Icelandic noir/political/police procedural

Published in the U.S. as Frozen Assets and in the U.K. as Frozen Out, Quentin Bates's new crime novel set in Iceland is evidently the first in a series featuring Sergeant Gunnhildur, a uniformed police officer in charge of the station in a small fishing town. Though Gunnhildur is a widow who refuses to talk about her husband and is now the single mother of a teenage girl and a young man (out at sea on a fishing vessel), she has little of the grim outlook of the main character of Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic series and less of the "ordinary-life," almost cozy character of Yrsa Sigurdardóttir's.

Bates is English, but has lived in Iceland and has also been a journalist for a commercial fishing magazine, both certainly qualifications for the job of bringing Gunnhildur's setting to life. The novel is first a straightforward police procedural, with "Gunna," as she is frequently known, dealing with her superiors in Keflavik and Reykjavik, her diverse colleagues in Hvalvik, and a drowned man who is found along the docks.

Her superiors want the case ruled a suicide, but Gunna thinks there's more to it and pursues it doggedly to its roots in a Rekjavik P.R. agency, an aluminum plant and a power plant in her own neighborhood, and an anonymous blogger who seems to know too much about the private lives of some politicians, P.R. folks, and the financial shenanigans behind the construction projects. And lurking behind it all is what some of the characters fear (and the reader knows is looming), the Icelandic financial meltdown.

Fans of police procedurals as a genre will be with Gunna all along, and thriller fans will be engaged by the time the plot gets into high gear in the last half, after Gunna has discovered who's behind the death (and some others) and is in hot, but frustrating, pursuit. And increasingly as the plot moves along, we are in classic noir territory, as the corruption at the top of government and business throws sand in the gears of the investigation.

Wisely, though, Bates keeps the focus on the street level investigation, rather than moving into the corridors of power. The story stays at the level of the ordinary policewoman rather than reaching into political-thriller territory, and we see the effects, rather than the closeup activities, of the corrupt hierarchy. Also interesting is the penetration of the blogger into the plot, in terms of periodic posts, and the young journalist who is shadowing Gunna for a story on rural cops.

All the elements mesh smoothly and enjoyably, and every time the story seems to be heading for a cliche, Bates steers away into something more interesting. While the gloomy intensity of Indridason's novels is not present here, Bates's book is more vivid, to me, than Sigurdardóttir's: livelier and more noir, somehow, at the same time.

I'm curious whether readers find the U.K. or the U.S. title and cover more appealing. Votes, anyone? I think the U.K. cover is more graphically interesting, but the U.S. cover has a certain retro-noir appeal that I actually prefer (Soho Crime, the U.S. publisher, does a good job with covers).

Hans Werner Kettenbach's The Stronger Sex

The Stronger Sex, newly published in English translation (done by Anthea Bell) by crime fiction publisher Bitter Lemon Press, isn't really a crime novel, or even a thriller, despite including a private detective, a race track, a mysterious older woman and a young lover, a young lawyer thrust into a difficult case without knowing the consequences, and so on. But the case deals with an accusation that an employer has dismissed a worker improperly: a woman working for a despotic entrepreneur asks for time off, and when refused, she takes sick leave. When the employer fires her without notice, she sues under German workers' rights laws and the case is set to come before a special employment tribunal.

Young attorney Alexander Zabel is assigned to defend the employer, Herbert Klofft, in the case by his boss, who is a friend of Klofft's. Most of the novel is Zabel's first-person puzzlement over how to proceed in the case, mixed with his on-again-off-again relationship with an attractive art critic, his fascination with the sexy-but-seventy Cilly Klofft, the defendant's wife, and his alternating sympathy and repulsion with regard to the difficult but very ill Kofft.

The blurbs accompanying the book suggest a similarity to Patricia Highsmith, which is indeed a valid comment—but it's to Highsmith's tightly wound but quieter novels, rather than the Ripley books. For me, the relationship of Zabel and Cilly was the most interesting element in what is a noir story but one whose violence is for the most part emotional and psychological rather than physical or blatant.

In fact, The Stronger Sex reminds me, in retrospect, of a short story rather than a novel, a very long story (342 pages, but more of a meditation centering on a minor incident rather than working with a bigger subject or a more complex plot. Of the three Bitter Lemon books by Kettenbach, David's Story and Black Ice, I found The Stronger Sex to be the most interesting and the most readable, though the furthest of the three from any conventional aspects of crime fiction. In some ways it reminds me o the recent novels by Peter Temple (Truth in particular), though it is much further from the rules and structures of the detective story or mystery novel than Temple's books—it's the concentration on character and situation and voice that I was reminded of in reading Kettenbach.

So: It's a bit of Temple, a bit of Hollywood (or even London) Boulevard, a bit if Highsmith, and a bit of mainstream fiction. I recommend it if you're in the mood for something quite different.

