Leighton Gage, In Memoriam

I like many others today am mourning the loss of Leighton Gage, whose death is announced here: http://networkedblogs.com/Nz0Gd.
I was an avid follower of his Mario Silva series and had the good fortune to meet him when he was passing through the Washington DC area. He will be missed by his readers and also by all of us who have benefited from his participation in the crime fiction blogging community.

Two-fer Friday: from France

I've just finished two crime novels from France, courtesy of NetGalley: The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, the most recent Adamsberg novel from Fred Vargas (translated by Sian Reynolds) and The 7th Woman, the first (and first translated) crime novel by Frédérique Molay (translated by Anne Trager). The two books are at opposite ends of the spectrum of "romans policiers," though  both deal with serial killers (and the authors share a first name, since Vargas's real name is Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau).

The quirkiness of Vargas's writing is well known: of her 13 novels, 8 have been translated into English and have won a number of awards. In each case, her novels begin with a seemingly preposterous event drawn from history or fairy tales or myth (such as a revival of the plague, attacks by werewolves, or, in this case, the appearance of a ghostly army that "seizes" evil-doers and thereby predicts their violent deaths). And the plots wander indirectly toward a conclusion that is more or less drawn from everyday life, commonly having to do with unhappy families and disputes among members of small neighborhoods or towns.

Ordebec (the book is called The Furious Army in French, another of the terms by which the ghostly horde is known) includes several plots, ranging from attacks on a pigeon, on a housewife, on an industrialist, and on a disgraceful man in the small Normandy town of Ordebec (this last one being predicted by a young woman's vision of the horde). All the events begin at more or less the same time, and Adamsberg investigates them all, with the help this time of his recently discovered son (see the previous book) and a young firebug suspected of the murder of the industrialist. The text is lively, despite a good deal of repetition) but not in the ordinary vein of crime fiction. Vargas's readers enjoy the company of the motley crew of eccentrics that make up Adamsberg's circle and the circle around the crimes. Vargas's knowledge of archaeology and history makes the mythic aspects of the stories also very real and entertaining (she's an archaeologist among other things).

The 7th Woman is a more straightforward police procedural, and we learn a lot more about how the French police work in actuality here than in any of Vargas's books. But straightforward is mostly

what the book is, in spite of the lurid aspects of the serial killer being chased. Molay, like Vargas, has real-life experience pertinent to her tale (in politics) and the administrative aspects of the book are believable and vivid. But she has a tendency to "tell and not show," and for me none of the characters really had a spark that made them come to life. Crime fiction characters (and plots, for that matter) certainly don't need the more extravagant aspects of Vargas's style to come to life for a reader (this reader, anyway), but when I think of specifically French examples of the genre (by Dominique Manotti or Jean-Patrick Manchette, to cite just 2 examples) there is a liveliness in characterization, writing, and scene setting that I miss in Molay's writing. Molay has certainly amassed a lot of positive blurbs (and evidently sales), but I couldn't really engage with her writing. My loss, probably.

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec is published by Penguin, and The 7th Woman by Le French Book, which seems to be a digital only publishing house, something like Stockholm Text in its first incarnation. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Le French for future publications, but will have to be convinced taht another book by Molay should join my TBR pile.

Fruttero & Lucentini: Il Palio delle contrade morte

This post continues my occasional series of reviews of Italian crime fiction not translated into English (as my Italian progresses to the point that I can read some of them). Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini are best know in the English-speaking world for two, books, The Sunday Woman (an excellent police procedural and social satire set in Torino) and The D. Case (which concerns a meta-fictional investigation and completion of Charles Dickens's unfinished detective story, The Mystery of Edwin Drood). One other book has been translated, as Enigma by the Sea, a sort of locked-room mystery that is also very good--though there are hints that a translation was at one time available for another book, Lovers of No Fixed Abode (a combination mystery novel, romance, and evocation of Venice). Il Palio delle Contrade Morte, though, is something different.

