Gallows Lane, by Brian McGilloway

The second novel in the "Inspector Benedict Devlin" series has just been released. As with Borderlands, the first in the series, the style is understated in a way that paradoxically emphasizes the horror and emotion of the crimes and their aftermath. McGilloway's characters are not "hard-boiled" in the venerable noir tradition, they are instead struggling with the consequences of their contact with death and violence. Devlin is concerned about the effect his work is having on his family, though the family members are themselves barely sketched in. More completely drawn, and also conflicted about her job, is Devlin's partner at work, Caroline, as well as a few other cops. The murders are as lurid as in Borderlands, though there is more variety in the deaths here. There's also plenty of misdirection in the plot, which is not straightforward in terms of either story or police work. But the novel is carefully constructed, emphasizing Devlin's mistakes rather than his competence, and the ensuing self-doubts (just as he's up for a promotion that he's not sure he wants). There is an interesting, aggressive hostility between Devlin and one of his colleagues that keeps the police aspects of the book lively. Some of these threads of conflict and self-doubt promise much for a sequel, but Gallows Lane is itself a satisfying story on many levels. The book's complicated group of police, the female detective as partner, and the very strong sense of place echo a faraway detective series, the "peninsula" novels of Garry Disher, from Australia. But McGilloway is a more terse and poetic writer, compressing a great deal of event and emotion into a small space. Among the very accomplished group of new Irish crime writers, McGilloway ranks very high in his ability to evoke a particular milieu, to populate it with interesting and believable characters, and to structure his stories around meaningful (if sometimes horrifying) metaphors.

Benjamin Black's second

Like the first "Benjamin Black" novel by John Banville (Christine Falls), The Silver Swan is beautifully written, and is fully realized in its details. The characters are interesting and believable, the setting meticulously rendered, and the language evocative. But where Christine Falls had, if anything, too much plot, The Silver Swan doesn't have quite enough. Not to say that nothing happens: there are plenty of incidents along the way as Quirke, the curious pathologist in Dublin's post-World War II days, follows a thread revealed when a college friend asks him not to perform an autopsy on the friend's wife, apparently drowned, probably a suicide. But the incidents don't quite cohere into a story. First, there are some aspects of the plot that are difficult to believe: Not only the many coincidences required to involve practically Quirke's whole family in the story, but also specific plot points--beginning with that autopsy, which Quirke performs secretly, without informing the husband. I'm no expert, but it seems that an autopsy would, be a bit difficult to conceal from a family member, and in any case, the ease with which Quirke's deception succeeds is never explained. There is also a lot of very lurid material here, but all of it joyless. And the key figure in that part of the book, a Viennese-Indian guru of sorts, remains so opaque that his motivations are difficult to grasp. Black-Banville also departs from his hero's point of view so often that we hardly know what Quirke has discovered, or even what he knows of the "true" events at the end of the book. Black-Banville's narrator is more godlike than is usual in the best crime novels, which frequently depend on the limitation of point of view to draw the reader into the police procedure, the detective's investigation, or whatever thread leads through the maze of motivations and events. Though the ending of the book does include surprises, we know a bit too much as we go along for us to bother too much about where we are going to end up, especially given the tawdriness of much of the story. I was reminded of Graham Greene's early "entertainments," particularly by one of the most oddly engaging characters, the self-styled "spiv" Leslie Swan, a slimeball of the first order. His victims are perhaps less innocent than some of those in those early Greene books, and the moral less clear. Like those books, too, Black-Banville's is mostly atmosphere, something that Banville is, of course, known for in his mainstream novels, and the ambience is quite engaging and interesting. But, for me, the atmosphere is not quite enough to hold together a story whose various elements are linked by strands of coincedence, but are at the same time never quite cohere into a whole story.

Declan Hughes #3

The third Ed Loy novel by Declan Hughes continues to explore the wealthy and middle class families of Dublin, but with a somewhat broader social eye as well: the horsey set, from owners and trainers through jockeys and hangers on, is the primary focus of the crime and the novel, but public housing estates and crimes usually associated with such settings also appear. The title of the book depends on your location: In the U.S. it's The Price of Blood, continuing the "blood" series of Hughes's titles and picking up on the Judas theme of the novel; in the U.K., it's The Dying Breed, emphasizing another theme, the bloodlines of horses and also people (with an additional suggestion of families prone to violent death, a theme in all Hughes's novels so far). The story is character-driven, and Hughes once again shows his background in drama: the characters are individually well drawn, but come to life especially in their interactions with one another. The story is also dramatic, in the sense that is it has the structure of a tragedy rooted in family history. The gangsters that have haunted the books are back again, in a slightly different assortment of the Halligan family, as well as the pro- and con-Loy police and other running characters--more fully realized than the minor characters in some crime fiction, and without the usual cliches of speech or action. The story relies to a very large extent on the lies that people tell, or the information they withhold, from Loy and from each other. Loy bounces from one set of assumptions to another, as the truth, or some fragment of it, unfolds. The plot works better at the level of metaphor than as a reasonable story, but it's really the writing that holds the book together, a fluid and allusive style that fits very well with the symbolic rather than rational storyline. And after all, the plots of Hammett or Chandler don't always make straightforward sense, and Hughes is operating, as I said, at the level of tragedy rather than slice-of-life fiction. There is, however, a self-mutilation that I find difficult to swallow (I'm making a little joke, but I won't spoil the plot by explaining it here). But Loy's voice as narrator is solid and believable: he's lively, without being overtly clever or glib like some crime narrators, to keep the reader on his side. And the rhythm and flow of Hughes's prose style is rare eloquence in the field of crime fiction.

