New Gothic noir from Prague: Milos Urban's Seven Churches

I picked up a copy of Milos Urban's Seven Churches before traveling to Prague, since a crime novel is often a good guide to the streets of a strange city. Urban's book pays off in spades in that regard, though it isn't exactly a crime novel. The cover claims that the author is the Czech Republic's answer to Umberto Eco, which isn't an exact comparison: but Urban's novel is a philosophical potboiler, somewhat in the fashion of Eco's novels.

The lead character and narrator of Seven Churches is (or was) a policeman, but a failed one. When the novel begins, he has been disgraced, but happens upon a grisly crime: a man has been hung in a bell tower by his heel, swinging back and forth with the motion of the bell. The hanged man survives, and through the investigation of that crime, the narrator's career is somewhat redeemed, as the case becomes linked to the death of a woman he was supposed to be protecting, before being kicked out of the force. Other gruesome deaths follow, in an extravagant, neo-Gothic fashion, but the bulk of the novel isn't about the police case.

There is an early digression into the narrator's youth (I'm not giving his name because the name itself is a comic and dramatic point in the plot), and at critical points, the narrator falls into a trance and has visions of the city of Prague in Medieval times. The book, in fact, is more than anything else about the layers of architecture and history in the city, as waves of styles (Renaissance, Baroque, modern) literally overlay the Gothic origins of the city and its churches, as well as Gothic revivals that attempt to restore the original while in fact simply adding another layer. These styles are, of course, intimately intertwined with the religious and political as well as architectural history of Prague.

So the book is indeed a very stylized tour guide to the city, especially the "new town," where a good deal of the action takes place (not so much the famous Wenceslas, or Vaclav, Square as other squares and churches of Novy Mesto (and the book points out that, unusually for a major square in a European city, there are no churches on Wenceslas Square).

Added to the Gothic architecture and the narrator's Gothic deliriums are several phantasmagoric episodes and an overarching conspiracy: altogether a Gothic atmosphere in both the architectural and the fictional senses.The narrator is as much involved with a mysterious pair of men, one large and aristocratic, the other gnome-like, who are investigating the city for their own ends. The detective story serves mainly to anchor the plot in a rationality that is at odds with the narrative's strangeness. The arc of the story is increasingly tied up in conspiracy, rather than the police investigation, as the narrator drops in and out of the investigation and in and out of contact with the conspiracy. And at the end, the story veers off into something else entirely, a kind of Gothic enclave within the modern city.

Prague is a fascinating, beautiful, and mysterious city, and Seven Churches evokes all those aspects, though the book can be a bit frustrating in its repetitions, digressions, and extneded discussions of history and architecture. I recommend it for anyone interested in Prague or in neo-Gothic storytelling; For anyone whose interest is in traditional detective stories, the book will be very frustrating, but if you persist, there are considerable (if sometimes odd) rewards.

The first Harry Hole: Jo Nesbø's The Bat

I had seen several reviews of The Bat comparing it not altogether favorably with the later Harry Hole novels by Jo Nesbø, but when I had the chance (via NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday) to see a copy i jumped at the chance. And I thought The Bat was very good, showing both Hole and Nesbø at an early stage of what has become one of the most succesful Scandinavian crime series.

The Bat begins with Harry's arrival in Sydney, Australia, where a Norwegian woman has been murdered: he has been sent both to aid the Sydney police and to redeem his own career (already disgraced by his alcoholism). The book takes a while to get going, as Harry makes contact with various police, friends of the dead woman, and other denizens of Sydney, including members of an underground that includes prostitutes, pimps, and performers in a touring circus and a boxing circuit.

When the book starts to pick up momentum, all the characteristics of the later books are present: Harry's self-destructive behavior, violence (meted out to Harry himself and to victims of what turns out to be a serial killer, another characteristic of the series), and the pain of love. There are segments that are not as fully exploited for maximum effect as we can see in some of the later books, but overall the story is not only promising, in terms of projecting the effectiveness of later books, but also an enjoyable story on its own.

And a bonus is considerable information about Harry's early life and formative years, some of which is reflected in later books, but never in as much detail. Some of these episodes slow the story a bit, but for fans of the series the digressions are definitely welcome. We learn in particular about Harry's family and his first love, who is a lingering influence on his life and the subject of most of his dreams and reminiscences in The Bat.

WE also learn a good deal about Aboriginal culture, which lies behind the book's title. These passages are perhaps not as completely integrated into the story as is the case with some contemporary Australian crime fiction (particularly that of Adrian Hyland), but is still well done and essential to both the atmosphere and the plot. Sydney is also very evocatively portrayed; I don't know how much time Nesbø spend in the city, but the setting is very convincing.

I read the book as a digital galley on an iPod touch, which can be a bit challenging, particularly with a very long book--fortunately The Bat isn't quite as long as some of the later books in the series, and the story moves along quickly enough that I didn't find the small screen and the constant page-turning any obstacle to the pleasure to be had from the book. Whatever your reading method, The Bat is well worth reading, whether it's a flashback (for devoted readers of the Harry Hole books) or a first introduction to the series.

Philosophical noir from Japan: Fuminori Nakamura's Evil and the Mask

F

ull disclosure (or perhaps bragging): SoHo Press used a blurb taken from my review of Fuminori Nakamura's previous book (The Thief) on the flyleaf of the new book (Evil and the Mask). Evil and the Mask is, like The Thief, a philsophical crime novel of the sort that both Japanese and French writers do so well. Evil and the Mask begins with an 11-year old boy being told on his birthday by his elderly and wealthy father than he is to be trained as a "cancer," aimed toward destroying those around him and society at large, and that on a subsequent birthday the father will show him hell.

That beginning sets up an expectation somewhere between Mishima and Bataille, but the story follows a somewhat different path, jumping back and forth bttween the child's progress and his adult reincarnation, after surgery to change his appearance; and the story is more like Kobo Abe than Mishima, in the end. That is to say, not as perverse as the latter but as strangely straightforward as the former.