Håkan Nesser: The Inspector and Silence

Håkan Nesser's Van Veeteren series was written in Swedish in the '90s but is just reaching English (can his new series be far behind?), with what is, I think, the 5th translation, The Inspector and Silence. Simultaneously with reading the book, I heard a rumor that the MhZ Network in the U.S. has purchased the rights to the Van Veeteren TV series, to be shown this spring--an interesting development, if true.

The Inspector and Silence kept reminding me of two other, seemingly contradictory, crime novelists, the classic Swiss detective stories of Friedrich Glauser and the quirky novels of French writer Fred Vargas. Somehow, the ruminative Van Veeteren thrust into a small town (as he is in this book and in some others) reminded me of the dour detective of the Swiss writer, while his character quirks reminded me of Vargas's Adamsberg. Van Veeteren, just to name a couple of instances, plays both chess and badminton obsessively, likes to use stock phrases and aphorisms, and goes off by himself during the investigation, discovering the clue to the mystery by accident.

There are long passages of narrative, broken by occasional dialogue, and fortunately both the narrator and the interior monologue of Van Veeteren are lively and often funny. The narrator isn't Van Veeteren, but they share a wry sensibility, both of them often comparing the current situation to crime novels and movies (there are explicit references to Poirot and Holmes as well). The other cops are an intereting group, though not on stage nearly as much as the Chief Inspector.

The story isn't really a puzzle mystery, since the reader is as much at sea as the detectives. A woman calls a small-town police station, manned by a substitute while the chief of police is on vacation (it's July, and all the other detectives have vacation plans for August), saying that a young girl has disappeared from a summer camp run by a religious cult. When the acting chief, and ultimately Van Veeteren, called in to assist, question the cult (which has sexual overtones), no one will admit that anyone is missing, and no one offers much help.

Most of the novel is taken up with Van Veeteren's musings about what little they know, and about the cult itself, with little progress (though events do begin to take over the story with new discoveries). Much of the considerable pleasure, though, is sharing time with the off-center detective, who at the beginning is plotting to vacation in the same spot as a woman from a previous case (she's unaware of his machinations) and his desire to quit the police and become part-owner of an antiquarian bookshop.

Readers of the series will know (and anticipate with pleasure) the latest of Nesser's books to be translated, and new readers might dive in to The Inspector and Silence without any problem. Either way, I can highly recommend this book by a very different Swedish crime novelist.

Roslund & Hellström, Three Seconds

The new Swedish noir by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström is unusual in several ways. First, the running character around whom their crime series is based, Ewert Grens, isn't at the center of the novel; and Grens is probably the most thoroughly unlikable central character in any crime series. The idiosyncratic pair of detectives in K.O. Dahl's series come close at times, but are more sympathetic (to peers and readers than Grens, who drives everyone away who might become a friend. More about him in a minute.

The character who is at the center of Three Seconds is the most unusual undercover operative I've come across in crime fiction, apparently a reflection of the real tendency of Swedish police to use criminals, rather than undercover cops, to penetrate criminal organizations. So Piet Hoffman, the "hero" of the book, is a snitch. We learn something about his motivations only very late in the book: for the most part, we can only see his sacrifices (paid off the books and not that handsomely; forced to lie to his wife and kids, and then to put them at risk). His criminal record is exaggerated by his handlers to give him street (and prison) cred, while he's actually a petty criminal whose background we know little about.

Roslund & Hellström frequently write about prison and prisoners, and most of this book is about both the Polish mafia and the police striving to insert Hoffman, code name Paula, into prison in order to take over the drug trade (and, on the part of the police, attack the crime organization). Hoffman's preparations for prison are fascinating, approaching The Day of the Jackal in the intricacy of technical processes about which the reader can only guess the function.

And the novel ticks along quickly until suddenly Hoffman needs to put his preparations into use, at which point (fair warning) the book shifts into very high gear, pulling the reader along compulsively. It's fascinating to watch the plot unfold, to find out what the "three seconds" of the title signify, and to follow the ultimate shift of emphasis from Hoffman to Grens. Readers will probably anticipate one of the final plot points, but it's nevertheless a pleasure to see it unfold. The story is very Swedish, in the sense that it turns upon a type of corruption that a number of Swedish crime writers have depicted, more so than some other nationalities of noir (not only Larsson but in different ways Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Leif G. W. Persson).

Grens is here finally undergoing a process of grief, letting go of a wife injured by his own (inadvertent) actions and recently deceased after a very long sojourn in a nursing home. In the process, his obsession with a particular Swedish pop singer of an earlier generation is ever-present in his very renunciation of it (and her). Grens is almost at retirement, obsessive, solitary, aggressive, angry, and finally showing a few glimmers of humanity.

Three Seconds improves upon an already accomplished crime series, through its glimpses of Grens's life in transition and through the creation of an original character in Hoffman: plus it has an intriguing and involving plot. Don't be put off the book if prison stories aren't your "thing,": although the prison is at the heart of the book, it's not a prison book. And although it's a "thesis" novel, taking on a social ill as perceived by the authors, the story remains in the characters caught in nets of their own making, rather than in abstract principles.

