Janwillem Van de Wetering, The Maine Massacre

I recently heard an audio-book version (from Recorded Books) of Janwillem Van de Wetering's The Maine Massacre (though the image reproduced here is the cover of the SoHo Press edition of the novel, set in Maine rather than Amsterdam but featuring his usual cops (though Grijpstra is only in it briefly). The Commisaris, aging and a bit feeble, needs to go to a small town in Maine to help his sister, whose husband has just died. Grijpstra, worried about his boss, schemes to send Sergeant De Gier to the same town on an international police exchange program. The Dutch cops discover a series of murders flowing from issues of property development, preservation of nature, and class. There are frequently funny observations about the U.S. from a Dutch cop's perspective (Van de Wetering actually lived in Maine, at least part-time, in a small town, where he died, actually), and one of the pleasures of the audio version is hearing the reader, George Guidall, approximate the Dutch pronunciation of the cops' names (something I'd always wondered about--and Guidall seems to know something about Dutch pronunciation). Van de Wetering actually describes the Dutch "g" sound in the novel as sounding like someone had swallowed a fly and was trying to cough it up. De Gier's fashion sense is quite funny--his outfit is stuck firmly in 1979, when the book was published; Van de Wetering surely meant the sergeant's clothes to seem funny, especially in the wildly inappropriate context of the Maine woods, but they're funnier still for anyone who remembers the clothing of the era from the perspective of today (or anyone who is embarrassed by his own old photos dressed in the clothes of the era). The mystery aspect of the book is fairly typical of the series--I have to say, though, that I miss the atmosphere of Amsterdam, in which Grijpstra and De Gier swim comfortably, as opposed to the alien environment of small-town America. I've discovered that there is a fairly recent Dutch TV series based on the Grijpstra-De Gier books, by the same production team as had earlier produced a series based on the Baantjer books. Unfortunately the series is inaccessible here--though there is an old movie version (1979) of one of the books (Outsider in Amsterdam, I think) that IS available here (under various titles, mainly Fatal Error or Grijpstra & De Gier) because it's an early Rutger Hauer movie (he plays De Gier, appropriately enough). I've sent for a cheap DVD and if it's any good I'll review it here.

Varg Veum 2 (movie based on Gunnar Staalesen character)

Last night the MHZ Network in the U.S. ran the second of the Varg Veum movies based on Gunnar Staalesen's Norwegian crime novels. The title is Sleeping Beauty (originally titled Tornerose, which I think is in fact the Norwegian name for Sleeping Beauty--who was called Briar Rose in in the English translation of the Grimm tale, before Disney got to her). This one develops Veum's character a bit further (by exposing him to corpses, middle-class families, and gangsters), plus the girlfriend he established a bit of a relationship with at the end of the first film reappears (but it seems, from the plot, as if she won't be a regular in the series). The relationship between Veum and a senior cop is also developed a bit further, extending their antipathy to new levels. Sleeping Beauty's plot is a bit over-determined, including murder, incest, pedophilia, drugs, runaways, child prostitution, sex among neighbors, homosexuality (considered by a teenager's father to be worse than his drug abuse), insider trading, organized crime, police stakeouts, attempted matricide, and a pair of broken marriages (and I may have forgotten some plotlines by now)--but the 90-minute film doesn't seem overstuffed and the story moves along at a fast but not frenetic pace. And Bergen looks more pleasant (with its bay, hills, old quarter, charming center city apartments, and spectacular upper-class houses), though almost as cold, as in the first Veum film. The series is a bit more action oriented than the various incarnations of the Wallander series, but at the same time, Veum is a more complex character than Wallander: Veum has had a career change from social work to private detective, both with an emphasis on aiding children, and he's alternately hard-boiled and vulnerable. He does share with Wallander a certain lack of fashion (or even grooming) sense, though: Veum is taller and thinner than the 3 Wallanders I've seen, but his stubbly beard is more trendy--though his long, perpetually dirty-looking hair brings down his "look" a bit. I'm not sure how many more of the Veum films MHZ is running, but it looks like there are 6 that were produced for Norwegian TV: Here's hoping we get them all, and more in the future (maybe we'll see what summer in Bergen is like?).

M.S. Power and The Stalker's Apprentice

For forgotten-book Friday: Rob Kitchin's recent, highly praised police procedural The Rule Book is not the first book to propose a series of murders that follow rules set forth in a book (though Kitchin's may be the first in which the murderer is also the author of the book). It's a common enough theme, and there's another Irish writer who has used it two novels and a third that is a sequel to one of the first two. Nathan Crosby's Fan Mail, by M.S. Power (whose brilliant Childred of the North trilogy has been mentioned here several times) is a combination of the book theme with a Dick Francis plot (though Francis should have only hoped to write as well as Power). The novel concerns a serial killer novel set in the horse-racing world in England; the author-narrator is dismayed to receive letters announcing that the letter-writer is using the novel as a template for his own series of murders. The plot is conventional enough, and the book is best in its comic elements and in the interplay among its very well-drawn characters.
I've just finished Power's The Stalker's Apprentice, which is about a "reader" at a London publishing house who comes upon the manuscript for a novel of multiple murder and begins using it as the model for his own spree. The Stalker's Apprentice (which was made into a TV movie a couple of years ago) is very different from Power's Fan Mail book not only because of its setting in London rather than the racing world, but also because there's some ambiguity about whether the writer of the manuscript is manipulating the main character (who is also the narrator for about half the novel) into committing the murders. I had actually begun to tire of the killer's narrative until I reached the second section of the novel, which (along with alternating parts of the final section) focuses on Inspector Inspector Birt and Sergeant Wilson, the detecties in pursuit of the killer. The cops are interesting and quirky, and for me the police procedural opened the story out of the claustrophobic but oddly affectless world of the killer into a more involving tale. The tension builds as the story moves toward a final murder that is implied in the manuscript (and is the basis of the cops' theory of the crimes), but that killing becomes part of the devious interrelationships of killer, writer, and cops rather than a direct element of the narrative. The ambiguity of the ending implies a sequel--and there is one (it's on my tbr pile), Dealing with Kranze. I don't know whether Power planned the sequel from the beginning or wrote it to capitalize in the success of The Stalker's Apprentice, but it promises to take the story in interesting directions. Power has also written several other books that are, in one way or another, crime novels. His first book, Hunt for the Autumn Clowns, is a bizarre but frequently very funny rural Gothic tale of a slow-witted boy and his Irish-Faulkerian-sexualized environment. There are a couple of murders, but the pleasure in reading the book comes from the eloquent narrative and its twisted logic. Power wrote at least one other police procedural, Vengeance (which I had looked for for years and only recently found), also on my tbr pile, and one other Gothic tale, Bridie and the Silver Lady, which turns the spooky fairy tale on its head (the pubescent girl is the monster rather than the monster's prey). I was led into the search for Power's crime books by the powerful experience of reading Children of the North, but his other books are of various sorts and though always interesting a bit uneven. Clowns is funny and horrifying, in something of the same way as Patrick McCabe's Butcher Boy (though the books are quite different); Power's Come the Executioner, is very like a post-Cold War spy novel or thriller, with the setting of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; Fan Mail is a fairly conventional mystery novel; Bridie is a disturbing tale of psychology and supernatural visitation; and Stalker combines some of the elements of all of the above, along with a chilling portrait of an attractive, upper-middle-class English sociopath or two. What they all have in common is an attention to character and a style that varies from lucid to comic to startling. Two questions about movies: has anyone seen the film of The Stalker's Apprentice? And has anyone seen (or does anyone remember) the TV film made from a Bill James's Harpur & Iles book? I think the film was called "Harpur & Iles."

