Diego De Silva, I Hadn't Understood

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

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

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

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

Timothy Williams, Another Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berlin Noir TV series

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to do with Montparnasse

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

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

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

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

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

Graveland, by Alan Glynn

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

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

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

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

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

One from Istanbul, one from Barcelona

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

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

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

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

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

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

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

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

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

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

Marek Krajewski, The Minotaur's Head

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

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

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

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

Lars Kepler's The Nightmare

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

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

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

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



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

Perfect Hatred, Leighton Gage

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

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

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

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

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

Arne Dahl: Books and Films

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

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

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

Irish noir: Declan Burke's Slaughter's Hound

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

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

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

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

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

Ratlines, by Stuart Neville

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

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

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

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

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

Only one of Giorgio Scerbanenco's crime novels featuring Dr. Duca Lamberti had been published in English translation (Duca and the Milan Murders) before Hersilia Press brought out the very first Duca story, A Private Venus, last year. When I read Duca and the Milan Murders years ago, it struck me as a conventional murder mystery--but now, having read A Private Venus, I'm going to have to go back and re-read it (if I can find it), because A Private Venus is anything but conventional.

Duca is a disgraced physician, just released from prison, when a wealthy man offers him an unconventional job, watching over (and if possible, detoxifying) the alcoholic waster who is his son. Duca takes the job, not having any other prospects, but discovers that there is a crime underlying the young man's lethargy and alcoholism. He enlists the help of a policeman from his past as well as a young woman that he meets, but basically Duca draws all the narrative energy upon himself.

Which is a bit of a problem, since that young woman is the most interesting character in the book, and she reaps the whirlwind sown by Duca. I won't go into any more detail, but Duca makes some extraordinarily stupid decisions as he tracks down the criminals, but he's not the one who will pay the price for the mistakes.

The writing style is a bit indirect and always interesting, and a reader is drawn along by the characters, especially the unfortunate young woman, into the seedy, noir milieu of post-War Milan. The criminal enterprise at first seems even a bit quaint, but turns as sinister as any current crime before the end. Scerbanenco presents a moral conundrum for the reader: Can we empathize with Duca when he is drawing misfortune on other characters? If anyone remembers Duca and the Milan Murders or has read any of the other books in the original Italian, please let us know if Duca becomes a character that it's easier to identify with.

Babylon, Camilla Ceder

Camilla Ceder's Babylon, the second in her series featuring detective Christian Tell and his (now) girlfriend Seja Lundberg, has a family resemblance to a specific end of the Scandinavian crime spectrum: specifically that occupied by Mari Jungstedt and Camilla Läckberg. In all these writers' books, a central male character (a policeman or a reporter) meets a woman who is a witness in the first book's crime, and they become a couple in later books. In Läckberg's case, the non-cop/reporter female character is her central character, Erica Falck, is her central character and continues to be involved in crimes and investigations. In the cases of Jungstedt and Ceder, the relationship remains central to the stories, but the non-professional partner is less involved directly in the crimes (though in the case of Jungstedt she's dragged into events at least once more).

Also, the books by all three are about the people in the story more than the crimes. And in all three, the private lives of the central characters remain an important aspect of the books, even when not directly related to the current plot. For example, Seja, in Babylon, is not really involved in the crime plot at all, but still remains a central character, with a good portion of the book told from her point of view. In other Scandinavian crime fiction, the detective's private life is frequently part of the action, but the wife/husband/partner is less central to the story (think of two other writers whose books are, like Ceder's, set in Göteborg, Åke Edwardson and Helene Tursten).

The emphasis on the partnership rather humanizes the investigator in the books of Ceder, Jungstedt, and Läckberg, but also shifts the stories somewhat away from the "noir" end of the crime fiction spectrum, which traditionally focuses on loners or at least detectives with difficult private lives. The observation isn't a value judgment--just an observation about the nature of Ceder's books.

The plot of Babylon has something to do with the title's historic region, but is mostly set in and around Göteborg. There's a rural aspect, too, since Seja continues to live in a remote cabin with no indoor plumbing (something that's hard for me, at least, to grasp in a Swedish setting--imagine the outhouse on cold nights...

But Ceder conveys both urban and rural settings vividly. The story starts with an interesting character who's more than a bit of a mess, a character who might have been more central to the story than she turns out to be here. She's a jealous girlfriend whose live-in boyfriend is murdered, along with his academic mentor (who is also his lover). The evidence points toward the jealous girlfriend, but there's a break-in at her house that raises other possibilities. The ex-husband of the mentor is implicated, and the reader gets a glimpse of the men involved in the break-in--leading to complications and shifts between Denmark, Turkey, and Sweden that Ceder handles very well.