The child, Fumihiro Kuki, is provided with a companion: an adopted girl named Kaori. It becomes obvious that the hell that Fumihiro has been promised will be suffered by Kaori, and Fumihiro has fallen in love with her. Their relationship is at first childlike, and then sexual, and Fumihiro decides to take whatever action is necessary to prevent her from being harmed. His father has already begun to call Kaori to his room, for purposes that are at first unclear, when Fumihiro begins to put his plan into practice.

Subsequent chapters alternate between the boy and the man, and the latter has become estranged from Kaori for unstate reasons while continuing to be fascinated by her. He hires a private detective to find out what her life is like now. As the "contemporary" phase of the story progresses, it involves a cult and an anarchistic gang bent on terrorizing and destroying society, as well as other survivors from the Kuki clan. One of the key elements in the story is the practice of the Kuki patriarchs to sire a son late in life with the purpose of making him a cancer, a theme that repeatedly returns.

The story is very dark, including murder and despair as well as the cancer theme, but Fumihiro's voice (he's the first-person narrator) is simple and direct, without histrionics. The darkness of the story does not follow predictable paths, and the twists and turns lead to a sort of redemption, of a sort that Samuel Beckett might recognize. And for all the philosophy and the perversity of the story, the novel engages the reader without prurience; it's Fumihiro's near-normality as a narrator and actor, and the contrast with the horrors referred to rather than directly portrayed, that keeps the story interesting and lively.

This is certainly not a conventional crime story. It's lurid qualities are subdued (in contrast to, for example the blatantly lurid--comically so at times--of Marek Krajewski's Eberhard Mock stories), and the police detective who becomes interested in Fumihiro in his new identity plays a part in the story that only hints at a conventional crime novel. If you read The Thief, Evil and the Mask will not be a total surprise, since the two protagonists share a path from unconventional childhood through subversive adulthool--though this book is both longer and broader in them and aims than the earlier book. Evil and the Mask is certainly accessible without having first read The Thief, though perhaps a shorter book might offer a reader a useful introduction to the dark but thoughtful world of Fuminori Nakamura.

Whispering Death, by Garry Disher

I'm just catching up with the newest Hal Challis/Ellen Destry book by Australia's Garry Disher (when his next, a Wyatt book, is just about to come out). Whispering Death could be the best yet among Disher's books, from whatever series. Though Destry is mostly absent (on a course prior to setting up a sex crines unit in the Peninsula of the series' setting), Pam Murphy, the younger detective and the other female in the squad, steps up to a prominent role. In fact, Pam is more involved than Challis in the investigation of a rape and abduction (and subsequent related crimes), while Challis worries about a series of bank robberies and his own problems with a failing classic car (a Triumph) and the classic airplane he's lost interest in, now that he has finished restoring it.

But the book actually starts out with a fascinating new character, unrelated to the crime that the squad is investigating. A young woman who goes by many names is a skillful, careful, and sympathetic burglar who is casing out houses to rob, but keeping her professional life away from her current residence and her safe-deposit box, which are both in Challis's back  yard.

One of the marks of an assured and skillful crime novelist is the ability to keep the plot moving in unexpected directions, and Disher achieves that throughout Whispering Death. I can't really talk much more about the story without giving away the plot, though plot is only one of the pleasures of the book and the series. Challis and Murphy are delightfully ordinary people, with personal lives full of ordinary problems. The narration and dialogue are so natural that a reader would be sucked in even if the plot wasn't moving so quickly and unexpectedly forward. And after a couple of sudden twists at the end, mgiht we expect some sort of sequel? Let's hope...

Screwball Noir: Rob Kitchin's Stiffed

Rob Kitchin's new novel, Stiffed, is (to borrow Paul Cain's phrase) a fast one (and a funny one). It's a farce with guns and bodies instead of sex. Tadhg Maguire, born in Ireland but raised in a fictional New England town of modest size, wakes up one morning, hungover, to discover that instead of his girlfriend of less than a year, there is a hairy corpse in bed with him. In fact, the hairy corpse of the local crime boss's henchman. Instead of calling the cops, after being beaned by his wife, once she appears on the scene, he seeks the help of his friends in getting rid of his problem corpse.

From the point, the story descends into a spiralling assortment of problems for Tadgh and his friends, a motley group of outsiders who had been their own little clique in school. Each of the friends contributes his or her own vulnerabilities and strengths to the story, along with an assorment of cops and gangsters and perhaps the most dangerous of all, Tadhg's girlfriend.

In addition to the wild fights (with and without guns), hot pursuits (with and without cars), and other fast and funny occurences, there are some running jokes, not least of which is Tadhg's name, which no one can pronounce, giving rise to an assortment of tortured versions of the very Irish Irish surname. The American setting, which Kitchin mostly gets right, is another source of comedy (there are just a few un-American terms, like "press-up" instead of "push-up," most of which can be understood as Tadhg's lingluistic links to his homeland). Baseball-obsessed small-town America, complete with its own small-time mafia (in conflict with gangsters coming in from outside) is evoked with barbed accuracy.

The plot revolves around stolen money, and Kitchin draws out the essential storyline through all the twists and turns and even past the ending (stopping a book before all the threads are quite pulled loose is something he has done effectively before). I mentioned Paul Cain above, but the noir author that Stiffed resembles most is probably Donald Westlake, in some of his various incarnations: Westlake set a high standard for this sort of dark comedy, and Kitchin proves a worthy successor, in an even more tightly wound and rapid farce than those of the his predecessor.

Summertime Death, Mons Kallentoft

Summertime Death is the second in Mons Kallentoft's tetralogy featuring Malin Fors, a detective in the small Swedish city of Linköping. The setting of the first book, Midwinter Sacrifice, was ice cold, and this one is steamy and hot, but the books share a lot in terms of style. Both are interspersed with monologues by the murdered victims, a device that I find irritating and in this case also unnecessary. The dead people don't really advance the plot. Another stylistic quirk is the use of sentence fragments, something that I also find irritating if not done well, but Kallentoft mostly uses the fragmentary style in a positive way, to move the story rapidly along. Not to say that the story actually moves rapidly: the detectives in this case spend a lot of time spinning their wheels.

