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Archive for the ‘Crime Fiction’ Category

Watching the Dark, by Peter Robinson

Posted in Books into Films, Crime Fiction, Reviews on June 4, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

This is the most recent – 2012 – in a long series of British police procedurals featuring Detective Chief Inspector Banks and set in the fictional town of Eastvale in Yorkshire. I’ve read a number of others in the series over the years, and have found them competent and readable. But what drew me back to this one was seeing the first two 90 minute episodes of the TV series DCI Banks, which were based on two of the earlier books. I wanted to refresh my view of Banks and see if it fitted with the TV version.

Inspector Bill Quinn is on sick leave when he is killed in what looks like a professional hit. Could it be related to the case he was working on, which involved surveillance of a shady money lender who might have had links to people trafficking? Or could it be connected to the case of a missing girl which had haunted him for years? And Professional Standards would like to know why compromising pictures of Quinn and a young girl were found in his room, though everyone knew that he was devoted to his recently dead wife. Then there’s the personal side of things. Inspector Annie Cabbot, Bank’s long term off-sider, is just back from sick leave herself, after getting over injuries sustained in the previous book. Is she up to the hard grind of a murder inquiry? And how will the attractive but cold Inspector Joanna Passero from Professional Standards fit into the investigation?

This is all fairly standard stuff. Banks is a likeable enough character, in something of the same mould as Ian Rankin’s Rebus: divorced, a loner, but without the aggression. He doesn’t always go by the book, and thinks most detectives ‘didn’t know the right questions to ask’. Like Rebus, he sees connections that others miss. Robinson humanises him partly through his musical tastes; here he finds himself starting to like Mahler’s symphonies. ‘Was this something that happened when you got older? Failing eyesight, mysterious aches and pains, enjoying Mahler? Would Wagner be next?’ Coming in at the end of the series, a reader might miss the depth of the rapport between Banks and Cabbot, who have had an on-again off-again relationship in earlier books. The investigation itself relies rather too much on what people are conveniently prepared to tell the detectives, and I think some of the earlier stories were stronger. But there is some good social realism in the people trafficking element of the story. It’s no surprise that the endorsements on the covers of most of Robinson’s books are from Ian Rankin and Michael Connolly.

So how does this sort of character, and this sort of book, come out on TV? Banks is played by Stephen Tompkinson, a fairly common face on British TV, who has played both comedy and drama (and was a police constable in Minder, for those who remember). He plays Banks as rather tougher and more conflicted than I had pictured him. I sometimes find the TV characterisation adds to the one in the book, as with Alec Guinness and George Smiley, or George Baker and Reg Wexford. I don’t feel that here; the kind and compassionate side of Banks isn’t really developed in what I’ve seen of this series.  Annie Cabbot, however, is a pleasure; she is played by Andrea Lowe with rather more cheekiness and verve than I remember from the books. Not surprisingly, the stories themselves are made more dramatic than they seem in the books, where the careful accumulation of evidence is important in building tension. On TV, the spectacle is more important, so there the more vivid events like fires or car chases get a lot of air time. The violence is also emphasised more than in the books, simply by being visual. Reading about a burnt body is quite different from seeing one close up. I also find that with TV, any ambiguities or weaknesses in the plot can be glossed over by concentration on the action. It’s only afterwards that you wonder, for example, just how Banks knew where he had to go in order to save Annie from her headstrong pursuit of the baddie in Playing With Fire.

Overall, I certainly enjoyed the two programs I’ve seen, and went to bed after them feeling more disturbed than I had reading the books. I’ll certainly watch any further episodes. But if I had to choose between TV and book, I’d choose the book every time.

You can read more about Peter Robinson and DCI Banks here.

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Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on May 8, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

In Exit Music (2007), Detective Inspector John Rebus retired from the Lothian and Boarders police force, and Rankin got on with creating a new series about Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox. In The Complaints (2009) and The Impossible Dead (2011) Fox has some things in common with Rebus, but is in other ways his opposite, being a member of the Professional Ethics and Standards section of the Lothian and Borders Police, which investigates police malpractice. Inevitably, Rankin couldn’t resist bringing them together, and Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012) is the result.

Rebus is back as a civilian working on cold cases in the Serious Crime Review Unit – (SCRU: it has to be a joke). He is approached by a woman whose daughter disappeared some years earlier and who has a theory that the disappearances of several other young women in the intervening years are related to it because all of them happened near one Scottish highway, the A9. No one has taken her seriously, but now another young woman has gone missing on the same road. Rebus thinks it’s worth taking a further look.

Rebus retains his strained relationship with the Edinburgh crime boss Big Ger Cafferty, whose life he saved. A family friend of the girl at the centre of the new case is also an Edinburgh crime figure. Rebus’s contact with these two men is exactly the sort of thing that attracts the attention of SCRU and Malcolm Fox, and he is soon investigating Rebus, of whom he is deeply suspicious. ‘John Rebus should be extinct, Clarke. Somehow the Ice Age came and went and left him still swimming around while the rest of us evolved,’ he says. ‘I know a cop gone bad when I see one. Rebus has spent so many years crossing the line he’s managed to rub it out altogether.’ Rebus’s protégé Siobhan Clarke is rising up the ranks; she is torn between Fox’s view and loyalty to Rebus. ‘Fox was right, of course: Rebus was the loosest of cannons, and no constabulary had room for those any more.’ She knows how difficult he can be: ‘You can be a real bastard sometimes, John,’ she says. ‘It has been said,’ he admitted. ‘And believe me, I’m not proud of the fact.’ ‘Thing is, though, you are proud of the fact.’ She looked at him again. ‘You really are.’ She knows that he is old fashioned by modern police standards; he can scarcely even use a computer. ‘You’re vinyl, we’re digital,’ she says. But she knows that his contacts on the street, including Cafferty, are crucial to how he works: ‘kicking up all the sand and sediment, then studying what effect it had and what was uncovered in the process.’ She gets the chance in the story to decide where her loyalties lie.

Even without a badge, Rebus is the same as ever: solitary, disrespectful of authority, going his own way, working his hunches. But poor old Fox comes off much worse; whereas in the two previous books, he has been an sympathetic character, here he is shown as narrow and vindictive, disapproving almost as much of Rebus’s life style as anything else. ‘Fox had ceased to take alcohol because he was an alcoholic, while Rebus continued to sup for the exact same reason. Somehow, though, Rebus still functioned, while Fox seldom had.’ Rankin can do what he likes with his own characters, but it does seem a bit unfair to favour one creation so markedly over another.

The Rebus stories usually involve crimes that reflect society, but this time Rankin says he has written a ‘road’ story. ‘Rebus had always thought of roads as simple, mute entities, but he knew differently now – they had individual identities and foibles. They pulsed with life.’ And so does the story. ‘When you’re on the road,’ Rebus says, ‘there’s always a destination, and you know you’re going to reach it one way or another.’ But I’m perhaps less happy with the destination reached this time; it remains very open ended (like a road?). This is partly because of Rebus’s civilian status; he can no longer just arrest someone. It’s probably also because Rankin is keeping his options open as to Rebus’s future (and Fox’s). It is made very clear that Rebus’s way of doing things is now frowned on, even if it gets results. Even SCRU is being disbanded in favour of a centralised Scottish cold case unit. And there is a changing of guard even among the crime bosses. Where will all this leave Rebus? We’ll have to wait for the next book to find out.

You can read more about Rebus on Ian Rankin’s interesting website here. My reviews of the Malcolm Fox books are here and here.

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Tuesday’s Gone, by Nicci French

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on April 2, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Tuesday’s Gone (2012) is the second in the series of which Blue Monday – I wrote about it a few weeks ago – is the first. I noted then that ‘Nicci French’ is actually a collaboration between Nicci Gerard and Sean French – not that you can pick that there are two writers at work.

The main character is again Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist, and she is again cooperating with Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson. This time the naked and decomposing body of a man has been found in the apartment of a mentally disturbed woman who seems to have little contact with reality. Did she kill him? Karlsson’s boss is keen to wrap the case up quickly, on the grounds that the woman will be institutionalised either way. But Karlsson wants Frieda’s help: ‘She’s got an instinct,’ he says. ‘We’ve got enough people following procedure.’ And things turn out to be much more complicated than they seem at first. Thanks to Frieda’s persistence, the police are soon investigating a number of people who may have had a motive for the killing. But is Frieda even more involved than she thinks?

I noted in my earlier post that there was a thread left hanging at the end that might be picked up again, and this proves to be the case. You don’t need to have read Blue Monday to know what’s going on, because the authors have been quite clever in explaining the carry-over from the first book. Frieda is questioned by a professional standards committee about her actions in the previous case. This not only covers the back story, but also raises a question which is important in the way Frieda is presented in this story: is she acting as a psychotherapist or as a detective? ‘I’m not like a policeman,’ she says, ‘and I don’t want to be.’ But she can’t leave well alone. ‘It would be like going out knowing the gas was on.’ As a psychotherapist, she asks questions of her patients which are designed to help them understand their own situation. Working with the police, her questions can have lethal consequences. ‘You don’t know whether to catch people or cure them,’ says a friend. Self-doubt and even guilt about the outcomes of her involvement make her an interesting character.

