K.O. Dahl--new Norwegian noir.

A blurb on the back 0f the newly translated The Fourth Man, by K.O. Dahl, compares the novel to the classic noir of James M. Cain. The comparison is apt, especially since Dahl's book is basically a love story, as many of Cain's were (Dahl's novel also has something in common with the movie Body Heat, which is in its turn a take on Cain's work. I don't know how many of Dahl's books there are featuring his dyspeptic duo of Oslo detectives, Frølich and Gunnarstrand, but this one is focused on Frank Frølich, the younger of the two. Dahl takes a logical tack in turning the format of the police procedural in a noir direction: he makes his detective an outsider by showing him in disgrace or disrepute in any case. Jo Nesbo takes another tack with his detective, Harry Hole, by making him an alcoholic mess. Frølich may in fact be better company than Hole, though I'm still a big fan of Nesbo's work. Dahl's novel is also more compact than Nesbo's, which are on the massive side. Dahl takes several other elements of the genre (besides the Cain-ian love story and the cop-outsider), including a twisty plot and a cynical attitude toward wealth and property. It's a fast-moving plot told in a much more metaphorical and adjective rich style (not for Dahl the famous advice of Colette to the young Simenon: "cut out all the adjectives"). It's engaging and well written, and a more classic version of noir than most of the current Scandinavian novels.

Swedish crime novel: The Glass Devil

I've read the three crime novels by Helene Tursten that have been translated, all of them police procedurals featuring Inspector Irene Huss of Gothenburg (Göteborg). There are plenty of dark and terrible crimes (in the case of the new The Glass Devil, a brutal triple murder, hints of Satanism, pedophilia, etc) but Inspector Huss herself seems to have no dark side to her character. She's always troubled by the darkness in the killers she confronts, has nightmares about the crimes, but her homelife is untroubled, her relationship with her co-workers mostly no problem. Her fellow detectives are less well developed, but except for some alcoholism and taciturnity, also pretty much untroubled characters. In that sense, Tursten's novels are more like 87th Precinct novels than true noir (also the case with several of the other current crop of Scandinavian crime novels in translation, particularly the series by Åke Edwardson and perhaps also the one by Liza Marklund). I've enjoyed the books, but they have a sunnier quality than some of my favorites among the new Scandinavians, such as Jo Nesbo. In the new novel, Inspector Huss interviews the co-workers of a murdered parson and his family, tries to get an interview with the sole surviving member of the family (a daughter who has moved to London), runs down leads based on Satanic symbols left at the scenes of the crimes, and generally follows police procedure down lots of blind alleys without finding any motives and few clues. If you like procedurals, all of that is fine. My biggest problem with the book is one inconsistency in the plot: One of the few pieces of physical evidence that the police find is planted by the murderer to put them on a false trail--but just as the police follow that false trail, the killer gives himself up saying that they're getting too close to the truth. But the form of the confession is unique and there are still a couple of surprises (one interesting and one a bit cute) still to come after that dénouement. So I have a few quibbles but it was still an enjoyable read and I'll be watching for more of this series. I still have a few more new Swedes to get through, including K.O. Dahl's first and the newest one by Marklund (plus a couple of Irish crime novels and the new Vicki Hendricks)--lots to look forward to!

Fruttero & Lucentini

Does anyone remember the crime novels of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini? They remain bestsellers in Europe, but only one was published in the U.S. (The Sunday Woman, translated by William Weaver in the mid-70s, was promoted as a literary novel rather than a crime novel, if I remember correctly--possibly because of the translator and the publisher, Helen and Kurt Wolff). Another title, An Enigma by the Sea, was in print in the U.K. for a while, and a third was promised there but never published. It's difficult to see why these novels have not been a success in English. They're hardly noir, in any traditional sense. They're light and frequently funny, depicting the interrelationships among a group of middle-class Italians in difficult circumstances and various cities. The Sunday Woman is set in Turin (of which we get a significant tour in the novel), and deals with murder (of course) but also sexual pursuit and attraction. The conversation between the detective and the leading lady is funny and true to life, as is the attraction between them (not Bogart and Bacall stuff, more comic and real). There are also gay lovers, hot pursuits through a city market, and langorous conversations in hillside villas. The Sunday Woman is long out of print, but still easy to find second-hand (it must have had a large printing in its first edition, plus a mass-market paperback was done, also in the 70s). Enigma by the Sea deals with a murder among a group gathered together in a country house, but the dynamic is much the same. The novels are charming and addictive, and worth going back to read again. If you're looking for shoot-em-up action, you'll find them frustratingly slow. If character and setting are what you're interested in in a crime novel, they're unsurpassed. I long for more of them to be available in English, since I have little hope of polishing up the little Italian I know enough to read them in the original...