Derek Raymond and a few upcoming titles

Coming up next: the new Declan Hughes and Brian McGilloway from Ireland and the first of Swedist crime novelist Camilla Läckberg's novels to make it into English. But first... Serpent's Tail is bringing out new edition of How the Dead Live, by Derek Raymond (a pseudonym used by British writer Robin Cook--no, not that Robin Cook), with a new introduction by Will Self (who had stolen the title for one of his own books without having read Raymond's book)--giving an excuse to reconsider the Factory series that Raymond-Cook published in the '80s. Raymond broke new ground for noir fiction, updating classic pulp noir with an almost baroque style of writing and a police detective (nameless) at the center of the narrative rather than the private detective that is more typical of classic noir. Raymond certainly established a precedent followed by Ken Bruen (and others) years later, the irritable, violent, and philosophical detective that lies behind Bruen's police detective and to some extent his ex-Garda private detective as well. As in any kind of writing, crime writing generally falls into two categories, in terms of style: a transparent, almost journalistic style and a self-conscious style that calls attention to itself as a narrative. Raymond definitely falls into the latter category. Not only does the detective-narrator use dated London slang (probably dated when Raymond was writing) but also a manner that includes colorful, pithy observations and asides--even extended philosophical considerations of death, loneliness, and social deterioration (Raymond is perhaps the poet of the Thatcher years). And the plots of the Factory books are also distinctive: while most of them are set in gritty London, How the Dead Live moves out to small town England--but not a cozy village: this is the small town of Gothic extremes. Indeed the plot is extremely Gothic, rather than crime or mystery oriented. The detective is sent down to the village to look into the apparent disappearance of a leading citizen's wife, who has been missing for months without the local constabulary taking any notice. What the London detective finds is a crumbling manor house, with beautifully described ruined rooms, and a defrocked physician who has done something dreadful with his wife (all will be explained in a more or less reasonable manner, but the Gothic atmosphere is as think as Jane Eyre or the Surrealist/Symbolist excesses of the turn of the previous century). All of that with the tough detective on top of it is a heady mixture bound together by Raymond's quirky prose. This is definitely a unique and distinctive read, quite different from even Raymond's other books (much less the run of the mill detective or mystery novel). What the current crop of crime fiction owes to Raymond is his example of thoughtful, distinctive prose along with the hard-boiled police detective--but a little weirdness perhaps, too, in some of the "mire" of Arnaldur Indridason's first novel, as just one example of neo-Gothic noir. I can only ask of the living inheritors of Derek Raymond's mantle: more, please.

revisiting Jo Nesbø

It's rare for me to reread a crime novel until a considerable time has passed (are there some of you out there who do reread them frequently?). Plot is too easily remembered and too much a part of most crime fiction to get a lot of pleasure out of rereading a book that you remember fairly well. But I just finished rereading Jo Nesbø's Devil's Star, because of the disturbed order in which the novels have been translated. The most recently translated, Nemesis, leaves a plot line unfinished that reaches its conclusion in Devil's Star, which actually was the first of the author's books to be translated into English. Since it had been several years since I read Devil's Star, when it was first out, I decided to follow the hanging plot on to the end (again) and also to see whether Devil's Star holds up to a rereading. My conclusion: Devil's Star is probably the best of the 3 Nesbø books we have in English. Nesbø specializes in red herrings and false conclusions, and there are plenty of them here--but fewer than in Nemesis, and to better effect. There are lots of plot elements that could have been cliches (serial killer, blood diamonds, a Nazi past, devil worship, and so on) but Nesbø cleverly undermines the cliche elements and uses each of them in a positive, believable manner. I should also correct one thing I've said before: that Devil's Star begins with a bravado performance that follows a drop of blood through a 100-year-old house. Actually it's rainwater that the narrator follows as it flows into the house, tracing the construction methods and materials along the way through the cracks and picking up a few drops of fresh blood along the way (plus some blood mixed in with the builder's mortar in the original construction): the elegance of that narrative performance actually carries right through the novel, which repeatedly returns to water and to building materials, straight through the end when Harry Hole, the main character of the series, tastes the same egg-like flavor that appears in that first chapter, a sign of the blood in the mixed mortar. One advantage of rereading a large and well-written novel is that, with the plot less important to the reading experience, the structural metaphors of the story (which are in this case, indeed, structural metaphors) become clearer. Regarding characters, the naturalism of Nesbø's style keeps them lively even in a re-encounter. Someone responded to my previous post on Nesbø with a request to explain what I meant when I said that Hole was more "real" than some other Scandinavian fictional detectives, such as Irene Huss--what I mean is that Hole is more completely realized in his internal life, in all its inadequacies, failings, accomplishments, addictions, and so forth. Compared to Hole, Huss seems a bit naive (especially in The Torso), though I must admit that her balance between career and family is perhaps a more "real" reflection of a police detective's life than the more dramatic extremes of Hole's life. But though Irene is sympathetic and fully realized, Hole is more memorable as a character per se (not a good thing, I suppose, if you follow the logic of some of the original pulp noir novels, whose heroes were fairly anonymous). Any arguments, about that statement or my assessment of Nesbø and Devil's Star?

Pars vite et reviens tard: The Movie!

I got hold of a copy of the DVD of what is evidently the first film from Fred Vargas's distinctive series of crime novels, Pars vite et reviens tard by director Regis Wargnier (from the novel known in English as Have Mercy on Us All. I hadn't thought of it before, but there are NTSC, region 1 DVDs produced for Canadian viewers, with English subtitles, of French movies--a source I'll keep in mind for the future. The movie includes almost all of the characters and events of the novel but a substantial amount of the quirky character traits from the novel are obscured by the necessities of a screen play (and some of the actors were a bit surprising, to me, as embodiments of the characters). Camille has a small but crucial part, and Danglard's relationship with her is intact (details that might have gotten lost in a lesser translation to film). I got an unbiased positive opinion on the movie from my wife, who has not read the novels--and there's enough of the novel's nature to make it interesting to someone who has read it. There's a lot of language in Vargas's works that can't make it into the dialogue of a screenplay, after all. One reviewer complained that the movie fails to show the "village within Paris" that is the real subject of the book (even more than the plague), but all the elements of the village are here--shown instead of described, and therefore a bit sketchier. The movie is a vast improvement on the translation to film of The Laughing Policeman, which I recently saw--that has to be one of the worst movies ever made from a great crime novel (Walter Matthau as Martin Beck--I mean, really!) In Pars vite, the intuitive leaps of Adamsberg, versus the rational plodding of Danglard, are also here, seeming a bit abrupt in a movie, but still intact. I seem to be damning with faint praise, when actually I thought the movie was good fun. Perhaps unfortunate that I saw the DVD on the same day as going to the movie theater to see In Bruges, a powerful work of original cinema by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, not based on a novel and therefore tailored perfectly for the movie screen (and seen on a big screen instead of the living-room TV). I'll be watching Pars vite et reviens tard again, though--it's a keeper that I'll be lending out to friends who have (and haven't) read the book.