The writing in this story is good. Frieda and her friends, Karlsson and his colleagues and all those involved because of the crime are well-drawn, often as quickly sketched in little cameo portraits. The bleak February weather casts an appropriate gloom over proceedings. The physical environment of London, in particular Frieda’s curiosity about its (now) hidden rivers, is interesting. And the social details, like the time and motion study being conducted into the police force, are realistic. The book is easy to read, and while perhaps not a classic ‘page-turner’, has quite enough pace and suspense to make it hard to put down.

But for all this, Tuesday’s Gone is not a novel that I would think of as literature that happens to be about crime, as for example I think Kate Atkinson’s crime stories are – see this post for instance. This is because French’s book remains at heart a police procedural, and operates within the conventions of that genre. Frieda essentially provides new evidence. Though she often acts on her own initiative – ‘you rather like the idea of getting involved when you aren’t meant to,’ Karlsson says – she is nevertheless part of a police enquiry. Furthermore, the plot turns on a convention common in detective stories – though I won’t say what it is.

Perhaps because fitting the elements of the plot together is the main concern of the writers, it has a somewhat contrived air about it. And while it’s all very well for Frieda to do better as a detective than the police because she has ‘an instinct’ – expressed as a sense that something doesn’t quite fit, or someone’s demeanour that isn’t quite right – I’m not sure how long a writer can keep this device going, and keep it credible. We still have Wednesday to Sunday to go, and I’ll be interested to see how they do it.

You can read more about Nicci French here.

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The Wreckage, by Michael Robotham

Posted in Crime Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reviews on March 3, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

In a recent post on Nicci French’s Blue Monday, I said that that it reminded me of the Joe O’Loughlin thrillers by Michael Robotham, the most recent of which is Say You’re Sorry (2012). At the time I forgot that another Robotham, The Wreckage, came out in 2011. In it, he has returned to one of his earlier creations, Vincent Ruiz, a retired Detective Inspector, who has been either protagonist or a secondary character in the previous books. Joe gets a minor role in this one.

It is 2010. The story starts with Luca Terracini, a journalist in Baghdad, a city still occupied by the Americans and still in chaos seven years after the invasion which toppled Sadam Hussein. Luca is following up the story of yet another bank robbery, and is already off side with the Iraqi police. Is there something more than random crime going on here? In London, Ruiz befriends a young woman who is apparently being beaten up by her boyfriend, only to find he has been set up and robbed. He is outraged; he wants his stuff back. But why are other people interested in finding the thief? What could she have taken that is worth killing for? And what has this to do with the prosperity of a major bank at a time when others are reeling from the effects of the GFC? There are a number of other characters who have something to add to the story, and Robotham keeps the reader is suspense about who knows what, or what their motives could be. Unlike a number of his earlier books which are in the first person, this one is told in the limited third person, where each character only knows their own circumstances, and has little knowledge of how these might fit into the larger picture. The reader knows from the beginning that there must be some connection between what is happening in Baghdad and what is happening in London, and Robotham shows great skill in gradually drawing the two threads together. His use of the present tense adds to the sense of urgency in the story.

Robotham’s writing is, as usual, first class. Most of the characters are well drawn, though perhaps there is a bit of stereotyping, especially where one of the villains is concerned. I find Ruiz particularly convincing. He isn’t a detective anymore – which makes detecting more difficult, though he still has useful contacts. He misses the force: ‘the camaraderie of the Met, the sense of purpose, the smell of cigarette smoke and wet overcoats. It was an unreal world, yet it was more than real, if that makes sense. Important. Frustrating. Over.’ But more importantly, now that he is a private citizen, what motivates him to continue with his investigation, even after he has been warned off? ‘Maybe there was a bit of Don Quixote in all men his age,’ he muses. ‘They tilt at windmills because they don’t want to grow old.’ Unconstrained by the conventions of the police procedural, Robotham can write as a non-genre novelist, and let the reader know what is going on inside all his characters’ heads.

In terms of setting, I find his descriptions of life in Baghdad particularly compelling: ‘Sadr City is an immense suburb in eastern Baghdad full of ramshackle one-storey buildings covered in dust and patched together with scavenged building materials. The city has many neighbourhoods like this one – sectarian strongholds, full of widows, orphans and the dispossessed; Sunni or Shiite, bombed back the Stone Age’. Robotham conveys a real sense of menace and fear, but also a respect for the dignity of many ordinary Iraqis. London seems a bit flat after Baghdad.

As I noted in my post on The Night Ferry, the Ruiz stories involve crimes that go beyond individual greed or psychosis, and question the structures of power in society. Ruiz and Luca both in their way take the advice of the Watergate investigators Woodward and Bernstein to ‘follow the money’ and with money goes power. The title ‘The Wreckage’ could be taken to apply to the turmoil in Iraq, and America’s role in it, but it applies equally to the impact of financial practices of banks deemed too big to fail. It is clear from the prologue that terrorism, another sort of wreckage, will play a part in the story, and Robotham raises the problem of what is the proper response to this threat. He isn’t preaching; his apportioning of responsibility for the wrongs that are done is far from simplistic. The fact that he asks important questions is another reason why I think Robotham’s work is an example of the way that good crime fiction can go beyond genre and be considered as literature in its own right.

You can see my earlier posts on The Suspect (2004), Lost (2005) The Night Ferry (2007) and Bombproof (2008), and read more about Michael Robotham here. He is speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week on Wednesday 5 March.

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Blue Monday, by Nicci French

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on January 29, 2013 | 2 Comments »

‘Nicci French’ is the pseudonym of the husband and wife team Nicci Gerard and Sean French. Both have published in their own right, but together they have created a ‘third voice, a third author with her own proper style’. Blue Monday (2011) is their thirteenth book, and they have announced it will be the first in a series featuring psychiatrist Frieda Klein.

Nicci French writes psychological thrillers, which open a window into the ‘dark world’ of psychological behaviour that borders on the abnormal, and often enough tips right over into the criminal. In this series, it appears they will go beyond the obsessive love, self-destructiveness, amnesia and criminal insanity found in their earlier books, and embed psychological theories and practices into the plots. Reading this book, I was reminded of Michael Robotham’s Joe O’Loughlin series – a new one of which, Say You’re Sorry, came out in 2012. Blue Monday faces the same challenge of getting the psychology credible, as well as everything else.

The book begins with a prelude set in 1987. A little girl vanishes on her way home from school and no amount of searching can find her, dead or alive. In the present day, another child disappears without trace. Frieda Klein has a patient who dreams of a child who looks like the one that has just disappeared. What, if anything, should she do about this?

Like many psychological thrillers, Blue Monday has many of the attributes of a non-genre novel, including characters with ordinary working lives, aspirations and relationships, and a setting – parts of London – that is interesting in itself both geographically and socially. Frieda is the centre of a web of characters, all interesting and well-drawn, some of whom relate directly to the crime at the core of the book, and others who flesh out her world. It remains to be seen which of these make it into the next book. But the plot is what is really important, and there are some satisfying twists and turns – including one clever but rather nasty surprise. As Sean French has commented, thriller plots must be ‘structurally sound and solid as a machine, yet fraudulent. One of the pleasures of reading is of allowing yourself to be deceived.’

Psychology becomes part of the investigation of the crime when normal police procedures fail. ‘Most cases,’ says Inspector Karlsson, ‘are pretty straightforward. You advance by routine investigation and you follow the rule book. There’s blood, there are fingerprints, there is DNA, there are images caught on CCTV, there are witnesses.’ But in this case, there is no choice but to follow ‘any rumour, any idea, any possible connection … however tenuous.’ Enter the dreams and associations of the unconscious mind. I’m not going to say which particular psychological situation is central to the story, but it is one that I am normally a bit sceptical about. Some hypothetical scientific evidence is presented to back it up, and a search of the Web suggests there may be some real evidence for it. So who am I to say whether or not it could be so? But the important thing is that it feels convincing to me in the context of the story. Even if this form of detection is one of the things that falls under Sean French’s category of ‘fraudulent’, it is handled with sufficient subtlety that is works as part of the plot of a thriller.

Talking about their first collaboration, The Memory Game (1997), Sean French explained that each of them wrote a section, not necessarily in chronological order, and then gave it to the other to work on. He said that he no longer knew which bits he had written, and which were Nicci Gerard’s. I assume they still work in this way; certainly the writing is seamless. And certainly it’s effective. I’m not claiming this as great literature, but it is very well written, and is at least as good as much non-genre writing. It has that mysterious quality of ringing true – the right word in the right place.