Jake Needham's The Big Mango

The Big Mango, by Jake Needham, is a confident thriller that builds up to its explosive conclusion, rather than blowing up people and things from the beginning. The story is more in the line of Eric Ambler than that of many recent thrillers, taking an ordinary guy and thrusting him, in frequently comic ways, into an unfamiliar and unfriendly situation. The writing is clear and evocative, whether in portraying San Francisco in the early chapters or Bangkok for the majority of the book, and the characters are lively and interesting. The story is set in the '90s (originally published in Asia in 1999, The Big Mango was reprinted in 2010 by Marshall Cavendish in Singapore; the only editions so far have been limited to Asian publishers and distributors). Eddie, a small-time lawyer and former Vietnam-era marine, starts getting threatening mail and visitors that refer to his time in Vietnam, when he worked in a squad involved in guarding the Embassy in the waning days of the U.S. presence.

The maguffin is the stuff of legends, urban and otherwise: it seems the gold and currency from the Bank of Vietnam vanished during the chaos of the U.S. departure, and someone (several someones, as it turns out) thinks Eddie's former Captain knows what happened to the money, and maybe Eddie does too. After a visit from the Secret Service, Eddie gets an offer from a mystery man offering him a lot of money to go to Bangkok to look for the Captain and the money.

From there, Eddie becomes involved with a shady crew: his old Army buddy, a laid back bookstore owner and Native American; an American in Bangkok who writes a column on the nightlife there; a DEA agent; and various other Americans, Thais, and Vietnamese. It's a story told from the point of view of outsiders, seduced by Thailand but not blind to the pollution, corruption, and violence of the capital city. The other book I've read by Needham, The Ambassador's Wife, is quite different, more of an insider's look at another Asian crossroads city, Singapore (also seen with a jaundiced eye). And The Ambassador's Wife is a police procedural or mystery, whereas The Big Mango is more of a slowly building adventure story.

On the basis of these two books, I'm now a fan of Needham's writing, and wish that the more of the books were more accessible: maybe his books are a prize to be sought by travelers and noir readers who find themselves in English-language bookstores in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, etc.

Crime metaphors in non-crime fiction

I've noticed lately that crime fiction seems to have become a touchstone for writers who want to write about contemporary life, particularly city life. A book I just finished, Sleepwalker, by John Toomey, is a comic portrait of an Ireland just poised on the brink of the boom going bust. The only crimes inflicted by or upon the characters in the book are emotional: there are some very funny scenes depicting the miseries that families inflict upon themselves and outsiders, and the main character, a slacker drifting along miserably from job to pub to bed, stupidly inflicts pain on everyone who loves or even likes him. The writer plays comically with fictional structures like the famous "unreliable narrator," and one of the comic turns concerns the narrators intrusions into the story.

But at a couple of points, Toomey invokes crime and crime fiction as a means of putting his story into context. In one passage, he contrasts the peaceful, if miserable, lives of his characters against the violence going on offstage, in the city only glimpsed by the reader and the characters themselves. More explicitly, he depicts a demoralized character thusly: "The things he thought he had earned on his own steam had been laid down beside him, like a framing murder weapon, carefully placed at the scene while he slept, ready to incriminate him and strip him of all credibility further down the plotline."

Just a passing metaphor, perhaps, but also a means of casting the characters miseries into a harsh comic light by the use of a framing device much more serious than what is actually confronting him. Comic crime fiction does some of the same sort of thing (I'm currently reading, or rather listening to, a Donald Westlake novel). So crime fiction and its particular toolkit are in a way a standard for considering modern life seriously, and also a means of viewing lives less stressed comically. Does that make any sense? Does the notion described above say anything about a novelist like Kate Atkinson who uses crime fiction as a serio-comic framing device for "literary" fiction?

Or perhaps I'm just overinterpreting, sequestered as I am in a warm house on a very cold day. Sleepwalker, by the way, is a funny book (perhaps not quite funny enough) and a cold, hard look at a culture on the brink of a disaster. It's published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive Press, which has a particular interest in comic and off-center fiction around the world.

New Catalan Crime: Teresa Solana's A Shortcut to Paradise

Teresa Solana's new novel featuring unlicensed detective twin brothers Pep (or Borja, his alter ego) and Eduard carries forward the satirical style of her first novel, A Not So Perfect Crime, as well as the tantalizing view of everyday life in Barcelona (among both the high and the low of Catalan society), along with a plot that is a bit more of a puzzle mystery than in the first novel. But Pep and Eduard are no brilliant crime-solvers: they have to pay (bribe, almost) a retired cop to solve the mystery for them. The pleasure, indeed, is not the solving of the crime as much as the comic twists and turns along the way.