Jo Nesbø, Nemesis (Sorgenfri)

I can see why Harvill Secker started publishing their translations of Jo Nesbø's novels about Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo police with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th books in the series. The first 2 books sent Harry off to Bangkok and Australia, while the next three are focused mostly on Norway (exotic enough, for readers in the U.S. and U.K., without going further afield)--plus these three novels have a common subplot concerning the criminal enterprise of another detective, Tom Waaler, a drama that extends across all three novels before reaching resolution. But why the publisher brought out the 5th novel first, and then the 3rd, and now finally the 4th, is beyond me, especially given that continued story. That distorted order means that the early readers of Nesbø in English only had to put up with the tension of that extended plot through one long novel instead of three, but the tension of a delayed plot resolution is after all what fiction is about, and knowing the resolution before reading the first two books in which it appears removed some of the reader's pleasure in them, knowing what will happen eventually. The title of Nemesis was also changed in English, but perhaps the original (Sorgenfri, or "carefree" or "sans souci") though it has resonance in the plot, would surely have been a misleading title for a crime novel in English--and both Nemesis and The House of Pain (another title the U.K. publisher considered) also have resonance in the plot, so the title works (better than the distorted order at the very least). These are long books (Nemesis is 474 pages) with a number of red herrings, with insights (sometimes misleading) into the criminal's minds, and with complex plots--but it is the author's skill and language that pulls the reader along through the whole length of the books. The Devil's Star, the first of the books to appear in English, begins with a 7-page bravura performance in which the narrative follows a drip of blood through as it runs through a 100-year-old building, tracing the history of its construction along the way. This passage also provides metaphors with which Devil's Star ends and for the name of Tom Waaler, Harry's real "nemesis" in all of these three books. Nemesis also begins with a cleverly designed opening chapter, threading Harry into a bank robbery in an entertaining way as the reader gradually figures out what's going on. The plot overall is crammed with so many premature (and incorrect) solutions to the crimes that the reader may feel as if he or she (as much as the detective) is being toyed with a bit (though the tension is released and wound back up again repeatedly in the process, an effective device overall). The plot finally comes back around again to its starting point, with much mayhem in the wake of all those mistaken conclusions on the part of the police. And at the end, there is what would have been a tantalizing taste of where the series was going (except that we got that book first, so we know how it turns out, already). I'll stop complaining--but I will recommend these books (and I do highly recommend them) to new readers in the order they were published (Redbreast, Nemesis, Devil's Star--no need to wait for the first one, apparently being translated, much less the second, apparently not being translated). You'll want to shake Harry and point him in the right direction because you know something he only suspects, and you may get frustrated with the Waaler plot as it distracts us (and Harry) from the more immediate crimes that form the plot of each book--and Waaler threatens almost to become that cliche of mystery fiction, the master criminal who lurks behind every crime. But the Waaler plot has the effect of immersing us in Harry's world, the world of the depressed and alcoholic detective--and the world of Oslo, which is very much present in the texture of the narratives, in its present day, its history, and its culture. The characters are lively and fully realized, even the bit players. Harry teeters on the brink of alchoholic despair, in some novels more able to cope than in others, but his troubles, his conscience, and his persistence (with no self-righteousness, no sense of purpose other than to keep on going) are very engaging. He's a more "real" character than some of the other Scandinavian detectives currently showing up (Wallander is quite real, Irene Huss and some others perhaps less so). And I can't resist going back to Devil's Star now, to revisit how the Tom Waaler story develops--a personal testament to the pull that the story has on the reader, and the skill of the author in creating it.

New Swedish crime: Kjell Eriksson's Demon of Dakar

The newly translated Demon of Dakar, by Kjell Eriksson is the third novel centered around Detective Ann Lindell of the Uppsala police. Lindell doesn't appear until well into the novel, which follows more closely (from the beginning) the travels and travails of a Mexican peasant, a Zapotec named Manuel Alavez, who comes to Sweden to visit his brother who has ended up in a Swedish jail after being convicted of drug smuggling (another brother died in Germany on the same illegal smuggling operation). The demon of the English title is the unpleasant owner of 2 restaurants in Uppsala (and one of several characters of mixed nationality, perhaps a commentary on contemporary Swedish life), who with his partner has set up a smuggling operation to finance his restaurant empire. The Swedish title, Mannen Från Bergen (The Man From The Mountains), is actually more relevant to the action (and the key metaphor) of the novel, but the editors chose the English title to echo (effectively) the ironic exoticism of Eriksson's first novel in English, the excellent The Princess of Burundi. In the Demon, the exoticism is only partly ironic, since there is considerable time spent on the life of Manuel in a Zapotec village (quite exotic from a Swedish point of view). The strength of the novel is actually in the other 2 strains of the novel: the methodical work of Lindell and the police and the lives of a group of restaurant workers at Dakar, one of the drug smuggler's restaurants. At first, a cook named Johnny seems to be a central figure among this group, but Eva, a new waiter, turns out to be more important, both in her work life and her home life. One of the factors that most determines the kind of novel this is, though, is the fact that the reader knows all along who has murdered the smuggler-restauranteur's partner, as well as what is happening among most of the others involved in the novel's crimes. So this novel is a procedural, rather than a mystery, because we follow the police trying to find the truth, rather than trying to find it ourselves. But unlike the usual procedural, the police here make only partial progress (I won't give away the conclusion, though). The sympathy of the author lies with Manuel, and unfortunately Manuel and his brother are less completely realized as characters than the Europeans in this and Eriksson's other novels. Manuel, whose interior monologue takes up a considerable portion of the novel's narrative, is to a certain extent a "noble savage," occupying a strategic or ideological relationship to Swedes and Swedish society, rather than a full and complex character. His nostalgia for a seemingly pure and honest village life does not entirely ring true (though to Eriksson's credit he does portray the political and social plight of the Zapotecs rather than setting them up as happy peasants). Some other characters, such as Zero, a Swedish-born Turkish teenager, seem to get short shrift (though they could easily have contributed interesting highlights, at least, to the novel) while Manuel's longing for his home takes up large chunks of the narrative. But if I grew impatient at times with Manuel, the novel has considerable merits, not least of which is Eriksson's ability to tell an international story without resorting to international conspiracies (to my mind a flaw in a number of the estimable Henning Mankell's books). The proletarian or quotidian quality of his books is one of their greates virtues: without resorting to cliches, the author gives such a detailed portrait of daily life among the working classes and ordinary people that he deserves to be described as writer of truly "noir" crime fiction, more so that some other current Scandinavian writers. High praise, from my point of view. Next on my stack of reading, I'm happy to say, is Nemesis, by Jo Nesbo, whose Harry Hole character is another kind of "noir" creation: the depressed detective (a very entertaining one, too, judging from the earlier translations of Nesbo's books). So--off to Norway...

