New Italians next

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

patience of the spider, andrea camilleri

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

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

Irish crime series

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

Last of the Carvalho stories

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

Last entry in current Scandinavian crime wave

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

Barcelona and Pepe Carvalho

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



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


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

Murder on Gotland

The second of Mari Jungstedt's Gotland crime novels is out, with the title Unspoken (not a translation of the Swedish title, which would be more like "In the Night's Silence" or even "In the Still of the Night"). The first novel in the series was Unseen--the tendency to give a crime series a repetitive title sequence of some sort is pure marketing, but I can attest that the Swedes do it, too. When Mel Brooks's film The Producers first appeared in Sweden, they used the title Det Våras För Hitler, or Springtime for Hitler. So when Blazing Saddles came out, they called that Det Våras För Sheriffen (Springtime for the Sheriff) and so on: Det Våras För Frankenstein (that one's obvious) and on and on--the strangest one, to me, is Det Våras För Världshistorien (Springtime for History of the World?!). These days, the distributors are more likely to just keep the English title for new films and TV shows released there (would an American distributor dare to keep a Swedish title? Could the moviegoing public in the U.S. pronounce a Swedish title?). Anyway, Jungstedt's Unspoken deals with the murder of an alcoholic photographer who has just won big at the harness-racing track. The police (led by chief detective Anders Knutas, who is a bit stiff, in a slightly comic way, even consciously so, within the narration that sticks to his point of view) pursue a widening series of leads, some provided by a TV journalist sent over from Stockholm (just as he was in the first Knutas novel, and his affair with a married mother of two continues--regardless of the fact that she's not involved in the case, as she was in Unseen). There's plenty of dark stuff in the book, in an unspectacular way--no serial killers, nobody returning from the dead, nobody plotting to kill the Prime Minister--but that, I think is one of the strengths of the majority of new crime novels coming from Scandinavia. The authors seem to find plenty of threat and drama in ordinary life (which is, as I've mentioned before, one of the characteristics of noir as a genre, and one of the reasons I'm drawn to that sub-class of crime fiction). For me, there's a bit too much "soap opera" here--the private lives of Knutas, the reporter and his girlfriend, and even those involved in the crimes threatens to tip the balance between the criminal proceedings and the problems at home, etc. But Jungstedt is skillful in rebalancing the story and moving the crime and its investigation forward. I like the fact that Knutas doesn't inspire awe in his team--they're irritated by some of his stiffness and his jealous reaction to a Stockholm detective brought in for the case (whom everyone else likes immensely). That, more than his arguments with his wife, give depth to the character and to the life of the police station. There is one device in this story that I find a bit awkward--one thread of the plot involves a 14-year-old girl who is lonely and suffers from what's called the Borderline syndrome (she's cutting herself, for one thing). Part of her story is told in the "now" of the narrative (each chapter is headed by a date), and part in irruptions of text titled "Several Months Ago." I think I'd have been less irritated if these sections were separated out more from the rest of the narrative, and it may be that it's the publisher rather than the author who is responsible for the way the story is textually laid out. But as is, it seems like a "make-do" device rather than an elegant way of integrating flashbacks. The novel ends with an unconventional cliffhanger (for a crime novel, anyway), so I guess there are more Knutas & co. novels to come. I'll keep reading them, for the almost sinister ordinariness of the characters and the stories, as well as the, to me, exotic setting. However, the "solution to the crime" in Unspoken seemed a bit contrived to me, though entirely in line with the crimes. There is a passage in the novel that illuminates in an interesting way one of the differences between Scandinavian and American or English crime fiction: we're used to hard-boiled detectives (and reporters) and the adherence of their Scandinavian counterparts to definite rules of behavior is a little startling. Johan, the reporter who has seduced a married Gotlander, is insistent about not crossing boundaries, like publishing a name that the police want kept secret or interviewing a woman who's in shock after the death of her daughter. The ethics are admirable, but we're so used to hard driving reporters (and cops) who ignore the rules that the humane and rule-bound Scandivian characters in crime fiction (with the notable exception of the novels of Jo Nesbo) mark a distinct cultural difference. That difference, too, is one of the exotic attractions of the current crime wave from the far North. A personal note: I will probably not be blogging for the next week or 10 days--I'll be sitting in a cafe in Barcelona with a Vazquez Montalban novel...

