness has been called the first Dada novel in English (and it was indeed published with the help of Gertrude Stein)--I wouldn't go that far, but it was decidedly written under the influence of the literary upheavals of the early 20th century. However, Coates was more interested in playing with the conventions of the thriller than with breaking new literary ground (and for that reason resonates with Flann O'Brien's other masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds, another wild comedy). All the twists and turns are impossible to describe, and the literary hijinks are both sophisticated and funny--but one of the most interesting and entertaining aspects of Coates's novel is that the thriller plot works, in a sci-fi, Three Stooges sort of way. When I first read The Eater of Darkness, I made the mistake of trying to make straightforward sense of it--is the story a dream of one of the characters about another, absent one? Is it a fantasy about America, like Kafka's amazing Amerika (another book that The Eater has something in common with)? But it really only works if you disengage the brain and all your tendency to interpret or make sense of it. If you can do that, it's a lot of fun (if you can find a copy--and there are still some floating around that don't require you to rob an armored car to pay for). Coates, by the way, went on to write a pretty good ghost story, Wisteria Cottage, as well as a bohemian novel, Yesterday's Burdens, and other literary books, as well as being the art critic for The New Yorker for a while. In the intro to the paperback edition he seems partly proud and partly embarrassed by the youthful exhuberance of his first novel. But don't let his later credentials or the ambivalence of the adult literateur put you off.

Noir/Mystery from Saudi Arabia: Finding Nouf, Zoë Ferraris

Reading Finding Nouf, a first novel by Zoë Ferraris, is something like reading science fiction, the culture described is so alien to an outsider. It also reminded me in some ways of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. But it is indeed a mystery, though the whodunnit aspects of the novel are actually a smaller part of the impact of the novel than Ferraris's intimate description of Saudi Arabian life, told in the third person voice, in which not only the oppression of women is evoked in depth but also the pain and loss inflicted on men by that very same oppression. The central character, Nayir, is a Palestinian and devout Muslim who grew up in Saudi Arabia and has become a desert guide (aspiring, almost, to the intimacy with the desert exhibited by the Bedouin). He is unmarried, and at many points in the novel his melancholy over that fact is palpable (as when he sees a man with four wives). He in fact does not even know any women, partly a result of his status as an outsider with no family. When the sister of Othman, a wealthy friend disappears, probably in the desert, Nayir is enlisted to help first with the search and then with a private investigation into her death (when the family pressures the authorities to call the case an accident). Othman also enlists his fiancee, Katya, a half-Russian/half-Saudi who has flouted convention by getting a job in the medical examiner's office, to help in the investigation--a good thing, since Nayir will not be able to even talk to any of the women involved in the case. And it's really the extent of the gender divide, and the extent of its consequences, that are the most striking and evocative elements of the novel. Ferraris's delineation of the divide is compelling, leaving the reader open-mouthed or shaking his/her head at many points. The waste of human life that is a product of the oppression is also explicit, but at no point does the author or narrator preach. In fact, the devotion to Islam of Nayir is at the very center of the novel, and the changes forced on him by his experiences in the course of the investigation are more central to the story, really, than the solution of the crime (which, although believable, isn't as metaphorically satisfying as the character portraits and the picture of the society that Ferraris accomplishes). This is indeed a mystery, more than a thriller or a noir novel, in that Nayir and Katya are repeatedly going over the same meager evidence as they try to make progress (and their progress is very slow and difficult for the first half of the novel). But the atmosphere of repression, the portayal of the culture's rigidity and the small, marginal attempts to escape it by those individuals not fundamentally in support of it, create so bleak and unrelenting an image that the novel is darker than many gritty noir crime novels. At some points, the setting and the occasional entrances by Bedouins recall some of Paul Bowles's novels, particularly The Sheltering Sky and The Spider's House, though Bowles is concerned more with an outsider's experience of the culture and the desert (and is describing Morocco not Saudi Arabia); plus there is a mysticism in The Sheltering Sky that is mostly missing in Finding Nouf--The Spider's House delves more deeply into the daily life of an Islamic country than The Sheltering Sky, and the consequences for inter-cultural relationships (and is a much better book, to me--I find The Sheltering Sky a bit more of a young person's book at many points, and The Spider's House is much more subtle). Bowles did write a pretty good thriller, as I recall (Let it Come Down), but that was set in South America as I recall. Anyway, back to the point: Finding Nouf includes various outsiders including some Americans, but always from the point of view of the Islamic culture in which Nayir is immersed. Nayir's own growth (and the opening for Ferraris to create a series out of her characters) occurs in a comic thread in which Nayir acquires a Columbo-style trenchcoat (not exactly suitable for the climate but an outward sign of his new status) and in the interrelationship of Nayir and Katya, as he struggles to define his role with respect to a woman who doesn't conform rigidly to the sex roles enforced by fundamentalist Islam of the Saudi variety (and by dreaded religious police and informers who are practically everywhere). Some plot points that you think are going to turn into cliches instead become touching signs of Nayir's personal growth in relation to his religion and his awareness of women as people, and as I said before, these moments and the overall embodiment in Ferraris's prose of the terrifyingly strict rules and laws of the country are the real impact of the book. Although the oppressive environment may make the novel difficult to read, much less comprehend, for many readers, Ferraris's novel uses the crime/mystery genre to delineate the inside of a culture more thoroughly (because more complete in its portrait of women's position within it) than other recent crime fiction set in Arabic and Islamic countries. Yasmina Khadra is more concerned with a male point of view and with politics in his police novels, Matt Beynon Rees is more concerned with the intricacies of the particular Palestinian situation, Mehmet Murat Somer is more interested in the transvestite subculture within a Turkey that is at least constitutionally secular, and Abdelilah Hamdouchi is particularly interested in civil and legal rights of those caught in the judicial process. One novel that does capture the fundamentalist Islamic world in as frightening a manner as Ferraris is Moghul Buffet, by Cheryl Benard (also a woman and an outsider with, like Ferraris, intimate personal experience in the culture)--but Moghul Buffet is a wild and funny book rather than a subtle and intimate portrait. Finding Nouf offers the reader a cosmic shift of viewpoint, into a regime that is otherwise difficult to penetrate as either a traveler or a reader.