At numerous points, A Shortcut to Paradise (translated by Peter Bush from the original Catalan) made me think of the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. In particular, a chapter on one character's prison experience and another character's ultimate fate are reminiscent of the cruel farce of Waugh's satires. There's also a wild party that spirals out of control.

Solana also provides much comedy based on the literary scene of Barcelona, apparently (given the disclaimer at the end) pointed at specific targets. But as a reader unfamiliar with those real-life literati, I can attest that the comedy carries through without knowing the references. There's also some literary comedy concerning the literary value of certain kinds of writing, culminating in a final, extended joke regarding the fate of a posthumous manuscript.

But as with Eduard and Pep's first outing, a lot of the pleasure in reading the book comes from spending time with the disarmingly normal detectives, muggers, murderers, and falsely accused throughout the book, viewed through Eduard's first-person narrative and through third-person glimpses into the lives of others in the story.

I hope Solana keeps up this wonderful series: further comic and criminal forays into Barcelona life, and further installments in the brothers' lives (Eduard striving for an ordinary middle-class life and Borja dreaming of nobility, sort of) would be most welcome.

Jassy Mackenzie's second Jade de Jong (South African Noir)

I liked the first Jade de Jong novel by Jassy Mackenzie, and the second one, Stolen Lives, is even better. The first half of the novel dragged me along relentlessly. There's a plot line that in the second half seems a bit tacked on (though it leads to a twisty and cliff-hanger-y ending) dealing with a character who could be very interesting but isn't fully developed—but overall the novel (and that second half) are very good indeed.

Jade, having returned (in the first novel, Random Violence) to her native Johannesburg to bring her private detective business there—as well as to a) inflict some revenge and b) reestablish contact with the object of her (mostly unrequited) passion, detective David Patel of the J-burg police. Patel refers a client to Jade thinking that it's just a woman in need of straightforward bodyguarding, after her husband has disappeared, but the case becomes complicated when the Jade and the client are shot at and later the husband is discovered nearly dead from extreme torture and their daughter is found to be missing. Then David's son, who has been living with his estranged wife, is kidnapped...

There is a parallel case developing in England, concerning brothels and human trafficking, which ties into Jade's case and links to a deadly and mysterious character at the fringes of both: an African man whom we glimpse in a pawn shop and other locales in several chapters interspersed with the English plot and Jade's case. The threads come together in an unexpected way, forcing the reader to reassess his or her opinion about the characters. And Jade herself is very interesting: we follow not only her professional exploits but also her troubled relationship with David and a discovery about herself and her heritage that she makes in connection with her current case.

The novel offers once again a dynamic glimpse of post-Apartheid South Africa in all its grime and glory, as well as thematic consideration of violence and its roots in culture (and perhaps genetics), marriage, and desire: it's among the best of the substantial crop of South African crime fiction now becoming available.

Helsinki Homicide II, Jarkko Sipila's next Finnish noir

Jarkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide series (the new volume's title is Helsinki Homicide: Vengeance) is traditional noir in a lot of ways. The style of the writing is very direct, mixing dialogue and narration in about equal parts. That's a significant fact for Vengeance, which reminds me in some ways of the biker-gang novels of Canadian crime writer John McFetridge, except that McFetridge moves the story forward almost entirely via dialogue (and the Canadian writer's wit is frequently in evidence, whereas the humor in Sipila's books is very dry, in a laconic, somehow Finnish style).

Sipila's main character, Suhonen, an undercover cop, sets things in motion simply by seeing a suspicious driver, whom he follows. The driver meets a Russian-Estonian whom Suhonen discovers has ties to drug trafficking between Estonia and Finland, but the plot twists away from that revelation toward the just-released-from-prison leader of the Skulls biker gang, Tapani Larsson, who bears a grudge against Suhonen.

For me, the book began to pick up speed and to compel my interest as the character of Salmela becomes more important. Salmela is a low-life, brain-injured former prison inmate, as well as childhood friend of Suhonen. Salmela's attempt to do one drug deal to provide enough cash to get him out of the criminal life pulls him into the Skulls' orbit and a dangerous assignment from the police.

Sipila avoids cliches throughout: as Salmela spirals downward, his story never takes the obvious turn, and as his situation becomes more desperate, the tale tightens and compels the reader (this reader anyway) forward. Looking back at the first Sipila novel to be translated, which I reviewed here in a rather lukewarm fashion, I like the series more than I indicated then. I mentioned the link to McFetridge, and in the earlier review I mentioned a similarity to Elmore Leonard's casual, realistic plotting as well as to the Jim Thompson school of noir.

What I realize now is that Sipila's style is naturalism. He doesn't strain for effects or play up his hero as a flashy crime fighter. When Suhonen and Salmela are stranded in a tight spot, the outcome isn't determined by flashy martial arts skills or mind-bending feats of detection (or mind-stretching coincidences0 but by a very ordinary aspect of modern life. Sipila is giving a straightforward and believable portrait of conflict in the streets of Helsinki, and giving a gritty portrait of the city as well as a truly noir reading experience along the way.