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir's newly translated novel, Last Rituals, has a motto or subtitle on the cover (An Icelandic Novel of Secret Symbols, Medieval Witchcraft, and Modern Murder) that is very misleading, but does anticipate a key thread of the book. The leading character, Thóra Gudmundsdottor, shares a good deal with Erlendur, the central character of Arnaldur Indridason's estimable Reykjavik police procedurals, though Thóra is a lawyer rather than a detective. Both are divorced, both have problems with their children, and both are without a companion--but where Erlendur is depressed, Thóra is just harried; where Erlendur's daughter is a junkie, Thóra's 16-year-old son has gotten into a more typical teenage problem (though almost as disruptive for the family). Erlendur's private life is a mess (as is his apartment), but Thóra's is a more "normal" kind of mess (keeping track of the kids, the house, the ex-husband, her job, etc.)--and the normality of her life is frequently exploited for both contrast and comic effect amid the violent and bizarre discoveries in the story. Last Rituals also shares a couple of things with Arnaldur's: Iceland is itself an important element in the books; there are overtones of a dark past (much further in the past in Yrsa's book) and the story moves forward with the doggedness of an investigation rather than the trappings of a thriller. These are procedurals, though Last Rituals doesn't follow the police for the most part. The rituals of the title, as well as the subtitle on the cover, imply witchcraft and metaphysics, but Yrsa's novel is really more about academia than devil worshippers. But she skillfully uses the sensational aspects of the deceased student's life and research (and Icelandic history) to keep the reader interested through the slow accumulation of evidence (the victim is a "modern primitive," an apt description of the subculture of piercings and body modifications). In brief: a German student in an Icelandic university falls out of a closet, dead and with his eyes removed, onto the head of his department. The body also has a symbol carved on it. The family, not believing in the guilt of the drug dealer arrested by the police, sends a family lawyer to Iceland to locate a local lawyer who speaks German and is willing to help them investigate the circumstances of their son's death. The lawyer, alternately stiffly formal and sarcastically flirtatious, vies with Thóra for the novels center of gravity, though the German remains slightly opaque as a character. Thóra's naiveté ragarding the salacious and strange revelations of the victim's death and his academic interests parallels a frequent pattern in Scandavian crime fiction--as for example in the adventurous sexual escapades at the center of one of Helene Tursten's books, in which Detective Irene Huss reacts in a less than hard-boiled way to the salacious facts of the case. Though Scandinavia was once famous for its porn, Scandinavian crime fiction projects a rather tamer cultural milieu. But at least in the case of Last Rituals, Thóra provides a moral center that anchors the book. Yrsa's book is a solid entry, full of fascinating historical and cultural detail, in the Scandinavian crime wave. It avoids clichés, builds slowly, but pulls the reader along without the devices of pulp (such as, when the story flags, throw in another murder). The sensational elements are handled in a nonsensational way, and I found myself drawn in by the historical references and Thóra's investigative efforts more than the post-adolescent fascinations of the circle of students at the ostensible center of the story. So the subtitle or teaser on the novel's cover misleads to the extent that it suggests a novel focused on witchcraft, but does suggest the bloody history of Medieval and Renaissance Europe that anchors the story. I hope Yrsa's novels find other Maguffins that are as effective in her later books, and look forward to finding out.

Reply to a comment on earlier post

An anonymous reader of my running commentary (or blather?) in this blog has left a comment to my original post on Tana French's In the Woods. I'm reposting his comment and my reply, with a request for further discussion about the character of crime novels and/or mysteries. Here goes:
"Anonymous said...Dont you get it.....Ryan did the original murders and that is why he blocks out what happened....12:12 AM". My reply was "Anonymous thinks that the novel is a puzzle to be solved, and that the answer is Ryan as the murderer in the old case (the murder of his 2 childhood friends). I think the novel is more than a puzzle, and the obvious possibility that Ryan murdered his friends is no more certain (or essential to the novel) than the other possibilities, criminal or metaphysical. 6:52 AM". BTW, I'm not up reading blog comments at 6:52AM, that's California time and I'm on East-Coast U.S. time. But the exchange implies the question of what a crime novel or a mystery is "about," especially in the case of a complex story or a novel with literary aspirations. Is it important to know who murdered Ryan's friends? Some of the reviewers on Amazon thought so--they were disappointed by the novels conclusion. Are the metaphysical overtones that are if anything emphasized by the ambiguous conclusion a problem for a crime novel? And is the solving of a puzzle a necessary distinguishing characteristic between what we are these days calling "crime fiction" and mystery novels? Any thoughts?