Myrin (Jar City)--the movie

The Independent Film Channel has brought the film of Arnaldur Indridason's Jar City to U.S. movie screens (or at least to the Toronto Film Festival and to On-Demand cable, which is where I saw it). The film has the advantage of several other film series made from Scandinavian crime novels: the actors (though not exactly how readers might have envisioned them) disappear into the roles. Jar City features the land- and cityscape of Iceland in a way rarely seen by those of us who have only experienced the country through travelogues. Director Baltasar Kormákur presents a cold, nearly barren country full of brutalist modern buildings. but in the almost anonymous cityscape, everyone seems to know everyone else (perhaps a comment on the common ground of the police and their usual "clients"). the occasional older building with more character (a church, one house) stand out starkly against the bleak backdrop of both nature and culture. There is a duality of time in the film, two narratives that are converging toward the conclusion: they are differentiated not only by the angle of view on the central events but also by color, one warmer and the other cooler and bluer. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg, the cohorts of chief detective Erlendur, behave very much like their counterparts in the novels. Erlendur himself is as cranky and anti-social as his literary other, but perhaps not quite so difficult. His daughter, an essential character in the series, is also slightly less aggressive in her problematic relationship with Erlendur in the film. The story is complex and as bleak as the landscape, but as in the book the viewer is pulled in, through the filmmaker's (and the novelist's) considerable sympathy with the cops, the murderer, the victims, the witnesses, and the human condition. That sounds like overreaching for a crime novel, but as with some of the other Scandinavians, the Erlendur novels are quietly ambitious in their approach to fiction and to crime fiction. Whether you already know the Arnaldur Indridason novels or not, the film of Jar City (or Myrin, which means "marsh" or "mire") will be rewarding and moving--plus creepy and at times disgusting. The culinary habits of Icelanders are very much in evidence, along with various forms of decomposition (readers of the novel will know what to expect from this story, along those lines, even more than subsequent Erlendur novels). We can only hope that further films are made from the series (and that those of us outside Scandinavia will have access to them). Anyone else seen Jar City? If so, please let u s know what you thought, and also what you know about the possible future of films based on Arnaldur Indridason's novels.

This Night's Foul Work, by Fred Vargas

Reading in close sequence the latest books in English translation by French female crime writers Dominique Manotti and Fred Vargas is an interesting experience. Both authors are distinguished scholars in other fields, and both use considerable chunks of French history in their stories. But where Manotti's books are very much "placed" in recent social history, Vargas's books float in an alternate universe of imagination, a world that shares certain points with ours (including, in this case, natural history, a rivalry between 17th century poets, French regional rivalries, ghosts, reliquaries, and medieval magic), but it's a world in which "cloud shovelers," as her chief detective Adamsberg describes himself, are more able to cope than the realists or positivists. The story develops slowly, without a clear trajectory until well into the novel, and there are more unexpected revelations here than in Vargas's other novels, almost in a Holmesian fashion. But you don't read Vargas as much for the plot as for her distinctive voice. What other crime novelist could depend on a policeman (a new cop in Adamsberg's unit) who frequently speaks in Racinian Alexandrine verse (which I imagine was the devil to translate into English, since twelve syllable Alexandrines are very far from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter that is more natural in English). The other characters do take note of peculiarity of speech, but they absorb the oddness along with all the other strange people and events that populate Vargas's Paris. Vargas shares something with the fantasy novels of French intellectual Jacques Roubaud, which technically revolve around crime but are set in an imaginary world of lightness and wish-fulfillment. Vargas's stories are not as light (there are bloody murders of both people and beasts in This Night's Foul Work) but there is also a gentle comedy and a series of discrete, almost ethnographically defined communities into which the reader must enter wholeheartedly to appreciate the books. This is not the noir of classic film noir, nor of the American novels that French noir filmmakers so admired. This world is a dark and funny descendant of Sherlock Holmes's mystery-adventure stories, but with gender roles and other social conventions both updated and creatively confused. I must admit that I find the serious and deeply political novels of Manotti more deeply satisfying than the lighter and more satirical fictions of Vargas; but Vargas exploits the profound power of fiction itself to create an experience that draws the reader into a rich, vivid, and unique world of eccentric characters, bizarre murders, and a sensibility that is close to classic South American magic realism.