Johan Theorin, The Darkest Room

In The Darkest Room, Swedish crime writer Johan Theorin skillfully brings together several disparate elements: a series of ghost stories, a thriller, a mystery, and a series of historical vignettes about the various ways to die in a cold, unforgiving environment. Like Theorin’s first novel, Echoes from the Dead, In the Darkest Room (whose original Swedish title is Nattfåk, meaning “night blizzard”) is set on the Swedish island of Öland, in the Baltic sea, south of Gotland. The first story evoked the towns and the prarie-like Alvar, and the second evokes the houses and lighthouses along the eastern coast of the island. The characters are as disparate as the plotlines: a young Stockholm family moving into an old lighthouse-keeper’s manor house with a plan to renovate it; a B&E crew made up of pair of meth-head, violent brothers and a local guy who’s only in it as a cure for boredom; a rookie cop and an amateur detective who lives in an old-folks home (that last character is a holdover from the first novel, and his appearance is telegraphed by an early encounter between the thieves and a ship-in-a-bottle). There are also the ghosts of sailors lost at sea, a young wife, a junkie sister, and various previous residents of the manor house—we meet the ghosts in a running narrative that turns out to be a confessional of sorts, as well as in stories from island residents, spooky presences encountered by various characters, the thieving brothers’ Ouija Board, and physical evidence in the house and its barn. Echoes from the Dead updated folktale motifs, and In the Darkest Room does the same (especially with one overarching metaphor related to the English title that becomes actualized in the second half of the book), but emphasizes both the unwilling dead and the weight of history. The novel is interesting from the beginning, naturalistic but spooky as well as well written, but as the threads of the tale begin to converge, along with the Christmas blizzard of the original Swedish title, the pace picks up to that of a thriller (and the translator, Marlaine Delargy, deserves a lot of credit for maintaining that pace in lucid English)—you’ll find yourself ripping through the almost 400 pages. But the climax is reached more in terms of character than violence (though there is violence), as in almost the style of Elmore Leonard rather than a standard thriller-writer’s climactic violence. But what the novel leaves the reader with (even after a coda-like ending that brings the book back toward the mystery genre) is a sense of the continuity of human dwelling and dying in a fully realized, particular place. And where a number of Scandinavian novels have dealt with the new immigtion problems, Theorin looks toward a different kind of “intruder” into the calm, uniform surface of Swedish life: the continuing presence of those who are gone but not quite forgotten. I’m pasting in three covers again, U.S., U.K., and Sweden, two of which offer (naturally enough) takes on the storm-and-lighthouse motif and one, the U.S., a scene of snow, forest, and glowing redness of dawn or dusk in the far north (another, less obvious motif in the book). Graphically, I like the Swedish and U.S. ones better than the U.K. one, which also emphasizes the sea a bit more than the others.

Karin Fossum, The Water's Edge

Karin Fossum likes to shake up the formula for her crime fiction (and for crime fiction generally) in her Inspector Sejer novels. The latest to be translated into English, The Water’s Edge (Den som elsker noe annet in the original Norwegian, literayy "he who loves something else), is no exception. A normal pattern for a crime novel (as for a crime TV show like Law & Order) is for a witness to discover a body at the beginning, and then the witness isn’t heard from again (except possibly as the subject of an interview). Fossum sets up a conflict between the husband and wife who discover a pedophile’s victim at the beginning of The Water’s Edge, and then carries that conflict forward through the rest of the book, as they argue about what they witnessed and how it has affected them (there’s even a hint of something else at the very end, akin to the end of Fossum’s Don’t Look Back, but I won’t telegraph that detail).
There’s a bit of the usual investigation, feature Sejer and his partner, the younger Skarre, but a large part of the narrative that focuses on them is taken up with an ongoing discussion between them of what pedophilia signifies about the perpetrator and his social/familial context. There’s also quite a bit of text devoted to the victims’ families and to the killer, and the pedophile becomes almost a sympathetic character, in a twisted way. The result of the combination of the more meditative, interior monologues and the dialogues between the cops and the glimpses of the married couple's daily life is a splintered image, a kaleidoscope or jigsaw puzzle that in the end emphasizes the daily tragedies of normal life as much or more than the awful crimes.
Fossum's ending (really there are plural endings, as each thread of the plot ends separately) emphasizes both the awfulness of the ordinary and what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, carrying forward the dark, brooding story beyond the end of the novel and into the reader's life--a most effective ending for a noir crime novel. Another query about covers: The U.S. and U.K. covers above are very similar, but I like the graphic and foggy quality of the U.K. one better myself (that's the one in the middle of the post). The Norwegian cover is much more explicit about the crime at the beginning of the novel--perhaps too explicit? Or are the English-language publishers afraid of visually addressing the pedophilia theme on a cover?

Delhi Noir

On the occasion of a radio appearance by Hirsh Sawhney (editor of Delhi Noir, Akashic's new book in its international noir series) along with blogger extraordinaire Peter Rozovsky, I'm posting a review of Delhi Noir today. Check Peter's blog, Detectives Beyond Borders, for details of the radio show, which should be available on the Wisconsin Public Radio website as a live feed or an archived audio. I don't know how Akashic does it--they find writer/editors all over the world that know just who to solicit new noir stories from in a given city. Delhi Noir has the usual high quality of the series along with an unusual continuity of tone (beyond just the setting) in the stories, so that the book reads almost like an episodic novel rather than a collection. Part of the tone is the language: the speakers in these stories (and there's a lot of dialogue) are polyglot, native speakers in a jumble of the native languages of Delhi and India, and there's a helpful glossary at the back of the book--though the stories so skilfully weave the non-English terms and the slang into the dialogue that a reader usually does not need to break the rhythm of the story to check the glossary. The overarching motif is the conflict of rich and poor, new wealth and old social practices, in the city of Delhi today. Sawhney makes the point in his introduction that Delhi doesn't have the tradition of crime fiction that exists in some other Indian cities, perhaps (says Sawhney) because of the character of the capital city's denizens, who aren't interested in the cruelty and inequity that might burst the bubble of their booming rise to capitalist or bureaucratic bliss. And cruelty and inequity are here in this collection in abundance, ameliorated by comedy, revenge (particularly in the science-fiction crime tale that ends the collection), and frequently a melancholy acceptance of the way things are at the bottom of the social structure. Rather than singling out individual writers (some still living in Delhi, some elsewhere in India, and some in the Indian diaspora) for praise, for now I will just advise you to get this collection asap, whether you're interested in India, international noir, crime fiction, or just good writing. Akashic scores again with Delhi Noir.

Norwegian crime novel translated in Italian film

Girl by the Lake (La ragazza del lago), Andrea Molaioli's award-winning first film as director in 2007 was an adaptation of Karin Fossum's 5th Inspector Sejer novel (the first to be translated into English), Don't Look Back. The translation to Italy (and to film) is surprisingly effective. The evocation of the lake (site of the murder) and the town in Fossum's novel were very vivid, and Molaioli's visual equivalent is entirely coherent with the original, transformed from a small village in Norway to a village in northern, Alpine Italy, near Udine. Inspector Sejer becomes Commissario Sanzio (played with understated brilliance by Toni Servillo), but is the same tall, glum, terse policeman. The plot is simplified and changed in several significant ways without taking anything away from the dark, emotional truth of the story. And Fossum's brilliant, misdirecting beginning is preserved perfectly. The visual storytelling of the film, alternating with the dialogue of the police investigation, evokes the story in (of course) an entirely different way that Fossum's novel, but the directness of the translation points out the visual quality of Fossum's own storytelling. And the dialogue, against that background, emphasizes an essential, almost metafictional quality of the police procedural as a genre: storytelling is the subject and the medium of the form. Everyone in Girl by the Lake is telling a different story, and the police keep adapting their own version of the story as facts become known. The viewer (or reader) becomes tangled in all the stories, straight through to a final resolution (or approximation of a resolution). Girl by the Lake is a very quiet cop movie, suited to both the setting and this particular story: a lyrical evocation of dreadful illness and tragic events.