Peter Temple, Dead Point

I recently heard the audio version of Peter Temple's Dead Point, which I believe is the latest of the Jack Irish novels (correct me if I'm wrong, please). The Irish novels normally have three plots, coinciding with Jack's three careers (as a lawyer, a fixer for a circle of horse-racing enthusiasts, and an apprentice woodworker). The pattern holds here, with Jack involved in the aftermath of a failed betting scheme (and a couple of thefts from people after succesful betting schemes), in a missing-person case involving a bartender, and in the installation of a high-end library in a wealthy woman's house. Parts of the cases become related, but it's primarily Jack himself who ties the book together.

Jack is, in fact, good company. And his first-person narrative works very well in an audio version. The plot moves inexorably forward, but the primary interest is, as usual, the characters, not just Jack but important and even secondary characters throughout the book.

The denouement is complicated, as usual, and so is Jack's love life, as usual. The violence at the conclusion of the missing-person plot is perhaps less extreme than in the previous books, but is a very complicated incident, mechanically. I won't explain more, but Temple renders an almost Rube Goldberg series of events in a believable way.

The Irish novels are perhaps more pure entertainment than Temple's other recent books, but no less interesting for all that. I need to go back and read some of Temple's early books, most of which I missed—any recommendations?

The Irene Huss videos, 2-6

I reviewed the first Irene Huss TV film, from Helene Tursten's series of crime novels set in Göteborg, a while ago, I'm just getting around to reviewing the rest of the first season because the disks I originally received were mislabeled, creating a bit of confusion as to what I was watching. All cleared up now.

The remaining films are 2. The Horse Figurine, 3. The Fire Dance, 4. The Night Round, 5. The Glass Devil, and 6. The Gold Digger. Of these 5, two (in addition to The Torso, already reviewed) are taken from novels already translated into English. SoHo Press has assured us that more of the novels are being translated, but I haven't heard which ones, yet.

The Horse Figurine was actually taken from the first novel to appear in English, translated as Detective Inspector Irene Huss, dealing with a wealthy man who falls from a balcony in the city, while his wife witnesses his death from a nearby taxi. The investigation leads to biker gangs, and to an apartment directly across from the fateful balcony, and along the way Huss's family is threatened.



The Fire Dance deals with serial arson, the stabbing death of an old woman, and an unsolved case from Irene's early career. The Night Round is a kind of ghost story, dealing with a murder on the staircase of an old hospital, murky goings-on among current staff, and the hospital's murky history.

The Glass Devil deals with religion, piety, satanism, and the murder of an entire family. The Gold Digger takes on propoerty developers, on-line poker, investment bubbles, and a possible affair on the part of Irene's seemingly model husband (a professional chef).

Translated to the small screen, all the stories are interesting, but all seem a bit too much like conventional TV cop shows (more so than the books, for some reason). Perhaps the things that make the books distinctive (Irene's very ordinary home life, struggling with two working parents, adolescent daughters, annoying neighbors, etc.) veers into sit-com or stock cop-show territory when produced for TV. Though all the secondary characters among the police get a certain amount of face-time, and all are characterized individually, the focus on Irene herself is also a bit more prominent when visualized for us on-screen.

Those are not major complaints, though—especially if compared to the rest of TV crime fare. Angela Kovacs as Irene is pitch perfect (not exactly how I imagined the character from the books, but better realized than my imaginary version), and the rest of the cast, including Bjarne Henriksen, Dag Malmberg, Eric Ericson, and Inga Landgré, is also very good, though working with material (in terms of their characters) that will be a bit familiar from cop shows around the world. A starring character is also the city of Göteborg and its surroundings, seen here not as a tourist mecca (which is may in fact not be) but as a gritty port city.

So: compared to Swedish TV crime series that rise far above the genre, Irene Huss perhaps gets 4 out of 5 stars. 5 stars would go to the original Martin Beck series starring Gösta Ekman, taken from 7 (I think) of the 10 novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö (I think they never filmed the Laughing Policeman or the Locked Room, and The Abominable Man was filmed for the big screen by Bo Widerberg as Man on the Roof); 5 stars would also go to the original Wallander series for Swedish TV, starring Rolf Lassgård. The later Swedish series based on Beck and Wallander, starring Peter Haber and Krister Henriksson, as well as the U.K. Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh, fall into the 4-star category for me, along with Irene Huss—so the Huss stories are definitely in good company (and highly recommended). The 5-star films are able to sustain a mood to a higher degree, and reach for (and mostly grasp) a wider scope than the 4-star ones, to me.

I'm happy to entertain other opinions about either set of rankings though—anyone have any thoughts? My only final thought is that I'm anticipating the translation of further Huss stories into English, whether they've been filmed or not—the novels are in the first rank of the Scandinavian crime wave.

