Colin Bateman's Mystery Man

Dan Starkey, the anti-hero of Colin Bateman's series crime novels (he also writes stand-alones) is a feckless magnet for murder and mayhem, especially as played by David Thewlis in the 1998 movie of the first Starkey novel, Divorcing Jack. The unnamed narrator and central character of the new novel (the author has re-christened himself simply Bateman) conjures up visions of Starkey and Thewlis but to an exaggerated extreme: we learn gradually, and with accelerating speed, that the monologist-narrator is hyper-medicated, allergic to everything, afraid of human contact, paranoid, and has read far too many crime novels. There's a whiff of metafiction--the narrator is the owner-operator of No Alibis, a bookstore in Belfast specializing in crime fiction, and there really is just such a store, in the exact same location, though reportedly the owner bares absolutely no resemblance to Bateman's hero--and the varied plot includes a great number of punctured crime-fiction cliches as well as numerous references to classic and current mystery fiction (as well as a very funny portrait of a certain Irish literary figure who has begun issuing crime novels). A private detective whose office is next to the fictional bookstore disappears, and his clients start asking the bookshop owner for assistance in locating, among other things, a graffiti artist painting insulting comments and a pair of leather trousers purportedly lost by a dry cleaning shop. Then he's lured (very reluctantly) into the case of a missing woman who is the wife of a publisher (of literary rather than genre works) and sets off on a very paranoia-inducing trail that includes a couple of beautiful women (one of them a jewelry store clerk that the narrator has been for some time spying on), Nazis, Holocaust survivors, dance teachers, a useless bookshop clerk, book fairs, an auto dealership, a police detective, a car chase, and a writers' retreat. Along the way, Bateman has a lot of fun with the conventions of the mystery genre, the relationships among writers, publishers, and readers, and the nebbishy character of the lustful, aggressive, shy, obsessive-compulsive hero-narrator. The book is fairly long (just over 400 pages) but the type is very big (approaching the Large Type font for the visually impaired) and moves very quickly from an "amateur detective" story to the thriller plot and at the end, a tantalizing hint of a different kind of story altogether. Bateman's last novel, Orpheus Rising, was magic realism rather than crime fiction, and in the new one, he has come back to crime with a comic vengeance (most of the vengeance seemingly directed toward the standard techniques of crime writing and toward the narrator himself). Reportedly, Bateman is at work on a sequel titled Day of the Jack Russell, and that title gives a flavor of the hijinks as well as the reflexive quality of Bateman's crime writing (whose subject is crime writing) in what may be a new series. Good news, since Mystery Man is the funniest crime novel since Bateman's own Divorcing Jack and Cycle of Violence.

The Arms Maker of Berlin, by Dan Fesperman

The latest post-cold-war thriller from Dan Fesperman portrays, as one of the characters says, characters who are "Modern Germany made flesh, in all its macabre and tragic grandeur." He does manage to suggest some of that burden of history in The Arms Maker of Berlin, but without portraying the city in as concrete a way as I would have liked (Berlin is a fascinating place to visit, whether in person or on the page). There's a lot of motion in Fesperman's book (characters moving back and forth across the Atlantic, up and down the east coast of the U.S., and across Europe, not to mention across time, in numerous flashbacks to WWII), and a lot is revealed to the reader before the investigator at the center of the book, historian Nat Turnbull, figures it out. There are moments of suspense, lots of Nazis and former Nazis now embedded in Germany after the fall of the Wall, and some interesting material about the White Rose resistance movement in Hitler's Germany.

But is it just me: are the Nazis a tired motif by now? Hitler and his minions have certainly been rich territory for fiction (almost too easy as a source for tension and threat). Nazis figure in the book I'm reading next, too, Bateman's Mystery Man--but I suspect Bateman will be using them in a not entirely straightforward fashion. Fesperman's Nazi hunter/historian is propelled by the arrest of his former mentor into a rat's nest of police, FBI, and spies and ultimately into the intimate past lives of that mentor and a crowd of Germans and Swiss whom he encountered in wartime Bern. The flashbacks deal with a German mini-Krupp industrialist who manufactured war materiel for the Nazis and for all comers after the war (along with coffee makers): his youth and bad choices during the height of the war are the engine that drives the plot and the historian's search. The reasons given as to why anyone would care anymore about the industrialist's past are plausible but not really developed (why flesh out the Iranians, the Pakistanis, and the nuclear weapons parts when there are Nazis to be pursued, right?). The novel was pretty good, in spite of my frustrations with it--I was propelled along to the finish. And it makes me want to go back to Fesperman's Sarajevo detective (in Lies in the Dark and Small Boat of Great Sorrows) as well his excursions into other parts of the world in a couple of more recent novels--to see whether my jaded attitude toward WWII plots is getting in the way of an appreciation for this obviously gifted and well-informed novelist.

Spinetingler Awards Short List

I was surprised and pleased to learn that I've made the Shortlist for the Second Annual Spinetingler Awards in the Reviewer category (click here to see all the categories and nominations). I'm honored to be nominated, and in the company of such a distinguished group of reviewers, too (Ali Karim, Larry Gandle, Lesa Holstine, Karen Chisholm, and myself)! If you'd like to vote in any or all categories, click here, and there are links to all the nominated stories as well. And many thanks to everyone at Spinetingler magazine (in its new home at bookspotcentral.com)!

Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator (and a murder)

Amara Lakhous's novel, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is a portrait of a group of immigrants and Italians in a piazza in Rome, but in a series of eleven brief monologues, Lakhous accomplishes much more. The monologues are all concerned with the disappearance of Amadeo, a translator suspected of the crime by the police, and the monologues are each accompanied by an existential "wail" by Amadeo himself. In structure, Clash of Civilizations resembles Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm (reviewed here last year): the monologues have the character of testimony, about the murder of a bully called The Gladiator in the titular elevator (which is also the source of disputes among the various residents of the house, arguments that will be very familiar to anyone who has lived in a co-op style apartment building). But their testimony also has a gossipy character that reveals a lot about the speaker as well as the community as a whole: and each speaker is characterized effecively through a few characteristics given in his/her own testimony as well as through the eyes of the other characters. And Amadeo's wails reveal not only his own character and his relationsn with the rest of the community but also the basic themes of the book: immigration, memory, language, and a person's sense of place or home. The real mystery of the book is not who the murderer is (though the solving of that mystery is withheld until the final testimony, that of a police inspector): the real resolution is the gradual discovery of who Amadeo is, and the discovery of his own tragedy. Curiously, both the Clash of Civilizations and another (very succesful) book published by Europa Editions (Elegance of the Hedgehog) end with a similar incident that arrives out of the blue but nevertheless provides a resolution. It's impossible to describe that incident (or to say much about Amadeo's identity) without giving away too much, though. What I can say is that Lakhous's book is a brief, quiet, often funny, and ultimately poetic commentary on our globalized world, brought into focus through his concentration on the interaction of a small group in a very particular place.

Gothic paranoid techno-warning serial killer novel

Charles Maclean achieves a composite of several modes of crime fiction in Home Before Dark: Gothic (complete with Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca), a serial killer, a cautionary tale about Internet relationships, a paranoid double cross (is the good guy really the killer), and so on. The first third of the novel includes very effective portraits of Florence and Venice with a murder plot aboard the Orient Express (no less), as well as murders of three young women. The middle third is about the rich, English father of the first murdered girl seeking to find the murderer by any means necessary, while also conducting an on-line affair with a young woman in New York. And the last third is a spiralling chase sequence with the killer chasing a sort-of private detective, the father, and his on-line amour. All of the above is skilfully done, though for me it all goes on a bit too long. But there's one creepy aspect to the whole story that suggests Maclean has larger concerns: the reader is put in the position of voyeur in an elaborate Second-Life website constructed by the killer, and at a certain point it's difficult to avoid the feeling of also being a voyeur in the killings of the young women (and the threats to another one)--implicating us, the audience, in the Gothic-Postmodern-sociopath/serial killer narrative as active participants--which of course, we are.