But the most striking aspects of the book for me have to do with the attitudes and imaginations of the detectives. They seem fixated on immigrants and they leap to conclusions about the rape of one of the early victims that seem unmerited, almost refusing to acknowledge the character of rape and rapists. (Spoiler alert, I'm going tomention some essential clues in the following sentence or two.) The presence of paint (rather than semen) in the violated victim's body suggests immediately that a dildo has been used (not, as one might think, that any number of objects might have been used--a breadth of weapons would be borne out by both news accounts and numerous crime novels). And their assumption about the use of a dildo leads them to suspect lesbians and men whose sexual organs are missing. Again, their imaginations (and in this case that of the author in particular) seem divergent from the realities of the crime.

The focus on immigrants and homosexual women is bad enough, but the police turn a blind eye to the violent abuse by one of their own toward some of the suspects (particularly ones without the means to report the crimes against them). We needn't insist on so-called political correctness in our crime fiction, but the blithe acceptance of the abuse and prejudice on the part of the detectives is more akin to Mike Hammer novels than the usual Scandinavian fare.

The plot is pretty standard serial killer stuff: a young woman who is still alive and ultimately two who have been killed exhibit wounds linking them together clearly. We only meet the killer toward the end, but the killer's motivation is hinted at earlier. Malin's dogged pursuit of the truth leads the killer to target her own daughter, another over-used device, in my humble opinion.

As is sometimes the case with books that I find unsatisfying (and longer than they need to be), I found myself reading more and more quickly, seeking the positive aspects of the story (particularly the characters, who are mostly well-drawn and except for their prejudices and their blindness to prejudice and abuse among their colleagues, mostly sympathetic, and the small-town Swedish setting, which is well drawn and evocative). Other readers may find the interesting parts of the book to outweigh the annoying parts (or might even not be annoyed in the way that I was), but the best I can do is report my own reaction. I'm certainly open to alternative opinions--but one thing that can say with more objectivity is that Kallentoft does not approach the scope and style of the other very long Swedish novel that I read recently, Leif G.W. Persson's Linda, as in The Linda Murder, which also includes a lot of obnoxious attitudes and actions on the part of the police, but in a way that sets them into a context that is both satirical and socially aware.

Leif G.W. Persson's Bäckström novel, Linda: As in the Linda Murder

Swedish crime novelist Leif G.W. Persson has written an etensive series of police procedurals united not by a single main character but by a revolving set of characters and a series of interrelated plots (to judge by the 3 novels so far translated into English and the two films available in the U.S..--Bo Widerberg's 1984 The Man from Mallorca, available on VHS with subtitles and En Pilgrims Död, a Swedish 4-part TV series that may or may not be available for download along with downloadable subtitles).

The most recently translated novel, Linda, As in the Linda Murder, focuses on an obnozious and frequently funny minor character in some of the other works, Evert Bäckström, a short, fat, lazy, self-centered detective who has been chosen (from all of Persson's many characters) as the model for a U.S. TV series which will star Rainn Wilson of The Office. Bäckström's malign and feckless character has produced disasters and has been present (if not actually bringing about) successes in Persson's fictional world.

Linda operates on two levels: the first is the investigation of the murder of a young woman (Linda, obviously) in Växjö, in southern Swedien. Bäckström is assigned to lead a team of investigators, mainly because everyone else is out of town (it's early July) for vacation. Bäckström's main concerns are with his wallet, his stomach, and the availability of alcohol, and insofar as it doesn't interfere with those things, also the case. As the investigation stumbles forward (entirely due to the efforts of the other detectives on the team) there is a lot of repetition, some of it comic, some of it necessitated by the spiralling forward of the slow-moving process of the police team and frequent false leads. But the repetition didn't become tedious, for me: partly because of the train-wreck comedy surrounding Bäckström and partly because of the metodical quality of the investigation and the writing. Some of the repetititon also is related to the personalities of the other detectives, particularly the one who ultimately pulls on the right threads to unravel the case (I won't tell you who that is, part of the pleasure in reading the book is seeing who is headed toward the truth, and some of the twistiness of the end is in how the conclusion is reached).

And just past halfway through (spoiler alert) there is a shift that integrates some additional characters from other novels (in fact also illuminating the plots that will follow Linda in this series), and the second level that I mentioned above begins to develop. One of Bäckström's spectacular failings is his attitude toward women, sometimes kept to himself and sometimes revealed openly. If you find his attitude more annoying than comic, trust me--you should stick with the book. Increasingly through the last third of the novel and with considerable impact at the very end, the author brings the story and Bäckström's sexism (and not only his sexism) into stark focus.

As in the classic procedural, the solving of the case proceeds by police (rather than mystery novel) standards. The reader is rarely privy to knowledge not available to the detectives.

Since this novel is not in a direct line with the first two Persson novels to be released in English, there's no need to read the other books first. On the other hand, if you have read one or both of the others, you will perhaps enjoy Linda more than a novice Persson fan, as characters from the other stories appear like old friends to add their own particular quality and history to the tale. All of the Persson novels so far translated are very long (Linda is 488 pages), but the style is clean and easy to read; all of them proceed indirectly, rather than in a straight line--the pleasure is not just in the solution to a mystery but the clarification of what is actually going on (a process that is somewhat simplified in the films). But I've found all of them rewarding, and having read them makes the very good films more enjoyable as well. Persson, by the way, is something of a media personality in Sweden, more for his actual role in the criminal justice system (as a consultant and profiler, I think), and there are several parodies of his talk-show TV appearances that can be seen on YouTube (but only in Swedish, as far as I can tell).