SoHo Crime, Bitter Lemon Press, and Sergio Bizzio's Rage

SoHo Crime in the U.S. and Bitter Lemon Press in the U.K. are two of the leading independent publishers of international crime fiction in English. Their lists overlap a bit (both publish Garry Disher) and both publish novels that are detective-oriented and books that are more in the line of psychological novels (thrillers isn't really an adequate word), though SoHo's list tilts toward the detectives and Bitter Lemon's list tilts toward the psychologicals. The newly translated (by Amanda Hopkinson) Argentine novel Rage by Sergio Bizzio (from Bitter Lemon) is definitely in the latter category. The cover announces that it's to be made into a movie by Guillermo del Toro, and that's no surprise: the claustrophobic and high-concept novel hearkens back to early-20th-century expressionist writing in several ways. It's focused on the working class (as many of the expressionist writers were), it includes a hallucinatory (though also ordinary) architecture as its primary setting), and its effect is rather more like reading a ghost story or a fairy tale than reading a crime novel. In some ways it's a combination of the Phantom of the Opera and one of Francis Carco's gritty novels of lower-class Paris. There's also a hint of gender confusion in a couple of spots, one being that the primary character, José Maria, is most often called Maria. He's a construction worker who falls in love with a maid, Rosa, who works in a mansion near his current construction site. The novel actually begins with a suggestion of pornography, Maria suggesting a sex act that Rosa is reluctant to perform, in one of their rare moments together in a room-by-the-hour hotel. the tone shifts away from porn, though, when Maria goes on the run, pursued for the murder of his boss; instead of running way he runs in: he hides in the attic of the house where Rosa lives and works, but without telling her. The rest of the book narrates the scenes and sounds that Maria witnesses as he sneaks up and down staircases, through hallways of upper stories, and occasionally down to the ground floor, spying on Rosa and her employers and occasional visitors. The crimes that occur in the house, including rape and murder, are a less important aspect of the novel's texture than Maria's daily effort to survive undetected. As I said, it's easy to imagine del Toro's attraction for the story, given that director's interest in and skill with labyrinthine tales (both in scene and psychology). Bizzio's evocation of Maria-the-phantom's scurrying journeys and his glimpsed and overheard narrative is vivid, though I did find my attention lapsing now and then; it is, after all, a very high concept story--you either buy into the conceit or you don't; you're either in or out, there's no halfway. The same was true to some extent with some other Bitter Lemon books, Blackout (by Gianluca Morozzi, also to be made into a movie), for instance--though Blackout leads up to a plot twist while Rage moves forward with a kind of inexorable rhythm toward an almost inevitable conclusion foretold by a pun or double meaning in the original Spanish title that I can't explain without giving too much away. I'd definitely be interested in other books by Bizzio (and in the del Toro film), though Rage (in spite of the murder and mayhem) isn't the kind of crime novel I usually look for. Thanks are due to Bitter Lemon for stretching my reading horizons as well as for the high quality of their entire crime list.

Gunnar Staalesen's Varg Veum

I had a chance to see the first of the new TV films based on Gunnar Staalesen's series about Bergen, Norway private detective Varg Veum (on the MhZ Network, a public TV station in the U.S. that specializes in non-U.S. programming, mostly news). Three of Staalesen's novels have been translated, though a couple of them have been out of print for a while, and a 4th is about to be released by Arcadia in the U.K. The film is an interesting portrait of Bergen and of an unconventional private detective: Veum is a former social worker, specializing in children's cases. As a detective, he also frequently works on cases involving children. So while he's a tough and hard-boiled investigator on the one hand, he's also a principled and socially conscious citizen and professional (the social consciousness comes through a bit clearer in the novels). The actor playing Veum, Trond Espen Seim, is quite good, showing the character's melancholy determination without overdoing it. The rest of the characters, business professionals and cops, are a foil for Veum's seedy persona (and the cast is quite effective, in a European style of acting--fairly low-key). The story involves a missing child, a corporation that, while undergoing a generational change of leadership, is also involved in dirty deals. How the missing child is related to the corporation's greed is a complex trail that Veum gradually unravels, while getting abused verbally and physically by cops and corporate thugs. It will be interesting to see how the Veum series develops, but this first entry is quite effective in updating the private detective while also providing a new model for a detective's background and motivation. And the series also should remind us that what seems like a gap between Sjöwall and Wahlöö and the current Scandinavian crime wave (beginning with Wallander) was in fact a busy time for the crime genre in the Scandinavian countries--Staalesen's first crime novel appeared in 1975 and Varg Veum first appeared in English translation in 1986. This is an excellent and unique series that should not be forgotten in our appreciation of Scandinavian crime fiction's current worldwide popularity. And one benefit of the availability of the new film is that a reader finally gets some idea as to how "Varg Veum" should be pronounced...

Rob Kitchin, The Rule Book

I rarely read reviews of a book before reviewing it myself, but Rob Kitchin's new Irish serial killer novel breaks so many rules of crime writing (an irony perhaps intended by Kitchin in his title and the books premise: The Rule Book) that I went looking for other opinions before trying to formulate my own. The most useful review was by Critical Mick (see his review here), who remarks on Kitchin's rule-breaking style as well as other aspects of the book. I fully agree with Mick's praise of the book's success in pulling in the reader, as well as his analysis of Kitchin's twists on the serial killer genre in film and fiction. I also agree with one of his criticisms of the book (that there are a number of proofreading errors that may not be the author's fault) but disagree with a couple of others. Mick says that the police procedural method is followed too closely and accurately, perhaps confusing the reader with the numerous detectives' names and activities: I for one am a big fan of the police procedural as a genre, and Kitchin gives us an excellent version, emphasizing not the lurid crimes committed by the serial killer but the sometimes plodding pursuit of the killer in the detectives' meticulous methodology. I also disagree with Mick that the setting is evoked with perhaps too much realism. I haven't spent that much time in Ireland, and have never been to Maynooth or some of the other particular settings, but I found Kitchin's descriptions of these places evoked a real Ireland, a real picture of the place that formed an excellent "frame" for the fictional events. Kitchin's background in geography and mapping provided not only some conceptual elements in the plot and action, but perhaps also the background for his skill in sketching out his portrait of Ireland (and like Mick, I appreciate that the places in The Rule Book are not fictionalized equivalents, but actual places we might either recognize or visit. Mick mentions that Kitchin breaks a big crime-novel-plot rule in his ending (which can't be described without giving too much away): I can admire Kitchin's daring and his accomplishment in this particular case while still being a bit frustrated by it. You'll see what I mean when you read the book--which I highly recommend you do. The story follows Detective Superintendant Colm McEvoy's dogged pursuit of a serial killer who leaves behind a "rule book" that demonstrates his genius and lays out a plan (partly in code) of 7 murders in 7 days. That "rule book" provides the title and the structure, without overwhelming the narrative drive, mostly maintained in the dialogue among the cops (sometimes professional, sometimes emotional). As the killer progresses through his plan, the police have immense difficulty in keeping up with him, much less identifying or catching him. In a few instances, the killer is lucky, but in most cases, his rules (not always followed exactly) are proved in his acting out of them. McEvoy is frustrated not only by the killer but by an ambitious subordinate and back-stabbing superiors in the Gardai. He is also hampered by his own emotional and physical state (he's a wreck, in the aftermath of his wife's death, leaving him as a single father to a 12-year old girl). McEvoy's turmoil is believable and not overwrought, and the dialogue among all the police is also natural, not strained or over-written. The story is told in the third person mostly from McEvoy's point of view with occasional short segments from the point of view of the killer and that of a couple of the other cops, plus one of the victims. That focus on McEvoy tightens the drama without overly limiting the reader's perspective. And the story is tight indeed, moving along at an electric pace that never lets up. Kitchin's skill in maintaining that pace as well as the naturalism of the characters and setting is quite impressive in a first novel. A sequel is implied in the text (and Kitchin mentions he's working on the third McEvoy novel in an interview by Gerard Brennan here), and I'm hoping the sequel doesn't take long to arrive.