The other igi heitman novel (by Pernille Rygg)

Igi Heitmann, Pernille Rygg's main character in two crime novels (The Butterfly Effect and The Golden Section) set in Oslo, Norway, is one of the most distinctive and thoroughly "present" of all noir characters. The novels are complex and allusive, and not written in easy or transparent language. Rygg's style is often indirect, almost stream of consciousness and with oblique shifts in direction. In the 2nd book, several pages of discussion of threats against women from Igi's point of view go by before you realize that she's in the middle of being beaten by a couple of thugs. And after this passage, another aspect of her writing arises: her use of an extended rhetorical image to evoke Igi's situation and her state of mind. And the milieu of Oslo is not simply described, each setting within the city is so particular in its metaphorical presence that each has an emotional resonance: each setting is so sharply evoked that it becomes a participant in the story. Sometimes the indirection of Rygg's prose reminds me of Henry James (though without the moralism and long, long sentences of James). In the midst of this complexity, the novel can be quite funny. There is one (sort of) gang fight that is a (sort of) rumble between Pakistani gangsters and gay s&m clubsters--as comic as the gang war in Graeme Gordon's hilarious but violent Bayswater Bodycount. And Igi's insight into modern society, the crime at hand, and her own life and mind is extensive, and she's a complex character, worth spending time with. Don't expect a straight line from one chapter to the next, though. As the first novel dealt with occultism and sex games, the second deals with psychology and art. And as the first novel revolved around Igi's recently deceased father, the new one revolves around the rest of her family: her transvestite husband (much more fully realized than in the 1st book, along with his female alter ego, whom Igi seems to think of as an intruder into the family circle), her mother and stepfather, and especially her young daughter (Igi discovered her pregnancy at the end of the 1st book). But Igi is no stock character as a mother: she's a bit jealous that the toddler is more attached to her father than to her mother, but she's not wracked with guilt about it. She's desperate to protect her daughter at times, but still not overprotective. The daughter, even, is a real character, with her own quirks but without caricature, as might have been the case with a more genre-bound novel. Rygg's text is poetic, but her feeling for the crime victims is real and believable. She has no official stake in the mystery (one murder suspect is a patient--Igi is now a practicing clinical psychologist--and another is a woman Igi meets with in looking into the circumstances of the first crime). And wrapped around all of this is a well-evoked artworld, with its own jealousies and personalities, the world of urban-revival real estate with its own relentless logic, as well as a capitalist coterie that is interested in art, murder, and Igi for its own reasons. The Golden Section is a complex tale, told in poetic style, and develops Rygg's fictional world further than The Butterfly Effect did. As far as I know, there are no more Igi Heitmann novels, even in Norwegian, but I can hope for more, and more translations into English, some time in the future. There was a gap of some years between the first 2 books, and the time was well spent--if it takes Rygg a few years to produce another crime novel, the result will likely be even more interesting than the first 2.

Saskia Noort's The Dinner Club

I trust some small presses for their consistently high quality international noir fiction. Bitter Lemon, from the U.K., is one of them (others are Serpent's Tail, Europa Editions, and a few others). So I had no hesitation about buying a copy of Saskia Noort's new crime novel from the Netherlands, The Dinner Club, which has been available for a while in the U.K. The blurb on the back of The Dinner Club compares it to Desperate Housewives combined with Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith is the more apt comparison, since what Noort's circle of friends shares with the Desperates is a suburban setting and lifestyle--but Dinner has none of the cuteness that mars the Desperates. Another comparison noted on the book cover is with Nicci French, the pseudonym of journalists Sean French and Nicci Gerrard. To me, that's not much of a recommendation, and I would probably not have ordered the book without a) the Bitter Lemon imprint and b) the Dutch setting. I've already reviewed or mentioned a few Dutch crime writers or writers who use Dutch settings (Nicholas Freeling, Baantjer, van de Wettering, and Håkan Nesser, whose novels are set in a fictional country that is as much Netherlands as it is Denmark or any other North European country). The Dinner Club is not much like all those: the story develops slowly, and for the first half it seems hardly like a crime novel, more like a suburban-housewife novel of a more general sort, like Maeve Binchy's books, for example. But the menace builds, more slowly perhaps than in a Highsmith book, but just as inexorably. In the end I enjoyed the book (I read it on the intercity train over the past 2 days). The point of view is very controlled, almost claustrophobic, confined to the mind of Karen, the main character. Some of the other central characters are skilfully defined, but others are mere sketches, even some of the essential characters. The plot is carefully constructed and geared for a final surprise revelation (a surprise for Karen, at least, since there is plenty of indication of who the murderous plotter is)--and surprise is not, actually, a Highsmith-ian characteristic. The action sequences in that final surprise are actually a weak point in the book--necessary for the plot but at odds with the atmosphere of the rest of the book. What is happening? Basically, Karen and her husband move out from Amsterdam to a commuter suburb for all the usual reasons, but she becomes frustrated with the unfriendliness of the village natives. She ultimately falls in with a circle of women who are all transplants from the city, but share little else in common. When there are two apparent suicides in this circle and their families, Karen (and a police detective) become suspicious and start to look for conspiracies, to the ridicule of Karen's husband and the rest of the circle, to the extent that she is ultimately ostracized (adding to the paranoid atmosphere). As I said, I enjoyed it without being quite seduced by it. I'd probably read another of Noort's books, for the same reasons I read this one, but it might not be at the top of my list.