Having said I think it’s well written and well constructed, I have to add that Blue Monday is also quite unpleasant. Missing children and grieving parents are a miserable subject, but most good crime stories are about very unpleasant events. So it is more than that. Perhaps it’s that I have an expectation that there will be a just resolution in crime stories, and here I’m not sure there is one. We will have to wait for the sequel to see if what is unresolved in this book is addressed in the next one – Tuesday’s Gone (2012).

You can read more about Nicci French here.

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Holiday Reading

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on January 8, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Looking for something to read over the holidays? Here’s some American crime writers you could consider.

Hell Gate (2010), by Linda Fairstein. Fairstein comes highly recommended. She is a former prosecutor and expert on crimes of violence against women; Kathy Reichs and Lee Child both endorse her on the back cover, and a discerning friend likes her. The book is one of a series featuring Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper and it deals with human trafficking and murder in New York. It’s not court room drama – Cooper acts much like a police detective investigating these crimes. The NY District Attorney’s office, the NYPD and the FBI are all involved, and I found it a bit difficult remembering who was who. Perhaps there are better books in the series, because I didn’t find this one particularly compelling. There is too much padding, not enough narrative drive and a stock ending that is one of my least favourite plot structures. Read it, but only if you don’t have much else to choose from.  Probably five out of ten – remembering that I hardly ever give tens. You can find more about Linda Fairstein here.

Keeping the Dead (2009), by Tess Gerritsen. I picked this book up at random from the library shelf, and liked it better than the more highly recommended one above. It is one of a series featuring Boston homicide detective, Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles, though other characters also carry the story, meaning it is not strictly a police procedural. The details of the ‘how and where’ of the crimes are interesting and well imagined, and the plot has some quite satisfying twists and turns. I don’t find the ‘why’ quite as convincing, though the motive for the crimes is a fairly standard one in psychological crime thrillers, which I guess this aspires to be. I think you have to write really well to create the atmosphere of a good psychological thriller – think Barbara Vine – and Gerritsen, though perfectly adequate, doesn’t quite make it for me. So it’s a seven. You can find out more about Gerritsen here.

Then there is The Drop (2011), the most recent Harry Bosch story by that master of the police procedural, Michael Connelly. I’ve read and enjoyed most of the fourteen books in the Harry Bosch series, so I can easily relate to him and his life in the Los Angeles Police Department; it may be harder coming in cold. A few books ago, Harry resigned in frustration from the LAPD; now he is back in the Open-Unsolved Unit as part of the Deferred Retirement Option Plan which aims to keep experienced officers in the force. But this isn’t the only ‘drop’ in the book. Harry has two cases, one involving a drop from a building – did the victim jump or was he pushed? – the other involving the DNA from a drop of blood found at a murder scene. Both cases have interesting twists and turns, and there is an underlying theme about the nature of evil, all making for a satisfying story. But what stands out for me is the meticulous detection involved in both cases, which is surely at the heart of the police procedural. There’s always a bit of luck or coincidence, but Bosch uses the evidence in a very convincing way. Given that I’m making the judgement within the conventions of crime writing, I’d give it 9 out of ten. You can find more about Connelly here.

Holiday reading for me is almost by definition reading you don’t have to concentrate on. All of these fit that bill for a hot and lazy afternoon – and even if you are in the depths of winter there’s a place for reading crime fiction in front of a warm fire. My scoring system is totally personal; which of these writers you prefer is likely to be just a matter of taste.  Happy reading!

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Torn Apart, by Peter Corris

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on November 6, 2012 | 1 Comment »

My last post was on a book by P.M. Newton, a great new Australian crime writer. So this time I’m writing about a book by one of the fathers of the genre. I’ve been reading Cliff Hardy stories since Peter Corris first started writing them in the 1980s. (Before that, I read his articles on Pacific history, but he must have figured out pretty soon that there was more money in crime fiction than academic history.) Since then, he’s published thirty-seven Cliff Hardy stories, plus some short stories and historical fiction and some non-fiction. His previous Cliff Hardy story, Deep Water, jointly won the Ned Kelly award for 2009. This one was published in 2010.

Unlike many detective heroes, Hardy has aged over the years, though unlike his lawyer, he’s not yet eligible for a Senior’s card.  He is no longer working as a private detective, having lost his licence as a result of various illegal activities in previous books. He’s also had a heart attack and a quadruple bypass. So this time Corris makes the investigation personal. Hardy meets Patrick Malloy, a previously unknown second cousin who looks remarkably like him. They become friends. Then Malloy is murdered in Hardy’s house. Hardy doesn’t know much about Malloy’s past: what could there be in it to occasion a vicious attack like this one? Or is it a case of mistaken identity and it is really Hardy they are after?

Without a licence or a gun, and pretty much persona non grata with the Sydney police, investigation is difficult. Hardy has to rely on various underworld informants to help him. Which are real leads, and which red herrings? And he is soon in hot water. ‘You have a knack for trouble on several fronts,’ comments his lawyer. Hardy has always been of the school of private detectives like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser who get results by confronting people and seeing what happens. This is less an option for Hardy than it used to be, as it requires a capacity to absorb physical punishment that he no longer possesses. It is interesting to see how Corris gets around this, though I found his solution a bit too convenient. The other issue that always interests me is how a private detective concludes his or her investigation, since they can’t arrest the perpetrator. Does the bad guy get killed by the detective? Checkmated in some way? Or is there a friendly police force to call on? The mechanism Corris uses isn’t completely a deus ex machine, but it has a bit of a whiff of that about it.

So why read this book? First, because Hardy is a likable character. I assume that Corris consciously draws on the Philip Marlowe tradition of the private eye as laconic, wise cracking and tough, just as Parker does, because that is the sort of character he has created. Hardy has, however, mellowed a bit over the years. He’s still capable of violence, but has learnt patience, both in investigations and personal relationships. He doesn’t suffer from any existential angst, but he is thoughtful and observant. He enjoys his inner suburban Sydney environment, and is only a little nostalgic for the good old days. The ‘waterside workers, tradesmen, boxers, footballer and bohemians’ are gone from Balmain, to be replaced by gentrification – ‘renovated, speed bumped, mosaic paved and priced into a middle class haven’. But looking at the harbour, ‘the water itself was still the same’.  And so is he.

Second, Corris is a good story teller. There are several possible directions for the investigation, and these lead Hardy into interesting situations and mini climaxes which keep the pages turning. Like most of the Hardy stories, it is relatively short and not particularly complex, but this is hardly surprising given the number of Hardy stories Corris has produced. I’m not sure of the relevance of the title – or the cover image for that matter, but yes, I’m being trivial.

Overall, I don’t think it is as good as the best of Corris, or the best of other Australian crime writing, for example Michael Robotham’s Lost – read my review here - or Shattered, both of which have won the Ned Kelly, or up to the high standard of Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore or Truth, the first of which won a Ned Kelly and the second the much more prestigious Miles Franklin Award – see my review here. But it’s still worth reading. It’s the sort of book you might enjoy on a wet afternoon, or on an aeroplane – though don’t expect it to last you from Sydney to New York.

You can read more about Peter Corris here.

 

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The Old School, by P.M. Newton

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on October 30, 2012 | 1 Comment »

It’s always a pleasure to read a good new crime novel. That it is an Australian crime novel is a bonus for me, especially when it explores the social context, as this one does.  This isn’t to say that crime stories set elsewhere are not equally enjoyable – it’s just nice to see Australian material so well handled.  The Old School (2010) is P.M. Newton’s first book, and I certainly hope she keeps writing.

It is 1992. Nhu Kelly – inevitably known as Ned – is a detective constable in the NSW Police, based at Bankstown, an outer Sydney suburb. Her working life usually consists of burglary, assault or rape, but this time it’s murder. Two bodies have been found encased in concrete on a demolition site in Bankstown. Both are female. One is soon found to be a missing Aboriginal activist who disappeared without trace sixteen years ago. The other is Asian, but her identity is a mystery. What could have brought them together in death? Soon a number of possible theories emerge – and one of them is uncomfortably close to home for Nhu.

The process of investigation is compelling in itself. But two other aspects of the book raise it above the level of the average police procedural. One is the writing about Nhu herself, her relations with other police, her sister and her sense of her position in the world. As the investigation starts to involve her dead parents, all of these come under threat. Who can she trust? ‘Befriend and betray’ is the mantra of the undercover police; how far does it apply elsewhere in the Force, and in personal relationships? Newton writes well about human relationships under strain. Is Nhu being lied to? ‘Suspicion grew, like an insect bight: at first a feathery brush against the skin, then a growing burning, consuming need to scratch.’  She fights with her sister over their memories of their parents. Her sister asks her why she wants a job ‘where you spend your life meeting people for the first time on the worst day of their lives.’ Nhu retaliates. They ‘Took deep breaths, trying to decide just how hurtful they’d got, whether they’d gone over the abyss this time or still just teetered on the brink.’