Forgotten neo-noir film: Delusion

Seventeen or 18 years ago, I saw a neo-noir movie set in the American desert, about a computer executive who embezzled from his company, drove to Nevada, and picked up a couple stranded along the highway because their car spun out and flipped over. A couple of years later, I remembered that scrap of plot, but had forgotten everything else about the movie, the name, the actors, the director, everything. And since then, I've been intermittently trying to remember or find the movie again. I finally recovered the name, Delusion, by looking at lists of neo-noir movies, arranged by year, and following up on the names that seemed likely. Now that I've found it (and obtained a VHS, which I watched last night) I'm not sure it was worth all that trouble (though on Amazon it gets an average of 5 stars from the small number of reviews)-- sill, it's a pretty good movie. Directed by Belgian-born writer, director, and producer Carl Colpaert, Delusion was originally set for release as Mirage, in 1990, but another B-movie came out just ahead of them with that name. So the film company regrouped and re-released it as Delusion (a false start that may have contributed to the lack of success and subsequent obscurity of the film. Jim Metzler, who was also in another good neo-noir (One False Move) just a year or so later) is George, who has embezzled about a quarter million dollars (it sounded like a bigger amount in 1990) from his failing computer company and is trying to get to Reno to start up a new company. Kyle Secor (of Homicide: A Life on the Streets) and Jennifer Rubin (of many a later B-movie) are the hitchhikers that George shouldn't have picked up (Chevy and Patti). George soon discovers that not only can he not get rid of them, they're on their way to meet Larry, a gangster (Jerry Orbach, of Law & Order) who's exiled to an old trailer parked next to an isolated desert lake. What ensues is a series of confrontations between Chevy, who turns out to be a hit man for the Las Vegas mob, and George, whose money is hidden in the spare-tire compartment of his Volvo (which Chevy and Patti have stolen)--and Patti turns out to have her own agenda. There are a couple of twists and turns, as well as shots that are taken straight from old Westerns and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (both films were partly shot in Death Valley), leading to an ambiguous old-West ending that is partially resolved in a little surprise buried in the credits. Alas, it's not too likely that anyone will have much of a chance to see the movie, since it's only available in VHS, and not exactly easy to find. But it's an early example of neo noir with a reach that just exceeds its grasp, in terms of its art-film aspirations and its filmmaking style. I can recommend it, though, for an evening's quirky entertainment, if it's available for a reasonable price--it deserves a better fate than its current obscurity (and a better fate, perhaps, than its characters experience in the end).

The Redeemer, by Jo Nesbø

The Redeemer is Jo Nesbø's best novel so far. It has less of the grand, historical plotline than The Redbreast, and the three-novel Tom Waaler plot ended with a previous novel (ostensibly), but The Redeemer has an elegant structure, considerable humor, and a zig-zagging story that continually loops back on itself. Plus it has the usual virtues of a Nesbø novel: engaging characters, interesting insights on Norwegian and European culture, and a tightening suspense that is released only at the end (after several false "endings" along the way). In this book, a number of plotlines intersect, with a phrase or even an object dropped at the end of a section only to be picked up (with comic and ironic effect) in the opening sentence of the next section (occurring miles away and in a different context. Not just a literary game, these transitions are simply one element of the lively and involving story. There's a Croatian hit man going to Oslo for one last job, a gaaggle of Salvation Army officers and soldiers in Norway involved in some very human interpersonal relations, a wealthy family struggling to maintain its fortune, and detective (and central character) is losing his boss, his only protector in a police hierarchy that is hostile to Hole's independent ways. The new boss is a military man returning to the police with all the subtlety and empathy one might expect from a special forces type (but he turns out to be a complex character rather than a cardboard one). There are dire consequences for some of Hole's team, and the hitman takes a difficult and circuitous route toward the fufillment of his mission. And in fact, the Waaler plot (those who've been reading the Nesbø as they have come out in English will know what I'm talking about) does in fact return in a surprise ending that has (one can see in retrospect) been prepared for symbolically all along. Nesbø is one of only a few crime writers who can manage the complex structure, the large cast of characters, and the wide ranging storylines in novels as bulky as The Redeemer, while also keeping the reader moving rapidly along from one cliff hanger to another. Because of the complexity and the references to earlier stories, it's probably best not to start reading Nesbø with this one, but if it's the only one you can get hold of, go ahead--and hold on to your hat, it's a wild and often funny (as well as satisfying) ride.

South African thriller: Margie Orford's Like Clockwork

Margie Orford's new (in the U.K. and U.S.) Like Clockwork was actually originally published in S.A. in '06. Orford has wrapped a serial killer novel in a book about violence against women in a broader sense, and the two levels of the novel get a bit confused. The central character, Dr. Clare Hart, is similarly pulled in two directions: she's both a profiler with ties (both personal and professional) to the police and a journalist investigating the exploitation of women for profit for a documentary film. There are a lot of instances in the book of human trafficking and sexual slavery, domestic violence, and gang violence directed against women (in initiation rituals for just one example), many of them aimed at exactly the same young women being targeted by the serial killer. The expected tension of a serial killer story is therefore dissipated a bit among all the other violence and misery, until the last few chapters, when the serial killer plot and the attention of Dr. Hart both come sharply into focus. Orford's novel is a good portrait of the racial and cultural stew of Cape Town, and she gives a good sense of the city and surroundings, from middle class to working class to slums, from Table Mountain to Robben Island. And she also gives a good sense of the violence against women both in this particular culture and in human society at large. The story is no more "overdetermined" than another Cape Town thriller reviewed here a few weeks ago (Roger Smith's Mixed Blood), and both effectively use the gang violence plaguing the city. Smith plunges his characters into the maelstrom while Orford keeps her central characters at arm's length from the violence (though Hart's sister is a recluse and gang victim), logical outcomes of their approaches (Smith's is not a series book and Orford's has all the signs of being the beginning of a series). Along with the better known Deon Meyer (and I suspect other writers that I haven't discovered yet), Smith and Orford bring the violent, beautiful, and vibrant city of Cape Town to life on the page--each giving emphasis to different aspects of life there. I'm looking forward to more from all of them, and hoping for advice from anyone who knows other high-quality crime writers from S.A.--The excellent blog Crime Beat South Africa is one resource; are there others? And does anyone have recommendations about which S.A. writer I should try to get hold of next?

Back to the Coast, by Saskia Noort

Saskia Noort's first novel (her second to be translated into English from the original Dutch), Back to the Coast, is a paranoid thriller that eases the reader down from the scattered normal life of singer (for a rock/soul cover band) and single mother Maria into the maelstrom of psychotic violence. The book has some of the pacing of Hitchcock's or Chabrol's psychological thrillers, but resolutely from the point of view of the female narrator, Maria herself. Maria has just had an abortion, unable to cope with two children and a depressed boyfriend she's just kicked out of her house, and she starts getting nasty threats referring to the abortion and her lifestyle. The police can't or won't do anything, and when the threats accelerate she flees from her home, going with her children to stay with her semi-estranged sister, who lives in their parents' former boarding house on the shore, a house Maria remembers with no fondness as the site of her mother's insanity and her father's indifference. But the terror follows her there, and Maria begins to suspect her brother-in-law, who has walked out on Maria's sister, has been stalking and threatening her. Though the reader may suspect what's actually going on long before Maria does, Noort effectively tightens the straitjacket of her narrative in the second half of the book, after carefully portraying Maria's life and character in the first half. Noort's second book, The Dinner Club, is an original suburban thriller, but Back to the Coast uses family life in a more sinister way, as an effective metaphor for ties that bind in unhealthy ways. The conclusion is a bit abrupt, and the final intervention comes from an unexpected direction, but Back to the Coast is a compelling narrative of both real and paranoid threats and of the bonds and the damages created by families.