Scandinavian tsunami, and others

The flood of Scandinavian crime novels continues unabated. Are there more crime writers than ever before in Sweden and Norway (especially those 2) than ever before? Or have they only just started translating them. I'm just starting the second Pernille Rygg novel, The Golden Section, but that one's actually several years old. Rumors of new Scandinavians include Helene Tursten (I actually have that one already), Nesser, Fossum, Indridason, K.O. Dahl, and Kjell Eriksson (I'm looking forward to that one especially, since I especially enjoyed The Princess of Burundi--there's a new Liza Marklund but it's hard to get in the U.S. and I haven't been motivated enough to order it via intercontinental shipping). And can a new Nesbo be far behind (though his books are pretty long, maybe the translation takes a while). There are a few non-Scandinavians I'm also looking forward to: including Gene Kerrigan, Fred Vargas, and Saskia Noort (I've got those piled up on my end table) plus not-yet published titles by Deon Meyer from South Africa, Vicki Hendricks (OK, OK, this is supposed to be about non-U.S. novels, but Hendricks is great, and her publisher is in the U.K.--does that count), Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett of Spain, Jean-Claude Izzo from France, and Carlo Lucarelli from Italy (the next chapter of his wonderful fascist-era series). Plus there's a new book from Japan just out (The Hunter, by Asa Nonami). I haven't heard anything about any more translations from Dominique Manotti, but I can always hope.

Inger Frimansson

Some writers who turn to crime fiction after having a career in another genre or in mainstream fiction turn out what might be called "professional" novels that are incidentally crime novels. Elmore Leonard is an exception--his earlier career was in Westerns, and his crime novels, while throughly professional, have a casually written air, almost as if they were transcribed rather than composed. One example of professional, though no less enjoyable for that, fiction is Inger Frimansson's recently translated Good Night, My Darling. Frimansson's book also contrasts with the previous Swedish novel reviewed here, Mari Jungstedt's Unseen. Both novels turn on revenge for events experienced much earlier, in school. Both feature girl bullies. Both include substantial flashbacks. And both are "collective" novels, a term I've been using to describe stories told from multiple points of view, i.e. with the focus split among a number of characters. But Unseen is a procedural, a roman policier, and that structure dominates the plot. Good Night, My Darling is instead a thriller, I suppose--without the overlay or grid of police activity. And the atmospheric, slowly building composition takes shape in more poetic language than is typically the case with the policier (and the language of Unseen is typical of the genre--a plain language that I happen to appreciate in contemporary writing--not Hemingway-esque or even Simenon-esque, but still straightforward). Frimansson's first book in English is not overwritten, by any means, and perhaps resembles Ruth Rendell than any other prominent writer in English that I can think of. But there's also quite a bit of Patricia Highsmith, and even a taste of Beat Not the Bones, the amazing jungle adventure/suspense novel by Charlotte Jay (an adventure hinted at from the novel's first words occupies a large chunk of narrative toward the end). There's not an early murder to solve, there's a building sense that something bad is going to happen, and a slow revelation of bad things that have happened in the past, things that foreshadow or even determine what is happening in the book's "now." One of the pleasures of Frimansson's book is a more complete picture of a certain suburban slice of Stockholm than has so far been shown in most contemporary Swedish crime fiction. This isn't urban Stockholm--it's the city's boundary with nature. Stockholm is built on a lake, and is at the edge of an archipelago, and nature is important to even urban Swede's sense of themselves. The denizens of this novel dwell at that not-quite city and not-quite rural zone, and nature invades the main character's house, in the form of a tame bird that is not the usual parrot, parakeet, or canary. These characters are not cliche Swedes, though--several of them have non-Swedish forebears (the main character, Justine, has a French mother, who died when her daughter was 3). And the characters range in age from the remembered primary school kids of the novel's past to a paralyzed old woman in a rest home--as well as a moral range across numerous shades of gray. No one in the novel is guiltless, but all are sympathetic. My only quibble with the novel is that at the end, Justine's character seems hardly capable of some of her actions, regardless of her substantial motivation--but that ties her to Highsmith's characters, in fact, since Highsmith's violence often far exceeds the apparent capacities of the characters who perpetrate it. I'm pasting in a cover from a recent Swedish paperback edition because the American cover isn't up on the web anywhere yet--I may come back and paste in the American one later.