Declan Hughes, All the Dead Voices

The fourth of Declan Hughes's Ed Loy crime novels is just coming out the U.S. now. The novel brings together the uncertain future of the failed Celtic Tiger and the deadly past of the Irish Troubles. The Troubles lurk in the background of any contemporary Irish crime novel (certain elements that had used crime to finance their violent actions are simply continuing their career as criminals now), but the IRA, INLA, etc., figure in All the Dead Voices more than in the first three Ed Loy novels. And it's a bleak picture that Hughes draws, of gangsters and good citizens that share a common violent past but have moved on in disparate ways, and of the new violence of an urbanized Dublin. As always, though, Hughes grounds his story in that most violent and turbulent of human institutions, the family. Loy is hired by two families in distress: a gangster who has fled to Greece asks him to look after his younger brother, now a celebrated footballer; and a young mother asks him to find out who murdered her father years before (her mother's lover had been jailed for the offense but released on a technicality, but the Gardai believe he did it and refuse to reopen the case).

The two cases inevitably intertwine, as Loy moves back and forth around Dublin among the cops and the gangsters, often becoming the subject of "unwanted attention" from both. There are a lot of characters (and a lot of murders), sometimes a little hard to keep up with the plot, but Hughes skilfully reiterates the story through Loy's overlapping interrogations of the suspects and victims--if the reader momentarily forgets what's going on, the narrator (whether Loy himself or the non-Loy-narrated sections concerning the gangster who hired him and a family in Armagh 20 years earlier) will set you straight. The plot goes off in some unexpected directions: just when you think you're headed for a predictable or operatic crescendo, Hughes undercuts that expectation with casual violence or the withdrawal of an expected twist. And at the end, amid the nearly Jacobean mayhem, there's a hint of redemption for Loy and those around him.

I see that Loy is off to his former home-in-exile, L.A., in the next book, and into a serial-murder plot that will threaten that very redemption--but we'll have to wait until next year for that. A word about covers--I'm pasting three images of the U.K. and U.S. covers as well as a Harper-Collins cover that apparently was rejected but still appears on the publisher's website (as H-C is the parent of Wm. Morrow, the titular U.S. publisher). In the U.K., someone (Loy?) is headed into a tunnel and in the U.S. released version he's headed over a bridge. Whereas the U.K. cover looks like a film poster ("Ed Loy in..."), the U.S. version is cluttered with text (blurbs and award announcements). All in all I like the unreleased U.S. version best (the one at the top of this blog post), though it misspells John Connolly's name in the blurb on that one, and there's a bit of Gothic type that doesn't quite work. Thoughts, anyone?

David's Revenge, by Hans Werner Kettenbach

The two crime novels by Hans Werner Kettenbach that have been translated so far (both translated by Anthea Bell and published by Bitter Lemon Press) have a carefully controlled point of view. In the new one, David's Revenge, we see everything through the eyes of a middle-aged schoolteacher who is married to a lawyer and has a teen-aged son who is an incipient skinhead. But Christian does more than narrate: he tells himself stories, spins rationalizations of his behavior and that of others, wraps himself up in his story-inspired notions of what is happening around him. The result is a particularly claustrophobic paranoid thriller, brought down to human (rather than global) level within a bourgeois German household. Regardless of this domestic focus, the plot is political: a post-Cold War tale of (possible) spies and collaborators in the newly united Germany and the newly liberated Georgia, thrust then (as again recently) into bloody civil war based on the country's former and current relations with Russia. The novel begins with a letter from Georgia from a translator, David Ninoshvili, whom Christian had met at a conference in Tbilisi a few years earlier, and who is now announcing that he's arriving in Germany to stay in Christian's guest room while pitching Georgian literature to German publishers. Christian remembers David and especially David's wife, with whom Christian had almost had an affair. The whole story turns on what David might or might not have known about the interrupted affair, and on who David might actually be now and have been then: a KGB or Georgian intelligence officer who lured a German into a compromising position? A jealous husband bent on revenge? Christian is quite a different character from the narrator of Black Ice, Kettenbach's previously translated novel, who was a bit slow intellectually. Christian is an intellectual and a seasoned high school teacher and drama instructor. Rather than piecing together the puzzle of what might have happened, as in Black Ice, Christian evolves through a series of reinterpretations of David and of his own wife and son (whose relationships to David change through the course of the novel), through the narration of events and through the stories (told in the present tense, as we would tell a joke--"a dog walks into a bar...", at least in English) that Christian's interior monologue repeatedly lapses into. As with Black Ice, though, the murder and mayhem are all off-stage, and Christian only catches glimpses of these events second-hand, through the TV and newspapers. Christian is an ordinary guy, caught up (or not) in international intrigue and suddenly fascinated by the history and literature of Georgia and its relationship to Germany. What Kettenbach is up to is not a Le Carre sort of thing, not even the post-Cold War Le Carre. His novel brings down the big-issue politics, the still active intelligence apparatus, and murderous crimes to the living room, to now, to the schoolroom, and to the bedroom and to the interior of an ordinary man's dialogue with himself.

Matt Beynon Rees, The Samaritan's Secret

Matt Beynon Rees is on track to construct a "Comédie Humaine" for Palestine in his series featuring Bethlehem school teacher and amateur detective Omar Yussef Sirhan. Volume 1 introduced us to Palestinian Bethlehem, Volume 2 to Gaza, and Volume 3 to both the dangerous city of Nablus and to the remnant of the Samaritan culture, which is partly based near there on the community's sacred mountain. In all three novels Rees demonstrates the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, the destructive competition between Fatah and Hamas, and the pervasive and oppressive (mostly offstage) presence of the Israeli army. The key problem of The Samaritan's Secret is the Hamas-Fatah violent competition for supremacy, with considerable energy also around the contrast of wealth and poverty and the tension between stricter and more liberal (or even secular) versions of Islam. In Nablus with his family for the wedding of Sami, a policeman we encountered in the previous novel, Omar Yussef becomes involved in the increasingly complex circumstances of the murder of a young Samaritan man (and we learn a great deal about his obscure culture). The strength of Omar Yussef (and also his Achilles heal, in terms of "getting along" in Palestine, and in Nablus in particular) is his empathy and humanity: he refuses to turn away from the Samaritan man's tragedy or to look away from the corruption that lies beneath not only the murder but daily life in the city. Omar Yussef is the furthest thing from a hard-boiled detective: he feels too much of the pain of individual victims in his splintered, unstable society. It is precisely the contrast he provides to the indeed very dark, hard-boiled, noir (whatever term you choose) environment in which he lives that gives the series its edge. His friend the Bethlehem police chief not only is cynical about politics and religion, he can casually kill a man for what seems to be convenience. Only Omar Yussef is troubled by that sort of thing, and even he remains loyal to his friend, fully aware of his character and his past (even more ruthless) deeds. The mystery is solved in an almost archaeological fashion, with numerous missteps and red herrings along the way (Omar Yussef is no ratiocinative detective, he's more intuitive and impulsive, a character trait that constantly troubles his family). He is only momentarily chastened when his actions endanger his favorite granddaughter, who has insisted on going out for a local sweet (which sounds indeed cloyingly sweet). Rees give us a couple of chase sequences that are nonetheless exciting for Omar Yussef's lack of speed and agility--and are not simply amusing or "cute" as has been the case with some elderly detectives over the years of the genre. There is humor (as always in this series) but without condescending to his characters--it is their own humor, which we are privileged to share in, their comic response in the face of the despair and terror of their seemingly endless situation. Rees provides insight and also a satisfying crime story.