Havana Noir

Next up will be another string of Scandinavian imports, one from Iceland (Yrsa Sigurdardottir's Last Rituals) and two from Sweden (Åke Edwardson's Frozen Tracks and Mari Jungstedt's Unspoken); but first, Havana Noir, the 17th in Akashic's Noir series, but the first based on a non-Anglo culture (anthologies from Ireland and the U.K. are the other non-U.S. books so far). Havana Noir, edited by Achy Obehas (who also translated most of the stories) deserves attention not only as noir and as a glimpse into a culture most of us have little access to--but also for the quality of the writing regardless of source or genre. In fact, a number of the stories are not conventional crime stories (though most qualify under Obejas's own definition of noir--see quotes from her introduction in my previous post). Few have police or detectives in central roles. But most are startling revelations of the darkness at the heart of not just the Cuban experience but modern life as a whole. The best of the stories (including Obejas's own "Zenzizenic") offer complex rather than simplistic appraisals of life in Cuba (and some, also including Obejas's story, employ considerable humor). Only one story, by Carolina García Aguilera (a prominent emigre writer) is disappointingly one-dimensional in its vision of Cuba. Among the rest, whether by emigres or writers living in Cuba, include many that are moving, evocative, and significant. Miguel Mejidas's "Nowhere Man" is surreal and nightmarish experience that made me think of the stories of the great Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera. Alex Abella's detective story is an exciting tale of revolution and escape (and the only "pulp noir" story in the collection), and the story that most clearly states the oppressive context for the revolution (Batista's dictatorial, corrupt-capitalist regime), as well as American support for that regime. Several stories deal with the Chinese legacy in Havana and several others with the influence of Santería. Several show a violent underworld from the point of view of the members of that world, and all the stories demonstrate the hollow claims of the government that there is no crime in Cuba's socialist state. One story, "La Coca-Cola del Olvido" by Lea Aschkenas, turns on violent politics in the emigre Cuban community of the U.S. This is a substantial collection, over 350 pages with 18 stories ranging from barely 3 pages to over 30. Altogether, the writing is excellent, the view of Cuba unparalleled, and the contribution to the literature of noir undeniable. Havana Noir will stretch in various ways readers' notions of noir, of Cuba, and of crime writing as a limited or limiting form.

Noir (and Havana)

I won't have my review ready for a couple of days, but I've been reading the new Havana Noir (edited by Achy Obejas for the Akashic Noir series), and I can't resist passing on the excellent thoughts on noir that Obejas offers in her introducton. She says that, "Descriptive rather than prescriptive, noirs explore the symptoms of an ailing society but rarely suggest remedies. They are frequently contestataire in their unblinking portraits but unnervingly apolitical. Their protagonists are alienated and at risk, caught in ethical quandaries outside of their control, and driven to the very edge." She adds that, "Crime stories, especially those with detective protagonists, try to find order, to right things; noirs wearily revel in the vacuum of values, give in to conflict not as a puzzle to be solved but as a cul-de-sac. Noirs explore and expose but refuse to solve." I've been seeking adequate definitions of "noir" since I started this blog, and Obejas goes a long way toward describing what is unique (and, at least to me, appealing) about the genre (if it is actually a genre rather than simply an attitude). Not that all of the stories in Havana Noir exactly fit her own definition, but at least the first half or so of the anthology (as far as I've gotten) is very good on its own terms (and the best of those among the Akashic series that I've looked at so far).

Two from Barcelona

Neither of these books is new, and one is not a crime novel, really. I dug them up because I'm going to Barcelona in a few weeks and wondered whether there were crime writers other than Vazquez Montalban who were from or set their books in Catalonia. Study in Lilac by Maria-Antonia Oliver was written in Catalan rather than Spanish, and is set in the pre-Olympics Barcelona of seedy dockside and fetid seas. It's a feminist tale, whose title refers to graffiti in that shade that recommend revenge of a particular sort for rape--something not revealed until very late in the book. With its Conan Doyle reference in the title, it shouldn't be a surprise that the novel has some metafictional overtones--not only Pepe Carvalho (from Vazquez Montalban's books, and the hero of an as yet untranslated series of detective stores written in Catalan make appearances, one playing a key role in the end. But metafiction and tendentious politics aside, Study in Lilac is an interesting journey toward a conclusion that is not politically correct in any conventional sense, but is satisfying in the context of the novel's own world. Benjamin Prado's Never Shake Hands with a Left-Handed Gunman is all metafiction, with the author as an essential character, one of four narrators giving their perspectives on a missing friend who was obsessed with literature, punk-rock, Elvis, and other cultural phenomena. Crime fiction is constantly referred to but never achieved in this book: It's literature, after all. But Prado recognizes explicitly that it's a failure as a crime novel, which
is one of the book's primary virtues (another being that it's a short book). The characters are itneresting, the setting lively if a bit vague, and the plot almost non-existant (one of the usual factors in the by now large library of too-literary crime novels). The splintered perspective of the 4 narrators is echoed in the discursive, meandering story, which both starts and ends in the middle. I can appreciate what Prado is doing (and his knowledge of and his own appreciation for crime fiction), but Study in Lilac is more fun.