The first Adamsberg book, now available in English

We finally have the first of Fred Vargas's Inspector Adamsberg novels in English (as The Chalk Circle Man), after 13 years and 4 other translations (plus one from her other series). There is perhaps less problem with the publication out of order than there has been with some other authors (I'm thinking of Jo Nesbø for one), since each of the Adamsberg books uses Vargas's odd assortment of characters and effects, without too much crime plot running from one book to another. What we do get, finally, is a glimpse of Adamsberg's early days with his team of detectives, showing with his first big case how he both brings them around and frustrates them with his intuitive style. We also get a fuller perspective on the love of his life, Camille, though she is onstage for a very brief moment (as is typical of the series)--and their relationship is one of the distinctive features of this series. The events in The Chalk Circle Man evolve from an encounter between a female scientist and a blind man in a bar, and from Adamsberg's interest in (and fears about) a series of blue chalk circles that are appearing, with a cryptic text, around single mundane objects on sidewalks and streets in several of Paris's arrondisements. The plot is as quirky as we now expect from Vargas (and it's difficult to imagine the impact the book might have had on its original readers since we do know now what to expect from Vargas), and there is poetry and history as usual, but there is not an overarching historical or mythical or stylistic "maguffin" as in some others of the books (the plague, a detective who speaks in classic Alexandrine verse, werewolves). Instead, we get a full picture of Adamsberg himself, a portrait of the logical Danglard coming to terms with Adamsberg and his methods, and we get a couple of sudden twists in the investigation, one perhaps predictable and the other genuinely out of left field (the latter regarding motive, and though well prepared for when you think back through the book, is a quick shift, a flick of the book's serpentine tail.

African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho (translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley) is disturbing, dark, and funny. The author is French-Congolese, and his work has been highly praised in France and Francophone Africa for this and other works. African Psycho has been compared to Nabokov, Dostoievsky, and Camus (not so much to Brett Easton Ellis, in spite of the title) but it owes as much to Amos Tutuola's great Palm Wine Drinkard, especially in the very funny hyphenated place names (the neighborhood in which the story takes place is called He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, because of the residents' drinking habits) and the folk-tale-meets-serial-killer-novel quality of the book. The narrative is a monologue by a young man named Greg (or Grégoire) who idolizes his country's only serial killer, Angoualima. The first sections of the book take Greg through his orphaned childhood and his growing fascination with the serial killer; from there, we see Greg's first attempts at violence (an attack on a real estate agent and a young woman--both brutal but neither achieving his murderous intent) and his plan for the murder of a woman named Germaine, as announced in the first words of the novel. Greg begins to have dialogues with the deceased Angoualima at his grave: conversations in which the dead killer is part psychotherapist and part self-absorbed psychopath. If it all sounds hallucinatory, it is, and Greg's imagination is brutal and ugly. But Greg is also the Woody Allen of serial killers, and the combination of all these elements is fascinating and funny, while also being ironic and obsessive, frightening and mesmerizing. The narrator refers disparagingly to crime fiction that begins with a corpse and ends with a solution, and though most of what he says can be taken as irony, in this statement he accurately assesses his own story as different from crime fiction. Mabanckou is writing about horrors of the human soul and contemporary global culture in the language of crime fiction (because that's the most effective vehicle for taking about those horrors) and in the mode of comedy (because that's the only mode that can deal with these horrors without despair).

A Country House excursion

Though a country house cozy is not my usual reading material, I found myself reading a copy of Louise Penny's new novel (The Murder Stone in the U.K., A Rule Against Murder in the U.S.) over last weekend. For almost 100 pages, the squabbles of a family attempting a weekend reunion are all that interrupt an anniversary trip to a remote Quebec manor house/inn by Inspector Gamache and his wife. After the inevitable death (with a novel murder weapon), the investigation by Gamache and his team from the homicide division of the Montreal Sureté competes for attention with the family squabbles. The solution to the crime is as novel as the choice of weapon, and the somewhat drawn-out ending manages to reestablish order and family and the calm of the lakeside inn. I'm caricaturing the story: Penny is actually very skillful in making the characters (and their disturbed family) interesting, and there's quite a bit of humor (including a running gag about a child named Bean whose sex has never been disclosed by the mother to anyone in or out of her family). When the investigation kicks in, there's a passage about Gamache (about whom I've seen the claim that he's a unique creation, with some justification) that I think is interesting, particularly in contrast to another book I've just added to my tbr pile: Fred Vargas's Chalk Circle Man.

Penny characterizes one of the murder squad members as a "hound" and another as a "hunter," and then goes on to say: "And Gamache? He knew he was neither the hound nor the hunter. Armand Gamache was the explorer. He went ahead of all the rest, into territory unknown and uncharted. He was drawn to the edge of things. To the places old mariners knew, and warned, 'Beyond here be monsters.'" That's sort of true about Gamache, but how much more true is it of Vargas's Inspector Adamsberg? In fact, Vargas's novels have something in common with the cozy form: each book, whether urban or rural, carefully delineates a small community, bound by family, clan, or proximity, and draws out a strange story through her odd investigative team, chiefly the indeed very odd Adamsberg, who frequently runs right off the edge of the cliff into the realm of monsters. What keeps Vargas's books from really being cozies is the distance from "normal" life that she's willing to travel, and though she allows order to be reestablished at the end, it's a tentative order, shaken by the threats that Adamsberg has uncovered and beaten back. Some of the more outré aspects of Vargas's stories (werewolves, the plague, etc.) end up having rational explanations--but always with the supernatural and strange elements remaining just off-stage, ready to reenter, even after being unmasked. Penny's book is a pleasant read, skillfully managed and fun, in many ways a modernization of the traditional mystery, within the strict limits she has set out (murders in or around a tiny town in Quebec, a seasonal theme for the four books so far in the series). Vargas creates strict limits for each story only to turn them inside out, in scholarly as well as supernatural ways, and readers who are willing to follow her will be treated to startling rather than reassuring tales. That, I guess, is why I'm more interested in Vargas: I've always looked for something startling or arresting in the fiction I read, whatever the genre. The Murder Stone is characterized on the cover as "An Inspector Gamache Crime Novel": a few years ago, that would surely have been "An Inspector Gamache Mystery" and not to insist on sub-genres too heavily, I think the word "mystery" would still be more accurate advertising: Gamache and the cozy/country end of mystery fiction are less about the crime, really, than about a solution, a resolution, a resettling of the scene into its calm normal state. I enjoyed my excursion into Penny's rural Quebec mystery, but I'm really looking forward to Vargas's twisted crime in what I understand is actually the very first Adamsberg novel, only now available in English.

Andean Express, by Juan de Recacoechea

Bolivian writer Juan de Recacoechea's second novel to be published in the U.S. (translated by Adrian Althoff) begins like an homage to the famous Agatha Christie novel suggested by the title: It's the 1950s, and Ricardo, a young man headed for a beach vacation, boards a train in La Paz, along with a colorful cross-section of Bolivian life: a card sharp; a brothel keeper; a priest who isn't what he seems; a newly married mine-owner accompanied by Gulietta, his young wife, and her mother; a cabaret club owner; a cripple; and so on. Almost all of the characters turn out to have a grudge of one sort or another against the mine owner, and Ricardo, of course, is enamored with Gulietta. A murder will occur, naturally enough. But from the beginning there are clues, not to the murder but to the fact that Recacoechea is looking for something other than a murder mystery: there are references to Anna Karenina, Othello, and The Red and the Black, as well as popular romance novels--and Andean Express is at least as much involved in the romance as the revenge, but always with a light touch. In fact, one of the characters refers to the story he's caught up in with the comment that "This could be a Billy Wilder comedy." Recacoechea's first novel to be translated, American Visa, starts out as an ironic comedy of frustration, centered on a man trying to get the document in the book's title, but it veered first into picaresque and then into tragedy. Andean Express starts as a murder mystery à la Christie and veers into farce before becoming a coming of age tale of a sort. Both are pitched by the publisher as noir (the back cover of the new book suggests a pedigree including Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler), but though American Visa has the inevitability and tragedy of noir, it doesn't have a plot typical of noir; and in Andean Express, the murder is a bit too casual and its consequences are not so much tragic as comic. But we shouldn't get too hung up on genre, despite the appeal to noir by the publisher: Andean Express is a lot of fun, twisting and turning through several genres and offering a tasty selection of shady characters, and an entertaining lesson on Bolivia's social and political history. The pace is fast, the tone is light and frequently funny, there's a high-stakes poker game with lots of cheating, and there's a train journey across the high Andean plain: what more could we ask for in a short, well-paced, tale in an exotic location. Plus where else can you get a synthesis of Stendhal and Some Like It Hot?