Cobblestone: A Detective Novel

Occasionally I like to take a look back at an older novel that is remrkable in one way or another. One of the most remarkable is Cobblestone: A Detective Novel, by Peter Lengyel, a Hungarian writer better known for science fiction than detective fiction. But Cobblestone is and is not a detective novel. It's a massive story of the beginning fo the 20th century, ranging across Europe but centered on a pursuit through Budapest's streets and brothels: a master detective pursuing a master safecracker. And at the same time it's a meta-novel taking Hungarian history from the end of the 20th century back to the beginnings of the universe. Not only are there layers and layers to this tale, there is also a sudden shift at the middle of the novel that is unlike anything else in any other novel, detective or otherwise--I won't give it away, but it is either a masterstroke or the most irritating device ever attempted in fiction. But back to the detective story, the tale is a fascinating mosaic of the underworld of Budapest, as well as a fantastic heist story. It unreels like at atmospheric movie, but it is decidedly a novel, not really filmable at all. If anyone's interested, I can give more details. It's not easy to find, but it's not out of print.

The last Vazquez Montalban

In the couple of years before his death, Manuel Vazquez Montalban brought out one last Pepe Carvalho novel, The Man of My Life. In a novel that circles around several women (a couple of them returned from earlier novels), the author violates the logic of one of Carvalho's most scanadalous habits: burning books. In this last book, the previous novels come back in the form of those two women and in the reminiscences they narrate and provoke. Most of the novel is actually taken up with discussions of Catalan nationalism and post-nationalism, Satanism, Catharism, and so forth. Vazquez Montalban seems to be taking stock not only of his own work but also of the nervous and more or less paranoid currents of the new Europe. One thread of the book does involve a murder that Carvalho is supposed to be investigating, but his cursory search for the killer is frustrated not only by the powers behind the killing but also by the constant distractions that sideline the detective: food, philosophy, love, and memory. None of the Carvalho stories are straightforward--they're about texture and thought and politics, food and sex and violence (usually institutional more than individual). The Man of My Life is the least straightforward, though, and the most thoughtful. This book is essential for anyone who has enjoyed Carvalho's exploits and mannerisms, but not the best place to start on an investigation of this quirky and brilliant Catalan crime writer.

From Sweden: Jungstedt's Unseen

Unseen, by Mari Jungstedt, came out last year in the U.S., but until recently it escaped by attetion somehow. It's a police procedural that has inevitably been compared to Henning Mankell's novels but is actually quite different. It's another of the "collective" novels that have been coming out of Sweden: as with Åsa Larsson's novels of the far north of Sweden, Jungstedt's story of Gotland (an island in the Baltic just off the Swedish coast) has a central character that only occasionally takes center stage. That alone takes this police procedural away from Mankell territory (his detective, Kurt Wallander, is at center stage all the time, except when--usually later in the books--the killer is at the center of the narrative). Jungstedt's detective, Anders Knutas, is in many ways less well defined than several of the other characters, including the best friend of what is thought to be the first victim of the novel's serial killer (and the journalist who befriends her). A woman is killed with an axe, along the shore after a violent argument with her boyfriend. Then another woman is killed on her way home from a bar, where she had flirted with a stranger. And as the victims pile up, there's no thread linking them. The collective, split point of view works very well in carrying the story forward step by step, withough anticipating too much of what's to come. But there are two flaws, to me, with the book. The killer's voice periodically interrupts unnecessarily--I would have been happier with the book if I'd simply skipped those passages (conveniently italicized). I might actually try that exercise if I read the book again. And a more substantial flaw is that the ending is both sketchy and cliched. After proceeding at deliberate speed throughout, Jungstedt feels it necessary to kick into such a high gear at the end that it's difficult to visualize what's happening (except that we've been over this particular high-stakes, high-tension ground so many times that the film almost runs in our head without the author's help). There are a couple of uniquely Swedish twists--such as the consequences of the novel's final death (something that readers not already conversant with the mores and the correctness of Swedish police novels may find a bit startling). I won't say more because I don't want to risk inserting any spoilers. Unseen was good, if not perfect--better in some ways than either Helene Tursten or Åke Edwardsson (two other prominent competitors for the other-than-Wallander detective spot) and I'd recommend it--and I'd definitely read any further translations from her work (I think there is a German tv movie of at least one of her novels, with more forthcoming--Swedish detectives on Gotland speaking German, no doubt, just as Donna Leon's characters speak German in the Venetian setting of the German tv adaptations of her work).