Dominique Manotti: Lorraine Connection

Dominique Manotti is an economic historian, and her novels have a historical quality: normally set in the recent past, in a specific social milieu and often tied to a specific, actual event, her novels tell the story of France's modern social evolution, for better and worse. But Lorraine Connection is a bit different from the others that have been translated so far. Like her policiers set in Paris, the style is fast: a third-person, present tense narrative moves breathlessly through the story. But unlike the others, Lorraine Connection has the same pseudo-documentary quality as the best political cinema (Battle of Algiers, Z, or more recently Bloody Sunday): real events in economic and corporate history are linked with a wide cast of characters (all of them flawed, even amoral or ruthless--another quality common to the policiers). None of the characters is a central character in any normal sense. One character that a reader may become attached to appears early in the novel and another more than a third of the way in. Neither is involved directly in the conclusion. But if a reader sets aside all expectations and succumbs to the faux-documentary style, the splintered narrative, and the basis in factual events, the impact of the novel is intense. It is the darkest of noir stories, investigating the damp underside of the global economy and its own central actors. Manotti apparently turned to noir fiction to adequately portray what had become of the society into which her idealistic generation of intellectuals in France were born and for which they had attempted to instigate change. Her analysis is pessimistic without giving up, paranoid without tipping over into conspiracy theories (instead she grounds her story in the facts, rather than the theories, of conspiracy. I'm a big fan of her police novels, but Lorraine Connection is more powerful, more disturbing, and even, if you give yourself up to her narrative style, more absorbing. Just to state a part of the story, to give you an idea of the story, the sequence of events begins with an industrial accident in a rural factory, leading to a labor action, a factory in flames, privatization of defense and high-tech companies, intrigue among corporate committees who lose out in the privatization competition, murder, revenge, coverups, more murders, blackmail, extortion, theft, painfully difficult families, and a melancholy detective. Enough for a wild, entertaining, and even informative ride.

Crime fiction in Palestine

I'm getting to Matt Beynon Rees's Palestinian crime novels late--the second one is already out, I see. The Collaborator of Bethlehem is structurally an "amateur detective" novel, but in tone and development it's really much more like the Algerian police trilogy of Yasmina Khadra or the Berlin novels of Philip Kerr (I see there's a 5th in that series out now, too). Like Kerr and Khadra, Rees is depicting a city in which crime is pervasive in the social structure--in the Berlin novels by Kerr, it is of course the Nazi regime and its aftermath that provide the background; in Khadra's trilogy it's the turmoil of an authoritarian regime under attack by fundamentalist rebels; In Rees's novels, it's a territory in which the powers of order are constantly undercut by the Israeli army (not demonized here--they're mostly an anonymous force literally on the horizon, until tanks roll into town, with a mission for which civilian lives and property are irrelevant) on the one hand and by gunmen on the other. When a Palestinian Christian tries to run off the gunmen using his house to shoot at the Israeli's across the valley (and thereby drawing fire onto the house), the Christian, an outsider in the community, is denounced as a collaborator (after a Muslim is shot by an Israeli sniper). As you can tell, though the plot is simple, the context is very complicated. The amateur detective, Omar Yussef is a schoolteacher who thinks of the denounced man as a protege, and his quixotic effort to save the man and prove that one of the gunmen actually was the collaborator is the story. But the narrative is really less interesting than the portrait of Palestine, which is very detailed and very pessimistic, seeing no resolution for the innocent townspeople of whatever religion. The ending is actually a discordant up-note that seems, to me, to be tacked on when the writer realized that a series was possible. Not that the detective really accomplishes anything in the end, he just resolves some of his own problems after another unfortunate death, and begins to think of himself as a detective (despite his lack of effect). The solution to the mystery is likewise a bit artificial: the actual collaborator is a character whose behavior is inconsistent in ways that I can imagine some will find interestingly three-dimensional but that for me was just inconsistent. But Rees's command of the atmosphere of the book is admirable and effective. I'm off on a French crime tour at the moment (new books by the two leading French women crime writers--in translation anyway--Fred Vargas and Dominique Manotti. But sometime down the line I'll return to Rees to see if his venture into Gaza is as good as his portrait of contemporary Bethelehem.

Mysteries of China and Laos

One of the reasons I started this blog was to try to figure out (in public, so to speak) why I liked some crime novels and didn't like others (and in the process it's also why I narrowed my focus on noir fiction rather than mystery fiction, and on translated and overseas--from a U.S. perspective--writing rather than American writing). A pair of fairly recent novels about Asia bring me back to that discussion: why is it that I enjoy Qiu Xiaolong's Chief Inspector Chen Cao novels set in contemporayr Shanghai (the new one is The Red Mandarin Dress) and don't appreciate Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri novels set in 1970s Vientiane, Laos (the one I'm currently reading it Anarchy and Old Dogs, from 2007). Xialong's language (I'm probably using his name wrong--does anyone know if Qiu is actually his family name?) is often stilted, his character absurdly correct on matters like sex, and the current novel goes doen a much overtrod path--the serial killer plot. Cotterill's Dr. Siri (not to mention his friends) is a clever, sarcastic character swimming upstream against a corrupt and inept socialist regime that in theory at least he agrees with. Other than the period setting (I don't go in much for period pieces, though the Siri novels aren't set all that far in the past), Cotterill's books seem like the dark-but-funny, exotic-locale stories that I should like, and Xiaolong's Chen novels are often slow, not comic, and include some absurd plot devices (like the coincidence between the two cases that Chen is involved in (or is trying not to be involved in, as he attempts to take time off to pursue a literary degree). I think the reason for my taste in this case is that the Chen stories are crammed with Chinese expressions and cultural behavior, while the Siri stories frequently sound like a bunch of Brits and Americans plopped down in the middle of a Southeast Asian revolution. References in Cotterill's novel tend to be about the Beatles, or a character's experiences in Paris (logical enough references given the colonial history of Laos), or a chacter's "rugby player knees." It's almost as if an overzealous translator has tried to convert the dialogue and narration from conversational Lao into conversational, mid-Atlantic English. On the other hand, Xialong's stilted language is a believable equivalent for the distinctive speech patterns of a culture still grounded in politeness and deference to etiquette and authority. Plus the Chen novels are crammed with larger and smaller depictions of contemporary Chinese culture, with all its contradictory combinations of Communist ideology, capitalist realities, and Confucian spin. It's telling that the cruelest parts of The Red Mandarin Dress are not the murders but the examples of cuisine that are too repulsive to repeat (a hint--have a look at the cover of the U.K. edition and imagine the dinner table it depicts--that would be the mildest of the eating habits in the story). In a book that is extremely aware of Western theories of psychology and literary criticism (perhaps too much so--though integrated into the narrative through the Inspector's literary studies), these cruelties are plainly emblematic of the culture that Xiaolong is portraying from the safe distance of his current teaching career in the U.S., a Chinese civilization caught between not only the "two systems" but also the superstitious and traditional ways that survived the Cultural Revolution and the cynical and rootless ways flooding into the country today. By the way, I included photos of both the U.K. and U.S. covers of The Red Mandarin Dress because the U.K. cover hints comically at what's actually in the book while the U.S. cover suggests a romantic or erotic tale that isn't delivered in the novel (though sex is present, behind the scenes, in many aspects of the investigation and in the inspector's private life. So, the verdict: I find myself turning the pages of Anarchy and Old Dogs without feeling myself much involved in the story, but I forgave the cliche's and the stiffness of The Red Mandarin Dress (not to mention the extremely frequent repetition of the title phrase throughout the book) because of a palpable sense of immersion in a very foreign place. Maybe a compromise with my crime fiction standards? Should I not be judging on its cultural insights if my topic is instead the crime fiction "chops" of the author?