Mixed Blood, by Roger Smith

The word that comes to mind after reading Roger Smith's new Cape Town thriller, Mixed Blood, is "overdetermined," a bit of jargon from Marxist literary theory--but also an apt description of a farce-like plot (not comic but violent). Farce, actually, gets its name from the French word for "stuffed," as in stuffed turkey, etc., and farces are always overstuffed with incidents spiralling around a central plot. Similarly Mixed Blood deals with a number of characters (an American family on the run after a botched robbery in the U.S., a bad cop, a "colored" night watchman, a couple of young punks, a Cape Flats slum kid and his mother, a straight-shooter Zulu cop named Zondi--perhaps in homage to James McClure's black cop in his apartheid era series), all revolving around and spiraling outward from a break in on the high-rent slopes of Cape Town's spectacular mountains. One of the central characters, the bad cop, is similarly overstuffed, to the point of comic-book exaggeration: He's fat, racist, smelly, violent, has a rash and hemorrhoids, and to top it off he's a religious fanatic. What happens to him in the end, in retrospect, calls for his being a spectacular figure rather than a simple man, in a symbolic sense at least. In parallel with the structure of farce, the story builds inexorably to a grand conclusion (violent rather than comic, here) bringing all the threads together and resolving almost everything (though I have to say I found the very final event a bit anticlimactic). Mixed Blood is a different kind of thriller than Deon Meyer produces: for one thing, Smith's story is more stylized--less realistic, less interested in character; at the same time, Smith draws a rather more complete portrait of Cape Town than Meyer does in any one of his books. We get the rich and the poor, the walled-in rich and the slum-dwelling poor, the mansions and the tin-roof shacks, the mixed-race coloreds, the now-ascendent blacks, the whites tentatively hanging on to the cliffs of Table Mountain and its related peaks, the tourist and consumer havens at the waterfront--all drawn vividly in all the complexity and beauty of the city itself. It's perhaps due to Smith's wise choice of an outsider (an American gambler-soldier-thief who had gotten caught up in a bad bank robbery, trying without much success to protect his family) as the central character, able from his distinct point of view to reflect on the beauty, the banality, and the violent contrasts of Cape Town. Smith's tale has a drive and an inevitability that makes it a compelling read, and I look forward to his next Cape Town novel, which won't be the next in a series, as he has dealt rather thoroughly with most of the characters in his first novel.

Most of Deon Meyer's crime novels from South Africa are closer to the thriller sub-genre than noir or police procedural, and Blood Safari is no exception. A thriller frequently features a highly skilled (though frequently psychologically damaged) hero who is for one reason or another tasked to save the world, or at least a corner of it. Meyer's heroes and plots are a bit different. His hero in Blood Safari, Lemmer (he doesn't like to use his surnames), is a bodyguard with a shady past, a man who recognizes that he has difficulty controlling his anger. He's skilled in fighting but doesn't carry a gun, and his job is to protect Emma le Roux, a woman who thinks her brother, long thought dead, has reappeared, and along with him a vague threat to her life. She's not a high-ranking politician or a famous journalist or the wife of the President or anything like that. Meyer stakes out a territory closer to daily life than to James Bond, but makes the reader care about his characters and their fates (and by extension, the fate of the new South African society that is their context), without the crutch of high crimes, terrorist threats to the world, etc. Lemmer must come to grips with his past and with changes to his carefully proscribed life brought about during his job guarding Emma, but there's no pat resolution to his struggle with those changes. And when the plot seems to veer toward a common thriller plot, even some plot elements he has himself used before, Meyer twists into something else. Lemmer, who is the narrator, has a lot of rules for conducting his life, and he's now finding them imperfect, particularly as they apply to his fixed views of women. His macho job and his particular form of masculinity are believable elements of the story, without overwhelming everthing with testosterone: Lemmer and Emma, the host of minor characters (good and evil and in between), and South Africa from the Cape to the Safari country in the north, are all vividly and sympathetically brought to life. Blood Safari is more measured and less myth-making than in his previous Hear of the Hunter, and more of a stand-alone plot than his Cape Town police novels (his first four novels are linked, major characters in one book becoming minor characters in another, and vice versa, in the manner of Balzac's Comedie Humaine). I'm a big fan of his first two books, Dead at Daybreak and Dead Before Dying, but he's nevertheless getting better and better, and Blood Safari is very good indeed.

Crime safari

I'm off for a tour of Cape Town crime in the next few days. I just finished Deon Meyer's Blood Safari (more on that soon--for now, I'll only say it's an excellent story about a bodyguard, up to Meyer's high standard of crime fiction), then Mixed Blood, by Roger Smith (born in Johannesburg, but a resident of Cape Town), then Margie Orford's Like Clockwork, published a couple of years ago in S.A. but just now making it to U.K. Anybody have other recommendations for South African crime up to those standards? One further note: ABE just published a list of what they say are the 10 funniest books, according to English readers. One of the books on the list is by Tom Sharpe, who also wrote two of the funniest books ever about apartheid (really! trust me on that), before he emigrated from South Africa, driven out before the end of apartheid, in part by those two very funny novels.

Politics Noir

Of the 13 stories in Politics Noir (edited by Gary Phillips and published by Verso) all but two (Ken Bruen's grim take on postwar gangster politics in Belfast and Sujata Massey's venture into an Imam-dominated town in Pakistan for a wish-fulfillment fantasy) are set in the U.S., and only 2 deal with national politics, and those 2 are among the weakest of the bunch (one is a fantasy about dirty pictures implicating Nixon and J.Edgar Hoover, one is a gratuitously mean and unfunny parody of the Clinton-Obama primary campaign, and by far the best of the 3 is Michele Martinez's tale of the rise and fall of a woman with a talent for the realpolitik of Capitol Hill). It's quite appropriate that state and local politics should be mostly the focus of a collection of noir tales, since it's the down and dirty of the local situation that is the heart of noir (and most of the stories touch on sex in some way, another appropriate element of noir). Pete Hautman's wonderful take on bloodthirsty Republican politics and public art in Minnesota is the best of the lot (and the funniest). Twist Phelan's teenager-runs-of-with-the-payoff story is very dark and bloody and effective. Darrell James works a double-double-cross in North Carolina and Black Artemis takes us into hip-hop politics in the Bronx. K.J.A. Wishnia's tale of a P.I.'s crusade against vote-suppression fraud aimed at the Latino community if perhaps the truest (though not the least bleak) of the stories. This is not the best of the many "Noir" this or that collections that have been coming out lately, but perhaps half the stories are interesting and amusing, not a bad average.

Barbara Nadel's 11th Inspector Ikmen novel

River of the Dead, by Barbara Nadel, sends Inspector Ikmen's assistant, Inspector Suleyman, away from Istanbul to the dark and dangerous east of Turkey, in search of an escaped prisoner, while Ikmen follows the trail in Istanbul. The story is very complicated, involving the multiple religions of Turkey, a serpent goddess who dwells in a cave, a monastery, wormwood and drugs, Ikmen's prodigal son, a Fagin-like organizer of boy-thieves, a Bulgarian prostitute, drug addicted hospital personnel, a body that has apparently washed down the Eufrates from the Iraq war, and so forth. One of the characters remarks in the middle of his confession, "it all became confusing then," and if even the perpetrators in the story find it confusing, what hope do we mere readers have. But Nadel maintains control of the story and leads us through both mystical and realistic paths to a bloody conclusion that at least ties up most of the loose ends. This is less a mystery than a police procedural (a rather repetitios one) married to an adventure story (the atheist Ikmen mutters about being in Harry Potter territory, at one point), along with an informative travelogue of Istanbul and Turkey's far east. It's a bit carnivalesque--though fun to read, perhaps because of that quality. Perhaps other readers can let us know if this pattern is typical of the other Ikmen novels (and perhaps they can also recommend whether it might be rewarding to go back and read the series from the beginning).