Swedes just keep coming, plus an old UK noir

New Swedish noir just keeps coming. There's a newly translated book by Inger Frimansson that I've ordered (it's officially coming out in April in the U.S.) and I just discovered Mari Jungstedt's Unseen, which I've started (but barely). Both come highly recommended. In the meantime, I picked up a copy of Jerry Raine's '90s Smalltime and read (or re-read) it--when I picked it up I couldn't remember whether I'd read it or not, when it was new or newer, and I still can't say for sure. I have a sneaking suspicion that I started it and couldn't finish it. I'd like to hear other people's opinions about Raine, because his next couple of books (Frankie Bosser Comes Home and Slaphead Chameleon) sound like just the kind of noir that I like, but Smalltime is irritating in a lot of ways. The setting is fine--a corner of London suburbia--and the characters are effective, as layabout working class types. But the language is very flat and the plotting is slow without offering any compensation in texture or detail. It's not that the characters or plot are unbelievable, it's just that none of the aspects of the novel seem to add up to much, and the language is so plain-spoken that it has hardly any life. It's not hard-boiled "tough-guy terse" language, it's just so straightforward that you barely sense any author behind it. It is, to be fair, a first novel--and as such it accomplishes its goals in getting the characters through their paces all the way to the end. But it's hard to care about anything in the book, and the occasional comic touches seem added on, not growing integrally out of the situation, just something Raine thought of and added in. Please--any thoughts? Should I go ahead with the next two? And to be honest, I have a smiliar problem with another Do-Not Press author, John B. Spencer. Any thoughts on him?

Leif Davidsen's Euro-Noir thriller

Or Noir Euro-thriller. Lime's Photograph is a few years old now, but it's a pan-European political novel that avoids a lot of the flaws that, in my opinion, mar the thriller genre as a whole. First, it's a first person novel, with Peter Lime (Danish emigre living in Spain, paparazzo and former leftist) occupying the center of the tale. And although geo-political concerns are aired (those of the post-Wall, EU world we still live in today), Lime isn't walking up to Prime Ministers or one-handedly preventing an international assasination. He takes a damaging photo of a Spanish official in a sexual tryst on a private beach, gets harassed by the police, approached by the Danish security service, and his personal life is wrecked. I won't give away any more of the plot, but it's about Lime in the context of the new Europe, not about kings and presidents and prime ministers. Davidsen is a silled and careful storyteller. The events unfold in a leisurely way (the paperback is 375 pages, plenty of room for the tale and its convolutions to unfold). The focus is on Lime's personality as it suffers and responds to events, as much on the plot (though plot is not stinted, there's plenty of story). I don't know of any other single novel that so carefully and effectively portrays at least 4 nations in the new world order (Spain, Denmark, Germany, and Russia). The passages of action (more necessary for a thriller than other genres within the noir landscape) are effective without overwhelming the rest of the story. The ultimate resolution explains the many threads that have gone before. And the reader's passage through the whole journey is most enjoyable.

A Corpse in the Koryo

Storytelling (and novel-writing) isn't really about revealing "what happened," it's really much more about delaying the telling. What keeps the reader turning pages is the pursuit of the plot, not the revelation of it. James Church, in his new noir crime novel of North Korea, A Corpse in the Koryo, knows that truth all too well. The book reads less like a crime novel than a spy novel, with the concealments, double-crossing, internal disputes among agencies, and final twists. The blurbs compare the novel with Philip Kerr's Berlin Trilogy (now a tetrology, actually) and the like (novels that use the police procedural to open up a closed society to the reader), but "Corpse" is more like Le Carre in many ways. Yes, it does open up a closed North Korea, validated by the pseudonymous author's professional experience there. But it's less about daily life in that country than about inter-agency strife. The protagonist, Inspector O, has plenty of noir attitude, but he's pulled this way and that by seemingly unrelated (even irrelevant) incidents and stories all the way through--like Marlowe, perhaps, is often pulled away from the main track, but in a way there is no main track visible in "Corpse," until close to the end. As I said above, Church has delayed that revelation of what's happening--not a problem, but more a spy maze than a noir one. And O is curiously open in his disdain for the power structure--though the portrait we occasionally glimpse of that country seems to be one that wouldn't tolerate that in a policeman--but that is explained in the story , in O's "protectors" within the system). And the citizens that populate the novel seem less desperately deprived than we are led by the news to believe about the citizens of that country (a member of that select group, the "axis of evil")--but again, the citizens frequently turn out to be hardly "simple citizens," again a factor making the book seem more like a spy novel. I guess it's not hard to tell that this is a book I admired more than enjoyed. I don't want to put other readers off--it's a fine story, and I'd read a sequel--but I hoped for something different, a book that Church evidently did not set out to write, rather than the one he did. A word about cover art--I've seen a number of books lately that don't utilize that aspect of a book terribly well (as evidenced by some of the ones I've reproduced here)--but A Corpse in the Koryo has a particularly good cover, for which the publishers should be commended. It has a great graphic quality and at the same time expresses a lot about the country it depicts.