Diego De Silva, I Hadn't Understood

In its bare bones, I Hadn't Understood, by Diego De Silva (published last year in English by Europa Editions in Anthony Shugaar's translation) is about a lawyer in Naples who is approached by the Camorra to represent one of their own, and the web that the criminal organization begins to weave around him.Vincenzo Malconico is an unsuccesful civil lawyer with a divorced wife who still sometimes visits his bed, a son and stepdaughter he sees occasionally, and an office shared with an assortment of similar failures

However,  Malconico's story is really a comic meditation on life today (especially in Italy), on the digressive potential of language, and on the current and future dangers of the criminal influence on daily life. He says at the beginning that he has a problem  controlling his sentences, and that is spectacularly true. Though the story moves inexorably forward, the progress is not in a straight line, in terms of either plot or the voice of Malconico, the narrator of his own tale. If you like a straight-ahead crime novel, maybe this isn't the book for you, but be warned that you will be missing a rich and rewarding experience.

De Silva avoids the cliche's of the usual legal thriller or cime novel: his family life isn't tortured (though his son is involved in a bizarre and dangerous investigation of his own), and the book is about (as much as anything else) his sudden success in both work and love (he unexpectedly finds himself the focus of the most attractive lawyer in the Neapolitan court system, for reasons everyone concerned finds somewhat odd). His sudden success with the Camorra is not unrelated, in terms of the source of his good (perhaps) fortune in that regard. The progress of his involvement with the mob progresses with both danger and comedy, proceeding toward a startling assessment of what the Camorra is and should be, in one of the later chapters.

I Hadn't Understood (Non avevo capito niente, in the original) is quite funny at times, and Vincenzo's voice draws the reader into both the comedy and the larger story. Each of the characters is three-dimensional, each in his or her own particular way. In the end, if Vincenzo doesn't quite achieve the heights he seems to be heading toward, his story ends in a way that is entirely suited to his personality, and also ends with a bit of hope for his future life. I didn't know what to expect from this book--in fact, I ordered a copy because De Silva was the author o one of the best stories presented in an Italian TV series, Crimini, but that story was quite different. But from the first page of this book, Vincenzo's digressive voice had me totally absorbed.

Timothy Williams, Another Sun

Timothy Williams's Un Autre Soleil, published in French in 2011, has finally arrived in English as Another Sun. Williams is the author of the excellent series set in Italy's north, featuring Commissario Trotti (and I hope that with the arrival of his new series, the Trotti novels will be brought back into print for new readers, along with the so far unpublished sequel).

Another Sun is set on the French island of Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean. The novel has classic elements of noir, including conflicts of race and family, hints of incest and jealousy, murder and unjust imprisonment, and so forth. But Williams's distinctive style carries these elements forward into something new.

Algerian-born French judge Anne Marie Laveaud has transferred to the French West Indies with her husband, a native of the island, and their young son. She is assigned to the case of a plantation-owner evidently shot to death by a man recently returned from imprisnment in the notorious prison islands that France maintained in South America. But Anne Marie doesn't believe that all the facts in the case are clear, and she ignores repeated pleas to forget the case.

Four factors that the Laveaud story shares with the Trotti books keep the reader on edge. One is the characterizations, which are sharp and particularized. Another is the dialogue (through which most of the story is carried forward): characters frequently talk past and over one another in a realistic indirectness that is frequently funny and sometimes frustrating (in a way that mirrors for the reader the frustration of Anne Marie in discovering the truth behind the case's facade). The third is the plotting, which always moves forward indirectly and toward unexpected directions.l Several times, we think we know what's going on and who killed the planter, always (until the end) nevertheless in the dark. And the social milieu is fully realized, including social and political realities that the characters themselves frequently seek to obfuscate.

Laveaud is more tenacious than her superiors expect, or want, her to be, and she discovers in the end a capacity for realism that her previous idealism has obscured. The full conclusion of the case and her new realism is left somewhat hanging, but not in a frustrating way. We may not know exactly how everything is playing out (and we may or may not discover more about these facts in the sequel, presuming and hoping that there is one), but Laveaud's presence as a personality provides a satisfying close.

The social aspects of the book include investigations of conflicts of race, revolution, colonialism, local and national politics, and New World vs. Old World worldviews. If that seems like a lot for a crime novel to carry, it's always in the service of the story and in the voices and attitudes of the characters. The book is quite different from the Trotti novels, despite the overlapping sensibilities, because Guadeloupe is quite different from Italy and Laveaud is not Trotti's female counterpart. Another Sun is a distinct, involving, and entertaining addition to the top rank of crime fiction.

Berlin Noir TV series

Im Angesicht des Verbrechens, which IMDB translates clumsily as In Face of the Crime (I've also seen it translated as Face to Face with Crime) is a 2010 series from German TV that is in the mode of HBO or BBC crime dramas, in terms of ambition, production, and style. The series is available with English subtitles (one reviewer at Amazon expressed skepticism about the subtitles when he saw the "In Face of the Crime" version of the title, but the subtitles are generally quite good).

There are 10 episodes, about 1 hour each. There's a good bit of repetition and flashback that stretches the story out a bit longer than is really necessary, but that's TV (there was a lot of repetition in the original Danish season of The Killing, even longer at 20 episodes). The story has several threads, each touching upon the Russian mob in Berlin, which has seemingly split in 2 segments that are tentatively at war with one another. One "family" concentrates on cigarette smuggling and legitimate business (such as the Odessa restaurant/club); the other branch is not only getting into prostitution, human traficking, and drugs, but also stealing the more "legitimate" branch's cigarette shipments.

Rather than all out war, the plot shows negotiations and maneuvering between the two factions, and caught in between are the two central characters: Marek, a cop whose Russian-Jewish family runs the Odessa (and the smuggling business), and Jelena, a young Ukranian woman (it's her photo on the DVD box) tricked into coming to Berlin and forced into prostitution. One ongoing thread in the story is Jelena's vision of Marek, while still in her Ukranian village, and the two of them passing one another as they criscross Berlin. The romantic aspect and her struggle against the life she's forced into add a human element to what is otherwise a pretty vicious bunch of characters.