The book begins with a married couple from Milan, Enzo and Valeria, watching the famous Palio events in the center of Siena, but from separate balcomies and in the company of apparently intimate but recent acquaintances. One track of the novel follows their observations of the events leading up to the race and ultimately the race itself. The other track is a series of flashbacks explaining how the couple came to be here, and came to be on separate balconies.

Attempting to reach an agri-tourism farm owned by friends, the couple is diverted by a halestorm and their own nervousness and lack of definite directions into an aristocratic villa, whose denizens invite them to wait out the storm. They ultimately stay for three eventful days, in the company of seven Siennese: the elegant Guidobaldo (with whom Valeria is immediately impressed), the young and beautiful Ginevra (at first inattentive and then very attentive to Enzo), an older couple (or maybe not a couple), a jockey famous for his participation in the Palio, and two visitors from Rome (as well as an Asian couple and a couple of other servants and their families). The interactions among all these people are very entertaining, told in beautiful, breezy prose.

But there is a strange twist out of normality that begins with a shadowy creature biting Valeria on her rear in a perverse sexual assault, and it gradually becomes obvious that Enzo and Valeria have stumbled into a labyrinth of conspiracy, family rivalries, and the history of the Palio (including the Contrade--rival neighborhood guilds that participate in the race), and in particular, the six contrade banned since 1729 from participating in the race. The banishment of these groups is explained as being the result of either corruption among them or the political maneuvering of the rival groups.

The mysterious goings-on reach a height in a murder and an investigation that seems to lead nowhere. But the conclusion of the novel reveals less about who committed the murder than what the motives for the attack had been--motives that shift the novel out of the realm of either noir or romance and into a sort of ghost story.

The book might not satisfy the taste of a crime fiction purist, though it has all the elements, plus a bit of horror story and historical conspiracy (not quite Dan Brown, but veering a bit in that direction). But Il Palio... has several things going for it. Though it may not be Fruttero and Lucentini's best book, it still has their vibrant style and wit. For a non-native speaker of Italian, it is also mercifully short. And it reveals a lot of detail about Palio, without ever being didactic or attempting to be a tour guide. Instead, the authors use the hermetic environment of Siena and its famous race to explore the experience of an average couple, having some trouble in their marriage but nothing drastic (as there is nothing drastic in their lives, in fact) who are thrust into a realm of mystery, murder, romance, and even the gothic.

I won't give a spoiler here, but if anyone is interested, I can post a very short "spoiler post" with a sentence or two about how the novel (and the race) does (and doesn't, since there is not a neat tying-up-of-loose-pends) conclude.

Eva's Eye (Inspector Sejer #1), Karin Fossum

Karin Fossum's series featuring Inspector Sejer (in a small city in Norway) has been one of the most consistently outstanding of the Scandinavian Crime Wave. We finally have the first book in the series, translated from Norwegian by James Anderson, and in this case reading the story out of order is no burden. We get a little more of Sejer's backstory, but as is often the case with this series, we spend more time with the people involved (in one way or another) with the crime than with the detective. We also see a wider assortment of police on Sejer's team, which has been reduced in later books mostly to his assistant, Detective Skarre (who appears here in a minor role).

The tale begins with the discovery of a body, when an artist named Eva Magnus is out walking along the river with her daughter. Oddly, Eva pretends (to her daughter) to be calling the police while actually doing nothing to report the discovery.

As Sejer works to find the identity of the dead man in the river, he comes across another case with certain overlapping elements, concerning the death of a woman named Maja. So we have two deaths and a single mother and artist who is acting guilty--most of the novel is occupied in bringing to light the connections among these elements, first by following Sejer's investigation, alternating with Eva's daily life as a painter and divorced mother who is suddenly and inexplicably able to pay her past-due bills.

Sejer pays several visits to Eva, resulting ultimately in a long flashback to a time when the two murder victims were still alive and Eva was struggling to get by. The flashback is told in a third-person narrative, but it is set into the novel as her story, as told to Sejer. Fairly early in that narrative, the picture begins to come into focus for the reader, but Fossum is very good at keeping us engaged, as things become clear--and also very good at upsetting our assumptions after we once again join Sejer in the "present" of the novel.