New round of scandinavians: Arnaldur

Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason has a new book out in English translation,
The Draining Lake. Like all the Erlendur books, this one features straightforward investigation by the police plus insight into the minds of others involved in the crime or its aftermath. The new novel also has a certain similarity to the 2nd of the 4 books available in English, Silence of the Grave, in the sense that a very old corpse, really a skeleton, has been revealed (in this case by an ecological disaster: a lake whose level is dropping precipitously, probably because of an earlier earthquake). But where the earlier book deals with family tragedy and abuse, the new one deals with tragic love and espionage (with a uniquely Icelandic twist). The spy story is engaging, if occasionally didactic (on more than one side of the argument): a man in Iceland ruminates about his schooldays in Leipzig during the early years of the Cold War, and the story involves surveillance, the recruiting of spies, and concealed identities. Meanwhile, Erlendur and his cohorts Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg try to figure out who the body in the lake was, weighted down by Russian bugging equipment. Erlendur becomes obsessed with a side issue opened up by the investigation, one of the men who went missing about the time the body went into the lake. Who is in the lake, and what the identity of that missing man is, are the mysteries of the book, and as the cops pursue them, they, too, get on the trail of the espionage tale. As I said, the spy story is very Icelandic, very different in tone and emphasis from Le Carre, yet on that same wavelength in several ways. And as is usual with this series, a melancholy air pervades the book, even with considerable comic effects--in this novel both the mess of Erlendur's private life and the tragic love affair in Leipzig provide the melancholy, but in both cases there is a sense of resolution (more personal in Erlendur's case, more historical in the love affair, through the uprising in Leipzig that began the fall of the Berlin Wall). All in all, the book, as with all in the series, are very satisfying as police procedurals, in spite of the fact that the police don't really discover very much through their own efforts--the frustration of their search, and Erlendur's more personal search for the missing person (missing persons being a major obsession on his part, due to his personal history), are an essential element of the texture of the series. So if you're looking for a thriller or violent noir, or a cozy, this won't be your sort of story. But if you respond to dark tales of investigation and of darker (though sometimes funny or at least satirical) everyday lives (in the face of cultural and historical realities), The Draining Lake is very rewarding--and very well written in a straightforward style that seems to be the norm up there.

Havana Noir part 3

I'm off to Scandinavia soon (in my literary travels--actually I'm off to Barcelona in a month in more literal travel terms), but taking a side trip to Cuba first, by means of Leonardo Padura's Havana Blue (that's the title in English of the third of his quartet-plus-one of novels featuring detective Mario Conde, the Count). All of Padura's books are melancholy, and all contain considerable social criticism of the socialist milieu of this not-very-cop-like cop. But Havana Blue seems even more melancholy (though Mario gets the girl, in a sense) and more critical (if I'm not forgetting some of the critical edge of the books translated earlier). Mario repeatedly refers to the "squalid story" that he wants to write, and the story of Havana Blue is pretty squalid. Corruption is the theme here, in a style that would be as corrupt in a capitalist system, but here has particular Cuban inflections. An old school acquaintance is missing, and Mario's reflections on his school years (and his infatuation with that missing friend's now-wife, Tamara) occupy a considerable portion of the novel, notable for both nostalgia and cutting satire of both the educational system of Communism and the still existing class structure of the school and the state. Padura's novels do not proceed directly, nor does the detective. Though mostly told in the third person, it's Mario's vacillation between attention to the case at hand and meditation on his disastrous personal life (plus his attention to a small circle of old friends) that form the structure and the surface of the story. A reader has to have a lot of tolerance for Mario's ruminations, which don't leave a lot of room for development of other characters who on the basis of the scant evidence seem very interesting, such as "China," the half-Chinese investigator who helps ferret out the financial corruption in this case. But as a window on Cuba, on a particular kind of Anglo-loving Cuban frame of mind (it's largely music and literature from the U.S. and U.K. that Mario returns to again and again, particularly Hemingway). One Americanism in the novel is botched by the translator (who is plainly British)--he gets the lingo of baseball all wrong, and baseball is important enough in this book that the mistakes are irritating. Nevertheless, Havana Blue is an essential addition to the crime fiction available from this setting and this writer.