I have to confess a preference for crime fiction with a somewhat less domestic focus (hence the title of this blog), but Ceder manages to keep a reader's interest in her characters, even the ones who don't figure directly in the crime. The uneasy relationship between Seja and Christian is solidly based in their personalities, but I confess I becaue a little impatient with the amount of time devoted to their personal pleasures and difficulties rather than with the crime at hand. My prejudice as a reader, I'm sure. I'll probably continue with Ceder's series, but my main interest in Swedish crime fiction is at the other end of the spectrum I mentioned above.

Crime in Singapore

Apparently Jake Needham's newly published second volume of his Inspector Tay series, The Umbrella Man, is available only in a Kindle version because the government of Singapore is not happy with his portrayal of their island republic. Having been to Singapore, and having just read The Umbrella Man, I can well believe that. The novel is about the blending of personal, professional, and cultural disasters, but the story is grounded in an unusually direct portrayal of the consequences of Singapore's quest for stability and prosperity at the expense of other democratic goals.

The novel begins with a series of bombings that will inevitably suggest terrorist attacks across the world (particularly, to an American reader at least, 9/11). The attack destroys the architectural and commercial heart of the city-state, as well as the confidence of its citizens. But Tay, due to the events of the previous novel, The Ambassador's Wife, is persona non grata with his own superiors and with the U.S. authorities who are elbowing their way into the bombing investigation. Tay is shunted aside into the investigation of a single, seemingly insignificant, murder in an apartment at the distant edge of Singapore.

But Tay is, of course, determined to leverage his assignment into an investigation of the larger crime, and with the help of his long-suffering assistant, as well as a coroner, and a few others (including the mysterious American spook who played a large role in The Ambassador's Wife, plus a ghost from Tay's past) Tay stumbles up against both the truth and the solid resistance of almost everyone else involved in the bombing investigation.

The story is not a straight-ahead police procedural or thriller. Tay is led back and forth from his own family history to various possible truths about the smaller and the larger case, through official theories about the bombing and the murder and through versions of the truth that relate directly to Singapore's politics and culture. The ending evolves directly from Tay's life and his dogged pursuit, without stretching credulity or falling into the cliches of grand international conspiracy (a sort of novel for which I have little use). Needham, in fact, leads the reader forward with Tay's convictions and uncertainties, into the avenues and the back streets of a Singapore that he has surgically opened up with the fictional device of the bombings. The result is an unusually potent combination of the potent drivers of noir, criminal acts and social insight.

Missing Maxine

I have to add my voice to the chorus mourning the loss of Maxine Clarke, who was not only a great reader and a great blogger (as Petrona) but also a great reader of blogs. It has been her voice more than any other who has tied together the crime fiction bloging community, and she is irreplaceable.

International crime, corruption, fraud

The Eyes of Lira Kazan is a new thriller from France, written by a journalist (Judith Perrignon) and a prosecutor (Eva Joly) and translated by Margaret Crosland and Elfreda Powell (published by Bitter Lemon). As you might expect, there's plenty of realistic detail in this story of corruption and murder across international borders, in the age of our current financial crisis. But the story is also compelling and well-written, in a straightforward, ensemble style reminiscent of some of Dominique Manotti's novels (the documentary and ensemble ones more than the series based on a Inspector Daquin). In my opinion, that's a high standard.

The story brings together several threads, from a Nigerian fraud investigator forced to flee the country to a Russian Journalist (the title character), to a court clerk in Nice, a russian oligarch, and a banker-fisherman from the Faroe islands. The oligarch figures mostly in the background, as a ruthless gangster who needs a lot of money laundered, and he thought he had found the perfect laundry in the banking system of the tiny Scandinavian outpost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But the Faroes bank is caught up in the same house of cards that brought down the banks of Iceland, and suddenly the whole system of illegal currency is threatened with collapse, and with violent retribution. The banker's wife drowns in Nice, dressed in an evening gown, and the clerk and his judge follow the trail of murder and money in dangerous directions.

Lira is at the center of the story: It's her journalistic pursuit of the oligarch that draws the others in (the Russian mobster is implicated not only in the Faroes bank but also in Nigerian fraud and corruption and government machinations in France). Lira travels to London to meet the Nigerian emigre but is attacked on the street, and her injury draws the characters and the story together.

The three crusaders from Russia, Nigeria, and France are threatened not only by the mobster but also by at least 2 governments, and can trust no one. They go on the run and rely ultimately upon the weapons of the 21st century to find at least some measure of justice (in [Spoiler Alert] what seems to me to be a bit of revenge fantasy that leaps just a bit beyond the novels dominant realism and pessimism--not a flaw in the story so much as a bit of skeptical hope built into its conclusion).

This is a slow-paced story that doesn't rely on dramatic representation of violence for its effect (most of the violence is "offstage" or understated). It's the threat felt not only personally but also politically and culturally by these characters that tightens the story and involves the reader. The "good guys" aren't flawless heroes, they're full characters with plenty of flaws, who in many ways draw themselves into the danger that threatens them. If you need a thriller with lots of blood and violence, this is perhaps not the book for you. But if you are looking for something more rooted in the realism of our international milieu, more coomplex and less obvious--I'd recommend The Eyes of Lira Kazan, and I hope Joly and Perrignon keep writing books like this.