Marek became a cop because his older brother was murdered in the street, and he's an outcast among the Russians, including his own family, who hate cops. He and his partner are ambitious to join an elite detective unit, and their successes and failures bring them in and out of the unit as the story progresses. Among the other threads of the story are a pair of cops who feed info to the Russian mob, Marek's sister, whose husband runs the Odessa, several Russian killers caught up in the maneuvering between the mob factions, and their girlfriends.

There is an interesting equivalence between the cops and the mob, each as ruthless as the other, but the cops are most often out-maneuvered by the criminals. Marek and his partner are more determined, luckier, and more motivated than the rest of the cops, but are frequently being used by one Russian faction against the other.

The result is a bit like The Wire, though Berlin is not quite as lovingly evoked here as Baltimore is in that earlier series, and with a more sincere romance at its center. The arc of the story and the atmosphere are definitely noir, as was The Wire, rather than the conventional TV crime/cop show kind fo thing. As I said earlier, it could have been shorter, but since there's not much German noir on film that's available with subtitles, the availability of this high quality show is a boon for English speakers (though the only version of it that I could find is Region 2/PAL, so if you're in the U.S. you'll need a region-free player.

Something to do with Montparnasse

Another twofer today, a bit more tenuous than the last one I posted. Cara Black's newest, Murder Below Montparnasse, and the newest translation from Helene Tursten, The Golden Calf, both have something to do with Montparnasse: Black's novel is set on the edges of the neighborhood, and Tursten's detective, Irene Huss, stays in a hotel on the edge of it when she has to take a junket to Paris in order to solve some murders in Göteborg. Plus both authors use a lot of detail about their detectives in the story (to very different effect).

Tursten first: The Golden Calf is one of the novels that has appeared in the Irene Huss TV series in Sweden (available with English subtitles), but based on memory alone, I'd say that in the case of this novel, the filmmakers have departed more from the book than they did with previous translations to TV drama. For good reason, in terms of the main plot, less so with respect to the detective's private life. For some reason the makers of the TV version (called Gold Digger in English) felt the need to create a mini-crisis in Huss's marriage; in the book, as is usual in the books, Huss and her husband, a succesful chef, get along just fine.

As to the story, we get plenty of atmosphere in both Göteborg and Paris, and lots and lots of detail about the financial and high-tech shenanigans of the circle of friends and business associates within which the murders are taking place (first one and then a pair of the group are murdered, along with the discovery that yet another has been missing for several years). In the book, the motive for the crime (as well as the identity of the killer) remains obscure until almost the end, and then is resolved in a "deus ex machina" fashion that involves the FBI. There's a lot of repetition of detail about the fraudulent financing of the group, and then a lot of detail about the motivations and background for the killers, coming all at once at the end. In the movie, the scheme and the resolution are better organized and more believable. All in all, I didn't think The Golden Calf was one of Tursten's best.

I get a little impatient with Cara Black's Aimée Leduc's books because somehow everything is always about Aimée, her associates, and her troubled family background, rather than about the crime at hand. That's certainly true of Murder Below Montparnasse, but her partner René is off to America at the beginning, for a change of pace and setting, and the detail about Paris is as always interesting. Because the series is set in the recent past and involves high-tech equipment, there's a bit of déjà vu in the revelations about new stuff (such as USB flash drives in this case), which is kind of funny. But the series lives or dies on the reader's relationship with Aimée.

In this case, a mysterious Russian tries to contact her, involves her in a possible murder, and then pulls away from her before letting her know what's going on (but not before implicating her mother in whatever it is). There's a painting (maybe a Modigliani) that would be a major discovery, if it exists, and the Montparnasse milieu of today blends with that of the painter's heyday throughout the story. There is a lot of back-and-forth movement across Paris (and California, while René is there), and considerable repeition (another link with The Golden Calf), but with a satisfactory resolution. I'd say that Murder Below Montparnasse is about on par with Black's usual standard.

Graveland, by Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn's new novel, Graveland, not only takes up where his most recent novels, Winterland and Bloodland, let off--it also takes up a theme of his first novel, The Dark Fields (made into the movie Limitless). I don't usually review U.S.-set crime fiction here, but since Graveland (set in New York City and upstate New York) is the third novel in a trilogy, and the first two novels are either set almost entirely in Ireland (Winterland) or mostly there (Bloodland), I'm making an exception.

Graveland doesn't continue the story in any literal way (as is the pattern of this trilogy): he simply uses characters that overlap the boundaries of the novels in various ways. The main character of Bloodland, Jimmy Gilroy, an Irish journalist, is a minor character in Graveland, and his mentor in the earlier novel, New York journalist Ellen Dorsey, is one of the main characters in the new book. In addition, the character who looms in the background of the first two books, the shadowy American financier and kingmaker James Vaughan, becomes even more prominent in Graveland.

The plotting of Graveland is one of its most interesting aspects. As in a lot of thrillers and crime novels (Graveland partakes of both modes), there are several seemingly unrelated plots at the beginning. An unemployed and divorced architect, Frank Bishop, languishes in a suburban retails store (selling high-tech game equipment, among other things), and is unable to reach his college-age daughter. On the heels of the world financial crisis, an investment banker and a hedge-fund manager are murdered on the street in New York. Vaughan is seemingly about to hand over the reins of his secretive private equity firm to his second-in-command, who's puzzled by both his boss's retirement and his health situation. And Ellen, who has turned her work on the failed presidential candidacy at the heart of Bloodland into a series of articles, has a nagging suspicion that the official story of the financial murders is incorrect.

Readers know in advance that these stories will come together. But Glynn keeps the plot fresh by seeming to head toward one sort of thriller plot and then veering off into something else. The shifts and surprises continue until well into the novel, and affect all the intersecting stories. An astute reader will figure out the final twist before the narrative makes it explicit, but not much before, and that reader will be pulled forward even more by the awful inevitability of what's going to happen.

