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

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

Twisted Noir from Italy: Gianluca Morozzi's Blackout

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

Italian noir by Michele Giuttari

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

The other Carlo Lucarelli

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

Kemal Kayankaya redux

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

German gothic from Andrea Maria Schenkel

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

Iain Levison's hybrid crime thriller

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

A new (original) Petra Delicado

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

Crime in Singapore

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

Anne Holt, What Never Happens

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

Past and Future crime fiction

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

The last Magdalen Nabb

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

my secret previous existence

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

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

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

A Swedish crime novel of a different sort

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

Carlo Lucarelli's Via delle Oche

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

Denise Mina's Slip of the Knife/Last Breath

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

New from Norway: K.O. Dahl's The Man in the Window

I wasn't sure why K.O.Dahl's "Oslo Detectives" or "Frølich & Gunnarstranda" novels were called that after reading the first one, The Fourth Man, which emphasized Frølich and his personal involvement with those involved in the crime, much more than his superior officer Gunnarstranda. But the second novel translated into English, The Man in the Window, balances their roles in the story, with a slight emphasis on Gunnarstranda this time. The Man in the Window is fairly long and complicated, much more so than The Fourth Man, and also more of a mystery (as Norman Price of the Crime Scraps blog reported in his Eurocrime review of The Man in the Window, the novel shares some structural devices with the cozy or country house mystery). Both detectives are experiencing some complications in their private lives (Frølich is doubting his commitment to his girlfriend and lusting after someone else, Gunnarstranda is mourning his deceased wife and beginning to revive his love life), but neither is personally involved in the crime at hand or the principals who are involved. Each of them has his own personality quirks and his own investigative style, and their conversation is a key element in the story. The novel begins by following the events of a January, Friday the 13th in the lives of a soon-to-be-deceased patriarch of a family in the antiques business and several others involved in his death in some way (his adulterous wife, a taxi driver, an actress, and several others. The facts withheld in these early passages seem less artificially withheld than I feared they might (the surprises in the later parts of the novel are effective in the police-procedural manner--there's no expectation in the procedural, as opposed to the Agatha-Christie sort of mystery, where the reader expects to have the clues to the puzzle from the beginning. Dahl, after the opening chapters, lets the reader follow Frølich and Gunnarstranda as they individually and together struggle to make sense of the murder and collect information about the various family members and others who surround the crime. The narrative is concerned with the revelation of the personalities of various characters as much as events or investigation, always (after the opening passages) through the two detectives' eyes. The methodical, even plodding, investigation is a specialty of the Scandinavian crime novel (as Norman Price also points out) from Sjöwall and Wahlöö forward to most of the Scandinavian novels in translation today. But Dahl's novel is perhaps more methodical than, say, the novels of Jo Nesbø, whose works (as so far translated) have something of the quality of the thriller, mixed with the procedural: Nesbø's Harry Hole is involved in (and threatened by) the criminals and events and subplots in ways unlike Dahl's cops (or those of Sjöwall and Wahlöö for that matter), giving them a forward propulsion largely missing in The Man in the Window--another factor that gives this book a quality of the puzzle mystery, moving forward only as the facts of the case become clear to the police (rather than bursting abruptly into the view of the character and the reader). As much as I admire Nesbø, I also enjoy immensely the stricly procedural approach that Dahl manipulates with much skill. The Man in the Window also has a lot of humor (not so characteristic of the Scandinavian crime novel), in the conversation between the two detectives and elsewhere in the novel: a verbal and situational comedy much appreciated by this reader within a long and complex investigation. All in all, my only complaint is that it's too hard to get Dahl's books in the U.S. promptly after the translations become available.