Brazilian noir: In Praise of Lies, by Patricia Melo

Patricia Melo packs a lot into the 187 pages (in the English translation by Clifford Landers) of In Praise of Lies--deadly snakes, venomous toads, a host of classic crime authors, several sexual betrayals, insurance scams, and international smuggling, to name a few plot points. Her novels have often dealt with lower class Brazilian life (including one turned into the hit-man movie, Man of the Year). But In Praise of Lies is up the social scale a bit: José is a writer who specializes in plaigirizing the plots of classic crime novels for the Brazilian pulp market, under a variety of pseudonyms. He makes the acquaintance of Melissa, a serologist specializing in venomous snakes, while researching a murder plot, and Melissa (in classic noir fashion) manipulates him into a plot to murder her husband, Ronald. As is normal in the world of noir, Melissa is not exactly who she seems to be, and we descend into a pastiche of a plot that José might have stolen from any number of crime novels. Melo is having a lot of infectious fun with the main story and with the plagiarized plot summaries that José is proposing to his publisher, but in the midst of the plot to kill Ronald, José suddenly loses his knack with noir and shifts into the self-help world, a prime territory for parody if there ever was one. But Melo never loses sight of the twists and turns of the main plot, and her novel can be with enjoyment read as straight pulp-noir, with new angles right up to the end. Though Melo clearly has literary ambitions, her parody of noir doesn't condescend to the genre, instead extracting from it a kernel of narrative truth that contrasts with the glib truths of José's career as a guru. Melo's hit-man plot in the novel The Killer and the film version Man of the Year is more straightforward in both narrative and social commentary, and though In Praise of Lies shares an edgy existentialism with that other story, Lies is more fun to read (and would also make a great movie, though perhaps the guru plot would be difficult to bring off alongside the crime plot).

Literary crime from Istanbul: Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, by Selçuk Altun

It seems to me that one of the major differences from a crime novel and a "literary novel" that uses crime novel structures is in the tone. Selçuk Altun's Songs My Mother Never Taught Me is a case in point. For over half the novel, there are alternating chapters from the point of view of Arda, whose father was murdered and whose mother has just died, and Bedirhan, a professional assassin who had murdered Arda's father. Bedirhan wants to quit the profession and is on the hunt for his employer, whose identity has been hidden behind a religious organization that has been commissioning the murders. Arda is relishing in his new freedom from his overbearing mother until he is pointed in the direction of his father's murderer and begins to search for him. What's happening has the hallmarks of a thriller or crime novel, but not the tone, which in Altun's novel is light rather than tense, with numerous literary references that are at least in part clues to the author's intentions (the references include Grahame Greene but also Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster, and the title is a reference to music by Dvorak). Among Turkish novels widely available in English, Altun resembles crime novelist Mehmet Murat Somer (even though Somer's novels are frequently comic) than the postmodern novels of Orhan Pamuk (though Altun's tone is lighter and more playful than Pamuk's). Fairly early in the novel, Arda mentions a family friend named Selçuk Altun, a banker and novelist. That bit of metafiction becomes more important in the last third of the novel, when Altun becomes a puppetmaster within the novel, as well as its author, giving a series of clues about Bedirhan in the form of locations around Istanbul. Arda's quest becomes an unconventional tour of the city and its history rather than a hot pursuit of the killer. Songs My Mother Never Taught Me is both fun and challenging, rather like satire or the dada or surrealist novel The Eater of Darkness, mentioned here last year, particularly in the quirky narrative tendency to veer off into new stories and references that hang loosely from the central thread. Songs My Mother Never Taught Me gives a palpable sense of Istanbul as well as a political and historical vision of Turkey. As a crime novel, it belongs in the more metaphysical and literary branch of the genre, somewhere between Kate Atkinson and Garbhan Downey or Teresa Solana, among recent literary crime fiction.

Hardboiled in Belize

In the Heat, by Ian Vasquez, reads like the start of a series (which it is). Miles Young is a Belizean boxer at the end of his career, looking for one more fight and some other way to make a living after that. His wife has left him with a young daughter to take care of. A character right out of California noir hires him to look for her 17-year-old daughter, who has run away with her boyfriend and a briefcase full of money that her mother was holding for a drug dealer. Much of the dialogue has a George Pelecanos ring--telegraphic and vernacular language, often leaving out articles and noun-subjects, and the deal-gone-wrong, the population of wasters and low-lifes, and the element of revenge that develops also have a Pelecanos-esque quality. Otherwise, the novel resembles a Ross McDonald novel that the mother-employer might have stepped out of, but in a new setting: Belize is rendered in detail without any travelogue-type writing. In the Heat is interesting and enjoyable, without quite rising to the noir heights of some retro-noir writers like Sean Doolittle or Charlie Huston or Adrian McKinty, at least with this first effort--but the characters are appealing, the milieu unusual and interesting, and the story flows easily and naturally.

Havana Fever, by Leonardo Padura

Leonardo Padura's Havana Fever, translated by Peter Bush and published by Bitter Lemon Press, is a very good book. Padura embeds a crime novel with resonances from Cuban history to Sophocles, from J.D. Salinger to Dickens and Dante. Padura uses his detective-hero Mario Conde from the Havana Quartet (plus Adios Hemingway) as a thread on which are hung several strains of Cuban history. Conde, now a used book dealer (really more of a book scout) discovers a valuable library in a decrepit mansion, and in one of the books there is a clipping about a bolero singer of the late 1950s who suddenly retired (after recording one 45 rpm record). Through the historical and rare books in the library (as Conde and his cohort go through them in order to make an offer to the owners) the colonial history of Cuba is told. Conde becomes fascinated with the bolero singer and her death, and through her Padura tells the story of Batista, the revolution, the mob-owned nightclubs, and the liveliness as well as the misery of the Cuban 1950s. As has been the case in the other Conde novels, the now-former detective and his expanded circle of friends are a collective device through which the history of post-revolutionary, post-Soviet, and contemporary Cuban history are told. And above all Havana, in its decaying glory, runs through everything. The novel is split in half, the first part corresponding to the A-side of the bolero singer's 45 and the second half corresponding to the B-side. But even more, the first half is Dickens and the second half is Dante. The crumbling mansion, the rich history of the old books, and the family dwelling in the house (aged brother and sister plus mad, ancient mother upstairs) are pure Victorian Gothic (there's even an epistolary thread running through the whole book and leading to the apprehension of the criminal). But a murder thrusts Conde back into an investigation that leads him into the Havana barrios where now drugs, gangsters, hookers, and despair reign as in a circle of hell. In both sections, the narrative has a despairing poetry beyond even that of the earlier Conde novels (which were themselves eloquently dark and poetic). The novel is fully a crime novel, but also an elegy for Havana and for Conde, whose trials and tragedies lead to a kind of catharsis and reconciliation that seems to mark the end of the series (I won't give away the ending, which is rooted not only in this novel but in earlier stories). It wouldn't be altogether necessary, though, to read the others in order to appreciate Havana Fever, which stands on its own, as crime fiction and as a powerful and evocative novel. Lest any of the above suggests a ponderous literary tome, rest assured that Padura's writing is accessible, his characters are vivid, and his storytelling laced with lively and even raunchy details of everyday life.

Neglected Swedish crime fiction writer

Taking a break from my trek into Cuban crime, I thought it might be a good time to remind folks that there's a Swedish crime fiction pioneer that hasn't been mentioned much in the blogs praising the more recent Swedish crime wave. Kerstin Ekman was originally a crime fiction writer, though of this first crime novels only one has been translated, as Under the Snow (published in Sweden in 1961, in English in 1997. She departed from crime fiction for some years (producing experimental and historical fiction that I know about, but I'm not an expert on her work), returning with a bestseller translated as Blackwater (published in Sweden in 1993, in English in 1996).