Dogs of Rome, Conor Fitzgerald

Halfway through, Conor Fitzgerald's Dogs of Rome shifts from a fairly straight police procedural (featuring a somewhat unusual cop--more on that in a minute) to noir/Elmore Leonard territory. It works very well, except for an ending that seems a bit tacked on (concerning a woman and a dog), though perhaps it helps set up the characters for a series. The lead character is Alec Blume, an American who was orphaned in Italy and stayed there. He's now a Commissario in the flying squad, and there is some cultural friction between the American and the Italians (peanut butter is a significant plot point). There's also a quite different tone (more Irish, perhaps, since Fitzgerald is actually an Irishman living in Rome, rather than American, giving the book a tri-national character) from contemporary Italian crime fiction. There are some kinds of jokes, some language, and that Elmore Leonard quality to the plot of the second half that give the story an international, if not specifically Irish or American, quality.

The story concerns a break-in resulting in a murder (events that the reader witnesses), assigned to Blume's team, but they are hedged in by political implications (the victim's wife is a politician and he himself was an animal activist). There is a TV documentary about dog fights (thankfully not depicted directly, though there is some animal cruelty), a connection to professional gangsters, and cops feeding information not only to the press but to suspects and crime lords.

There's also a knowing young girl (a victim's daughter), an FBI lawyer (and potential girlfriend for Alec), and lots of internal police politics. Some aspects are standard fare for crime fiction, but overall the tone and style are fresh, whether compared to the Anglo-American or the Italian realm of crime writing. Of the several books I've read (or heard) recently, this one was the best written and the most fun to read.

Which cover do you prefer? I like the graphic one, though photos of Rome are never a bad thing.

The Tourist (no not the movie)

I'm hoping to do some catching up over the next few days, and to get back to posting more regularly. To start with, I recently heard the audio version of Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, a spy novel unrelated to the recent (poorly reviewed) Hollywood movie. Steinhauer's tourist is a member of a secret black-ops CIA team based in New York (each member is called a tourist, the department is called tourism, etc.). Steinhauer is very good at depicting the characters as human (rather than as types), and he gets an effective sense of the gray moral areas of the contemporary spy trade. There's even some sly humor. But as a reader who has grown to expect the spy thriller to have a clockwork-like structure that surprises with its final but (looking backward) revelations, I didn't quite get what I wanted from The Tourist (there's a sequel that's well-reviewed--maybe I just haven't reached the end of the story yet). And maybe The Tourist suffers from my having read Mick Herron's Slow Horses first--that's a book that delivers the clockwork structure, the surprise, the irony, and considerable humor.

Milo the tourist has a fateful encounter in Venice, just before 9/11/01, in which his mentor is killed, and then time shifts forward to 2007 when Milo, now on administrative duty, is thrust back into black ops by the appearance of an assassin he has been tracking. But it's not the assassin that provides the tension, it's the consequences within the Department of Tourism, the CIA, and Homeland Security (as well as Milo's own family) that provide the impetus for the plot.

I liked this better than I liked the one of Steinhauer's East European novels that I read--and it provided enough interest and entertainment to get me through a 12-hour drive that I needed to make. It just didn't excite me in the same way that Slow Horses did when I first discovered it. Anyone read the sequel, The Nearest Exit? Does it provide completion for the story?

Finnish Noir: Raid and the Blackest Sheep, by Harri Nykanen

"Raid," pronounced like "ride," is a Finnish TV series (and a later movie) about a scruffy hit man whose nickname relates to the bug spray ("kills indoors an outdoors" is one version). The series is very entertaining, wryly funny, and follows the strain of crime fiction that flows from Western, cowboy fiction. Raid and the Blackest Sheep is the first of the Harri Nykanen novels (on which the series was based) to be translated into English by the new Ice Cold Crime imprint.

The book is essentially a road novel rather than a mystery, though there are some revelations at the end. Raid is helping a career criminal named Nygren who has returned home to Finland for a kind of farewell tour, settling scores and making amends. A hard-nosed detective is trying to find out if Nygren is planning a last heist, and Raid's friend on the police force, Lieutentant Jansson, is lured out of a rehabilitation center (where he's supposedly losing weight) when Raid calls him.

The result is a wild ride across Finland, with colorful characters among the police and the criminals very much in evidence. Raid himself is a curious combination of laid-back friendliness and ruthlessness, with a dash of very dry wit. Nykanen's writing is quite unlike anything else in Scandinavian crime fiction (even the other Finns), with perhaps more in common with neo-noir writers like Alan Guthrie. The book also has something in common with the dour and off-center comedy of the leading light of Finnish cinema, Aki Kaurismäki.

Ice Cold Crime also publishes the Helsinki Homicide series, by Jarkko Sipila, the second volume of which is in my short stack tbr pile.