Ottavio Cappellani's first

In anticipation of the release of Ottavio Cappellani's second novel to be translated into English (A Sicilian Tragedee), I went looking for the first one, Who is Lou Sciortino, in spite of a negative review from Publisher's Weekly posted on the Amazon website. The Publisher's Weekly reviewer compared Cappellani unfavorably to Elmore Leonard--what's with the Elmore Leonard comparisons? Does every novel dealing with the mob, or every comic crime novel with a meandering plot, have to be an Elmore Leonard clone? In fact, Who is Lou Sciortino is quite a different book from anything Leonard has done, and though it's not a perfect book, it has its rewards. First, Sciortino is a farce, with murder in place of most of the sex in a traditional farce. The plot deals (loosely) with Don Lou Sciortino of the New York mob and his grandson, also named Lou Sciortino, who's in charge of a film company that is really a money laundering operation.
When there's a bombing in his office, Lou Jr. gets sent off to his grandfather's home town, Catania, where he's supposed to hook up with Lou Sr.'s old Mafia buddies. But a filmmaker, a Mafia hairdresser, a would-be rocker who has turned to robbery (and mayhem) to support himself, a shopkeeper, a Jayne Maynsfield-like actress, various thugs, bodyguards, and "picciotti" (soldiers or "boys") twine around each other in sometimes calculated and sometimes casual violence when not attending barbecues, plotting more money laundering operations, and one-upping each other. The result doesn't make much sense as any kind of linear plot: it's really the story of what Corriere della Sera called a "post-modern Catania" and a post-modern Mafia as well. Here, as in Yeats's famous line, the center does not hold. The old ways have broken down (and even the grandfathers have to finally admit that the good old days were not so great), and what's left behind is a chaos of ambitions, offended honor, meddling grandfathers, sex-starved young people, and the various children, hangers-on, would-be mobsters, and picciotti who are caught between all of the above. The real pleasure, and perhaps Cappellani's real aim, is in the language. The skillful translator, Howard Curtis, has wisely chosen to leave much of the Sicilian slang in the original language, and we gradually become accustomed to the obscenities and interjections particular to the area, as well as much Mafia language, such as "picciotto." I happened to see a 1960s Italian movie last night, Mafioso, which is also comic (until it isn't), concerned with the Mafia's reach into the life of an engineer who has moved north to Milan but has come home for a visit. The movie and Cappellani's book illuminated one another in several ways, both in language (a number of references in the movie were clearer for having read Cappellani's book) and in the underlying theme of the ordinariness (along with the perniciousness) of life with the mob. In Mafioso, we are eased into the sordidness by the comic central character, and in Sciortino, we are momentarily eased into the place of the title character by the use of a second-person narrative at the beginning and end of the story, "you" are being narrated and addressed. That literary trick (fortunately not sustained for very long) implicates the reader and announces that the language and style will be central to the book (rather than plot), and perhaps warns a reader looking for an Elmore Leonard clone to look elsewhere. On the evidence of advance p.r. (admittedly not all that reliable), it looks like Cappellani's second book is going to be a better novel, but Who is Lou Sciortino is fun and also gives detailed information about the speech and the structure of a city infested with mobsters and Mafia history but also easing into the diversity and openness of the 21st century.