Under the Snow is itself an unconventional crime novel, dealing with a murder in a small town in the far north, investigated as much by a friend of the deceased as by the policeman sent out to look into it. The progress of the story and its resolution are indirect, but the form is that of a crime novel. The subject is hate, poverty, and racism in a small town, touching on Sami-Swedish relations. The position of the Sami is also central to Blackwater, which is a much longer and more complicated story, using a very violent double murder to talk about racism as well as small town hatred, a hippie commune, and a bunch of characters who are investigated in depth by the author. The story progresses slowly after the murder, for quite a stretch, with Ekman more interested in the characters and their interrelationships than in moving the investigation (by the town's police chief) forward. Then, in the book's second section, set 20 years after the first, a woman whose trip to the commune had initiated the novel recognizes someone who will lead to a resolution of the crime. Where another writer might have shifted quickly from that original time frame to the later one, Ekman (in this phase of her career) is more interested in drawing out that first setting and its population as long as she can give life to it, more in the fashion of a mainstream novel. But her skill in giving that life to the narrative makes the story hypnotic, even when it is moving very slowly. And when the "current time" narrative moves into gear, we are well prepared to understand and empathize with the story of the crime and its consequences, as well as the consequences of commune life, small town life, and life in the far north, with its divided cultures (one vastly more powerful than the other). Ekman's crime fiction has little in common with the better known earlier masters of Swedish crime, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, whose work is straightforward and linear (though there are gaps between the crime and its finall uncovering in their work as well). Even in the shorter Under the Snow, Ekman draws her characters in subtle detail, focusing on them more than on the plot. Sjöwall and Wahlöö draw their characters skilfully but in quick strokes, and use them to give the crime and the police a resonance in a social context that is their primary concern. I have to say, I'm more likely to re-read the Martin Beck novels again and again than to return repeatedly to Ekman's prose, but we should remember that Ekman's work is a lens through which we may better understand the more psychological and character-driven of contemporary Swedish (and Scandinavian) crime novels.

Havana Lunar, by Robert Arellano

I can't say a lot about the plot without telegraphing much of the novel's effectiveness, but Robert Arellano's recent Havana Lunar starts quickly: Manolo Rodriguez (called Mano), a doctor in "special period" Havana (after the fall of Cuba's biggest patron, the U.S.S.R.) is in his home's private clinic at night and hears breaking glass. The short first chapter progresses rapidly from a break-in, to Mano following the intruder to a bar, to a confrontation with a menacing police detective who is looking for a young woman who is Mano's patient. The novel then moves through a series of interlocking chapters set in various periods of Mano's (and Cuba's) history, filling in the background and moving inexorably back to the moment of the break-in and its consequences. I was afraid momentarily that the novel was using the crime-fiction model as a mere maguffin or excuse to present an "art novel" as if it were popular fiction, but by the middle of this short book, I was thoroughly hooked. In fact, Arellano is not only using precedents in Cuban literature and crime fiction, he's also honoring the tropes of classical noir--this could almost be a tropical version of a Goodis novel. And every element contributes to the movement toward a conclusion that coincides with Hurricane Andrew (a device other Cuban writers, not to mention Florida and Louisiana writers, have also used--but Arellano doesn't overdo it). The glimpses of Mano's orphaned youth are not merely local color: they supply both context and essential material for the "present day" (1992) plot. Every move the melancholy and moral doctor makes and every element in his first-person narrative (including Cuban spiritualism, political realities, the hardhips of the blockade, and the details of the doctor's life and character) contributes to the whole. By the time the noir plot has worked its way to an inevitable conclusion (with betrayals of friendship, love, sex) and a coda that is both pessimistic and oddly hopeful, the reader can finally see the whole picture. It is a poetic vision of both Cuban and modern life, in the form of pure noir fiction, with all the pulpy and profound aspects that the genre is prone to. I'm staying in Cuba for a while (after this very promising start to my "visit"), with very high hopes for Leonardo Padura's Havana Dreams (boosted by Krimileser's praise of the book in a comment to an earlier post here) and Achy Obejas's Ruins (boosted by her very excellent presentation of crime fiction in the Havana Noir collection).

The Shadow Walker, Michael Walters

I first heard about Michael Walters's crime novels (featuring Nergui, former cop and now at the Ministry of Security) set in Mongolia from Maxine, at her Petrona blog. I'm behind the curve in discovering the Nergui books, but since the U.S. publishing industry is also a bit late discovering them (the first one, The Shadow Walker, had its first U.S. edition only in August 08) I don't feel so slow. One of Walters's achievements is his portrait of an almost entirely new noir environment: I can't think of another urban noir novel in which nomadic tent settlements coexist with apartment blocks and abandoned factories. Mongolia and its capital city, Ulan Baatar, are (in the novel, at least) at the tipping point between a traditional nomadic culture and an already post-industrial globalism. The former Soviet influence now replaced by gangsters and multi-national corporations, Nergui's Mongolia is beset by corruption, economic uncertainty, uncertain urbanization, and the difficulty of returning from cities to a rural, peripatetic life. The characters range from former insurgents forced out into the countryside to Russian gangsters to English cops and diplomats to hard-working police (best exemplified by Nergui's protegee, Doripalam. The plot is based on a frustrating police investigation into a series of puzzling murders (serial killer? political assissin?), with one of the victims being a U.K. citizen, causing a senior detective from Manchester (Drew McLeish) to join the team. The English detective provides a Western point of view, someone for whom Mongolia needs an introduction (like the reader), an effective device. The plot, though, is less central to the novel than a growing sense of shadowy threat (Walters carefully leaves the murderer and other evildoers offstage for a long time) and an increasingly complex network of interests involved in the crimes: mining, politics, development,industrial espionage. The complexity of the competing interests rivals Le Carre's post-Cold War plots, but within a linear narrative (provided by the police investigation) rather than Le Carre's splintered storytelling style. The complexity is also evident in the Nergui's somewhat mysterious background (is he really police, a spy, a national hero?), but Nergui is a fascinating, fully rounded character rather than puzzling cypher--and The Shadow Walker (and, I expect, this series) rests firmly on his shoulders. It's not merely the unique location (though Walters makes great use of that) that makes The Shadow Walker a good read: Nergui's world is grounded in very real, very contemporary forces affecting all of us, concentrated in a unique form in a place that is both totally exotic and immediately recognizable.

The queue

I've been "off the air" for a while, life intervening to keep me from my awaiting stack of books. So I have nothing to report except for the contents of that stack, along with the country that each is set in:
The Shadow Walker, by Michael Walters, Mongolia
Havana Lunar, by Robert Arellano, Cuba
Havana Fever, by Leonardo Padua, Cuba
Bamboo and Blood, by James Church, North Korea
In the Heat, by Ian Vasquez, Belize
Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation, by Martin Millar, U.K.
African Psycho, by Alain Mabanckou, Congo
Politics Noir, edited by Gary Phillips
Not necessarily in that order, and there are a few others as well. Any recommendations regarding which one I should get to first?

Psychological noir: Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza's Blackout

Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza's Blackout is, like the earlier 5 novels in the Inspector Espinosa series, a psychological mystery that is distinctive but also has substantial common ground with some current and classical crime fiction. The plot is reminiscent of Simenon's Maigret books (as is the interest in psychology); rather than doggedly pursue a criminal or an investigation, Espinosa meanders around it, paying at least as much attention to his extracurricular reading, his girlfriend, and his food, calling to mind Pepe Carvalho in Vazquez Montalban's fiction and Leonardo Padura's Mario Conde. Though Espinosa has a reliable team (the only policemen he trusts in a corrupt force), they are not thoroughly characterized (as are, for instance, Carvalho's crew or Montalbano's cops in the novels of Andrea Camilleri): appropriate enough in stories that are less about police procedure or mystery than about philosophical investigations (and it's obviously no accident that the Inspector is named after a classical philosopher). But the philosophy is never obtrusive--these are philosophical novels rather in the manner of Camus's Stranger, but also remaining thoroughly within a crime-novel tradition. The psychology of victims and perpetrators (and of his urban Brazilian culture) has always been Garcia-Roza's underlying interest, but as I recall, it's only in the two most recently translated books that psychology and psychologists are also part of the plot. In Blackout, a homeless, one-legged man is murdered on a hilly cul-de-sac late at night, near a house where a dinner party is going on. Espinosa wonders how the man on crutches even got up the hill, much less why anyone would have killed. him. Intertwined with his musings and the investigation is the story of an interior designer and his wife who were at the party: the designer is having troubling blackouts, including the night of the murder, and the wife is a psychoanalyst who is beginning to get frisky with some of her female patients. The plot doesn't have a neat conclusion (typical with Garcia-Roza), and when the plot seems to be heading in a predictable directly, the author has some surprises up his sleeve. Espinosa is basically an observer, but one who cares deeply about his city and its troubles, while also keeping his intellect alive with extracurricular as well as professional. Blackout is a thoughtful, slow-moving story--perhaps the perfect followup to the very fast and adventurous Girl Who Played with Fire, but also in its own way a lively story and a an insight into one of the world's liveliest cities and into the challenges of social interaction and the human mind.