Border Noir

Journalist Sebastian Rotella has published a first novel that is a convincing, well-written, and evocative portrait of the border regions of San Diego/Tijuana and the Triple Border in South America (where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet).

It's an ensemble story, without a single lead character (though it begins and ends with Valentine Pescatore, a young U.S. border patrol agent). Besides Pescatore, there's a Mexican human rights activist turned cop (leader of an elite anti-corruption squad), the Mexican woman who took his place when he quit the human rights agency, an American woman who's an agent for the border patrol's inspector general (a "rat squad" sort of thing), and numerous policemen and narco-criminals.

The plot takes sudden twists and turns--when it seems like the story is going in a conventional cops-and-drug-lords or border-agents-and-illegal-immigrants direction, it will suddenly veer into the corruption story or an undercover cop story or a story of betrayal (of several sorts). Rotella keeps all of the above convincing, through his skill in writing as well as his refusal of a coherent single plotline. All the characters, even minor ones (even ones who speak hardly at all) are vivid, and there is considerable skepticism about characters who would be the good guys in a more conventional novel, as well as sympathy (of a sort, at least) with the gangster crews. There are also various references to adventure novels of the past (in particular The Three Musketeers).

The various U.S., Mexican, and tri-border settings are also convincing and complex, as well as the varied and powerful threats that the characters live under in each of those settings. One of the more startling settings is a Mexican prison that is surreal, but clearly based in reality.

I received this book as a review copy (thanks, Mulholland Books), with a different cover (there are a couple of different covers out there, shifts in the marketing campaign I guess. The cover of the copy I have is a bit more subtle than the one above (just the border fence and an over-flying helicopter), and the one above is a bit less busy than another one that's out there, which has the same image but white stripes across the cover (kind of busy, if you ask me).

I actually put off reading this book for a while after I received it, thinking it was just a border-thriller (and too American, perhaps, for a blog that is supposed to be international). But it's not a conventional border story, and there's plenty of international perspective.

Comic noir collaboration: Camilleri and Lucarelli

Acqua in Bocca is a short novel published in 2010 (by minimum fax, a publisher in Rome) in an almost epistolary style: an exchange between characters created by Andrea Camilleri and Carlo Lucarelli (Salvo Montalbano and Grazia Negro, respectively) in the process of an investigation of a murder in Bologna. The book actually resulted from a correspondence between the two authors, instigated by the publisher almost on a whim and then executed over time (the process is explained ina postscript). The book is unfortunately only available in Italian.

The story is fairly simple: a body is discovered on the floor of an apartment, a plastic bag over the victim's head and the corpses of a couple of "beta splendens" (Siamese Fighting Fish) nearby. Later, another fish is discovered in the corpse's windpipe, a contributing cause to the death. Ispettore Grazia Negro is assigned the case, but certain aspects of the case cause her to be circumspect with her superiors about what she is doing.

The witness who discovered the body then disappears, traced to a train station in Sicily, near Vigata, where Montalbano is the Commissario. Grazia, persistent in spite of being warned, contacts Salvo, asking him to be discreet. The exchange that follows is frequenty very funny, with Salvo taking different positions in his open and secret communications and messages passing back and forth concealed in cannoli (dispatched from Sicily) and tortellini (dispatched from Bologna).

Gradually, many of the characters in other books by the two authors appear in supporting roles (sometimes not directly "seen" but in the background of the story), including Mimi and Catarella from Sicily and Cogliandro from Bologna. Camilleri's contributions are frequently funny, particularly for anyone familiar with the Montalbano series, but Lucarelli's are also full of puns (including some characters' names), as well as other comic complications.

The book is short and (by the nature of the project) episodic, with documents and photographs interspersed in the text (Montalbano and Negro represented, obviously enough, from the TV series based on him and the movie based on her).

When the action shifts from Bologna to Milano Marittima, where Grazia has fled from those threatened by her investigation, the story takes a dark, but still comic, turn that it only partly explained by the final missive from Montalbano: we must choose to believe whether a violent act is intentional or coincidental.

Acqua in Bocca is light entertainment in a noir/comic mode. I read it a couple of times, as I've been studying Italian, with increasing comprehension--the language is fairly straightforward, if occasionally frustratingly idiomatic (Google Translate was sometimes more help than a dictionary). It was a lot of fun to practice Italian with, leading me onward to at least somewhat more literary texts (including several by Lucarelli and some I've just begun to tackle by Loriano Machiavelli (also quite comic in a particular way). My Italian teacher says she learned English by listening to pop music from England and America, because she was motivated to understand the lyrics, so I suppose my version of that is reading Italian noir, a rich vein of international crime fiction.