Death in the New Republic, by David Dison

There’s a blurb provided by the publisher of David Dison’s Johannesburg crime novel, Death in the New Republic, comparing the book to Jeffrey Archer’s thrillers. I’m afraid I don’t get the comparison, which would be at the least very misleading concerning Dison’s subtle, complex story of betrayal, murder, disgrace, and solidarity in the politics of the new South Africa. Dison’s narrative progresses in alternating short sentence fragments, long complex sentences, and interior monologues, with frequent Johannesburg slang and bursts of Afrikaans and Sesotho, the African language most familiar to Dison’s hero, Jerome Michael Nossel, known to everyone as Nossel. The complexity of the text echoes the complexity of the story and its political background. I recently reviewed an older book by Gillian Slovo, The Betrayal, written just as the apartheid regime was ending. Slovo drew some of the faultlines in the anti-apartheid struggle (and the apartheid regime itself) that extend and branch in various directions in Dison’s story. There are the people Dison calls “struggelistas,” former activists who seem not to have moved on from the struggle; the black ascendancy (a new middle class, a few wealthy plutocrats, and the powers-that-be of the government; the new immigrants, living at the fringes of the society; unrepentant white supremacist cops operating independently within the new police force; and others who have accommodated one way or another to the new reality of the country. Nossel himself, whose Jewish family has been in South Africa for many generations, moved from the struggle and exile into the national intelligence service, only to be disgraced and suspended because of a trap laid for him by forces within the government. He is called upon to help a government minister’s family when their son is about to be arrested for drug possession and dealing, and then he stumbles upon a murder. Neither the white narco-cops who want to arrest the minister’s son nor the black cops who show up to investigate the murder seem to be completely above board, and Nossel becomes involved in intertwined plots that ultimately reveal not only the perpetrator of the murder but also the hopes and despairs of current South Africa, from AIDS and corruption to democracy and equality. There’s a negative review of Death in the New Republic in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper by Kwanele Sosibo (see here) and a positive one by Maureen Isaacson in Crime Beat @ Book Southern Africa (see here), demonstrating a healthy range of opinion in Dison's home country concerning a book that is ambitious in its reach both in political and crime-novel terms. For myself, I found it to be a subtle and moving story that in which the main character investigates his own character as doggedly as he pursues the truth concerning the murder and the other criminal acts in the book. Death in the New Republic is very different from other recent South African crime novels, closer to Slovo's The Betrayal than to the novels of Deon Meyer or Margie Orford. Surely that's an encouraging sign of healthy diversity in the crime fiction of a country with both great hopes and great troubles.

Brian McGilloway, Bleed a River Deep

The blurbs for Brian McGilloway's third Inspector Devlin novel, Bleed a River Deep, suggest a story that in lesser hands would have been a generic thriller: an American right-wing former Senator (and former IRA supporter) arrives in Ireland for the opening of a new gold mine run by an Irish-American company, and in spite of the senator's own protection and the efforts of Devlin and the gardai, the American celebrity is shot at. Shades of international incident and conspiracy? Not in this case. The hints of sensational thriller plot are only small elements, just some of the threads among others that focus on illegal immigrants, cross-border smuggling, and eco-activism, all in along the border of Northern Ireland and Donegal on the verge of the Celtic Tiger's collapse. And rather than a supercop, Devlin is constantly in hot water when his mistakes make things worse for the immigrants, the gardai, his old friends, and himself. His new boss is on his case, and he gets suspended early on in the book; for a good deal of the story he's acting more like a private detective than a copy (almost as if McGilloway is preparing a career change for him). It is Devlin's empathy and conscience that make the books interesting and give them depth beyond the average police procedural (and Devlin's home life is shockingly normal, for a crime-novel cop). The ccomplications of crimes and criminals crossing back and forth between police jurisdictions adds particular interest, taking advantage of historical tensions as well as more normal jurisdictional disputes. McGilloway is unafraid of events that change his cast of characters (as has been seen in previous novels) or of unresolved plots. Bleed a River Deep's conclusion is satisfying to the reader without being satisfactory for Devlin and a number of other characters. McGilloway deserves the attention he has been getting for his Devlin novels: he's stretching the boundaries of the crime novel without condescending to the genre, and his novels deserve even wider recognition among crime fans and general readers. A question for those who know better than I what's happening in the translations of the new Irish crime wave: are readers outside the English-speaking world getting access to the fine crime fiction of McGilloway, Declan Hughes, Declan Burke, Gene Kerrigan, etc?

New Finnish Noir

It is perhaps unfair that I'm reviewing Harkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall right after reading and reviewing Garry Disher's Blood Moon. In contrast to the Australian novel, the characters in Sipila's Finnish police procedural are rather flat. The plot is very good, in the hard-boiled, no nonsense tradition (more on that in a minute) but the characters are so little delineated that it's frequently hard to tell one from the other (hence the list of characters in the front of the book, which is helpful and perhaps necessary). Most of the cops simply blend together, except for Detective Lieutentant Takamäki and undercover cop Suhonen, who are at the center of the story and are boss-and-subordinate but other than that little differentiated from one another, despite some amusing banter among the cops, as well as collegial irritation about some of Suhonen's tactics. The same is true of the bad guys, who seem to be little differentiated except by categories: thug, prison gangster, narc, boss, and within categories they can be hard to tell apart. As I said, perhaps Disher's skill at making characters (even minor ones) come idiosyncratically alive proves to be an unfortunate contrast when considering Sipila's novel. The flatness of the characters actually suits the plot fairly well, reinforcing the noir/pulp quality of the book (and that's not meant in a derogatory way, I like noir/pulp fiction). This book could be an updated version of those straight-to-paperback tales of the 1950s, Jim Thompson included. The mystery aspect of the plot is undercut about 2/3 of the way into the story when the reader is informed by the narrator about who the killers are, long before the cops figure it out. Again, that's not really a problem for me--one of the most interesting aspects of the story is a double-dealing plotline concerning a mid-level gangster who's ripping off his boss and covering his ass--one of the most interesting characters and plotlines, and one that requires the mystery aspect to be set aside. The plot winds around, coming back to the seemingly unrelated prologue just as the story picks up speed and everything comes together for an effective twist-and-turn conclusion something like Elmore Leonard’s realistically quirky plots, but at the same time reminiscent of the comic mayhem of the amazing Finnish TV series, RAID. The best part of the book, though, is its palpable sense of the winter cityscape of Helsinki and the street-level history of the city (such as a corner where a famous cop-killing happened). For that alone, I can recommend the book, though it’s pulp-y, plot-heavy quality puts it in a different category of the fleshier novels. Sipila and his brother have set up a publishing house, Ice Cold Crime, to bring his own and other Finnish writers to English-speaking audiences—including, I understand, something by Harri Nykänen, the author of the books upon which the aforesaid RAID series is based. So please, go buy this book (despite my own reservations): we should encourage publishers who bring more crime writers to our attention from countries like Finland! It is, by the way, an attractive book in a nice, small-ish format, easy to carry back and forth on the Metro train while commuting, as I can attest. To read Barbara Fister's more positive view of Sipila's quick character sketches, and of the novel as a whole, click here.