Eva's Eye must have been a very auspicious beginning for the series, for those able to see it when it came out. There are some details of daily life that date the story, but Fossum's concern is with the characters, whose lives and options are fully contemporary. She is particularly apt in her portrayal of Eva, both as a mother and an artist who is convinced (against all evidence) that she is a great artist (a hubris that seems to be required for anyone to continue in that calling). Black Seconds remains my favorite of the Sejer novels so far, but I would currently rank Eva's Eye a close second.

My Venice, by Donna Leon

Despite its title, Donna Leon's My Venice and Other Essays doesn't consist of one essay titled "My Venice" along with essays on other topics: it is instead a collection of occasional articles for various publications, some of which deal directly with Venice while others deal with Leon's family, her house outside Venice, her love of opera, etc. One topic it deals with only indirectly is the writing of crime novels, though there is an essay on teaching writing.

But the book is rich in something that illuminates Leon's novels: her indignations at incivilities, hunters, and other topics and her experiences with the difficulties, pleasures, and annoyances of living in Venice. What her detective deals with in her books, she addresses more directly here, though seldom illuminating any specific incidents in the books. She is often very funny, not least when she is venting her anger or bafflement over topics like the tendency in the field of classical music to emphasize the sexuality rather than the talent of some performers.

For a glimpse into the thoughts and life of Commissario Brunetti's author, or into the experiences and opinions that lie behind the detective's stories, My Venice is quite interesting. But more important is that Leon is interesting and entertaining to spend some time with, and her voice here is open, illuminating, and engaging.

Two-fer Friday: Anne Holt and Massimo Carlotto

It's hardly possible to imagine two crime novels as far apart (yet still in the genre) as Anne Holt's  Death of the Demon and Massimo Carlotto's At the End of a Dull Day. Everyone in Holt's book reaches out for the reader's sympathy; everyone in Carlotto's is deeply flawed and basically (to anthropomorphize) could not care less what the reader thinks of them. Both deal with delicate subjects (homosexuality, the child welfare system, and damaged children as well as murder in Holt's book; sex slavery, corruption, murder and domestic violence in Carlotto's). But Holt deals with the delicate subjects delicately, and Carlotto throws them naked in our faces. The trouble is, as despicable as we may find all the characters and the deeds contained in it, Carlotto's is a better book (though perhaps only for those with a devotion to noir).

Death of the Demon, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Bruce and published in the U.S. by Scribner, is in Holt's Hanne Wilhelmsen series (I believe it's the third or perhaps fourth to be translated from this series). Hanne has recently been promoted to a leadership position and is finding it difficult to step back from actual police work (learning that lesson is a big part of the book). The book begins with a long section about the arrival of a "new boy" in a group home run by the Salvation Army for children of troubled homes. The new boy, Olav, is very large and perhaps brain damaged at (or before) birth. He has problems controlling behavior and emotions, and we see a good deal of the book through his eyes. As he adjusts to his new life (or doesn't adjust) an event throws everything into chaos: the director of the center is murdered. Olav disappears (and is on the run for much of the book, though no one thinks he's the murder--since he's 12).

Hanne and her team spend most of the novel going back and forth among the staff and various other involved parties, making little progress until the end (which, by the way, I didn't find very convincing). The book is a traditional mystery, oriented toward the accumulation of evidence and the unveiling of the perpetrator. One of the distinguishing features of the series is Hanne's difficulty in acknowledging her ongoing homosexual relationship with her life-partner (not a cop), something that doesn't quite cohere with our idea of the liberalism of Norway,

At the End of a Dull Day (translated by Antony Shugaar and published by Europa Editions in their new World Noir series) is about Giorgio, who is a monster. He's a reformed terrorist and gangster, if by reformed you mean a restaurateur who also runs a prostitution ring involved in sex slavery as well as catering to corrupt politicians and abusing his wife (he's a control freak). We have met him before, in The Goodbye Kiss. He is double-crossed by his bookkeeper and most of the book is about him getting deeper into trouble and finally working out his revenge. He is casually violent, and dominates not only the other characters but (in an extreme way) his wife and mistress. And we see the whole book through his eyes.