A Spanish detective in Argentina

I read several of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's detective novels some years ago but never got addicted to the series. The plots are usually beside the point, and discoveries are often not made by the detective but simply stated in the narrative--the texture of the novels are far more important than the plots, which are devices for the exploration of the dark side of the modern world. On the strength of Andrea Camilleri's fondness for the novels, as well as the homage offered to Vázquez Montalbán in the "novel for four hands" by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos, I picked up what is evidently the second-to-last in the series, The Buenos Aries Quintet (the last is The Man of My Life, recently available in English). Private detective Pepe Carvalho is asked by his uncle to find a son who was a victim of the "dirty war" in Argentina 20 years previously and has been in exile in Spain ever since. The son belatedly decides to look for a daughter who was taken from him (when his wife was killed) and illegally adopted --disappeared as effectively as those murdered by the military government of those years. Off to Buenos Aires, reluctantly at first, Pepe is separated from his regular crew and his usual fare (food being a big part of this series). His new crew of damaged Argentinians who are more interesting than the regulars (to me, anyway). Carvalho repeatedly tells people that all he knows about Argentina is "tango, Maradona, and the disappeared." But as I mentioned above, the plot is not a straightforward (or even crooked) line from the assignment to the solution. We figure out where (and who) the daughter is long before the detective, and when she's found the novel takes little account of it. Much more important are the numerous ancillary tales and the main personalities (particularly Alma, everyone's love interest in one way or another) and the flock of auxiliary characters, who together draw a portrait not only of the conflict of left and right in Argentina but also the webs of conflict, deceit, and misery in the world at large. The text is full of tangos and poetry, food and sex, disguise and death. In an odd way when the novel reaches its most crescendo in a burlesque, macabre banquet among the members of the former (and still powerful) elite, The Buenos Aires Quintet reminds me of another big, baggy, overpopulated and satirical novel, Thomas Pynchon's first book, V. And as in V, the pleasure in reading Vázquez Montalbán's book is in going with the flow of the looping, overlapping stories as they reveal contemporary life, a troubled nation, and a vital people.

Irish noir thriller by Gene Kerrigan

There are some writers who seem natural, as if words simply flow freely into finished form: Elmore Leonard, maybe; and there are some writers whose work is professional, well structured: Henning Mankell, perhaps. But there are others who are both natural and professional, some of them coming from a journalistic background, like Gene Kerrigan from Ireland or Deon Meyer from South Africa. Kerrigan's first fictional book, Little Criminals, has both a seemingly careless plot, as meandering as Elmore Leonard's--but at the same time it has a tight overall structure so that at the end of the book, everything seems both inevitable and aesthetic. Little Criminals takes one of the pulp-iest plots in all of crime fiction, the same story as that masterpiece of the cheap paperback trash of early noir, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a book I've mentioned before: the kidnapping gone sour. But Kerrigan uses the pulp-y plot in the service of a portrait of the post-Celtic Tiger, Euro-centric, urbanized Ireland of today, in all its consumerist, un-quaint glory. Nobody in the book is entirely likeable, but it's a book you shouldn't pick up unless you're willing to stick with it for a while--Kerrigan will build up the tension until you have to keep going, you won't ba willing to stop. And just when you think you know what's coming, he takes a non-pulp sideroad into an intimate portrait of small town life, integral to the plot and at the same time affecting without descending into bathos. Yet the ending has something in common with No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a hollowness within the relief of the resolution, a desperation that comes only partly from the awfulness of the things that the characters have experienced. If you think I'm making too much of what is after all a crime novel well within the noir and pulp traditions, reconsider after you've read Little Criminals--this is a terrific book. I've ordered the sequel, but it doesn't seem to have been released yet.