The second aspect is the context in which Newton places the story. This isn’t just backdrop; it’s crucial to how the narrative unfolds.  In 1992, the NSW Police Force was being scrutinised by the Independent Commission Against Corruption for its dealings with criminals – the bribes, the backhanders, the drug deals. This public investigation forms a backdrop to the book. ‘This was a world Ned could barely believe existed.’ But she senses that some of ‘the badness’ may still be there. Certainly the police culture remains ‘old school’ in many ways. Being female and part Vietnamese, she is exposed to it herself.  Sergeant ‘Ugly’ Urganchich is an ‘equal opportunity- racist’; he abuses the Aboriginal people he comes into contact with, and calls Ned a ‘slopehead’ – though not in front of witnesses. Sexism is ingrained: ‘nothing short of arson would eliminate the essential scent of maleness that permeated every detectives’ office Ned had ever set foot in.’ But is the new breed of detectives any better?

Aboriginal-white relations are also a central to the plot, and again, the context is remarkably relevant. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reported in 1991, and sharply criticised police treatment of Aboriginal people.  How do the police respond? In 1992, the High Court ruled on the Mabo case, declaring that Aboriginal land rights are not extinguished by white settlement; in the story, no one yet knows what practical effect this will have. There are weak jokes, and the local ‘warb’ is nicknamed Mabo. Putting Prime Minister Keating’s Redfern speech into the book – his acknowledgement that ‘the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians’ – might seem a bit cheeky, but I think it is completely appropriate to the themes being explored.

And if the ICAC investigation and Mabo weren’t enough, there is also an examination of the effects that the war in Vietnam had on some of the participants. This is terrific social history.

If I have any reservation at all, it is about the high level of coincidence that links a serving detective to a murder that she is now investigating. It’s just a bit too convenient. But I can live with it. The air of gritty reality about the book outweighs such carping.

One of the amazing things about the book is that much of this air of gritty reality is actually reality. J.M. Newton served for thirteen years in the NSW Police, first as an officer, then as a detective. You can’t do much better than that.

I note that between 1995 and 1997, there was a further Royal Commission to determine the existence and extent of corruption within the New South Wales Police; specifically, it sought to determine whether corruption and misconduct were ‘systemic and entrenched’. Sounds like a good subject for another Ned Kelly story.

There’s not much about P.M. Newton on the internet, but she blogs here.

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Bad Debts, by Peter Temple

Posted in Books into Films, Crime Fiction, Reviews on October 16, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

This is the first, published in 1996, of four crime stories by Peter Temple featuring Jack Irish. It lacks the depth of Temple’s two most recent books – The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2010) – see my review of the latter here. These are crime stories that in my view, qualify as literature – though this is a matter of instinct rather than definition. The Jack Irish stories, however, are good, solid genre crime stories, and as such, very well worth a read.

Jack Irish is a former criminal lawyer. After his wife was murdered by a disgruntled client, he fell prey to depression and alcohol, and in this state, gave only cursory care to his clients. So he gave up criminal law and is now a very part-time suburban lawyer, debt collector and apprentice cabinet maker. He also works on slightly shady deals in the racing industry. In this story, he is asked for help by a former client convicted of a hit and run fatality, but before he can do anything, he finds that the man has been shot by police. Irish feels guilty that he did not give the man proper support earlier, and that he has failed him again now. He decides to find out more about the man’s death, and the crime he was convicted of. Jack’s investigation makes some important people unhappy, and as the bodies pile up, he has to decide what’s really important to him. Running along side, and only tangentially connected, is a tale of the turf; have Irish and his friends discovered a hidden gem?

This is certainly a page turner, with a clever and fast-moving story. In practice, Irish acts very much as a private detective, following up from one person and one piece of information to the next, stirring things up and having to deal with the consequences. The story is beautifully put together, and there are only a couple of places where I wondered how someone knew something, or how something had been resolved, though there is perhaps just a whiff of deus ex machina about the character Cam Delray. I’ve commented before on the options for the resolution of a case by a private detective, and was pleased to see Temple adopting a combination of the possibilities. However it’s the use of these conventions that make me see the book as genre crime. Although it deals with some of the same themes as Truth, such as power and corruption, there is a predictability about it that Temple’s best books don’t have. The impression that there is a formula at work is confirmed by reading the second Jack Irish story, Black Tide, which although equally enjoyable, uses a lot of the same plot devices.

Jack Irish is an engaging character who shares some of the characteristics of the honourable detective hero like Philip Marlowe who cover their inner darkness with flippant cynicism. He is a loner, and there is an air of melancholy about him –rather like the weather in Melbourne where the story is set. He is a champion of lost causes – like the Fitzroy Football Club his father played for, though he is disparaging about the trendy and superficial, like the old Melbourne pubs that have been ‘turned into Thai-Italian bistros with art prints in their lavatories’. He narrates the story, so Temple’s dry humour infuses all his observations. This is how the story starts. ‘I found Edward Dollery, age 47, defrocked accountant, big spender and dishonest person, living in a house rented in the name of Carol Pick. It was in a new brick-veneer suburb built on a cow pasture east of the city, one of those strangely silent developments where the average age is twelve and you can feel the pressure of the mortgages on your skin.’ How can you not want to read on?

A movie length version of Bad Debts staring Guy Pearce has recently been shown on ABC TV. On thinking about it afterwards, I had to be careful not to confuse two judgments. One was how faithful it was to the book. Answer? Four out of five. The movie takes out some characters and reduces the importance of others so that there are fewer links in the chain of investigation. This requires a little rejigging of the plot, but leaves it essentially intact. It also allows it to concentrate more on the action, particularly the violent action. Guy Pearce isn’t quite the Jack Irish I had imagined, but he is a perfectly acceptable one. I didn’t get the same sense of melancholy I found in the book.

The second judgment concerns what it is like as a movie. Again, four out of five. A friend who hadn’t read the book found the plot a bit confusing to follow in terms of who knew what when, and I can see that abbreviating the investigation might have that outcome. Accentuating the violence makes for good visual effects and fast paced drama – if that’s what you like. And being able to juxtapose scenes of impending violence for both Irish and his girl friend was a good way of creating tension – even though the girl friend scene wasn’t in the original. I enjoyed seeing how someone else handled the story, but overall still prefer the book.

You can find out a little more about Peter Temple here, and you can watch the movie on ABC iview here, though you’ll need to be quick – it doesn’t stay up for long.

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The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Posted in Crime Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reviews on August 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

It’s not really coincidence that just after I finished reading this book, I noticed a comment by Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to the effect that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel. The status of Jerusalem, and America’s attitude to it, is a key element in this story. Chabon’s book was published in 2007, and imagines a situation for Jews quite different from what actually happened. But it’s the same Jewish homeland issue: Chabon just comes at it in a different way, and arrives at a different conclusion from Romney’s.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is based on the premise that the Jewish attempt to settle in Palestine in 1948 failed. In the alternative reality of this story, ‘the Alaskan Settlement Act of 1940’ allowed Jewish refugees from Europe to come to Sitka, a small area of Alaska formerly colonised by Russians, who supplanted the native Tlingit people. There was in fact such a proposal put to Congress, though never proceeded with. Sitka was to be a Jewish enclave for sixty years; many of the three million Jews who settled or were born there hoped that their occupancy would be made permanent. But an ‘Alaska for the Alaskans, wild and clean’ campaign thwarted this hope, and Reversion is at hand. Where can the population of Sitka go now? ‘These are strange times to be a Jew’ is a phrase on everyone’s lips.

Chabon does a terrific job of creating this exiled Jewish community on the edge of dissolution. His main tool is language – of that, more below. But what he describes rings wonderfully true – the people, their behaviour, their clothes, the food, the smells (‘fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at the Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon’s Felting’), the weather. Erected in hope, some of Sitka’s buildings had ‘a kind of noble ugliness’. ‘Now they have only the ugliness of age and vacancy’. The Hotel Einstein looks ‘like a rat cage stored in a fish tank’. Alongside the tacky high rise apartment buildings, those who have done well have created replicas of the Eastern European villages they fled from, ‘clean as a freshly forged birth certificate.’ The community contains a disordered mix of secular and orthodox Jews, and several varieties of ‘Black Hats’ – Hasidic Jews. The main group of these – enriched by crime – are the (imaginary) Verbovers. Why do they not seem worried by the imminent Reversion?

This is, of course, as the title suggests, a crime story. Detective Meyer Landsman isn’t supposed to investigate the death of a heroin addict in the down-at-heel Hotel Zamenhof, since that would make it an active case and there aren’t supposed to be any active cases outstanding when the police department hands over to United States Marshalls in two months.  Landsman’s life is a mess. When he’s not working, he drinks. But he can’t leave this case alone, not least because of the unfinished chess game next to the dead man. And following this thread leads him, his partner and his ex-wife – who is now his boss – into the heart of a conspiracy that extends much further than the Federal District of Sitka. However I find the book’s title puzzling. The only reference to it comes when Landsman, temporarily deprived of his police badge, identifies himself by means of his union card. ‘We’re all over the world,’ he says. Maybe his lot is that of Jewish policemen everywhere.