urban noir by D

Back in the U.S.A. for a change, I'm reviewing a novel, set mostly in Atlanta (my former home town). There's at least one modern noir classic set in Atlanta, Down on Ponce, by Fred Willard, and it's certainly no surprise that urban noir should focus on one of the centers of hip hop culture and commerce. Atlanta has also in recent years been the site of one of the most spectacularly noir true crime stories, a murder-for-hire carried out by a drifter carrying a shotgun in a box of roses, delivered in dramatically hard-boiled fashion to the Buckhead home of a doomed wife, as well as a famous recent hostage situation and the Michael Vick case. Cake takes the terms of the hip hop or "thug lit" novel seriously but adds some twists from the broader world of noir fiction: D's novel compares favorably with Kenji Jasper's urban noir but also with George Pelecanos, Alan Guthrie, and Charlie Huston's Hank Thompson novels (with all of which Cake has a good deal in common). But Cake also reminds me in some ways of the noirest of classic noir, Paul Cain's Fast One. Both D and Cain are pseudonyms, both novels move very quickly toward doomed and fated endings. D's novel is also short, more in the tradition of classic noir (or Alan Guthrie, among newer novelists) than the contemporary, more expansive noir fiction. The assertively masculine quality of Cake is shared not only with thug lit but also with classic noir (Cake's female characters are mostly hookers, strippers, or baby mamas--the one exception plays the role of fate). The central character of Cake is unnamed, referred to throughout in the second person: there's a trick of cinematography that came to be known in the '80s as "suture," shot and counter-shot of two speakers, with the viewer "stitched" between them by the action of the camera. D's technique has a similar strategy, placing the reader in the position of the protagonist, almost as in a video game, by the use of "you" to refer to his character instead of "he" or "I." In a short, fast novel like this one, the device is very effective. In effect, "you" are on the run from a Brooklyn massacre (from D's previous novel, Got), moving to Atlanta to attempt to reboot your life by going back to school. But you move in with a cousin who's a small time dealer, and you get caught in the middle when a bigger dealer coopts his operation and starts killing people. Like Paul Cain's Kells, D's "you" isn't a thug, he's trying to stick to a principled position, to a certain humanity that's contradicted by almost everything in his situation. The results in both cases are met with the open eyes characteristic of noir rather than the rose-tinted glasses of some other genres, such as thrillers, cozies, etc.

The end of the Havana Quartet

Havana Gold is the last of Leonardo Padura's tetralogy-plus-one of novels about Havana detective Mario Conde, the Count. Actually the books are as much about Havana as about the detective or the crimes he investigates. In my limited acquaintance with Cuban literature, no one evokes that city in so poetic and evocative a way since G. Cabrera Infante (who was an emigre, while Padura has remained in his native city). Havana Gold is the last published but the second in the tetralogy (the fifth novel, Adios Hemingway, was an addendum featuring the same character but not a continuation of the series). As usual, the third person narration is interrupted by other voices, and there are metafictional elements (Conde proposes to write a novel about his current situation and call it Havana Gold (that's the translation, I'm sure the original novel uses its own Spanish title), plus when Conde is looking for something to read (while longing for his new girlfriend) the only book that appeals bears the title of Padura's obscure first novel. Padura's books resemble the Brazilian series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (which evokes Rio in a similar way, as well as having the meandering plots that characterize Padura's novels), But in a way a more apt comparison is to the detective novels of Yasmina Khadra, in that both are dealing with a threatened regime (Algeria threatened by a government that denies its citizens basic human rights and insurgent Islamic fundamentalists, Cuba's by U.S. embargo and its own clinging-to-communism-and-revolution regime). Khadra's detective is also a writer, though already a succesful one, while Conde remains a writer manque. Neither Khadra nor Padura have any optimism about their societies, though Padura is both more emotionally attached at least to his city and is less overtly political than Khadra. What is distinctive about Padura's detective novels is a pervading melancholy of nostalgia--not a nostalgia for a lost golden age, but for the loss of youthful dreams (not only Conde but all his friends have settled for less than seemed possible in their schooldays at the Pre-Uni that figures largely in this novel). Havana Gold finds Conde caught between two women, one a murdered teacher with an ambiguous reputation, the other a beautiful woman who mysteriously appears in Conde's path, needing her car's tire changed (the car itself being a mark of her position in Cuban society). Conde manages to solve the case of the murdered woman (not by ratiocination but by doggedly following leads and instincts). But the "case" of the mysterious woman leads him down his often-traveled path from love to loss. Not that he doesn't manage some consolation (from sex, from the cooking of his friend Skinny Carlos's mother, and from a tentative dedication to the job to which he is dedicated, without ever quite being a "real cop" or even a real adult (along with his nostalgia for lost youth there is much of the aged adolescent about Conde, with his penchant for picking fights, among other juvenile traits). It is Padura's strength that he achieves much poetry and truth with his flawed characters and within the structure of the crime novel.