Glynn keeps things moving rapidly forward, using dialogue and internal monologue rather than a more narrator-centric mode, keeping the story fresh and lively in the process. I found myself racing through the book's 383 pages. The resolution of the story not only ties up Graveland's plotlines, it also makes a fitting conclusion to the whole trilogy, without making any tedious attempt to replay the stories of the first two books, through Gilroy's brief appearance and the playing out of the Vaughan story. Winterland is about developers and politicians, Bloodland is about politicians and journalists, and Graveland is about financiers and journalists: but the whole set is really about money, and the pervasive and corrupting influence it has on contemporary life. If that's a lot for a few crime novels to carry, Glynn does it with flair, humor, and efficient but elegant writing.

One from Istanbul, one from Barcelona

Baksheesh, by Esmahan Aykol, and The Sound of One Hand Killing, by Teresa Solana, have a few things in common. Both have considerable comic elements; both have a meta-fictional premise (Aykol's heroine, Kati, owns a crime fiction bookstore, so there are frequent references to crime writers; and the client for whom Solana's unlicensed private detectives, twin brothers Borja and Eduard, are working is a crime writer named Teresa Solana. Plus both are set in Istanbul and Barcelona, cities not unknown to crime fiction but less heavily represented in the genre than, say, Italy or France, not to mention U.K. and U.S.

But The Sound of One Hand Killing is more clearly satirical in intent. Solana is skewering Catalonian society, as in her earlier novels, and new-age fads this time as well. The social climbers and herbal-medicine consumers in the book are quite funny, though Borja and Eduard are somewhat lacking in the traditional skills of the fictional private detective. The joke about Solana being their client isn't leaned on too heavily, so we're not subjected to the full-on metafiction of a few other contemporary crime-comedy writers. Despite the murder of the head guru of the health spa that the brothers have infiltrated on Solana's behalf, the tone is light and the pace fairly languid. It's less a page-turner than a light entertainment.

Aykol's tone is also fairly light, but there's more tension. The main concern of our heroine, Kati, is finding a new apartment, after her landlord has announced a rate increase. She briefly becomes a suspect in the murder of a squatter in an apartment that she seeks to rent (he menaced her and she him), but the murder mystery (and the tension of her being accused) dissipates somewhat in Kati's pursuit of the dead man's lover and family, which she manages to infiltrate. The result is a breezy tour through neighborhoods and homes of Turks that tourists would not normally see, with the romance of Aykols first novel, Hotel Bosphorus, mostly (but not entirely) replaced with real-estate lust. As with Solana's novel, Baksheesh is not much of a page turner. The ending, though, is truer to the characters than to the conventions of crime fiction, in an interesting way. Aykol's intention is less satirical than Solana's and more sociological, exploring the corruption and everyday life of the denizens of Istanbul, in the working class as well as professionals and those aspiring to social status (Kati's bookshop offers her inroads into both, which she exploits as necessary).

Both are enjoyable reads and neither is a conventional crime novel. Either would be an effective antidote for an overdose of noir or cozy reading.

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

A few years ago, a review copy of a book by an author I hadn't heard of, Mick Herron, arrived in my mailbox courtesy of Soho Crime publishers. The book was Slow Horses; its sequel, Dead Lions, arrived a couple of weeks ago, and the only reservation I have about the new book is that its predecessor was so good that it set an impossible standard for the current story.

After reading Slow Horses, I went back and worked my way through Herron's earlier books, which are all very good. The first one, Down Cemetery Road, is a wonderful book that not only introduces a unique character (private detective Zoe Boehm, who returns in several sequels) but also begins with one of the funniest set pieces I have ever encountered in a crime novel, set (believe it or not) in a dinner party in a suburban home).

Slow Horses introduced Slough House, a sort of halfway house for disgraced spies, members of Britain's MI5 that the organization is hoping to induce to leave the service by setting them up for endless bureaucratic tasks and perpetual boredom in an office distant from the central hub of headquarters. The novel also features some of the twistiest plotlines in crime fiction, something that all of Herron's books share. Dead Lions offers the same setting and the same pleasure in following the sudden twists and turns, but in a somewhat different context. Slow Horses dealt with terrorism (or, more properly, the manipulation of the fear of terrorism). Dead Lions deals with the remnants of the Cold War, within and beyond the security services.

Jackson Lamb, a central but not the main character of the earlier book, is at the very center here. He's a scruffy old warrior, set out to pasture in Slough House, in charge of the other "slow horses," as they are known in the service. When a former agent shows up dead on a train, Lamb involves his team of losers in finding out what might have led up to the death. From that point, the story involves embedded spies, gangsters, former KGB agents (some real and some mythical), and even young love (some casual, some committed, always dangerous). The story is funny but also very dark, and the specter of John LeCarré is explicitly invoked but also undercut or recast in a 21st century landscape.

The novel is beautifully written but also elegantly structured. I have spoken before of a setpiece at the beginning of one of Jo Nesbø's novels, in which a drop of water is followed as it runs through an old house. Herron offers not one but two setpieces, to frame the novel, but just as it's not good to offer spoilers about a book's plot, it's wrong to telegraph the pleasures of reading a well-built book. Ever since finishing Slow Horses (and passing it along to anyone I could think of), I've been waiting for a possible sequel. Now that it's here, I have the pleasure of experiencing it, along with the pang of having finished it (and having to wait again, for more from Herron). I see that he has a story coming out that revives the career of Zoe Boehm--perhaps that will tide me over...

Marek Krajewski, The Minotaur's Head

Since 2008, Marek Krajewski's crime novels featuring detective Eberhard Mock in the (then) German city of Breslau have been appearing in English, courtesy first of McLehose Press and more recently Melville International Crime, in the order of their original publication in Polish. Now we have a fourth Eberhard Mock novel, but it looks like they've skipped four of the Polish originals to bring out the 8th novel in English, not the 4th through 7th. It's wonderful to have Mock back again, but I have to wonder about those missing books, especially since the first three were in a very unusual pattern, each novel set earlier than the previous one,not sustainable, of course, unless we eventually ended up with Eberhard Mock, toddler-detective; but I wonder when the pattern was actually broken--since the new book is set after the first three. Mock is now integrated into the German Army, but is sent back into police-work to assist in the pursuit of a serial killer who has struck Breslau after two earlier killings in Lwow.