Glauser's 4th

The fourth of Friedrich Glauser's mysteries, The Chinaman, is as quirky as the first three--and each of the books is a distinctive take on the crime novel. The Chinaman starts with an exotic Holmesian premise, a dead man found spread across a recent grave is recently returned to his Swiss homeland after a lifetime at sea. And the detective called to the scene, Sergeant Studer, as it happens, encountered the dead man (nicknamed the Chinaman by the detective, for his oriental appearance) months earlier in a rural inn--and the Chinaman had asked the detective to investigate his murder in the future. But the story is actually more Dickensian, limited to the inn, a poorhouse, and a horticultural college, all in the small town where the body was found. Some elements of the Agatha Christie cozy sort crop up (and Christie and several other crime writers, including Simenon, are mentioned in passing as Studer finds their books on various townspeople's shelves)--but perhaps a bit too many poisons, hostile townspeople, and shootings for a conventional cozy. As with Studer's first case in Thumbprint, also set in a small town, there is an inexplicable claustrophobia that sets Glauser's stories apart from conventional mysteries. Even in the third of the books, Fever, with its adventure novel quality and its settings spread across Europe and North Africa, there is the atmosphere of tense, paranoiac claustrophobia. In The Chinaman, there is an exotic murder in a greenhouse that resonates particularly with me: When I was growing up my family had greenhouses, and from time to time I helped "bomb" them with insecticides. I'd set the boxes of insecticide on the floor at one end of the greenhouse, stick a sparker into it as a fuse, and light it. I'd walk quickly toward the exit at the other end, and if I looked back, I'd see the fog of poison billowing up around the flower beds and rushing toward me. The murder in The Chinaman isn't quite like that, but it involves what Glauser calls a glasshouse, an insecticide fog, and a character who is locked in. And as was the case with our greenhouses, one of the poisons available to bomb the glasshouse is nicotine, which we used to use until safety regulations forbid it (because it would kill anything). Glauser's characters vent the scene of the murder before entering, also a familiar task from my own experience, but they don't seem to worry much about residual poison inside (something that always spooked me, remembering that onrushing fog of gas, when I went into the greenhouse the next morning). But personal connection to the plot aside, Glauser's novel is a sometimes comic, twisted take on the mystery novel, right down to the final confrontation with the murderers (in the fashion of both Simenon and the cozies, with the suspects gathered together in the room). Studer's considerable sympathy with some of the downtrodden and unfortunate characters in this story feels genuine and adds a vital, human dimension to this distinctive tale from 1939. The more of Glauser that we have in English (thanks to Bitter Lemon Press) the more we can appreciate the achievement of an author who could craft these intricate tales in spite of his own struggles with schizophrenia, addiction, and incarceration. One more word of praise for Bitter Lemon: while all the Glauser books have attractive cover designs, The Chinaman's cover captures the off-center quality of this novel in particular, with an acid yellow color and a weird perspective in the photo of a body lying across a grave.

Donna Leon, Through a Glass Darkly

I've just heard, rather than read, Donna Leon's fairly recent Through a Glass Darkly, her novel of the Murano glass factories near Venice. I've always done better with adaptations of Leon's novels, particularly the entertaining German television versions (though it's a bit strange to hear Commissario Brunetti et. al. speaking German). I enjoyed the audio version of Through a Glass Darkly, in any case, more than others of Leon's novels I've read or heard. I've never been sure what it is about Leon's novels that I've found irritating, but this audio version helped me clarify my problem. Her narrative is curiously static, a series of "blackouts," staged encounters among the characters involved in the mystery and in Brunetti's conflicted relationships with his superiors and bureaucrats in general. These encounters move the story forward, but within each set-piece, not much happens except for conversation that is more or less indirect in relation to the murder at the center of the story. This method works very well to edge the reader toward Leon's famous inconclusive endings (her murderers rarely seem to go to jail, protected by family, by conspiracies of silence, and by the powers that be in Venice). But the novels are hardly thrillers, and there's frequently not much going on. In the case of Through the Glass Darkly, a lot of these scenes are quite funny, in satirical and ironic dialogues that Brunetti has with his wife, with the estimable Signorina Elettra, with his boss the Vice Questore, and with various workers and their families on the island of Murano. There are also, of course, numerous grotesqueries regarding the murder, but curiously, a gruesome death draws little comic interplay among the presumably hardened cops--most of whom flee the scene retching. In an American novel or movie, there would have been much banter regarding "crispy critters," or some such. Perhaps the Venetian police are less hard-hearted. In any case, the story concerns pollution from both large and small industry, as well as the environmental and human disasters that flow from them--a large subject brought down to very human specifics in this novel. All in all an involving and entertaining book--though still with one irritating aspect: the characters seem to be limited to a single expletive, though they use that one word a great deal ("bastard"). I've never met or hear an Italian who so severly limited his cursing to a single word, much less that one--they're language in the scatalogical vein is usually much more colorful and creative. And I also have one quibble wiht the audio version, as read by David Collacci: his voice is fine, his tone excellent, but for all the dialogue, he gives the characters stagey Italian accents. Why would they speak to one another with an accent--they're speaking Italian to one another, except when they are pointedly speaking the local Venetian dialect. Why should an English translation of what they're saying be delivered with an Italian accent?