Blood Moon, by Garry Disher

Blood Moon, by Garry Disher, is another excellent novel in the Inspector Hal Challis/Sergeant Ellen Destry series (his legal central characters, as opposed to his criminal one, in the Wyatt series). At the end of the previous novel in the series, Chain of Evidence, Challis and Destry had fallen into bed together after years (and 3 previous novels) of dancing around their attraction to each other. In Blood Moon (the title refers to a lunar eclipse), they're dealing with some of the consequences of being a couple at home and colleagues at work. That's only one thread of this complex and satisfying novel, though. Disher is particularly good at giving what would be minor characters in another writer's hands a full and complex life. Scobie is a plodder, as a detective, but for that reason effective at detail work--and his wife has veered further into religious compulsion; Pam Murphy has been promoted to plainclothes CID work but is falling into a relationship with a shady new cop in the department; and so on, each thread of their private lives intertwined with the crime plots of the book. Vacationing school kids descending on the beach community of Waterloo, Victoria, which sounds like Panama City Florida at U.S. spring break, but the kids in Disher's story are younger. The chaplain of a private school is viciously attacked, and we follow the rather miserable life of a woman whose husband is a classic controller/abuser. We also meet venal bureaucrats and politicians, a racist blogger, religious fanatics, and "toolies" taking advantage of the "schoolies" on spring break. There has also been a series of sexual assaults (a thread that promises to recur in future novels due to complications in the professional lives of Challis and Destry, whose relationship is now public). The format of the police procedural is a perfect frame for such a complex story (Disher's "caper" novels with Wyatt at the center are much more straightforward). And as is typical with the procedural form, the mystery aspect of the story is not a puzzle but a process. what Disher brings to the form is a superior command of the material and a very evident appreciation for the individuality of the various characters. The crimes and the investigations proceed in zigzag fashion, so that the plot continues to be as engaging as the characters. Fortunately for readers in the U.S. we've almost caught up with Disher's production (Blood Moon was published here in the same year as its Australian publication), though there are still some Wyatt novels that haven't appeared here and are a bit hard to find without paying huge shipping fees. Maybe Disher's success (and accomplishments) will inspire a U.S. publisher (perhaps Soho, the premier U.S. publisher of non-U.S. crime novels and the publisher of the Challis/Destry novels here) to pick up the Wyatt novels...

K.O. Dahl's 3rd "Oslo Detectives" novel to arrive in English

K.O. Dahl's detective stories are distinguished by a couple of characteristic features. First, unlike most crime fiction, the narrative focus is split between a younger, fatter policeman, Frølich, and his older, thinner superior officer (with a strategic comb-over), Gunnarstranda. Another feature of the novels is that Dahl's stories are pure police procedural: The cops are constantly discussing what they've found out and going over possible theories of the crime, resulting in a kind of looping or spiralling structure with frequent repetition of facts. The Last Fix, the third of Dahl's novels to reach English (in Don Bartlett's translation), begins more like a cozy or puzzle mystery, with a 70-page long story about a recovering junkie who is attacked at her job and then feels obliged to attend a very unpleasant dinner party hosted by her therapist and the therapist's husband. As she escapes the party (and the husband's groping hands), her path leads to a murder (and to other murders later in the story). That 70-page tale and a 70-page coda (which includes a very unusual chase scene and the revelation of the murderer) frame a 425-page central section that is almost entirely concerned with Frølich and Gunnarstranda's investigation, which is mostly wheel-spinning with occasional lurches forward when a new fact is discovered. What saves that central section from getting bogged down or boring is the structure (short chapters with a lot of dialogue) and the personalities of the dyspeptic duo at the center of the story. Frølich and Gunnarstranda bicker constantly like an old married couple, though Gunnarstranda frequently pulls rank and drags Frølich into line. They are not brilliant investigators, mostly worrying the mystery like a dog with an old bone until something shakes loose--and the result is frequently quite funny. Though neither character is particularly likable or charming, they are both quite vivid, and they both have a determination and a moral sense that ultimately gives a social conscience to the story that is a common characteristic of the Scandinavian crime wave. Dahl's novels probably have more in common with Håkan Nesser's than most of the other translated Nordic crime fiction, except for the dual central character and the firm grounding in a very real Oslo (where Nesser's ensemble of detectives is, thus far in the translated novels, clearly centered on Van Veetern and the books are set in a hypothetical North European country). Both Dahl and Nesser include snappy and frequently snappish dialogue (on the part of both the police and the witnesses), and both adhere to the procedural method rather than the mystery or thriller. In Dahl, there is less of the "least likely suspect" and more of the twist and turn of new information typical of the pure procedural (in Nesser's books, the murderer is more likely to be someone the reader is familiar with, and in Dahl it can be a very peripheral character). Both have distinctive voices, and both have comic elements based in the characters' personalities. The final revelation of the plot of The Last Fix (and the explanation of the English title, more on that in a minute) is a bit strained, more poetic justice than naturalistic event, but by that point Frølich and Gunnarstranda know a lot more than they can prove about what has happened (it's not a forensic series, though there is a forensic specialist in the stories: they mostly learn what's going on by talking to people). The original title was En liten gyllen ring, which means "a little gold ring," and that is actually an image (and an object) that bridges the opening and closing sections (and provides the title for the long middle section). It's a better title for the book, but I guess Faber, the publisher, wanted a something that emphasized the drug culture that underlies the book's events (though not actually the main thrust of the story). The ring suggests the themes of love and desire (both of a sexual sort and of a more existential sort) that the story is really about. Dahl contrasts social interactions with the characters' personal aspirations: the two being frequently in conflict, leading to the violence on which the story relies. And filtering the themes of love, family, social ills, conflict, and desire through the dyspeptic duo of Frølich and Gunnarstranda is a brilliant device, grounding the big themes in daily life, in comedy, and in the slog of police work.

Anthology of South African crime fiction

The new collection Bad Company, edited by Joanne Hichens and published by Pan Macmillan South Africa, gives us a sample of the excellent crime writing that has been bubbling up in that country for the past decade. Outside South Africa, we might know Deon Meyer and some of the classics (James McClure, Wessel Ebersohn) but we have little access to most of the writers collected by Hichens for this book. Here's hoping that Bad Company will get a wide enough circulation to change that situation: it certainly stands up to the best of international crime anthologies (such as the excellent City Noir series by Akashic Books). There's a wide variety of crime fiction here, from police procedurals to psychological thrillers, so there's something for everybody. My favorites are the ones in a more noir mode, but all of them are interesting, and Hichens provides an interesting introduction dealing with crime fiction and the reasons for its current boom in South Africa. Margie Orford leads off with a story featuring her series heroine Clare Hart (documentary film-maker and profiler--the first Clare Hart novel,reviewed here in a previous post, has recently been published in the U.K. and the second is coming out soon, I believe). The story is a chiseled, compact glimpse of a crime-ridden township, murder, and just a hint of hope. Deon Meyer's The Nostradamus Document is a fully realized police procedural with vivid characters, encompassing a full novel's worth of action and interaction in a fast-moving plot with an ending that is not quite a twist but more of a last minute save by the not-quite-straight central character, Detective Sergeant Fransman Dekker. There are several stories that twist back on someone engaged in a crime (such as the tales by Richard Kunzmann, Mike Nicol, Jassy Mackenzie, Hichens herself, Setswana writer Diale Tlholwe, and Zulu writer Meshack Masondo. Several explore extreme cases of social and psychological violence (as in stories by , particularly violence toward women. But there are also empowered women and women, like Orford's Hart, pushing back against the violence (in the case of Dirk Jordaan's story, pushing back in a rather extreme way). A story by the writing team know as Michael Stanley is more in the cozy genre (really more like a certain other writer using Botswana as a backdrop than are (so I've been told) "Stanley"'s novels featuring the same hippo-like policeman who puts in an appearance here). Several stories deal with the recently reported xenophobic violence in the country (such as the poetic story by Jane Taylor and Tim Keegan's study of the strained dynamics of family and race). Peter Church's The One is a tale about the conflict between justice and money, told in a fast and light tone, Andrew Brown's story investigates love and money a bit more darkly. Dark (very dark) tales by Michael Williams (the author of several Cape Town police procedurals) and Tracy Farren explore evil impulses. One of the best stories features private detective Nossel (also seen in Death in the New Republic, more available outside South Africa that the works of some of the other writers, but still not well enough known). Dison also deals with xenophobic violence: Nossel confronts the horror directly and concretely but also through Nossel's conscience and his own sheltered home life. The result demonstrates the great emotional power that a short story can have. If you can find Bad Company, it's a very good collection. Maybe if enough people clamor for it, Pan Macmillan will make it available as widely as it deserves.