As I said earlier, Chabon’s use of language is the defining characteristic of the book. It is a compelling mixture of present tense lyricism and wry humour – sometimes both at once. For example: ‘Night is an orange smear over Sitka, a compound of fog and the light of sodium vapour streetlamps. It has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat.’ Sometimes it is just funny. Landsman is ‘keeping the straightest face he’s got. He has never seen the regulations for the admission of Jews to Jerusalem, but he’s fairly certain that not being an obsessed religious fanatic is at the top of the list.’ Or, on Stika’s homicides: ’Some of these are gang-related: Russian Shtarkers whacking one another freestyle. The rest … are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.’ The inhabitants of Sitka speak Yiddish and there are many Yiddish words in the text, such as shammes, sholem, maven, shtetl, and eruv to mention just a few. The meaning of some is obvious, others less so.

Despite acknowledging how good it is, I have two minor problems with this book. One, perhaps surprisingly, is the language. There is just so much packed into nearly every sentence that reading requires maximum concentration all the time. This can be rather overwhelming. The other is that the conspiracy is a bit too over the top, though maybe if Romney gets to be President, I’ll have to eat my words on that.

You can read my review of Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay here. And you can read more about Chabon here, and the real Stika here. The proposal for a Jewish state in Alaska is mentioned here.

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Death in the Fifth Position, by Edgar Box (aka Gore Vidal)

Posted in Crime Fiction, Mystery Fiction, Reviews on August 21, 2012 | 1 Comment »

I didn’t know until I read some of the obituaries of Gore Vidal that he had ever written crime stories. It seems that the publication in 1948 of his third novel, The City and the Pillar, caused a scandal because of its frank depiction of homosexuality, so he decided to write crime stories for a time under a pseudonym. Thus Edgar Box was born. There are three Edgar Box stories, published in 1952,’53 and ’54, and apparently they did very well. So just out of curiosity, I read the first one.

The structure of the plot is conventional. Peter Cutler Sargeant is a brash young New York public relations man who is employed by a ballet company to deal with any bad publicity arising from the fact that the United Veterans Committee is accusing the resident choreographer of being a Communist. They are picketing the theatre. But any adverse publicity generated by this is quickly overwhelmed by the murder on stage of one of the leading dancers. Peter quickly establishes another interest by starting an affair with one of the corps de ballet, none other than the understudy of the dead ballerina. But there are a number of possible suspects with a motive for murder. As the bodies pile up, Peter tries to work out who dunnit. It’s not too hard for aficionados of the genre to pick who did.

The characterisation is conventional too; it’s pretty easy to stereotype members of a ballet company. There is the wily impresario, the aging Russian prima ballerina, the gay leading man and the tortured conductor. Peter, the narrator, is the most interesting of the characters; his asides, strangely enough, sound just like a young Gore Vidal. Early in the story, he finds himself feeling sorry for the person he suspects of murder, ‘which shows something or other about mid-twentieth-century morality: I mean we seem to be less and less aroused by such things as private murders in an age when public murder is so much admired.’ Vidal plays Sargeant for laughs: ‘I thought of those eighteen century prints of Rowlandson and Gilray and Hogarth, all the drunken mothers and ghastly children wallowing in gin in the alleys … it makes you stop and think. I thought longingly for several seconds of a gin and tonic.’ He regrets he has so little time alone ‘to figure just where I stood on any number of assorted topics like television, Joyce, deism, marionettes, buggery and Handel’s Messiah.’ Vidal clearly had a lot of fun writing this story. But he was possibly being serious when he wrote of the police: ‘There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of a group of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.’ Vidal was always a liberal on issues of state coercion.

It may be that what seems now a rather slight work carried a bit more weight at the time of writing because of its cheeky irreverence on subjects dear to the hearts of many Americans then, including Communism and homosexuality (‘Anyway, it may all be a matter of diet’). Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American activities was still riding high and people in America’s artistic community were regularly attacked as Communists.  Homosexuality was still a crime. Vidal ultimately plays it safe on both these issues in this story, but it probably seemed quite daring at the time. I get the impression that Vidal – that self- described ‘gentleman bitch’ – is treating the whole thing as a joke, but he may have had a more serious purpose as well.

Two trivial points.  One is that the journalist that Sargeant outsmarts is called Elmer Bush. I wonder if Vidal remembered his early creation when he called George W. Bush ‘the stupidest man in the United States’. The other concerns the ballet; the company seems able to perform Swan Lake, Sheherazade and an (imaginary) modern ballet all in one program. It must have been a long night.

Gore Vidal was one of the best contemporary commentators on American society and politics, and his incisive views and wit will be sadly missed. You can read some of his more controversial comments here. And you can read one of his many obituaries here.

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Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black

Posted in Crime Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reviews on July 31, 2012 | 1 Comment »

My last post was a review of John Banville’s The Sea. Speaking after this novel had won the 2005 Man Booker Prize, Banville announced that his next book would be a detective story written under a pseudonym using ‘unadorned prose’. ‘It is a piece of craftwork,’ he said. ‘It is not an art book, it is completely different to my usual work.’ Christine Falls is that book.

So how has it turned out? Well for a start, I wouldn’t call it a detective story. It’s a mystery story about family secrets. It involves crime and violence, but while the main character, Quirke, does try and unravel the mystery, for much of the time he shows an almost perverse aversion to detecting anything. Does he, or does he not want to know? The story is set in the 1950s, mostly in Dublin, with an interlude in Boston. Quirke is a pathologist, but don’t start thinking Silent Witness or Waking the Dead; his profession sets events in motion, but after that, plays almost no part in the story. As a child he was plucked from an orphanage and brought up by Garret Griffin, a leading member of Dublin society. He and Garret’s son Malachy both studied Medicine, and married sisters they met in Boston. But Quirke’s wife died, and now his life seems one long drift into what amounts to alcoholism (though not so named). But why is Malachy lying about the cause of death of a young woman named Christine Falls? What happened to her baby? And why does violence erupt every time questions are asked about this?

As in most mystery stories, the main character finds there is a secret, and is prompted in some way to unravel it. Quirke’s motivation is unclear; he scarcely knows himself what is driving him. ‘Why was he persisting like this? What were they to him, Christine Falls, or Christine Falls’s bastard ….And yet he knew he could not leave it behind him, this dark and tangled business. He had some kind of duty, he owed some kind of debt, to whom, he was not sure’. This ‘wide and tangled web in which he had become enmeshed’ is important to him because of his own experience of abandonment, life in an orphanage and informal adoption. It has left him uncertain of his identity – though the writer never puts it like that. Rather, ‘It occurred to him that he was sick of being Quirke, but knew there was no one else he could be.’ A quirk of fate, perhaps. Banville has been praised for the ‘great psychological penetration’ of his earlier novels, and it is the picture of Quirke, immobilised psychologically – and at one point physically as well – rather than a story of detection that is at the heart of the novel. In two crucial situations, he chooses passivity – if choice is the right word. ‘Some day, he told himself with an almost vindictive satisfaction, someday he would suffer for this laxity, this laziness of spirit, this cowardice’. ‘Unfocussed anger’ is the other side of this coin. He wonders if it will be the condition of his life, ‘that he would have to keep bouncing along before it helplessly forever, like a piece of litter buffeted by an unceasing wind.’ His decision finally to act, rather than any result of that action – which is only implied – is the real climax of the book; seen as a detective story, it would have been left woefully incomplete.

You will see from what I have already quoted that Banville/Black’s aspiration to write ‘unadorned prose’ isn’t really achieved either. I guess he can’t help himself. For example: ‘There was the church with the white spire they had passed last night in the mist-hung darkness; today it looked ordinary and even a little sheepish, as if its ghostly nocturnal springing up were a prank it was ashamed to be reminded of in daylight’. Or: ’The wind was driving sleet like spittle against the window, and the smoke from the city’s chimneys no sooner appeared than it was blowsily dispersed.’ It is very effective writing, but hardly without ornamentation. Perhaps there is less embellishment than in his ‘art’ novels; it’s true that I didn’t have to read with a dictionary next to me, as I did with his previous book. But he will apparently never be other than a literary writer. Surely this is a good thing.

So is this a highly literary crime story, or a mainstream novel about a damaged man? Or is this a distinction not worth making? Banville implicitly makes it in his comparison of ‘art’ and ‘craft’. On the Benjamin Black web pages there is a somewhat precious mock interview between Banville and Black – read it here – in which Black claims ‘Your books think: mine look, look and report’. I don’t really know what this means in practice. I merely find the writing and the characterisation more convincing than the plot, whatever distinctions Banville makes.

There is no Banville web page, but you can read more about him here.