But he gains some sympathy by not being in the Mafia (in any of its guises) or actually being a corrupt official, the two poles of the novel. The book is in many ways a dark commentary on Italy today. It also looks back to the roots of noir in books like Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and Giorgio mentions that his favorite TV series is Justified. Carlotto totally inhabits Giorgio and his world. The book is written in the swift, no-nonsense style of first-person noir and is a considerable achievement in that genre. But not for everyone, obviously.

A Wyatt sequel, by Garry Disher

A couple of years ago, after a long-ish hiatus, Garry Disher published a new novel about his character Wyatt, under the title "Wyatt." The novel contained several homages to an obvious model for Disher's series, the Parker novels by "Richard Stark," alias Donald Westlake.

Wyatt was published in the U.S. by Soho Crime,  which subsequently released two older Wyatt novels, Port Vila Blues and the new Fallout, which is a sequel to Port Vila Blues.

Though Wyatt is a newer book, it is in many ways a throwback to the earlier books, with Wyatt as a cool and solid character, almost a sociopath in his distance from normal social interaction. Port Vila Blues and Fallout seem to be from later in the thief's career: he is looking for a last score, and feeling both his age and his isolation.

Port Vila Blues introduced a female character (not that unusual in the Wyatt books) but in this case she reappears in the sequel, which is unusual. Liz Redding is a cop running after both Wyatt and a crooked cop, and (spoiler alert for those who haven't read the earlier book) she ends up allied with Wyatt, personally and professionally. Fallout begins as Wyatt abandons her on the yacht, on which they sailed away from Port Vila.

Actually that's not quite true: the novel opens with another thief, called the bush bandit by the press, who is robbing small banks across the countryside. His name is Wyatt, too: he's the older Wyatt's nephew Raymond. The family link provides us with more information about Wyatt's past than we have hitherto seen, both before and after uncle and nephew are reunited (in crime, of course). The appearance of his nephew, a felt connection with Liz, Wyatt's failure to achieve any permanent financial security despite a more or less succesful life of crime, and the pressure of a lifetime on the run are all weighing on him

But Fallout maintains two of the most distinctive features of the series: the dark dedication to noir and the naturalistic plotting. The plans of all the characters develop in a way that suggests a straightforward, linear story, but the plans are repeatedly undermined in ways that twist the plot away from what the reader expects and also away from any neatness. The Wyatt novels are messy, like life, and Disher's distinctive style stays away from any sort of artificial plot devices.

Which is not to say there's no structure. Especially in Fallout and Wyatt, the overarching structure is a parrallelism between Wyatt and another violent man, someone engaged in the same line of work as Wyatt but in subtle and not-so-subtle ways less sympathetic to the reader (although Wyatt doesn't himself try all that hard to be sympathetic). In Fallout, it's a prison escapee who has early history with Wyatt and becomes involved with him again (in ways I won't telegraph). These conflicts are resolved not in any super-hero sort of way, but through different styles of thinking and planning.

Fallout involves the jewel robbery of Port Vila Blues as well as the jailbreak, an art theft, a complex confidence game, and related violence and mayhem. But as usual, it's a short book, and a fast one. Disher's other series, about detectives in the Peninsula region of Australia, is perhaps a deeper and more complex set of stories, but the Wyatt books (and Fallout in particular) are extremely well done, and a wonderful homage not only to Westlake but also to the roots of noir fiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first Harry Hole: Jo Nesbø's The Bat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whispering Death, by Garry Disher

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

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

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

Screwball Noir: Rob Kitchin's Stiffed

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

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

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

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

Summertime Death, Mons Kallentoft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diego De Silva, I Hadn't Understood

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

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

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

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

Timothy Williams, Another Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berlin Noir TV series

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to do with Montparnasse

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

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

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

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

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

Graveland, by Alan Glynn

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

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

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

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

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

One from Istanbul, one from Barcelona

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

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

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

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