Double Cross, by Tracy Gilpin (from South Africa)

Like Stieg Larsson in his Millennium trilogy, Tracy Gilpin in her Cape Town crime novel Double Cross makes reference to Pippi Longstocking. But unlike Larsson's young heroine, Gilpin's main character, Dunai Marks, in spite of being a single mother, is callow young woman who comes across as even younger than she is. The short novel has some suggestions of "young adult" fiction and some slight hint of romance fiction (the publisher, Black Star Crime, is evidently owned by Harlequin), but manages to achieve some credibility as a crime novel that is also something of a coming-of-age story. Dunai arrives at her job in an NGO/activist organization to find that her boss, Siobhan Craig, has been murdered. The overburdened police seem happy to dismiss the case as a burglary gone bad, and Dunai sets out on her own investigation--setting in motion what seems to be an "amateur detective" plot. But partway through that plot gets derailed by a global conspiracy, not toppling over into DaVinci Code territory, but almost. And right in the middle of the novel we get a political lecture that is interesting in its own right (dealing with questions of the justification of violence in the service of righting social wrongs, a major theme of the book), but the lecture interrupts the novel's forward motion. When we get moving again, the plot mixes the conspiracy, Dunai's investigation (along with a helpful private investigator who threatens to become Dunai's love interest in spite of her original antipathy to him), and various threats from several Cape Town lowlifes from both ends of the social spectrum. The story never quite settles down, and the conspiracy doesn't have much to do with the crime under investigation, but the theme of violence and revolution is interesting, and the local color in Cape Town is handled very well (Double Cross shows Cape Town more thoroughly, from the Cape Flats to the Company Gardens, from Robben Island to the Bo-Kaap neighborhood) than most other South African crime novels). The conspiracy is interesting in itself (spoiler alert!) dealing with a 1,500-year-old feminist religious heresy and political backlash, but the terrorism that the plot actually hinges on is elsewhere. And it seems to me that Gilpin loses an opportunity to link to historical feminist movements, like the Beguines, which might have given more of a conspiratorial hint of authenticity (as in some of Pynchon's stories or for that matter Dan Brown with his templars), as well as a bit of historical education for the reader--but I'm not one to tell a writer what to do, and Gilpin may have had good reasons for inventing her own feminist conspiracy (or for all I know her conspiracy may be based on a historical model, I just couldn't find it with a web search). There are hints at the end of the novel that Gilpin has in mind a continuation of this novel into a series, with Dunai joining forces with her friend the detective and also with further exploration of the links and conflicts between the conspiracy and the South African government--and I'd certainly happily follow these characters in their further adventures. Dunai has experienced some disappointments and some enlightenment regarding the realities and dangers of the world and it might be interesting to see how she progresses with further relvelations and experiences, much less the considerable opportunities for portraying crime in Cape Town and environs. Speaking of which, I'm moving on to the new anthology of South African crime writing, Bad Company (edited by Joanne Hichens and published by Pan Macmillan South Africa) which I've been looking forward to since first seeing it mentioned on the excellent Crime Beat blog at http://crimebeat.book.co.za/, dealing with the new South African wave of crime writers.

The Father and the Foreigner, by Giancarlo De Cataldo, plus a note on Camilleri

Giancarlo De Cataldo is the author of the bestselling book "Crime Novel" from which the movie of the same name was made (and is also the editor of the excellent anthology of Italian crime writing, Crimini, reviewed here some time ago). Crime Novel is an epic, covering some years in the careers of a group of young men who take over the drug trade in Italy, and also covering some very eventful years in recent Italian history (the bombing of the Bologna train station, the kidnap/murder of Aldo Moro, etc.). The recently translated The Father and the Foreigner (published in the excellent Europa editions series and translated by Ann Goldstein) is a more intimate story rather than an epic like Crime Novel. It concerns the inner life of Diego, a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Justice in Rome, who is the father of a mentally handicapped boy. While waiting for his son at a physical therapy clinic, Diego meets Walid, a Middle-Eastern man whose even more severely handicapped son is also in physical therapy. The friendship becomes very important to Diego, who is experiencing the grief and difficulty of dealing with his son's handicap and also the strain that the experience is putting on his marriage. Walid not only gives Diego someone to talk to, he also provides a philosophical perspective on their common difficulty. But the friendship leads Diego further away from the normal world that he was already diverging from because of his son's needs and limitations. And then Walid asks a favor that puts Diego on the path to an "other" Rome he didn't know existed, a city of immigrants that is beyond Italian cafes and bars, beyond his family, beyond Christian religious ideas, and eventually beyond the law. In some ways The Father and the Foreigner is more a thriller, almost a spy thriller, than a crime novel. De Cataldo keeps his novel rooted in Diego's experience, even though the voice of the novel is in the third person. Diego's experience of "Crossing the frontier of normality" occurred first in his and his wife's realization that their son is not normal (and therefore the life of the family is not normal); in that sense he is already prepared for the wild ride that Walid pushes him toward, and the return at the end is a kind of reconciliation to the "new normal," as the expression goes. This is a much more intimate novel than Starnone's First Execution (also published by Europa editions and reviewed here recently). The focus has something in common with some of Massimo Carlotto's novels, with a perspective that is perhaps more humane and less political, and a style that resembles noir fiction more in tone than in plot. In an article for The Telegraph last year, De Cataldo says that "The Anglo-Saxon crime thrillers are all about the triumph and restoration of order,…of everything being resolved. By contrast, the modern Italian equivalent is about psychological and societal disorder; it's rooted in reality and maps the evil and corruption in politics and society, without offering resolution." That's true of The Father and the Foreigner, both in its portrait of "normal life" and society in Rome and also in its portrait of Diego's personal journey, and also true of the Italian crime fiction that I've read (and reviewed here). There's also an interesting interview with De Cataldo here, at The Rap Sheet, responds in a very interesting way to the interviewers' characterization of Andrea Camilleri as "a sort of cozy Italian Agatha Christie" with an alternative view of the Sicilian crime writer: "He is cunningly political, let’s say…Camilleri’s great merit was to set Italian writers and readers free. For the first time, they could enjoy great pop literature in a country where writing was traditionally divided into 'trash,' 'trivial,' and the 'grand masters.'” It's true that Camilleri is light and funny, and certainly popular and accessible. But the Montalbano novels are not only "cunningly political," they also provide cunning views of Sicilian life, of issues like ageing, and of human (especially family) interaction that are deeper and have wider scope than can be dismissed as "genre fiction" or characterized effectively by an Anglo-Saxon comparison. De Cataldo sets out to be darker in tone and intention in The Father and the Foreigner than does Camilleri in August Heat, but in spite of the light tone and stock characters (like Catarello) and comic situations, Camilleri does investigate the "psychological and societal disorder" rooted in a reality steeped in the "corruption in politics and society," and also "without offering resolution" as De Cataldo suggests of the best of Italian crime writing. One might prefer the lighter or the darker tone in one's reading, but I think Camilleri both fits the pattern De Cataldo lays out and also deserves serious consideration both for his comic and perhaps reassuring narrative and for the disturbing currents that are always near the surface of his stories.