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The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon

Posted in Crime Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reviews on July 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I think Michael Chabon is a wonderful writer – you can read my review of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay here. The Final Solution, subtitled A Story of Detection, is a much slighter work, perhaps best described as a novella; indeed it won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, which is a prize awarded for short stories. But it still shows what a great writer Chabon is.

The story, which is set in 1944, begins when an old man, who some of the locals dimly remember as once being a famous detective, meets a German boy with a parrot on the South Downs. The boy seems to be mute, but the parrot certainly is not; he reels off strings of German numbers. The old man is intrigued (even before he hears the numbers): ‘For the first time in many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.’ But others are also interested in the parrot. Then there is a murder, and the parrot disappears. The old man agrees to help the police – not to catch the murderer, but to find the parrot.

The old man is never named, but he is of course Sherlock Holmes, who retired after his illustrious career to the South Downs to keep bees; you can read about it here. In this story, the bees are still going strong. And there are a number of shady characters and odd circumstances for the old man to investigate. After a while, despite his physical frailty, he begins to enjoy himself: ‘A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, catching the light in glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallization, this paroxysm of guesswork, and one he had lived without for a terribly long time.’ So he follows the clues through to the end. But there is still a mystery unsolved. ‘The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings’. But now, faced with the unresolved, he concludes ‘That it was the insoluble problems – the false leads and the cold cases – that reflected the true nature of things.’ There is no ‘final solution’.

I really enjoy the way Chabon writes. His tone is wry and gently humorous; he seems able to like all his characters – even the dodgy ones, and of course the parrot. The old man is described as having a ‘liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement’, and this description could apply equally well to Chabon’s writing. For example, here is the ‘liveliness’ and ‘nearly amusement’. Mr Sackett, who has the title of managing director of a Research Dairy, is sitting in on an interview. ‘But he lit his cigarette like a soldier, hastily, and listened with an air of one accustomed to seeking flaws in strategies. It was doubtful, thought the old man, he had ever been near an actual cow.’ Here also, the fabled powers of observation of Sherlock Holmes.

The book both pays homage to and gently mocks Sherlock Holmes, and the early twentieth century detective story. In the final Holmes story, His Last Bow (1917) he comes out of retirement to hunt a German spy; there are shades, somewhat modified, of that story in this one. I wondered if I also saw references to John Buchan through allusions to Mr Black (the Black Stone in Thirty Nine Steps) and Der Vogel (to the wild birds and caged birds in Mr Standfast), but that could be imagination. The old man’s final conclusion about the true nature of things is, however, clearly at odds with the certainties of the older form.

If you enjoy this minor venture into detective fiction by Chabon, you might also enjoy his more fully realised novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), a complex murder mystery, among other things, set in an alternative present, where European Jews have been settled in Alaska (as was actually proposed) rather than in Israel. I will post about this novel soon.

In the meantime, you can read more about Michael Chabon here.

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Thrones, Dominions, by Dorothy Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on June 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »

This post is a testament to the pleasures of re-reading. I was reminded of this book when a friend said she was enjoying re-reading it, so I took another look too. I think I liked it more this time than I did when it originally came out in 1998.  And yes, it is a variety of fan fiction, designed to take advantage of the ‘what happened next?’ impulse. It’s also a way of reprising the world that Sayers created with her Wimsey stories in the golden age of crime writing.

Jill Paton Walsh has taken an unfinished crime story which Sayers abandoned in 1936 and turned it into Thrones, Dominions. I don’t know how much Sayers had written; some of the plot devices recall techniques she adopted in earlier books, so perhaps she had sketched out the story. But whoever contributed what, Paton Walsh has done a wonderful job of seamlessly pulling it all together so that the characters and setting as well as the plot all could easily have been written by Sayers. It may be objected that taking over another writer’s style, characters and world view is a lesser achievement than creating one’s own, and this is probably true. But it is no mean achievement to do it so well.

Sayers’s last completed crime story, Busman’s Holiday, saw Harriet Vane finally married to Lord Peter Wimsey. The Vane/Wimsey stories are all love stories as well as crime stories, and this one is no exception; we see here how the pair manages their married life. Indeed married life is one of the themes of the book, as the experience of Harriet and Peter is set against that of another couple, Rosamund and Laurence Harwell. ‘Honest dealing’ and equality – ‘a marriage of true minds’ – is the aim of Harriet and Peter. This doesn’t seem to be the case for the Harwells, and disaster comes of it.

Sayers excelled at clever puzzle plots in which the amateur detective joins the dots more skilfully than the police. Aficionados of her work will recognise the plot devices and guess who dunnit quite easily. Readers less familiar with golden age puzzle conventions won’t really have that much trouble either. But for all that, the plot is clever, the clues well placed and the solution satisfying. I also find it interesting that Sayers/Paton Walsh (probably the latter) offer a defence of the function of crime stories of the golden age as upholders of the status quo. Peter is speaking of the crime novel Harriet is writing when he says: ‘Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They project a vision of a world where wrongs are righted …’ but this of course applies equally to this book, and the genre to which it belongs. ‘I suppose very clever people can get their vision of justice from Dostoyevsky,’ he says. ‘But there aren’t enough of them to make a climate of opinion … you show [ordinary people] by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living’.

One reason why people these days may not read Sayers’s crime stories is that the setting and main character can be seen as dated and snobbish, and/or awash with nostalgia. A rich and titled bachelor with a devoted man servant is after all a bit of a cliché. This book tries for a broader setting. The year is 1936, and it has an air of impending crisis: Hitler marching into the Rhineland, the death of King George V, the assumption to the throne of the worryingly pro-German Edward VIII, and his dalliance with Mrs Simpson. The ‘orderly world’ feels rather threatened. Harriet is of course aware that she has entered a social stratum of exceptional privilege, and tries to apply common sense to some of its more silly conventions. But the writers can scarcely criticise this world, as it is one they have lovingly created. Sayers/Paton Walsh do, however, offer a defence of the aristocratic Wimsey as a detective. ‘I accuse myself,’ he says, ‘of accepting and enjoying the title and rank and privilege – the unthinking automatic respect given me for reasons of birth – and not giving back value for them; not pulling my weight … But at least … I can do an honest turn as a surrogate policeman.’ This may or may not satisfy the modern reader. It’s all too good to be true – which is of course its attraction. I guess it’s another of those personal preferences.

You can find out more about Dorothy Sayers and her work here, and my summary of ‘golden age’ crime stories here.

Jill Paton Walsh has had a distinguished writing career – she is now 75 – winning prizes for her children’s literature, and a Booker Prize short-listing for Knowledge of Angels in 1994. I’ve read several of her novels and have enjoyed them, though with some reservations about her world view. I guess I can accept her conservative approach better in the 1930s than in the 1990s. You can read more about her here.

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The Impossible Dead, by Ian Rankin

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on June 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »

The Impossible Dead (2011) is the second in Rankin’s new series about Inspector Malcolm Fox of ‘the Complaints’, or more properly the  Professional Ethics and Standards section of the Lothian and Borders Police. I enjoyed the first one, The Complaints (2009); see my post here. This one is even better.

Fox and his small team are investigating three detectives who may have covered up for a colleague who has been found guilty of misconduct, including demanding sexual favours of women he had arrested. As usual they meet with scant cooperation, but they are used to that. ‘I doubt there’s anything you can do that hasn’t been tried a hundred times,’ Fox tells an obstructive detective. ‘How come you hate cops so much?’ is the response. Fox can’t entirely ignore these barbs; he knows he is good at his job, but nevertheless worries that he isn’t doing ‘proper’ policing, and fears that he might not be able to. ‘Part of the appeal of the Complaints had been its focus on rules broken rather than bones … Did that make him a coward? … it was in his nature to avoid confrontation.’ Was he ‘Too scrupulous. Too willing to sidestep problems’? ‘You’ve not got anything to prove, Malcolm,’ says one of his colleagues. But he can’t quite believe it. Even his father has doubts. So when what seemed a straight forward case becomes complicated, Fox is anxious to pursue it, even though it goes well beyond his role as a complaints investigator, and becomes ‘proper’ detection.

How can a complaints case morph into a crime investigation? Rankin has used a device similar to the cold case scenario, where re-investigation of an old unsolved murder stirs up trouble in the present. In this case the death had been conveniently labelled suicide, but Fox quickly finds that this verdict is still in dispute. More deaths follow, for which the explanations seem too convenient. Has there been an official cover up? This is not action drama with a crisis on every page; it is a police procedural, with the slow following of leads and gathering of evidence. Not all of the investigation is fruitful, and the different threads can get a bit confusing. Fox is able to fit the pieces together because he is the only one who sees that they are all related – though there is a bit of luck involved. What he finds involves him in serious confrontation with authority and personal danger. ‘I can be a detective when I want to be,’ he finally says. ‘Just so you know.’ It is a clever and well put together plot.