one more Theresa Schwegel

I started reading Theresa Schwegel's cop novels because I read a newspaper review of her most recent one, Person of Interest, that sang its praises to the heavens, saying it succeeded both as a crime novel and as fiction. That comment should have been fair warning, since I'm always suspicious of claims that a crime novel is somehow of "literary" quality. But partly because Schwegel's books are set in Chicago, on the north side (where I lived for a while) I started her first book, Officer Down, which I thought was pretty good, so I got the second one, Probable Cause, which I didn't like quite as well, but it was still OK. The third book, though, the one I had read about in the first place, fulfills all my worst fears about books that claims are made about, to the tune that they to "rise above" the genre. Person of Interest seems, indeed, to be one of those contemporary "difficult marriage" books as well as a police procedural type of thriller. But it succeeds as neither and covers warmed over territory in both areas. It's difficult to care what happens to characters who are seem to be digging themselves deeper into their misery mainly to keep the plot going, plus if you back up from the plot and look at it as a whole, there are a couple of whopper coincidences. By the time the story reaches its violent phases, well into the story, they seem flat and contrived (one incident, pouring black widow spiders down somebody's shirt, is prepared for in the logic of a Chinese gang plot but still seems to be merely reaching for an exotic plot device). Krimileser, the author of the excellent German crime blog Internationale Krimis, reached the conclusion, in response to my earlier positive comments about Schwegel, posted a reply that my post had persuaded him to read her books, and that he found her second book, Probably Cause, disappointing, an "awkward book full of clichés and skewed plot constructions." I have to say that now I've reached the same conclusion about her third novel, though I still might recommend Officer Down as an interesting take on cops, Chicago, and crime fiction.

Stieg Larsson: Scandinavian crime wave strikes again!

I'm finally getting around to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (more about that title in a minute). In addition to being a great read (even at 533 pages in English translation, the story flows effortlessly forward), Stieg Larsson's novel is self-consciously a "text" in the semiotic sense (and it's a tribute to the author's skills that it's "text-ness" is never a burden to the reader). What I mean is that the references to literature (specifically crime literature) abound in particularly appropriate ways (more appropriate and effective than the tossed-off references or tributes common in Ken Bruen's novels). The main character in this book (the first of what is called the Millennium trilogy) is investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (publisher of Millennium magazine, hence the series title): after Blomkvist achieves notoriety by solving a series of daring robberies, he is inevitably referred to by a witty reporter as "Kalle Blomkvist," a nickname he hates. The reference is a bit lost on American readers, since the title character's name was changed in translations of Astrid Lindgren's boy-detective novels (Kalle Blomkvist in the original, Bill Bergson in translation). The reference is a sly clue to the reader about the author's approach, as well as a signal to watch what the reporter is reading: He's attracted to various pulp writers, and the nature of those books sometimes signals a shift in the narrative. When the story shifts from the investigation of a family's sordid past to the possible discovery of a ruthless serial killer, Blomkvist has gone from a Sue Grafton detective story to a Val McDermid serial killer novel (and a bloody one at that). About that title in English: Like Astrid Lindgren's English-language publishers, Maclehose Press has changed things around. The original Swedish title, literally translated, means "Men Who Hate Women." The current title in English, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, refers to the other chief character (and a more central character in later episodes), Lisbeth Salander, but the English title says little about the book itself. Perhaps a clue is the title of the second book in the trilogy, which Maclehose is reportedly leaving alone, in a literal translation: The Girl Who Played with Fire. Are they looking for a self-conscious "series" title? Will the third volume be called "The Girl Who Knew Too Much," or something like that? In any case, Salander is a fascinating character, an unsocialized "wild child" something like Carol O'Connell's Kathleen Mallory (but Salander is actually more believable and more interesting, though prodigiously talented and anti-social in similar ways). Crime novels have certainly gotten longer and fuller than in the classic days of Simenon and early McBain, but there are only a few crime novels that can sustain the length that Larsson does (and the sequels are apparently even longer): one other who does manage the trick is Jo Nesbø of Norway (what is it about the Scandinavians--rapidly catching up in numbers of books and numbers of pages after a late start in the international crime stakes). Larsson and Nesbø share the talent for writing a long novel that stays interesting all the way through, and a few other qualities, despite differences. Larsson's "detective" in this novel is a disgraced reporter (rather than a disgraced cop), but without the painful emotional history of Nesbø's Harry Hole. And Hole carries the novels almost single-handedly (at least in terms of running characters), whereas Larsson focuses on a pair of central characters. But Larsson is evidently performing a "deconstruction" or survey of crime fiction: in addition to Blomkvist's reading matter and his name, the three novels evidently take different models from within the genre (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is along that Grafton-McDermid-O'Connell spectrum), and at least one of the later books seems to be more of a thriller, political and otherwise. It's easy to see why the Millennium trilogy is a big hit in Sweden, and I'll be waiting impatiently for the final two volumes (final because Larsson died before the series achieved its current fame). I may return to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for another comment or two, but that's all for now--who else has read it? Does anyone have any comments?