A new Swedish noir-policier-mystery

Åsa Larsson runs a big risk with her new (new in English anyway) The Blood Spilt, the sequel to last year's Sun Storm (which I reviewed at the time). Like the earlier book, Spilt deals with a damaged lawyer from Stockholm who returns to her family home in Kiruna, in the far north of Sweden, near Finland and Lappland (the Lapps call themselves Sami now). And like the previous novel, this one begins with and centers upon the murder of a priest. The risks that Larsson runs are in simply duplicating the plot of a successful crime novel, in becoming pigeon-holed as the author of "religious noir" or some such thing, and in creating a sense that she is simply repeating herself, with nothing else to say. But Rebecka Martinson, the damaged Stockholmer in both books, is changed now, changed by the experience of the first book (not so common in series novels). She is poised at the precipice of a new life (and she's pretty negative about her old one). The priests, too, are very different--the founder and central preacher in an evangelical cult in the first, the parish priest in the Swedish national church in the second (as in England, the king of Sweden embraced Protestantism and created a national church, Lutheran in Sweden's case, but unlike in England the church has lost its government subsidy--one of the topics of The Blood Spilt. It is as if Larsson set out to show that it's not only the far fringes of organized religions that foster rivalry and hatred. On that subject, one of the comments I've had on this blog asked whether the Swedes are obsessed with religion, given the number of crime novels translated from Swedish dealing with the subject. Like most of Europe, Sweden is almost completely secular--but there are two strains of religion (those in Larsson's two books) that go back over a hundred years--the conformist and the nonconformist or fundamentalist. And in rural or small-town Sweden (the setting for Larsson's novel as well as those by Mankell that deal with religion, including the first with Linda Wallander as a main character), religion is far more important than in the cities, as is true in other developed countries. But back to Larsson, The Blood Spilt is in several ways better than its predecessor--the collective aspect remains (the point of view, always in the third person but focusing on an individual's perspective) shifts between Rebecka, the two cops who carry over from the first book, and several townspeople in the circle around (or in opposition to) the murdered priest--who is in this case not only a woman minister, not so rare in Sweden but not entirely embraced by the townspeople, but also a feminist. The Blood Spilt is more of a feminist novel, in fact, than any other recent crime novel that I can think of (that's a positive assesment, not a criticism). Larsson's novel is very atmospheric, regarding a small town in the far north as well as the enclosed world of this particular small town on its own and as it represents small town life everywhere. There are no absolutes here, in spite of the liturgical "mcguffin" of the book: neither the townie nor the villagers have the high ground, neither the irreligious nor the pious, neither the villagers nor the wolf (herself a central character). The novel is primarily texture and ambiguity, in fact--the plot moves forward glacially (again, that's not a criticism--it progresses like another Swedish book I admire, Kerstin Ekman's much longer and more oblique Blackwater. Larsson measures up to the ammbitions of Ekman's literary crime novel, without sacrificing the pleasures of the more direct (and shorter) genre of crime fiction. I may have some more to say about The Blood Spilt as I mull it over, and if anyone wants more of a plot summary let me know. Suffice it to say that it's a novel savored with pleasure rather than read at breakneck pace in an attempt to get to the final resolution.

China according to Chief Inspector Chen Cao

Qiu Xiaolong's new novel about crime in Shanghai, A Case of Two Cities is, on the one hand, open and straightforward almost to the point of callowness; on the other hand, it is completely ambiguous and unresolved. Those opposite reactions are a natural result, perhaps, of dealing honestly (as much as is possible) with contemporary China. The title is itself a bit misleading: the story begins in the city of Fujian, then moves to Shanghai, then on to Los Angeles and St. Louis (not coincidentally the city in which the author resides (he teaches at Washington University). As usual, there is a lot of poetry in the text, and a lot of reference by the characters to precedents in Chinese history, legend, and literature. Every decision, evidently, is referred back to the millennia of China's past, rather than to a direct analysis of the situation currently at hand. That constant referenceis added to a certain stiffness of language (perhaps an equivalent for a more formal "style" in Chinese language and culture, as compared to the West). Together, the history and the stiffness give these novels a texture completely different from the usual noir fiction, or even the typical mainstream mystery: neither the cops nor the Triad mobsters talk like Mike Hammer or th denizens of a Jim Thompson book: formality and indirection reign. There's also a good bit of flirtation between the sexes in the new book, though Inspector Chen remains almost without sex drive, so moral and careful is he. All of these comments might be taken as negative criticism, but the new book is almost as effective as a story as the first three in this series--and at least as effective as a portrait of today's socialist-capitalist-corrupt China. I found myself pulled along by the story, while at the same time frustrated by the brittle texture of the interrelationships among the characters (a number of whom are brought back from previous installments, including the U.S. marshall who was a sort-of love interest for Chen in an earlier book. A corrupt official who has fled to the U.S. has left behind a web of corrupt connections, and Chen is assigned by a high party official (still active though technically retired). Chen decides that those at the center of the group are too powerful to be approached directly, so he takes an indirect approach, interrogating those at the periphery--with disastrous results (his actions are revealed to those he is investigating, and a former friend of his is murdered). Then his investigation is seemingly derailed by another assignment, related to his career as a poet and translator--an assignment that will take him out fo the country, to the U.S., as the leader of a literary delegation. Int he process, mucch more is revealed about the state of business and politics in today's China, as well as the intricacies of relations between Chinese and American professionals.