One of the reasons I like Rankin’s books – in addition to his clever and complex plotting – is that they deal with crimes that grow out of the social, economic and political life of Edinburgh. In this case, present day power and influence are important, but the focus is on the history of the Scottish independence movement, the fringes of which for a brief time in the 1980s showed signs of becoming violent. The devolution of power to a Scottish Parliament in 1999 has all but obscured this history, but Rankin makes good use of it here. I like the story he tells about how in the early days of his writing, he would go into bookshops and surreptitiously move his books from the ‘crime’ section to ‘Scottish literature’. The setting of his work in Edinburgh is very important to the overall impact of his work.

If I have any complaint, it is that Fox is perhaps a bit colourless, especially when compared to the dynamic John Rebus, Rankin’s earlier Edinburgh detective. But this perhaps is Rankin’s intention; after all, he can’t just go on writing the same books. Fox is a sympathetic enough creation, whose home life is modest and somewhat troubled; his father is old and frail and his sister is rude and difficult. This is all in keeping with his feelings of self doubt and inadequacy. I think he perhaps overcomes these without much explanation; the motive is there, and we see how it happens, but maybe there’s a bit of ‘inside the head’ stuff missing here.

You can read more about Ian Rankin here, and a couple of favourable reviews here and here. I didn’t find any negative ones.

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Chelsea Mansions, by Barry Maitland

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on May 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Barry Maitland started writing detective fiction when he was Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University in New South Wales. He retired in 2000 and has been writing full time ever since. Having been born in England and lived there for more than forty years, it is not surprising that almost all his books are set there. Nor is it surprising that there is an architectural flavour to them all.

Chelsea Mansions (2011) is the eleventh in Maitland’s series featuring Kathy Kolla, who has now been promoted to Detective Inspector, and Detective Chief Inspector David Brock, who heads the Serious Crimes Branch of the Metropolitan Police. You don’t need to have read any of the others in the series; Maitland is good like that, though here there is an old score being settled. The story begins when an elderly American tourist who is staying at the slightly down-at-heel Chelsea Mansions Hotel is murdered. Chelsea Mansions is a row of adjoined six-storey Victorian terraces, all of which, except the hotel, are now owned by a rich Russian businessman. He has renovated his section of terraces – ‘its bulk enlivened by Dutch gables, decorative terracotta panels, white balcony trim and an impressive central portico’.  A few days after the first death, the Russian is found murdered. Is it a family matter? Could the Russian secret police be involved? Could these crimes possibly be connected? And what has the young Canadian who has just moved into the hotel got to do with it?

Maitland tells a good story, keeping up a fast, page turning pace. I enjoyed the suspense and found it a hard book to put down. There are crises, breakthroughs and disappointments, political interference and national security issues.  There is quite a lot of actual detecting. For most of the hunt, Brock is out of action, leaving Kathy to deal with the pressure. The police hierarchy want the uncomplicated answer. ‘Remember Occam’s razor, Brock – the simplest of two theories is to be preferred.’ ‘You’re never satisfied with the simple answer, you’ve always got to look for a more complicated explanation, a more interesting and original explanation. Well, you’re wrong.’ But is he?

But for all that I found most of the story engrossing, I was ultimately not satisfied. It isn’t the writing; Maitland has a good spare style perfectly appropriate to a police procedural. His characters are there for their role in the story rather than for any psychological insights, but again they are perfectly adequate. No, it’s the ending. I’m probably being my usual picky self here; at least one other friend enjoyed it without my reservations, and like most other of Maitland’s books, it received good reviews in the Australian press. (‘Maitland is a consummate plotter, steadily complicating an already complex narrative…’ The Age.) I like diversions and red herrings in a crime story as much as anyone else, but there is a major diversion in this story which seems to be a complication for complications sake. Not everything has to be tied in; in real life there aren’t any neat endings, and I’d rather have a messy conclusion to a book than one that is over-contrived. But here I think there is a sort of scatter-gun approach to the red herrings – a mixed metaphor if ever I wrote one – with the correct answer almost being randomly arrived at. Looking back you can see that there is the occasional hint about what is to come, but the resolution is rather too far fetched for my liking.

None of this is a reason not to read the story; as I said, other people have enjoyed it. But if you are new to Maitland, you might instead try his Silvermeadow (2000), which I think is the best of his books, making great use of not only his architectural insights, but also his sociological ones. His stand alone mystery with an Australian setting, Bright Air (2008) is also worth reading, and includes some interesting Australian architectural history.

Seven of his twelve books have been shortlisted for the annual Ned Kelly award for the best Australian crime novel, and he has won it once. You can read more about him and his work here.

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The Vault, by Ruth Rendell

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on May 7, 2012 | 2 Comments »

The Monster in the Box (2009) was going to be the last of Rendell’s stories featuring Inspector Reg Wexford. You can read my review of it here. But Ruth Rendall fans, like me, can be grateful that she has relented, and given him at least one more run in The Vault (2011). True he is no longer Inspector Wexford, having now retired. But he is still functioning as a detective, using his characteristic doggedness to think his way through a crime.

Aficionados of Rendell’s work will recognise the setting of the story – the Orcadia Cottage of A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998). This is not a Wexford novel, but one of her psychological thrillers. Having read it –or not – doesn’t spoil the plot of The Vault, but it does tell you what became of some of the characters. This is a bit cheeky, but at eighty-two, Rendell can be forgiven it. She’s also found a fairly obvious device for involving Wexford in detection. Where some writers put their retired detectives onto cold cases, a chance meeting with Tom Ede, a detective once much junior to him but now himself a Detective Superintendent, finds Wexford employed as an unpaid assistant in a case which is currently baffling Ede. Four bodies, money and jewellery have been found in the bricked up cellar of Orcadia Cottage. Three of them have been there for a long time, but one is much more recent. Who knew there even was a cellar?

Because he is no longer a policeman – something he has to keep reminding himself of – Wexford needs to think differently about his role. ‘He must become a private detective without any sort of licence to practise, not even the fame which attached to a Hercule Poirot or Peter Wimsey …’ And this can be frustrating. ‘He thought of what a lot he didn’t really know and that finding out might be closed off from him’. But his ability to see connections is no less than before. ‘You say I’m acting on my imagination and you may be right,’ he says to Ede, ‘but I see it as acting from my knowledge of human nature.’ No longer being a policeman also has its compensations. ‘In his previous life, his previous existence, he had seldom allowed himself likings and dislikings. Now he could. It was an advantage.’ And so it proves.

Rendell’s writing about Wexford and his world is always fresh and interesting. This time she has some fun with clichés, to which Ede is addicted, and into which Wexford finds himself falling. ‘Strike while the iron is hot’, ‘tighten our belts’, or ‘you’ve got enough on your plate’ are Ede’s standard fare, but eventually Wexford begins to find his use of ‘the hackneyed phrase endearing’, and to fall into cliché himself. Rendell draws her characters with small deft touches, as for example with Tom
Ede’s avoidance of swearing, which in a roundabout way has a role in the story.

The plot is serviceable rather than brilliant, with a somewhat greater degree of coincidence than is present in the best of Rendell’s stories. This is the first book I’ve read and reviewed on my new Kindle, and I found it a little difficult to go back and check just who was who – and I needed to, as there are a lot of interviews with characters who are not all that dissimilar. She has also adopted a curious device which I haven’t noticed in any other of her books whereby she forecasts outcomes, as in ‘he was destined to be enormously glad he insisted’, ‘a reaction he was later to regret’ or ‘later to learn … but thank God he hadn’t …’. I don’t think this adds anything.

Wexford is now living part of the time in London, and part in Kingsmarkham, and it is this side of his life that provides the material for a sub-plot, which concerns his daughter Sylvia. This sub-plot is not connected to the main narrative, though there are perhaps echoes of one in the other. If I were coming new to Wexford, I might find the sub-plot a distraction, but readers who have known him for years and shared in his family life will probably merely find it interesting. And I’d rather have these plot elements separate than see a forced union just for the sake of it. However I did wonder if it was just a device to make sure Mike Burdon is still in the story.

Fans like me will enjoy The Vault, but if you are coming new to the Wexford series, I’d start with some of the books of the mid nineties to early two thousands, such as Road Rage (1997), Harm Done (1999) or Babes in the Wood (2002), where we see a great crime writer at the height of her powers.

You can read more about Ruth Rendell and her books here. Baroness Rendell doesn’t seem to have a web site, but there are quite a lot of reviews and commentary on-line.

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The Hidden Assassins, by Robert Wilson

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on April 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Some time ago I read and enjoyed Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon (1999), which combines a present day investigation by Inspector Zé Coelho into the death of a young woman, and art theft by the Nazis in World War II. I thought the writing good and the plot clever. With The Hidden Assassins (2006), I expected another Coelho story. Wrong. Not even the same country. This book features Inspector Javier Falcón, is set in Seville, and is the third of a quartet of novels, all of which deal with different investigations, while having common threads running throughout. And while I would have done better to start at the beginning of the series with The Blind Man of Seville (2003), I still found the book gripping – if not quite as good as my first venture with Wilson.