Swansea Terminal

The sequel to Robert Lewis's The Last Llanelli Train is already out in the UK and will be out soon in the U.S., from Serpent's Tail. Swansea Terminal isn't about a train station: Robin Llewellyn, the down and out private investigator of the earlier novel is all the way down and all the way out now. The first part of the novel seems to be treading familiar literary territory, the extreme alcoholic, with all the attending pathos and dark comedy: familiar from Charles Bukowski to Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor books. Both those effects are here in abundance, but Lewis adds an ironic structure andn a crime plot that together give a shape to what is often (in books on alcoholics) shapelessly emotional. I must admit that I almost quit the novel when it seemed as if Llewellyn would stumble from bar to bar and humiliation to humiliation for the whole book--no matter how well written (and Swansea Terminal is indeed very well written) an alcoholic haze is not that entertaining or enlightening. The structure is provided by Llewellyn's last case as a private investigator (which he shirks) and by his sorry life history, in the form of the son he abandoned years before. In both cases, where the plot is going is not where you think. The humor in this novel (much touted by the publisher) is of the very dark variety, and comes more from the ironic plot structure than from banter or comic situations: the conversation and the playing out of events are uniformly bleak. But when the crime aspect of the story kicks in, in the second half, Llewellyn's miserable life history moves toward an almost epic quality (though remaining resolutely down and out). There's a passage worth quoting that provides the logic and the self-loathing inherent in this most noir style of noir: "ironically, down here, in the land of the lawless, as guarded and dishonest as it is, there is a lot more nakedness in your relationships with those around you...Sometimes, I guess, you can feel some wisdom in your disillusionment, some truth in your corruption, that others who do not suffer the same way are missing. You can tell yourself that society can only be seen properly from underneath." The quote goes on to provide further illumination the noir portrait of the bottom of society (it's page 151). There's also a telling comment concerning Llewellyn's membership in a select society, the terminally ill: "We call them courageous because they terrify us." At the end, Llewellyn's struggles and his outlook on life takes on the moving comic resignation of Beckett's characters. One aspect of the book that narrows its scope is the lack of women (even the bottom layer of society is not exclusively male, after all). The one woman character, whom Lewis ultimately calls a "our Cathleen ni Houlihan," a telling critique of modern Wales, perhaps, is portrayed in unrelentingly negative terms. The missing female characters provide an excuse to compare Lewis's Welsh noir with that of John Williams, whose cycle of Cardiff novels is a much more diverse portrait of the underclass, male and female. While Williams is more interested in a cast of characters, Lewis providews a practically apolyptic vision from a single character's narrow point of view. Both are interested in much more than genre fiction, and both challenge the conventions of crime fiction in interesting ways.

Question about Bill James

Bill James's Harpur & Iles novels are indirect, satirical, and bleakly comic forays into an alternative reality based on the gritty cities of England. Beneath the novels' brittle, Wodehouse-like surfaces, is there some truth about contemporary life? Truth about crime fiction (and literature in general) abounds in these short novels (the characters are constantly referring to literary greats, and the narrative manipulates the standards and cliche's of crime fiction mercilessly. But regarding a "higher" truth, it struck me while reading the new (in the U.S., anyway) novel, Girls that beneath the mocking tone, the artificial language, and the stylized characters (all of which are great fun) there's also an emotional truth, as much for the villains as the heroes (if anybody can tell one from another in this morally skeptical series). James's invented slang spills over from the dialogue into the narration, especially when the gangsters are speaking to one another: Manse Shale's bad grammar is replicated by the narrator in the early dialogue between Shale and Ralph Ember (one of James's inimitable creations). When Colin Harpur is talking to his daughters (and much of the novel follows his dialogue with them), he's correcting their grammar constantly (especially his younger daughter, Jill), and the narrator is on his toes as well, as if not to offend the sensibilities of the otherwise rough-around-the-edges detective. But what Girls is about more than anything else is the reality and the essential nature of the emotional ties between all the parents and children among the central cast of characters. The emotional truth is buttressed not by sentimentality but by the very skepticism (almost cynicism) of everything else going on in the novel. Harpur at one point quotes Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent, a book with much indirection in its narrative but with powerful feeling at its heart. If Conrad's story is tragic and James's novels are comic (to quote Girls about itself, "very darkly jokey") that's perhaps a measure of the distance between our world and Conrad's, leading perhaps to the notion that there is sociological truth as well as emotional depth to James's comedy.

The Sinner, by Petra Hammesfahr

Petra Hammesfahr's The Sinner, recently published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, reminds me of a couple of other German-language writers, Ingrid Noll (consistently described as "Germany's queen of crime," and Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Jelinek's perverse family dramas have the extreme exaggeration of satire, and Noll's novels combine perversity, murder, and ordinary family life. Likewise, Hammesfahr's novel begins with a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Cora Bender's clod of a husband (he resenbles some of Jelinek's male characters in that respect) wants sex every Friday and Saturday night, but Cora, who previously submitted willingly, has suddenly begun to dread the episodes. Her life falling apart, she plans an elaborate suicide, but just on the verge of that act, everything changes. A murder launches Cora (and we the readers) into a long, circuitous trip through her miserable childhood and the false front of her current life. And throughout her repeated interrogations, especially those with local police chief Rudi Grovian, Cora tells elaborate lies to cover up her motives and the truths that even she is not quite able to grasp. Those lies, and the long road that Grovian takes to discover what's really going on (against his own interests and against the advice of his colleagues) are the texture of the novel, and that texture is what sets The Sinner apart from the novels of Noll (whose sordid tales are more straightforward) or Jelinek (who is never much concerned with three-dimensional characters). The lies, of course, betray one of the characteristic motifs of modern fiction, the unreliable narrator (and Cora indeed narrates part of her tale). Cora is a spectacularly unreliable narrator, not honest even with herself (unable, in fact, to be honest with herself). Her family's poisonous history and ultimately both salacious and tragic outcome are revealed slowly and indirectly, the reader never sure what's a lie and what is narrative truth. The effect is startling and involving, though there are to me some false notes. For one thing, Cora's sister, a key actor in the family drama, is at first barely human, reduced to a lump of birth defects--but suddenly she's talking (and talking trash), a shift that Hammesfahr does explain, and one shift among many in this very indirect narrative, but a better sense of the infants development would have added some realism to that section of the story. Plus there are a number of coincidences that are ultimately drawn together into a coherent story, but strain credulity along the way (and to achieve full impact, the reader needs, indeed to strain for some sort of credible story amid all the misdirection). The Sinner is an unusual kind of crime novel, in which the "sin," if you will, that we think we know about becomes something quite different. Perhaps this is a book for fans of Patricia Highsmith or Stephen King (comparisons made by the publisher) more than those of the kind of noir or police procedural we are more familiar with under the heading of "crime fiction," though Hammesfahr has achieved something more complex than either of those writers, in terms of the manner of the telling and the circuitous life story of her main characters.