Comments on The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson

So much has already been written in the blogosphere about The Girl Who Played with Fire, volume two in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, that I don't need to go into a lot of detail. But I do have a few comments. It's a book that doesn't get going, really, until around page 200, and it's repetitive and overstuffed. But it's still compelling and I began to wonder why, what the secrets of its appeal are. It has been extensively noted that the lead character, Lisbeth Salander, is fascinating and unique--but there's actually a good bit of common ground with other characters in fiction and fantasy (Carol O'Connell's Mallory is an example from crime fiction, and then there's Tank Girl, and Hellboy's Liz Sherman. That drift into fantasy and comics suggests one of the points I'm heading toward. But first, how does the bagginess of the novel relate to its popularity: Larsson is engaging in what has been called the "reality effect," piling on detail and repetition that seems irrelevant or not directly relevant to the story, but detail that gives a sense of a complete world that the reader has entered into--so complete that one almost has a sense of peripheral vision, detail beyond what our eye is picking up directly in the narrative. By the time we get to some plot elements that are actually pretty hard to swallow, we're already committed to the naturalism that Larsson has embedded us within. What Larsson is doing, I think, is using a crime fiction structure to bring an old-fashioned adventure tale into the realm of ordinary modern, urban life (the world reinforced by the reality effect). The structure of The Girl Who Played with Fire (even more than is the case with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a title that might have been more accurately translated as Men Who Hate Women) is at its basic level that of an Alexandre Dumas story (with elements of The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables--and even The Man in the Iron Mask), with some aspects of George Sand's more melodramatic novels as well as Sand's sexual politics. But the adventure is updated into the realm of journalism, research, police procedure, hacking, etc., rather than swordplay and dungeons (though there's some of that, at least in its modern version, as well)--plus there's even some romance, of a sort. Salander's black-and-white morality as well as the plainly evil nature of a good portion of the cast of characters is also reminiscent of Dumas and the adventure story. Larsson goes further, though, into fantasy and superhero comics and even Star Wars (I won't give that element away, but trust me, there's a distinctly Star Wars turn to the plot). Though I am not really susceptible to the appeal of fantasy and superheroes, I am, in fact, susceptible to the appeals of the old-fashioned adventure tale, as I suspect are a lot of people who like or don't like fantasy and comics. Larsson gives all of us something: a naturalistic crime story with fantasy elements, a morality-and-adventure story that's entirely contemporary, without (almost) any superpowers, and totally without metaphysics or theology. It's our world, but with swashbuckling (of a very contemporary sort) and even cliffhangers. I mentioned Mallory before, and O'Connell's novels do have something of the fantasy world about them, but in a more straightforward noir format. In my experience, the broader canvas and the nod to 19th-century adventure in particular are unique to Larsson. I assume that the epic winds its way through a different set of events in volume 3, before reaching some sort of resolution--but unless I start practicing my Swedish I'll have to wait until next year to find out (and it would probably take longer than that for me to get my Swedish reading skills up to the task).

Dublin noir by Arlene Hunt

Arlene Hunt's first novel, Vicious Circle (from 2004), is quite different from her subsequent Dublin detective series: Vicious Circle is more violent, has a more thoroughly split focus, and is definitely more noir. The novel doesn't at first offer a specific point of view or central character. Gradually, from the shifting focus on a murderer, his victims, several cops, some prostitutes, and a police raid on a brothel, several key characters emerge: garda Sergeant Michael Dwyer and his boss, Jim Stafford; Amanda Harrington (prostitute and dominatrix) and her business partner Marna; and a big-time pimp named Paul "Tricky" McCracker. A few other characters become important later on. As you can see, it's a complicated story, with two basic plotlines (a serial killer and a ruthless pimp) that criss-cross and then cross back again. Hunt skilfully controls the complex plot so that the reader is never in doubt as to what's happening, where, and to whom. The narrative moves along briskly among the several characters, with a lot of detail about the working lives of both the gardai and the hookers. The story picks up considerable speed as it moves along through various victims and several twists and turns, toward a wild ride in which everything seems resolved (but isn't, quite). There's also a sort of coda, a bit like the ending of the film Body Heat, with the ones-that-got-away not quite happy to have escaped--but Hunt uses the coda to clarify some plot elements that she has previously concealed from the reader in a way that doesn't quite adhere to the unwritten contract between reader and writer/narrator: We are in one character's head often enough that we may feel slightly deceived when we find that there was something quite different going on in the character's head, something we're not privy to. Still, Hunt's initial effort has a lot to recommend it--she doesn't lean on the serial killer plot too much (and like some other bloggers have said recently, I am really sick of the serial killer plot), the world of the prostitutes rings true without being salacious, the characters are vivid and believable, and the cop shop is drawn so clearly that we might have expected the setting to recur in a series quite different from the somewhat less dark series with which Hunt has continued her writing career. Her first effort is an interesting venture into the darker realms of narrative and of modern Dublin.

Cops 1977: Charlie Owen's Bravo Jubilee

Charlie Owen is a British Joseph Wambaugh, in a way. He tells stories about beat cops, many of them very funny and many of them very violent. Bravo Jubilee has a plot of sorts, concerning DCI Harrison's pursuit of a Turkish gangster, Sercan Ozdemir, who has been trying to set up shop on Harrison's turf in the dead-end town of Handstead (known by one and all as Horse's Arse), near Manchester. But the plot is only a framework on which to hang a series of comic-but-naturalistic vignettes not too different from Wambaugh's classic cop stories in novels and true crime books going back to 1971. Owen's history of Horse's Arse and its team of reprobate cops, which has reached 3 novels now, is embedded in the U.K. (specifically the Manchester region) and in the 1970s, recalling (as the book jacket proclaims) the reprobate (and sexist) cops of TVs Life on Mars (the original, not the U.S. version) at least as much as it recalls Wambaugh. The considerable comedy of Bravo Jubilee, leading up to the Queen's Jubilee, is offset by a grotesque form of torture and murder that owen dwells on frequently and gleefully, but all in all the book is more comedy than crime novel.

Swedish crime: Mari Jungstedt's The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle is the third of Mari Jungstedt's series set on Gotland, off the coast of Sweden, featuring detective Anders Knutas (as well as a number of running police characters, a television journalist, and his girlfriend--who was a witness in the first Knutas book but is now only related to the crimes through the journalist). The translation by Tiina Nunnally is graceful and elegant (as always), in a direct language well suited to the material. The novel begins with a sailor witnessing a primitive ritual as his ship passes Gotland, an incident that will be recalled only much later. Then a horse is found decapitated, puzzling everyone, and then a body of a young woman (whose brief career in archaeology we have been following through her eyes) is found hanging naked from a tree. The sensationalism of the events (and the ritual killings) are downplayed by the simple, straightforward style of the narrative, the short chapters, and the commonsense rationalism of the cops. Though it's a bit frustrating to watch how long it takes for the police to grasp what sort of ritual they've been witnessing (after the fact) in the murders, the flatfootedness of the investigation and the narrative save the story from becoming melodramatic or sensational. In fact, the only element of melodrama is a cliff-hanger that suspends one of the running characters (close to death? dead?), a plot element to be resolved in the next book, presumably. Jungstedt evokes here not only the island and its contemporary culture (as she has done in the earlier novels) but also the Viking past (through the archaeology connections to the murders, more than through the ritualized killings--again avoiding sensationalism). We get a good deal of the daily events in the lives of Knutas and the journalist (and his girlfriend--now ambivalent about all that has happened to her, good and bad, in the series so far), anchoring the narrative further in the ordinariness of life. The so-far-translated Swedish crime writers seem to veer toward a real-life plainness of style and plot, even with highly charged material--one of the aspects of Scandinavian crime writing that I most appreciate. There's a bit more local color in Jungstedt's books than in, for example, those of Helene Tursten or even Henning Mankell (I would actually hope in the future for more local color from some of the Swedish writers--Åsa Larsson's Kiruna, for example, is a setting I'd like to hear more about). I'd be hard pressed to rank the writers in the Scandinavian crime wave, but Jungstedt is certainly in the first rank. Less important than the book itself, but still of interest, is the series of covers for the U.S. editions, which are very effective without relying on the "branding" so often the case with series novels (better for once than the U.K. covers, which feature a coordinated set of island scenes).