Book covers, U.S. vs. U.K.

Less annoying than the bad habit publishers have of changing the titles of translated crime novels (and less than the even more annoying habit of publishing the same novel under different English-language titles) is the change in the book cover between the U.S. and U.K. editions. Usually, I find the cover of the U.K. edition more appealing, though the English edition of Tana French's In the Woods has a startlingly misleading pitch on the cover (playing to the Gothic impression they were trying to give of the story). Sometimes, U.K. publishers (and in particular Penguin) are amazingly creative in cover designs--as in the recent U.K.-only editions of Kafka. Between the U.K. and U.S. editions of Benjamin Black's Christine Falls, I'm surprised that Henry Holt, the American publisher, didn't keep the U.K. cover simply as a taste of Irish cultural nostalgia in the U.S. market. The U.S. edition is handsome, but emphasizes the title character (as she might perhaps have appeared on the slab in the morgue, while after all she is the "maguffin" or "mcguffin" if you prefer that spelling, rather than a character in the novel. I'm not buying a crime novel because of its cover, but covers that suggest the history of the genre or its origins in pulp fiction can have a certain appeal. Even better is a well designed book, including the cover--since a book in any genre can be an object of desire, if it's done right.

The first "Quirke"

John Banville's first crime novel, Christine Falls (under the pseudonym Benjamin Black) has a number of things in common with Tana French's recent In the Woods. Both include Gothic elements, both are tightly wound and elegantly written stories that don't suggest much possibility for a sequel (though both do have forthcoming sequels). French's novel is more tightly plotted; Banville's has a good deal more plot than some of his other novels, as well as a somewhat more straightforward style. He packs a lot of elements from the mystery and crime tradition into the book: a Jim Thompson plot about a young drifter in the U.S., a Ross McDonald plot about a rich family spanning the Atlantic, a good deal of material drawn from the Magdalene scandal (which has already appeared in the work of other writers, including Ken Bruen), and a lot of depressing material about the broader interface between the Catholic Church, the poor, and the very rich. One thing that is surprisingly not important, after the early pages, is the profession of Quirke, Banville/Black's central character: unlike other fictional pathologists who are amateur or part-time detectives, Quirke only discovers one fact (although a big one) through his medical skills, and it's the fact that sets the rest of the book in motion. But after that, Quirke's job is only used for metaphorical purposes (his relation to the dead, versus his step-brother's profession as an obstetrician). Quirke is trying to find out why his step-brother has falsified the death certificate of a young woman, whose name the novel bears, and it leads to a dangerous network of Irish and American folks involved in the manipulation of orphans and mothers. Quirke is attacked, a woman who confides in him (partially) is murdered, and there are many revelations and events--perhaps too many, especially toward the end, when events seem less to carry the story forward than to eliminate characters who are getting int he way or to keep the moody atmosphere at its gloomy heights. The novel is set in the early 1950s, seemingly to take advantage of some aspects of Irish and American society in relation to the Church at that time. But the gloom and Gothicism seems well suited to the '50s, better perhaps than the now booming city of Dublin (though surely there are still many of the characteristics of his story that would still be relevant). It's a tightly packed, involving, beautifully written, and somehow not quite adequate crime novel. Banville's brother Vincent wrote a few detective stories that satisfy as such, though perhaps without the literary heft of the Benjamin Black tome. Banville isn't quite slumming in Christine Falls, but he's also not taking a full and focused advantage of the genre elements that he summons for this book. As with Tana French, I'm looking forward to the next Quirke book, partly to see how the trick of a sequel will come off, and partly to see if he's more tightly in control of the structures that he's borrowing from the nature and history of the crime novel in future efforts.