August Heat, Andrea Camilleri

Karen at Eurocrime has already noted here that Andrea Camilleri pays homage to Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in his newly translated (by Stephen Sartarelli) August Heat, and that he also comments on the poorly informed critic or reader who denigrates crime fiction as inconsequential. Camilleri once again makes his own point in the novel as a whole, as well. August Heat begins with more comedy than usual (and his novels are often very funny), even after the discovery of a terrible crime. There are many twists and turns in the plot as a murder leads to the discovery of illegal construction jobs, the cover up of another death (possibly murder) of an illegal immigrant, and (as is often the case in Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano novels) threads of Mafia influence on politics, the law, and daily life in Sicily. We expect the depiction of the stark, beautiful landscape and the tantalizing cuisine of Sicily in the Montalbano novels, and August Heat delivers on those scores. The story also gives a palpable sense of the brutal weather of a Sicilian August. But the charms of August Heat have more to do with the increasingly melancholy (though still dispeptic and irritable) Montalbano and his relationships with Fazio and Catarella (especially) among his police colleagues, with his girlfriend Livia, and with various sympathetic and unsympathetic people involved in the crimes in one way or another. The comedy, much less the surprises in the investigation, would be spoiled if I say much at all about the plot, so I will add only that Camilleri proves once again that he is the deserving heir to Leonardo Sciascia's terse, evocative portrayals of life in Mafia-ridden Sicily, and Camilleri adds to that deep note a light tone and comic touch that are decidedly his own. Sartarelli also once again demonstrates his ability to render an idiosyncratic (both Sicilian and, so I've been told, uniquely the author's own) language of Camilleri's Montalbano novels. There's one additional pleasure still awaiting the reader of this book: seeing it (or for that matter any of the other Montalbano stories) depicted in the excellent Italian TV series based Camilleri's work. And I want to thank public libraries all over the world, especially the Montgomery County Maryland library system--I've been getting a number of the books I review here from the library (including novels by Camilleri, Håkan Nesser, Bill James, and many others); the library makes it possible for me and many others to enjoy these great crime novelists work.

Matti Joensuu's To Steal Her Love

We in the English-speaking world rarely get access to Finnish crime writer Matti Joensuu's novels. The Stone Murders, published by St. Martins in 1986, was translated from a 1983 original which was not, I think, his first novel; To Steal Her Love, recently published in Arcadia's EuroCrime series, is translated from a 1993 original. The Priest of Evil, published in 2006 by Arcadia, is from a 2003 original (the later two translated by David Hackson, the earlier one translated by Raili Taylor). So of Joensuu's 10 novels, we have only the ones written at 10-year intervals (and in fact, there was a 10-year gap between The Priest of Evil and To Steal Her Love (published here out of order). However unfortunate it is that we have to wait, and that there are 7 of Joensuu's novels featuring Helsinki detective Timo Harjunpää still untranslated, we are lucky to now have To Steal Her Love, which succeeds on every level. Whereas The Stone Murders was a story about violent youths, through the experience of a humane and serious detective, To Steal Her Love is a broader canvas, suggesting at times the socially conscious novels of Sweden's Sjöwall and Wahlöö and at times the police thrillers of Norway's Jo Nesbø. Joensuu presents the story with occasional humor and with the authenticity a reader might expect from his background as a police detective. The police hierarchy is dysfunctional (more so than in the other two translated Joensuu books) in a totally believable manner. There is a malicious detective obstructing Harjunpää's progress in the investigation, but the relationships and motives between them are more everyday than is the case in the more dramatic subplot running through several of Nesbø's books. There are numerous cases that Harjunpää is called upon to investigate, some related to the main story and some not (making his life as a cop seem more authentic than in the one-case-only sort of police story): some of these cases (major or minor) are resolved and some are not, or only partially so. Harjunpää's private life, which features in all the novels, is here more completely delineated (though not so tragically as in the ending of The Priest of Evil). As in the later novel, the narrative is partly from the point of view of a demented criminal, though that criminal is more sympathetic than the riveting but totally evil character in The Priest of Evil. Tweety (named for his large head and small thin body) picks locks (by seeing the "colors" of the interior mechanism as he works a pick through it), and he also animates everything in his surroundings. He names everything that is important to him: each of his feet has a name, his flashlight and knife have names, and he gives his own names to the women whose apartments he enters when they are asleep. That plot concerning his molestation of the women does not go in the direction you might expect, and neither does the other major crime depicted throughout its planning and execution, a bank robbery. Tweety's criminal family is depicted mostly through his eyes in an almost Faulknerian fashion. But in spite of the almost Surrealist character of the story as seen through Tweety's eyes, and in spite of the complexity of the interwoven narratives, the story moves swiftly through the book's 300 plus pages (at least half again as long as either of the other two books by Joensuu that have been translated into English). The story moves along at a proper pace for a crime novel, but it encompasses more environmental and emotional scope than the average crime novel. And it accomplishes all that without a murder directly related to the central story: There are several corpses but for the most part we follow Tweety's frequently frustrated attempts to caress women in their sleep and his family's accelerating bank heist plot, from both the criminals' and the investigating officers' points of view (all told in the authorial 3rd person). And as a bonus, we get detail that fills out the stories of Harjunpää, his family, and one of the other detectives as glimpsed in the other books. After the experience of reading To Steal Her Love, I have to go back and read the other two, and reassess the less-than-glowing review that I gave to The Priest of Evil when I've come back to that book after finally being able to read its predecessor. From our first glimpse of Tweety's distorted perspective to Harjunpää's discovery of a headless corpse floating in the sea to the outlaw family's home life to Harjunpää's difficulties with the bureaucratic forces above him in the police force, To Steal Her Love is as good as any and better than most of the Scandinavian crime novels that have been highly praised here and elsewhere--and To Steal Her Love has numerous innovative and unusual qualities that makes it stand out in its own right. I was bowled over by it, and read almost straight through its 300-plus pages. This is a book that deserves a wide audience, much wider than Joensuu has up to now received in the English-speaking world.

French noir: Beyond Suspicion, by Tanguy Viel

Though the film and fiction term "noir" comes from French, the French model for crime fiction remains American. In Tanguy Viel's Beyond Suspicion (translated by Linda Coverdale and published by The New Press), the conspirators in a "perfect" kidnapping scheme dream of getting to "the States" and prefer to think of the ransom as "a million dollars" rather than a million euros. The plot is also classic American noir: a "hostess" from a bar (Lise) and her layabout boyfriend (Sam) reel in a rich widower (Henri) and plan an amateur kidnapping (Lise will be kidnapped and held for ransom). the other important character, Henri's mysterious brother, is mostly offstage. The atmosphere and style, though, are all French. Sam is the only voice in the novel, he's the narrator and there's not much dialogue. The story is told in almost a stream-of-consciousness style, moving from the wedding of Lise and Henri to the kidnapping with frequent detours to the past and glimpses of the narrative present. French reviewer Dobrina Clabeaut called Sam's voice "disembodied" and also refers to the characters as stupid and trivial, all of which is true. But Clabeaut also describes being caught up in the flow of words, the poetry of the language, overcoming the triviality of the characters and the plot, and I'm afraid that didn't happen for me. Thankfully, the novel is very short, really a novella. And the characters are indeed trivial, both in their personalities and in the weight they have in the story: we don't really end up knowing much about them, not even Sam's impressions of them (or even much about Sam). They're all types, exhibiting typical behavior like desire, deception, and jealousy. In a "foreword" to the U.S. edition, Jonathan Lethem says that the French response to the noir genre is to "purify it in the mode of a dream, to stalk its alienated essence," and Viel certainly does accomplish that. Beyond Suspicion is a literary achievement, perhaps, and even in translation the language is fluent and vivid (if not persuasive, in terms of making the plot seem more plausible). The plot is simple enough (suggesting perhaps classic French crime writer Sebastien Japrisot, though not his directness of style), but there are (to me) some gaping holes in the way it plays out in the end (a flaw in their plan leads to a clue that seems pretty trivial, leading them to take steps that seem hardly necessary--though the emotional (and literary) resolution requires them to take those steps. A pleasant, quick read but I prefer the direct "show me" style for this kind of story rather than the indirect "tell me" style (Jim Thompson, say, rather than Paul Auster, a name invoked by Lethem in the foreword). Oddly, the U.S. edition's cover takes a more indirect, suggestive image and the French edition uses a very literal image of an important site in the plot, the Americans emphasizing the literary quality of the book and the French emphasizing its roots in crime fiction. Another "alternate covers" question for you: which is more effective for this sort of literary crime narrative)?