Mari Jungstedt, The Killer's Art

Maybe it was just that I was reading it under difficult (family) circumstances, but I thought Mari Jungstedt's 4th "Anders Knutas" book was the weakest of the series as so far translated from the original Swedish. Gotland, the island setting, is portrayed in vivid ways, but the story wavers back and forth among several strands without getting much of anywhere (in spite of the sensational elements of the story), and Inspector Knutas seems incapable of dealing with the investigation or even problems on his own staff (his favorite detective wants to leave). The running subplot of the series, concerning reporter Johan Berg and his true love Emma, puts them in threat (again) and builds up their relationship mainly to crash it down.

The story sounds interesting enough in summary: an art dealer is found hanged from a city gate, with no clues about his killer or a motive. Though secrets are discovered about the dealer and his wife, none get the police very far along in their investigation. The plot moves on to the theft of a famous Swedish painting, Dardel's Dying Dandy (which I think has featured in more than one Swedish crime novel), homosexual prostitution, obsessions revolving around family succession, and the summer homes of 19th century aristocrats and bohemians.

To me, the solution to the crime seems to come out of nowhere, and the concluding sentences reach for dramatic resolution not really justified by the story. Norm liked the book more than me (see here), and I'll bow to his judgement, considering the circumstances I mentioned above, which stretched my reading out over a longer-than-usual period and involved several airplane journeys and hospital bedsides. I'll read the next Knutas novel with hopes for a more positive experience. I have some catching up to do, blog-wise, and will try to post a few times in the upcoming days.

Bandit Love, by Massimo Carlotto

The most recent of Massimo Carlotto's Marco "Alligator" Buratti novels to be translated (and a much more recent novel than the other two already translated), Bandit Love (translated by Antony Shugaar) plays out almost as a picaresque. The plot, based in Padua but going quite far afield, twists and turns without ever reaching a pat conclusion.

In this book, Buratti and his two friends/collaborators leave behind the bar and the private (unlicensed) detective business that they have been operating. Rossini, the gangster of the trio, discovers that his girlfriend, Sylvie, has been kidnapped, and as the team looks for her they realize that the crime relates to an event in their past, when they murdered a man who had been trying to involve them in investigating a theft of drugs from the police lockup. Their frantic search for Sylvie

There's much discussion of changes in Italy, with regard to the new and old mafias, the economic crash, and the loss of a local culture in the northeast, giving the whole book a melancholy (as well as noir) character. There are also various version of the love and loyalty between outlaws and their female partners, though Buratti himself has (mostly) lost his own love, Virna.

Like most of the books published by Europa Editions, Bandit Love is short, compact, and tightly packed with characters and incidents. [warning: partial spoiler ahead] Just when you think that the book is about to achieve a violent, final act of retribution, it veers off into an indeterminate future—possibly a sequel or possibly an end to the series that carries it forward into its own mythical future.

Bad Intentions, Karin Fossum

One of the distinctive features of Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer series is that they're not formulaic. A couple of them are straight police procedurals, but others are told more from the point of view of the characters than the police. Bad Intentions (published in the U.S. this year by Houghton Mifflin in a translation from the Norwegian by Barslund) is different as well, beginning with an incident that seems to be a crime but then doesn't. Fossum also has in several books led the reader to certain expectations about the story that she proceeds to undermine, and that is also true of Bad Intentions. What we might take at first to be a murder among friends turns into an intense story of collective guilt, sociopathic behavior, and loss.

The novel is short and intense, not perhaps my favorite among the Sejer books (but then I'm partial to the police procedural form, which is not the most important part of Bad Intentions). We learn a bit about Sejer, though, now that he is aging, his daughter is not close at hand, and his Sharpei is his closest companion (Skarre, his partner, is on stage only a few times). What I like best about Bad Intentions is the quiet tone, which emphasizes ordinary human feelings and failings, offering in the end a glimpse of hope (or at least coping): this isn't about international conspiracies, criminal gangs, or serial killers. It's a very closely observed, economically constructed story of the needs and bad choices of ordinary people.

Camilla Läckberg, The Stonecutter

Camilla Läckberg's The Stonecutter, which arrived in the U.S. this year, is about the miseries that parents visit upon their children, and vice versa. Many permutations are given, and almost everyone in the novel is guilty of something (so there are lots of suspects). This is the third book featuring Patrik Hedström, a detective in a small town in southwestern Sweden. His partner Erica, has just had a baby (and the baby is making her miserable in the ways that babies do). A young girl's body is brought to the sea's surface, caught in a lobster trap, and Patrik is thrown into the investigation of her disfunctional family and various possible perpetrators.

Along the way there are other, less dire crimes, and occasionally Erica's sister puts in an appearance--though more in a way that seems to be continuing her role in previous books and preparing for her role in a subsequent book than in any way directly relevant to the present book). A parallel story concerns a stonecutter in the area in the 1920s who falls under the spell of his employer's daughter, Agnes. Their story begins as a sort of reversed Elvira Madigan (a great Swedish romance directed by Bo Widerberg who also did the Martin Beck movie most praised by Maj Sjöwall), but Agnes is a particularly poisonous character and I found myself growing tired of this historical aspect of the mystery (a reader will probably figure out along the way what the relevance is to the present-day mystery.