Tana French and "Benjamin Black": A little news and a question

Unlikely as it may seem (to anyone who has read Irish writer Tana French's In the Woods), French is working on a sequel or maybe a series. The next volume, titled The Likeness, isdue out next spring, featuring the female partner (Cassie) of Ryan, the detective narrator of In the Woods. Cassie has her own dark past (to match Ryan's childhood secrets), both in her college years and in her undercover work prior to joining the fictional murder squad. I have to say I'm intrigued... And on another subject related to Irish crime fiction: is anyone else startled by the eruption of a Jim Thompson-esque subplot (set in Boston) in the middle of John Banville's pseudonymous, set-in-the-'50s crime novel, Christine Falls (written under a totally transparent pseudonym)? The style even seems to shift from the more elegant prose of the central tale of a Dublin pathologist (whose narration, though in the third person, is in the cultured tones of an Irish doctor) to the pugnacious reactions of a guy from Delaware who's trying to claw his way up into the working class in Boston... A review of Christine Falls follows soon.

Tana French (and is Benjamin Black actually John Banville when he's slumming?)

The question in my title is only half serious, and I've just started reading Christine Falls, the new crime novel written by John Banville under a transparent pseudonym. So I'll let you know what I think about that question after a while. In the meantime, there's another crime novel from Ireland that was preceded by p.r. and reviews that tout it as a "literary crime novel," so this post and the next will be related. All that p.r. and some of the reviews made French's novel sound like a dark, brooding Gothic thriller, which it isn't. It's for the most part a straightforward "policier" with one or two differences. First, the narrator, detective Rob Ryan, is a very chatty speaker, and his story moves forward with sly jokes, and a lot of silly banter with his partner, Cassie Maddox--the two are joined at the hip, soul mates one might think (but that relationship is ultimately a major factor in the plot). Rob's chatty manner takes the story over after a florid opening chapter (fortunately--I'm not sure I could have stuck with the overheated prose of the novel's beginning, which is much more Gothic than the body of the book). Rob even explains the quality of the prose in an offhand comment that he has a knack for imagery of the cheap flashy sort (as well as warning the reader that he, like all detectives, lies--a gesture toward the classic literary technique of the unreliable narrator, which remains part of the novel but not in a blatant fashion). The story itself is part of the reason that the book sounds so Gothic, when the story is outlined: Ryan is actually the sole survivor of a group of 3 children apparently attacked in a semi-rural wooded area 20 years previously. The other 2, his closest childhood friends, were never seen again. The return of this story, as gradually remembered by Ryan as well as given in references to the original case notes, does add a Gothic note at odds with the breezy narrative, and when the case at the core of the present-day narrative heats up, the 2 levels or tones of the book converge to some extent. The "current" story involves the body of a young girl discovered on a prehistoric, sacrificial stone in the middle of an archaeological dig that is hurrying its task in advance of road construction. The stone (and body) are in the same woods into which Ryan's friends disappeared. I have to admit that the setup was offputting to me at first. I've read a couple of crime stories set in Ireland with similar "Celtic" overtones, and they were mostly pretty bad (as well as mostly being by non-Irish writers). French's book fortunately concentrates on the procedural aspects of the investigation, along with the detectives' struggle against depression as the case moves forward without success over the course of a month. The archaeologists, the murdered girl's family, and local developers come under suspicion, but no evidence points clearly to any of them. Something is wrong in the girl's family, but Ryan and Maddox can't prove anything. And evidence and overtones of the story keep bringing back the 20-year old case (as well as Ryan's professional risk in not stepping off the case, in fact keeping secret his identity as the sole witness in the earlier case). The matter-of-fact quality of the present-day story, and the almost gossipy tone of the narrator keep the book grounded and fresh rather than overwrought, even when supernatural or magical elements drift past the tale, remaining well in the background. I have several problems with the book, but before getting to that I want to address a complaint made by several of the people who have posted reviews on Amazon--and this is a bit of a spoiler alert. The ending does not wrap up some of the threads of the tale, and that has confounded and annoyed some readers--if this is a mystery, why isn't everything tied up in a neat bundle at the end? And if this is not a mystery in that sense, is that because it's really a literary novel in disguise (or slumming as a detective story)? While there is a sophisticated structure underlying the book, I didn't get the sense that it was condescending to the genre. But Ryan's voice can get a little annoying, and the oblique clues to the unresolved parts of the story have a metaphysical tone that you have to take on whatever terms you are willing to do so--French does not tell you how far to go in accepting that aspect of the book at face value, or even how far she's willing to assert it. And the relationship of the 2 detectives, important as it is to the book, can be a little annoying--they're a bit cute together, until they stop being that, as the case moves into its final phase. Still, I liked the book much more than I anticipated, and followed it closely through a long-ish 400+ pages without it seeming too long. I'd appreciate hearing from others who've read this one--do you think it measures up as a crime novel? or does it seem pretentious in its literary ambitions? Questions I expect I'll have to return to in the next post, about Black/Banville.