At first unwillingly, and then fully engaged in the task, Mock is instructed to work with Polish detective named Popielski, a wonderful creation who seems at first totally opposite to Mock, but who actually has some common ground with him. The serial killer seems to be selecting only young virgins to mutilate and murder, and Popielski is in mortal fear that his own daughter will be the next victim.

The situation seems like a normal crime-novel plot, but as anyone who has read any of Marewski's books will know, these are not normal crime novels. Krajewski explores the lower depths of prewar Germany and Poland beetween the wars through not only the crimes but also the character of the thoroughly debased Mock himself. With the more-or-less straitlaced Popielski as a foil, The Minotaur's Head is at first somewhat less decadent than the first three books, but Popielski has some secrets that are gradually reveales, not to mention the gradual revelation of what is actually going on in the murders. By the time we reach the end, we have twisted downn into the murk along with the characters, who achieve a form of justice almost in spite of themselves.

And Popielski seems ripe for appearance, in a somewhat changed role, in future novels (I won't provide any spoilers). The Mock series is very dark and sometimes very funny (also in a dark way). Human appetites of all sorts are explored in the stories, in a style that is both jagged and literary, often with aspects of the author's classical scholarship in evidence (but in a playful way). The arrival of a new Krajewski novel in the landscape of English-language crime fiction is like a lurid spark that illuminates another way of doing and thinking about crime fiction, an illicit pleasure that the author graciously shares with the reader.

Lars Kepler's The Nightmare

The Nightmare, the sequel to a prominent Swedish crime of recent years, The Hypnotist, by a husband and wife writing team known as Lars Kepler, has the bones of a good book, undermined, especially in the first half, by some obvious flaws. Joona Linna, a Finno-Swedish super-detective, is alternately held in awe by other cops and squeezed out of investigations by the police hierarchy and the security police (in typical crime-fiction fashion). The awe he inspires in other cops is naively presented, and the obstructions placed in his way are a bit cliched. But these problems fade away in the second half, particularly with the development of a new character, Saga Bauer (whose name unfortunately coincides with the wonderful female character in the Danish-Swedish TV series, The Bridge, as well as a recurring description of her as rather elfin--fortunately she's simply a bit under-confident rather than autistic-ish, like the TV Saga).

Joona Linna (who's almost always described by his full name) is not, in his own mind, quite the superman that other people think he is. He's even a bit insecure, at times, despite the intuition that is his strongest investigative tool. The authors give him a flaw (a recurring severe migraine that he under-treats because the medicine fogs his mind), and he has a murky and evidently tragic past that only slowly comes to light for the reader. Joona's amazing investigative abilities are something like those of Jo Nesbø's detective Harry Hole, but Joona is a bit less self-destructive; both characters can be a bit irritating in their super-abilities, but neither is ultimately totally unbelievable, and Joona is if anything a bit less superhuman than Harry. There is, however, one action by Joona in the climax that is hardly believable (but then some of Harry's exploits beggar belief, too).

A number of the other characters, on the other hand, are cliches; the security police and SWAT team are drawn as bloodthirsty cardboard cutouts of their roles, especially early in the book. Some of the victims and a number of characters who are mostly bystanders do have individual personalities, and the settings are vividly drawn.

The writing is direct and effective, though there are stylistic quirks that are a bit distracting, particularly in the time-framing of overlapping episodes, such as a chapter early on that repeats almost exactly the chapter that went before, with a slightly different focus and time. There is also a chase sequence that goes on for a very, very long time. And as the plot gets more and more complicated, there begin to be some rather gothic and graphically cruel elements to the story, not everyone's taste I expect.



The plotting is the real strength of the book, along with the scene-setting. There are, however, some flashbacks that are intended to illuminate some of the character's biography and motivation, but some of these simply impede the story and pad out the page-count and may induce a bit of skimming on the reader's part.

Perfect Hatred, Leighton Gage

Leighton Gage's new Mario Silva novel, Perfect Hatred, is the second book that I've recently read that's partly set in the wild Tri-Border Area, where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet. The first was Sebastian Rotella's Triple Crossing, which drops a U.S. Border agent, undercover with a Mexican drug gang, into the lawless area. Gage's novel probes more deeply into the political and social realities of the area, as well as the impact of the lawlessness on the surrounding countries.

Perfect Hatred brings together three crimes: a terrorist bombing, the assassination of a regional politician, and a corrupt Brazilian's plot to assassinate the prosecutor who is about to put him in jail as well as Silva himself. A reader might expect the three plots to come together in the end, but Gage subverts the usual plot devices, while keeping all three plots moving rapidly forward.

Silva's team of federal police agents is split by his boss, half following the terrorist plot and half the political assassination. A young Muslim has kidnapped a baby, after murdering its mother, and planted a bomb in the baby's carriage, which explodes outside the U.S. consulate in São Paulo. In Curitiba, a candidate for governor of the state is shot in the head, along with a former associate of Silva's team, who has shot and killed the assassin.

One interesting development in this book is that the individuals on Silva's team have become so strongly characterized that Silva himself, though at the center of everything, does not dominate the story. Instead, the lead role is split among the team members, each an independent element in the collaborative whole. The result is a re-examination of the police procedural format, within the rapidly forward-moving story. Perfect Hatred is about justice and revenge, and the intertwining stories reach resolution in indirect ways, sometimes through inaction rather than action, or through outside actors being drawn into the plot. But Silva's team remains at the center, holding their own against a vividly drawn cast of other characters who range from outright villains through zealots, idealists, and innocent bystanders.

This is the sixth of Gage's Silva novels, each of which takes a different approach to the crime story and to the portrait of Brazil that he is progressively compiling. The books not only don't repeat themselves, they are also getting better and better as the series progresses.