Political noir

I read several of Paco Ignacio Taibo's earlier crime novels (featuring the sometime detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne) some years ago and then lost interest. Taibo's detective stories aren't so much "noir" as satirical and magic-realist. The author is using the detective form to comment on politics and contemporary life in Mexico and beyond. But I was curious about his most recent crime story since he co-wrote it in alternating chapters with a real-life revolutionary, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas still fighting in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Marcos's chapters are suprisingly comic (as well as tendentious and political, more what you would expect). Taibo's chapters are as comic as we might expect, but also political and critical. Both halves are "metafiction," drawing in authors and characters from beyond the novel's world--particularly both Spanish writer Manual Vazquez Montalban and his Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho (Vazquez Montalban, also a poltical novelist using the crime genre satirically, died recently and The Uncomfortable Dead is in part an obituary or hommage). As metafiction, magic realism, politics, and satire, this "novel by four hands" is not that satisfactory as noir fiction, but its politics are actually very much in line with noir: the neo-liberal bad guys of The Uncomfortable Dead are the same as the evil developers of Chinatown and numerous noir novels and films. The novel ends not with a victory over evil but with a partial revenge against the evil that the authors see as permeating society as a whole. If a couple of bad guys are removed from action, it's only a drop in the ocean of evil. Belascoaran turns from murdering one bad guy to playing head games (or subversion, perhaps) with numerous unidentified "Moraleses", Morales being the protean bad guy or guys of this book. I can't say I'm motivated to go back and catch up with the other tales of Belascoaran (though in spite of its tendentiousness I enjoyed this book), but I am motivated to go back to the novels of Vazquez Montalban (who also inspired the Montalbano novels set in Sicily)--more on that series later.

Older Scandinavian noir and some upcoming titles

While waiting for several new releases of European noir in translation and a new Qiu Xiaolong novel about Shanghai, I went back to reread a Norwegian noir novel called The Butterfly Effect, by Pernille Rygg. I wanted to see whether it might be worth seeking out the second of Rygg's novels about sort-of private detective Igi Heitmann, and couldn't remember the first one all that one (other than that it had some passing resemblance to Smilla's Sense of Snow, a novel I didn't care much for). The Butterfly Effect actually has a VERY superficial resemblance to Smilla (a clinical/scientific setting for part of the book, a young female central character, the Scandinavian setting). Rygg's Igi Heitmann, though, is a believable character rather than a magic-realist cypher. Not that Igi has your everyday problems, unless you're a failed scientist whose detective father was just killed, whose first client apparently committed suicide, and whose husband is flagrantly gay. Igi goes up against the power structures of the psychiatric establishment, the police force that crushed her father's professional hopes, and the financial power of the developers raping the city of Oslo (according to Rygg). More Chinatown than Smylla, in other words. But at every stage, the narrative is low key, Igi is three-dimensionally human, and the story is tragic but believable. I've sent for a copy of the second Igi book, The Golden Section. Meanwhile, upcoming reviews here include The Uncomfortable Dead (co-written by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatista revolutionaries in Chiapas, Mexico), the aforementioned Qiu Xiaolong novel, a couple of Irish police procedurals, and new translations of noir fiction by Åsa Larsson, Helene Tursten, and some other surprises.

Scottish noir (literary) fiction

I guess one reason I didn't connect with the Rebus novel (by Ian Rankin) that I was reading last week was that I was simultaneously (and coincidentally) reading another novel about Edinburgh, Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn, a sequel of sorts to her earlier Case Histories. One Good Turn is an amalgam of a literary novel and a crime novel--there are repeated references to Matryoshka dolls in the book, setting up the notion that the intertwined stories in the book are nested like the dolls. But in fact, the plot is more like a snake eating its tail, a looping of twined narratives whose interrelationships only become obvious at the very end. It's as if a bunch of characters from literary and popular novels (Maeve Binchy comes to mind, or maybe Alice McDermott) find themselves plopped down in Edinburgh amid a series of violent acts growing from the road rage incident at the beginning of the book. With a good crime novel (or a good novel) there can be a sense of elation at the end, an emotional release with the completion of the circle or the resolution of the story. Though Atkinson doesn't quite wrap everything up in a neat package, she does deliver that kind of literary satisfaction--without stenting on the crime story, the noir elements, or the considerable humor with which her story is laced. One Good Turn is a big step forward from Case Histories: more complex, more coherent (once you get to the end of the book), and more satisfying--plus the humor is more overt, inducing not just smiles but laughter. And One Good Turn is also a step up from the average crime novel (without condescending to the genre). Atkinson shows us why reading about crime is so enjoyable: we're reading about ourselves at our limits--the limit reached when our actions and desires are taken to their ultimate conclusions.