New Karin Fossum

Karin Fossum's newly translated Black Seconds seems to be the fulfillment of the clever and effective false start of her first novel to be translated (actually the fifth of her Inspector Sejer series), Don't Look Back. In that novel, everyone thinks a very young girl has been abducted, but the search party discovers instead the body of a teenage girl. That initial twist away from a particular kind of crime novel, the child abduction, and perhaps Fossum has been waiting to write that story since using it as such a clever feint earlier in her distinguished career. But there are twists here as well. Fossum is frequently compared to Ruth Rendell, and there is certainly some common ground there, particularly in Fossum's close attention to family dynamics and their attendant horrors. Fossum's novels are not whodunits. In Black Seconds, for once a literal translation of the original Norwegian title, we know early on who the likely perpetrators are: but there is considerable tension built up around the questions of what exactly happened, and why (also the key questions in most of Fossum's other novels). Fossum's sympathy for her characters is another key aspect of this series: she wants to understand the people, criminals and victims alike, as much as the what and why of the events. In Black Seconds, even the people responsible for the violence to the missing girl are eligible for Fossum's considerable sympathy, and ultimately ours. Fossum is also skillful in constructing the books, using parallels (in Black Seconds some of these have to do with silence or a choice not to speak) to create a well-formed tale. At least one of the earlier novels in the series, Calling Out for You, verged on gothic horror (without the metaphysics), but Black Seconds is a return to the bleak realism of which she is a master (mistress?). The Scandinavian crime wave seems to specialize in bleak emotional landscapes, and Black Seconds qualifies for inclusion in that category, but Fossum imbues the tale with humanity, and in the ending, even a little glimmer of hope for a positive future for some of her characters. About the plot, for those who are interested: a beautiful little girl disappears, an autistic middle aged man on a three-wheel-truck is glimpsed by the mother, out looking for the girl, and the mother's sister sits worrying at home while her son arrives home disgruntled because he's just dented the fender of his new car. All the elements are already in place, and the rest of the novel follows each of those characters as well as the police (detective Sejer and his uniformed younger colleague Skarre) move slowly forward in piecing together the facts of the case. Another thing the Scandinavians (since the estimable Sjöwall and Wahlöö) seem to be good at following the police in a systematic investigation that moves forward in fits and starts, giving the northern romans policiers a particular rhythm and style. Black Seconds qualifies for the top rank in that company.

McGilloway's Borderlands

Borderlands, the title of Brian McGilloway's first crime novel, evokes a wide range of associations, particularly in the northwest of Ireland, where the novel is set. Detective Ben Devlin and the rest of the characters cross repeatedly over the national border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and both the police and the various criminals and suspects cross back and forth over the line between social norms and antisocial behavior. The story deals with the discovery of a young woman's body in circumstances that suggest that the murderer may have been one of the travelers (formerly known as tinkers), Ireland's gypsies. The social lines between the settled population and the travelers, between petty criminals and businessmen, between the police and the murderers are never completely clear, and McGilloway manages the multiple ambiguities of the story very skilfully. Devlin is the narrator, but he's no superdetective: he muddles along, frequently aware that damage is being done because he hs made the wrong move or remained a step behind those responsible for the original murder, vicious beatings (of which he is more than once the victim himself), and crimes of the present and the past. The long, sad history of Irish political entanglements is one of the subjects of the novel, but it remains in the background, as McGilloway and his narrator focus instead on the people who have inherited that history and those entanglements. McGilloway's style is clear and direct, even when the story is not, giving a real sense of Devlin's puzzlement and the process by which things are clarified. The various policemen and women involved interact with believable and human qualities, and the rest of the society of small-town Northwest Ireland and western Northern Ireland is drawn with subtlety and compassion. This is a short but powerful crime novel, and a sympathetic portrait of a "borderland" that is too often obscured in cliches or ruralisms in fiction of the present and the past. McGilloway conveys a believable portrait of a real, troubled, and coping-as-best-they-can population in the new Ireland, with all its contradictions and complexities.