Arne Dahl: Books and Films

When it came out in English, Arne Dahl's Misterioso was obviously (to me) one of the best crime novels to have arrived from Scandinavia. So I was thrilled to learn that a Swedish TV-film based on that and the 4 subsequent "Intercrime" novels were available with English subtitles. The movie-version of Misterioso was very good, and faithful to the plot, characters, and spirit of the book. Subsequent films were equally good, but the second in the series, Bad Blood (Ont Blod in the original Swedish) dipped into the lurid serial killer segment of the crime fiction spectrum--not my favorite fictional neighborhood. I'm glad I saw the film, because in addition ot the clever cruelty, the characters in the ensemble cast were developed further, plus there's some interesting international politics and intrigue.

But now there's a dilemma. Bad Blood, the novel, is about to be released in English. Would the skill of the writer overcome the distaste I have for the lurid subject matter? Does the movie version in any way stand in for the book, or substitute for it? Usually the experience of reading is enough different from the experience of watching that I don't mind revisiting the book after the film or vice versa. Any thoughts on watching the same plot you've already read, or reading the same story you've already watched?

I think I'm coming down on the side of skipping the on-paper version of Bad Blood--not only because of the serial killer plot, but also because of the height of my current TBR stack. If anybody's interested, I can post reviews of the series (I'm halfway through the 4th installament--each book becomes 2 90-minute episodes). I also just learned that "Arne Dahl," both the name of the author and the title of the TV series, is a pseudonym for the writer Jan Arnald.

Irish noir: Declan Burke's Slaughter's Hound

Lately I've been reading books by authors who write novels in pairs or trilogies rather than open-ended series, which seems a relatively recent phenomenon in the crime fiction world. In several cases, the switch from one series or trilogy to another is also a shift in style or genre. For just one example, Carlo Lucarelli's DeLuca series (historical police procedurals) is quite different from his Grazia Negro books (serial killer stories), and different still from his Coliandro stories (which are comic, parodies of the police procedural). All of these series seem to be closed, without further installments (though there is one Grazia Negro book that hasn't been translated, Lupo Mannaro or Werewolf).

Declan Burke has just published Slaughter's Hound, the sequel (and seemingly final installment) to his first book, Eightball Boogie. These two books, featuring not-exactly detective Harry Rigby, are hard-boiled noir, in the tradition of Chandler and Ross MacDonald, but with a contemporary relentlessness and literary references that might remind a reader of a more recent noir writer, Ken Bruen. Burke's other pair of novels, The Big O and Crime Always Pays, are lighter, more in a comic or farcical but still noir tone, closer to Elmore Leonard than Jim Thompson. Neither series resembles Burke's brilliant stand-alone metafiction, Absolute Zero Cool.

Burke's literary references are not intrusive or artificial, but integral to his first-person narrator's character and to the story, and range from Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats to Bukowsky and William Gaddis (who is particularly relevant to one aspect of the overall story, dealing with forgery). One reference is closely related to the dark violence of the story, an image and an act that suggest two grotesque passages in Bataille's Story of the Eye and Kosinski's Painted Bird, though neither writer is mentioned. Neither the literary asides nor the overarching paen to an obscure Irish rock band, Rollerskate Skinny (who I confess I thought Burke had made up until I did a web search) slow down the inexorable downward spiral of Harry's life.

Harry is recently released from incarceration in a mental facility, to which he was confined after killing his brother at the end of Eightball Boogie. A roommate there is the son of a wealthy family right out of Ross MacDonald or even Chinatown, and part of the pleasure of the novel is Rigby's narrative exploration of the intricacies of this spectacularly dysfunctional family. The current Irish financial collapse is also a factor, as it plays out on the bars, alleys, and docks of Sligo, on Ireland's northwest.

Rigby's is an entertaining voice to spend time with, which relieves some of the pain in his story, though in the final section, the pain takes precedence, though there is an almost joyful resignation that echoes the passages repeatedly drawn from Rollerskate Skinny's repertoire. It's a dark journey, but rewarding for an intrepid reader.

Ratlines, by Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville's new novel is something of a departure: his previous novels deal with the violent aftermath of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, after the peace accord. Beginning with The Ghosts of Belfast, these were some of the most accomplished crime novels of the current Irish wave of crime writing. Ratlines goes back in time, to the aftermath of another war, World War II.

Albert Ryan is a Protestant Irishman who fought for the British during the war. Now an odd man out (both as an ex-soldier in civilian society and as both a Protestant and someone who didn't follow the orthodoxy of Irish neutrality. One aspect of that neutrality has come back to haunt him, along with those he killed (an overlap with The Ghosts of Belfast, though not emphasized here in the same way as that earlier novel).

Like most readers, I was not aware of the Irish government's policy of giving sanctuary to Nazis and Nazi collaborators after the end of the war. On the eve of John Kennedy's presidential visit to Ireland, someone is raising the profile of these unsavory characters by systematically murdering them. Charles Haughey, justice minister and future prime minister, enlists Ryan to find the murderers and to report not only to the government but to the most high-profile of the Nazi "guests," a famous strategist in the war. The title refers to lines of communication and transportation set up to rescue war criminals from the victorious allies, in the aftermath of war and even later.

So far, it sounds like a fairly conventional thriller. But the alliances and betrayals, the sharp characterizations, and the uncertain morality of all concerned keep the story leaning over the edge of conventional storytelling into an edgier and more interesting territory. Ryan is particularly interesting: he's not a leading man (in terms of looks and savoir-faire), a genius, or a martial-arts star (though there's a sort of parody of the James Bond sort of martial expertise, in a fencing match). He's a "good soldier" with little to gain or lose in this investigation that's been forced on him. He can only negotiate as best he can the dangerous and violent situation he's been thrust into.

The whole post-war-Nazi thing has been much mined by crime and thriller writers, but Neville uses it in a novel way, to reveal something about Irish history as well as the characters in the story. Though historical fiction (even recent history) is not my usual cup of tea, Ratlines is an excellentn read that held my interest completely.