Literary crime: Benjamín Prado's Snow is Silent

Snow is Silent, by Benjamín Prado (translated from the Spanish by Sam Richard), has elements of James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith, in a story that announces one crime in its opening paragraph, describes the planning of a robbery and the execution of a murder, moves on to a femme fatale, police interrogation, double cross, prison, and a final revelation. Plus there’s an element of the mystery-puzzle: the narrator announces at the beginning that he is one of the three main characters, one of whom will commit the crime, but he refuses to allow the reader to know which of them he is, concealing himself for the rest of the story in a third-person narrative that is omniscient with respect to all three of the characters, and promising to reveal who he is at the end. Sounds like a crime novel, or perhaps even a traditional mystery. And in a way it is, but it’s first of all a literary novel that’s just using the form of a crime nove. How can we make that distinction? I won’t say all, but a lot of literary novels are ultimately about writing rather than the story or the events and characters in the story. Snow is Silent is about, in a circuitous way, the writing of a novel about a novelist whose friends are helping him write a novel. Setting aside that very literary conceit, the Snow is Silent is most concerned with the construction of fiction: it follows a dictum of Modernism that a work of art is actually about itself, or more specifically about the inherent characteristics of a particular art form (the most famous statement of this sort is by Clement Greenberg, who said that modern painting is about the chief characteristic of that form of art: flatness). Fiction would then be about the chief characteristics of that form of art, the construction of a text or the writing in itself. Modernist writing, or literary fiction in the era after Modernism, can be both interesting and fun, but the very common, reflexive focus on the writing (and on writers) can be irritating for a reader who has come to a book for a story about something other than writing a story. Snow is Silent is clearly written, not in a turgid or academic style. Though it gets started on the crime story rather slowly, the narrative suddenly picks up speed, and moves rapidly through a cascade of events and revelations in short chapters that are almost like scenes in a film--except that the writing, and the conceit of the writing of a novel as the subject of the story, continues to be prominent. There is a certain reflexive quality in a lot of crime fiction: Ken Bruen is constantly referring to crime writers, the Spanish novel I reviewed here yesterday features a victim whose bookshelves are filled with crime novels, and the fact that his bedside table holds an Andrea Camilleri novel as well as a philosophical treatise by Hegel is a prominent plot point. But Prado’s book uses the crime form mostly to talk about about telling stories, and Bruen or Domingo Villar or John Harvey (and there are very many other examples) are referring to other crime writers as homage, as shorthand clues to the reader about the context of the story they’re telling, as a form of showing us who a character is by showing us what he/she reads, or as clever asides from a writer to the reader. The motive of the writer is in these cases more about telling a story than telling about writing. Is this a distinction that seems to hold up? Does it make Prado’s book sound more appealing or less? The cover of the U.K. edition, pictured here, is very effective in suggesting one strain of the plot (one man's obsession with a woman), but perhaps for that very reason misleading about the nature of the book (as well as suggesting that the relationaship goes a bit further than it actually does). Still, it's a great cover.

From Galicia: Water-blue Eyes, Domingo Villar

Descriptions that I had read of Domingo Villar's Water-blue Eyes (translated from Spanish by Martin Schifino and published in Arcadia's EuroCrime series) made it sound comic and low-key, and it is both those things, but it's also an interesting crime novel from an interesting part of the world, the city of Vigo in Galicia, Northwest Spain, a region with its own language and character. Villar's team of detectives, Inspector Leo Caldas and his assistant, Rafael Estévez, bears some resemblance to that of Barcelona's Alicia Bartlett-Gimenez (gender notwithstanding): an educated middle class boss and his crude sidekick, except that Estévez is larger and cruder than Bartlett-Gimenez's version, and he's also an outsider to Galicia, a device that Villar uses to much effect as he is frustrated repeatedly (to the point of violent comedy) by the regional trait of refusing to answer questions directly. The other key device (repeated almost to the point of becoming irritating) is the recognition of Caldas by everyone he meets as a radio personality (in fact, the novel begins with him in the studio enduring--rather than enjoying--his role as "Patrol on the Air" police spokesman). The mystery around which the story revolves is the gruesome death of a jazz musician (a unique murder weapon evidently chosen for its capacity to make everyone in the story (and a good portion of the readership) squirm. The story takes a familiar arc (the police treading water and getting nowhere, then suddenly making a discovery after another murder), but nothing is as direct or simple as it seems--in fact, Villar uses a trope that I haven't seen before: the police make mistakes because they miss blatant clues that the murderer has deliberately left for them, even though the investigators are in fact following the path the criminal wants them to take. The resolution to the mystery is, however, not in the end that unusual. But the light tone of the prose, the interesting if somewhat familiar central characters, the evocative imagery, and the effective immersion in Galician culture, gastronomy, and even city planning combine to make this a very worthwhile crime fiction read--and it also has a virtue much ignored these days: it's rather short, at about the length of classic crime fiction of the 1940s or '50s, a pleasant interlude rather than a long-term commitment, in terms of the reading experience. Spain is getting to be an interesting and varied source for crime fiction now, as well.

Ice Moon, by Jan Costin Wagner (Finnish/German)

I set aside Jan Costin Wagner's Ice Moon for a while, not too tempted by the descriptions I'd read (concerning alternating chapters from the cop's and the killer's point of view) or the fact that it's about Finland but written by a German. But Ice Moon is in fact worth the wait: it's an excellent crime novel in a style that is a bit like Henning Mankell, in the simple, almost flat, prose and the introspection of the troubled and lonely detective. But Wagner's prose is ultimately more poetic than Mankell's without sacrificing simplicity or directness. The detective is Kimmo Joentaa, whom we meet at the moment his wife is dying of cancer. His grief and gradual reconciliation with life is an arc of the novel that criss-crosses with two characters whose lives are deteriorating rapidly, the killer and the chief of detectives, Joentaa's boss. We do see through the killer's eyes, as well as several victims and other characters, but without the lurid voyeurism that we have seen in some serial killer books. And the points of view do not alternate: When more is happening in Joentaa's life and in the investigation, we get sequential chapters from the detective's point of view, with attention returning to the killer when more is happening there. The balance is much more effective than a simple alternation. Because we know what the killer is doing, we recognize the clues that the police are overlooking, and part of the book's tension is the anticipation of Joentaa's realization of what he is hearing and looking at: this isn't a mystery, it's part police procedural and part character study, with the murders and the resolution both growing organically from what we know about Joentaa, the killer, and other characters, and with visual and spoken/thought metaphors reinforcing the story and the lives of the people we meet. Ice Moon is compelling and complex, drawing the reader into worlds that are not alien but recognizable (perhaps seeming more normal because of the simple prose style), and all the more effective for the ordinariness of Joentaa's grief, his boss's erratic behavior, and the killer's descent into his private vortex. Compliments are due the translator, John Brownjohn, for a lucid and evocative translation from the German--I'd be interested to know, from German speakers who've read the original, whether the directness and flatness of the prose are an effective transformation of the style of the original German.