There are a couple of crimes of opportunity that seem a bit contrived (a character is at the perfect place, and with the necessary "equipment" at a perfect time), and there's a good deal of fumbling around by the less effective detectives on the small-town force, along with the requisite incompetent boss--who also has a subplot that is relevant to the parents-and-children theme but not to the story per se.

I heard the Audible recording of The Stonecutter, rather than read the book on paper, and I found myself getting a bit impatient. If I'd had pages in front of me I might have started skipping ahead. Still, the story is well constructed, and its "cozy" setting is nicely contradicted by some of the family horrors concealed behind closed doors. Läckberg is not my favorite of the current crop of Scandinavians, and this book could have used a bit of trimming, in my opinion, but I'll still line up for the next one.

Friday Forgotten (or at least hard to find) book: new John Brady

"Subtle" may not be an adjective that pops into your mind when reading most crime novels, but it does describe John Brady's new Matt Minogue novel, The Coast Road, so far accessible only from Canadian sources. Dublin Inspector Minogue has been sent to a new "cold case" sort of squad, charged to review unsolved cases, and his former colleague Tommy Malone is to be his assistant. Malone, as anyone who has followed the series, has a lot of baggage, and adds to it at the start of this book with a suspicious encounter with the gangster who had his twin brother (who was also a gangster) killed. And the background is post-Tiger Ireland, with all its still current difficulties, as well as the revelations of abuse by the priesthood.

But Minogue and Malone's survey of cold cases is derailed immediately into a review of the murder of a homeless man who had roamed the east coast of Ireland. The investigation leads to a nun who runs a shelter, a dodgy wannabe journalist, and a reluctant sister. But most of the book is told in conversations and interviews that circle around the facts and the plot rather than approaching them directly. What is actually going on, much less what led to the murder, lies beneath this surface for the reader as well as the detectives.

Fortunately, the dialogue is lively (all the more so because of the wit of the detective and the skill of the author). Minogue is dealing with some change in his family, not only with his emigre children but with his wife's involvement in a group that seeks religious renewal (Minogue himself has little sympathy for the Church).

A major theme is generational differences, particularly between urban Malone, not interested in the Irish language, and Minogue and his cohorts who were raised speaking (at least a little) the language. Among Minogue's generation, the regional differences (particularly in dialect and accent) of Ireland are important markers and the source of much slagging among the cops, while Malone is more of a European. The plot also turns on changes among the criminal community, including international participation.

Anyone who has followed Brady's work will be delighted to discover that there's a new book that is easily up to the standard of his earlier novels. Anyone not familiar with Brady could well start with The Coast Road, and if you have a taste for something quite different from the straight-ahead thriller sort of crime novel risks becoming the kind of fan that eagerly searches through used book sites and stores for the other books.

Foreign Forgotten Friday: crime in Singapore

Not so much forgotten as inaccessible: Jake Needham's The Ambassador's Wife was published in Hong Kong in 2006 and is about to be reprinted in Singapore by Marshall Cavendish Editions; but there hasn't been, and evidently will not be, any circulation outside of Southeast Asia.

The Ambassador's Wife features Inspector Samuel Tay of the Special Investigations Section of Singapore CID, but it's really about Singapore more than Tay. In fact, Tay is in a way a personification of Singapore: Westernized and somewhat insecure, but very efficient and dedicated to his job. Tay is in fact wealthy, but stays with the police rather than lapsing into a life of leisure.

He's presented with a puzzling case when a woman's body is found in the Marriot Hotel, in a room that was not supposed to be occupies. She is battered, sexually abused, and posed, but the scene has been thoroughly cleaned. When she eventually identified, the American embassy becomes involved (I won't say why, unless spoilers are requested) and Tay is assisted and/or obstructed by an FBI agent and a security officer from the embassy.

The case presents few leads but ultimately leads Tay on a deadly trip to Bangkok. In a way, the book is a Bildungsroman, leading Tay toward a maturity that, despite his years, he has not previously achieved. By the end, his attitudes toward the case and those involved has shifted considerably, and his own insecurity and ambivalence is at least partly cleared up. What starts as a somewhat dark but conventional detective novel darkens and deepens considerably by the end. There are a number of false leads and a few loose ends, but the conclusion makes sense in terms of Tay's personality and his personal journey.

But the city state of Singapore (and to a lesser extent Bangkok) is the main character: there have been only a few Singapore crime novels available in the West, including one by Hwee Hwee Tan, a couple by Gopal Barathan, and the most recent in the series featuring Inspector Singh, by Shamini Flint. None of those gives quite as comprehensive view of the city and its citizens as Needham gives here. The Ambassador's Wife most closely resembles Flint's books, among the Singapore crime novels, but the Singh stories retain a cozy quality that Needham steers away from, into noir territory.