More from Sweden: Camilla Läckberg's The Ice Princess

The first of Camilla Läckberg's mysteries, The Ice Princess, has finally appeared in the U.K. (not yet in the U.S.) in English translation. I say "mystery" rather than "crime novel" because although The Ice Princess has all the elements of noir, it also has elements of the "cozy" and the mystery genre. As one of the characters says about the evil within a small town, "Hatred, envy, greed and revenge, all of it concealed under a huge lid that was created by sentiments such as: 'what would people say?' All the evil, pettiness and malice was quietly allowed to ferment beneath a surface that always had to look so neat and clean." That pretty much captures the duality: a bleakness and malice common to crime fiction and a calm surface more common to mysteries. Whether a small-town story falls on one or the other side of the divide is a matter of emphasis, and Läckberg's novel includes enough naivete and good-natured surface that it falls mostly within the frame of the cozy: within a plot that includes enough horrors for a Gothic novel, the main characters, writer Erica Falck and detective Patrik Hedström, and others react in ways that suggest their own distance from those horrors rather than a weariness or complicity that one senses among characters in noir or crime fiction. There are elements in the plot, also, straight out of Bridget Jones's Diary (a connection suggested by the author herself, within the narrative) that don't fit the noir genre very well. None of that is a criticism, and though my own standards should put The Ice Princess outside the boundaries of this blog, I'm reviewing it anyway--partly for autobiographical reasons. My grandmother emigrated to the U.S. from southern Sweden in the early years of the 20th century, along with her mother, sisters, and brothers. I knew all of them, including my great-grandmother, except for my great-grandfather (who is another story, for another time). In 1973, I had a chance to visit Sweden briefly, and went to the little town of Asarum to look for my grandmother's cousin, who had stayed in Sweden. I didn't find her, but did find her brother, then in his 80s, and had tea with him and his girlfriend. A few years later, I had a chance to live in August Strindberg's apartment, now a museum, in connection with my doctoral dissertation on his autobiographical novels, and also a chance to visit with a well-to-do Swedish family in their summer cottage at Midsommar. My relatives in the U.S. and in Sweden have not really been captured in the Swedish crime fiction I've read so far--which has dealt more with cities, with modern (rather than traditional) rural locations, and with middle-class or urban communities--much more the milieu of my second trip to Sweden than my first. The Ice Princess is the first of the new wave of Swedish crime fiction in which I've recognized small town Sweden (more so than in the Gotland novels of Mari Jungstedt or the northern novels of Åsa Larsson, which resemble Läckberg's books more than others of the Scandinavian wave) and the people I know from that milieu. None of the portraits in Läckberg's novel are exact resemblances to my relatives and other small town Swedes I met, but many of them share (sometimes not very pleasant) characteristics with those I knew. That said, some of the characters are little more than caricatures (like the comic chief of police) and others are sketched in to little effect (like the other cops). There's also a "polyanna" aspect to the story, in the naive responses of Erica and Patrik--but that's a common feature in Swedish crime fiction (noticeable in Henning Mankell and most others), possibly a realistic aspect of the portrait of a culture less acclimated to violence. And for me, Läckberg captures both the dark underside and the real daily life of her fictionalized village, making it rhyme, at the very least, with my own experience of a very similar village (though one that is, I expect, not even now experiencing quite the property boom Läckberg depicts). If I don't find The Ice Princess exactly corresponding to my taste in crime writing, I nevertheless am grateful to her for bringing these characters to life, in all their varied social graces, pretentions, convictions, pettiness, flaws, graciousness, and charm.