After a brief preface set in London (the relevance of which only becomes clear at the end), the story begins with Javier investigating the discovery of a corpse mutilated so as to obscure its identity. But before he can really get started on the case, a bomb destroys an apartment block which has a mosque in its basement, and all of Seville’s resources are concentrated on dealing with what appears to be a terrorist attack. The story then introduces several other characters whose activities are also followed throughout the book. Some of these would be familiar to readers of the earlier books in the series; they would more quickly recognise the significance of their relationships with Javier than I did. I think understanding these relationships would have helped make him a more rounded character, though it is not necessary for the plot. The story is quite complex, with various red herrings and dead ends in the investigation, as well as mysterious issues of national security. Are the investigators jumping too quickly to conclusions? Some issues are left unresolved; I assume they are addressed in the final book of the series, The Ignorance of Blood (2009).

Even without the deeper knowledge of his background built up in the earlier novels, Javier is a likeable enough character. He is a loner, divorced from his wife and yearning to renew a relationship that ended in a previous book. He is good at his job, and doesn’t seem to have conflicts with his colleagues or superiors. He feels he is now operating too much on instinct: ‘He’d been such a scientific investigator in the past … Now he spent more time tuning in to his intuition. He tried to persuade himself that is was experience but sometimes it seemed like laziness.’ But he breaks the case by the application of logic to the confusion in a quite satisfying way.

The story is also about the effect that terrorism can have on individuals and whole cities. Wilson takes as his epigraph lines from Yeats’s poem The Second Coming: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. Even before the bomb, Javier feels anxious: ‘His instinct was telling him that this was the end of an old order and the ominous start of something new.’  Another character feels ‘the building’s collapse was an appalling replication of her own mental state’. The press and the public all too readily abandon the tolerance that used to characterise Seville and jump to the conclusion that the bomb was the work of Islamic terrorists. Many respond with demands that Moroccans and other North Africans now living in Spain be expelled. ‘They live with me, they live in my society, they enjoy its prosperity, until one day they decide to put a bomb under my apartment,’ says one of the survivors. ‘And now it is we who are angry.’  Javier struggles to make sense of it. Who benefits by such dislocation? Wilson is making a welcome point about Western and Islamic relations through the way he resolves this story.

Having said all that, I find it hard to put my finger on what it is about this book that disappoints me. I think it must be Wilson’s use of language. There’s nothing wrong with it; it just doesn’t rise above the perfectly adequate. I probably will go back and read the others in the series to see if they have more of the sparkle I thought I found in the first book of Wilson’s that I read.

You can find more about Robert Wilson and his books here.

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Bombproof, by Michael Robotham

Posted in Crime Fiction, Reviews on March 27, 2012 | 2 Comments »

After Nam Le’s The Boat – see my last post – I needed something a bit lighter to read. Michael Robotham wouldn’t normally qualify; his crime stories are usually intense, complex and scary, as can be seen from my earlier posts on The Suspect (2004), Lost (2005) and The Night Ferry (2007). But Bombproof (2008) was commissioned for Books Alive, which is an annual, government-funded, month-long nationwide campaign to promote books and reading. Written for a more general audience, it is nowhere near as challenging as his other work – which was just what I was looking for.

Sami MacBeth is a twenty seven year old guitarist who wants to be a rock god. But his main talent seems to be being in the wrong place at the wrong time – ‘a talent for trouble’.  He’s already done three years in prison for a jewel robbery he didn’t commit. All he wants to do now is find his missing sister, Nadia, but after only three days of freedom, he’s in even worse trouble than that which landed him in goal. He shares the story with Vincent Ruiz, the now retired Detective Inspector from the earlier three books. Ruiz would like to help Sami find his sister; he has a thing about missing girls, though thinks he might be a bit ‘long in the tooth’. He also has some old scores to settle, and these might just have something to do with the trouble Sami’s in. ‘The behaviour of stupid, violent people no longer interests him. The behaviour of clever, driven, dangerous people is a different story.’

The story is quite complicated, but much less subtle than in the earlier books. It is as if Robotham has plotted out who has to know what, how they find it out, and how that drives the action forward, rather than writing a narrative that gives a sense of growing organically. Sami needs a place to hide so there has to be a character that can hide him. The baddies need someone on the inside of the police, and Ruiz just happens to lunch with that person on a regular (though infrequent) basis. Chance and coincidence play a much greater – or at least more obvious – role than in the best crime stories, including Robotham’s own. He makes up for it by fast-paced writing and the excitement of an incident-filled storyline.

Sami and Ruiz are both, in their different ways, likeable characters. Sami isn’t dumb; he just ‘has about as much common sense as a pork chop’. He’s fiercely devoted to his sister, and will go to any lengths to find her. He doesn’t really think about what he’s doing; he just reacts to circumstances. His resilience under enormous pressure is somewhat unrealistic, and he seems to get smarter – or at least more assured – as the story progresses. But this is a forgivable plot weakness – many ‘ordinary person’ main characters manage the extraordinary. Ruiz is smart, laconic and persistent, and not above using physical intimidation – which is not bad for a man of sixty-two. ‘Subtlety,’ he thinks, ‘was never one of his strengths as a detective’; he’d rather ‘rattle a cage’. And so he does. Most of the other characters are more or less stereotypes, sketched in to play their part in the story.

Even though Robotham is not writing at full stretch, I still enjoy his use of language. Written in the present tense, it has an immediacy that makes for easy reading (as no doubt Robotham intended). His view of the world is sardonic; what can go wrong will go wrong. ‘Sami isn’t just unlucky, he’s a walking jinx, a Jonah; he’s the one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition; he’s the Irishman who burnt his lips trying to blow up a bus. Forget master criminal – Sami isn’t even a minor one.’ His dialogue is also entertaining. ‘We could catch the tube,’ suggests Sami. ‘I don’t catch trains,’ replies Dessie. ‘Why not?’ ‘I just don’t.’ ‘We’re running a bit low on choices for you to be taking a personal stand.’ Dessie grunts. Sami takes it as a yes’. But this is a crime story, and Robotham never lets the reader forget that crime is essentially cruel, exploitative and violent; there is nothing gentle about his descriptions of the havoc caused by it.

This story feels a bit like Robotham just dashed it off, but it is probably fairer to say that he was consciously writing for an audience that doesn’t read much, and on this basis, I think he has succeeded very well.  I was looking for a good, undemanding read, and I got one.

You can find out more about Robotham here.

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End Games, by Michael Dibdin

Posted in Books into Films, Crime Fiction, Reviews on March 6, 2012 | 1 Comment »

I’ve written recently about the way books by Kate Atkinson and John Le Carré have been turned into mini series or films. My acquaintance with the work of Michael Dibdin happened the other way round. I saw three episodes of a TV series based on his books before I had read any of them.

The 2011 series was called Zen, and was named for Dibdin’s Italian detective Aurellio Zen. The three ninety minute episodes were based on his first three Zen books, Ratking (1989), Vendetta (1991) and Cabal (1992). I thought the first one (which was actually Vendetta), was excellent. This was partly because of clever way Zen was pressured by one set of authorities to solve the case and another to shelve it, and by the way the different strands of the story were brought together. But it was also because Zen was such a likable character- the classic outsider who sardonically observes the frailties of the world and goes his own way, regardless of corporate power or politics. Not for nothing was Dibdin a fan of Raymond Chandler. The expressive face of Rufus Sewell, the actor playing Zen, was perfect for the part. It’s true that the second two of the series didn’t impress me as much; their plots relied unduly on coincidence. But as I’ve noted before, it seems easier to get away with chance and luck on the screen, where there is apparently less obligation for reasoned explanation than on the written page.

So I tried End Games (2007). Zen has been sent to Calabria as acting Chief of Police in Cosenza. What began as the kidnapping of an American lawyer – ‘A traditional Calabrian crime, with its roots in the immemorial banditry of the region’ – soon turns into a very nasty murder, and Zen immediately comes up against the traditional code of silence. But he is determined to do his job; ‘this stupid, meaningless, utterly compromised job that I try to do as well as I can’. There is in addition a rather complicated sub plot about the search for the treasure of Alaric, a Visigoth who sacked Rome in the fifth century AD. Some of the same characters are involved in both plots, but others, like the peculiar American billionaire Jake Daniels and the flamboyant Italian film director Luciano Aldobrandini, belong only to the sub plot. Zen is an engaging character, as he is in the TV series; his whimsical approach is enjoyable. Dibdin writes well and there are many nice touches, such as Zen’s assessment of the notary Nicola Mantega as having the manner of a third rate tenor in a provincial opera house – ‘He had neither the range nor the volume, not to mention the subtlety, to tackle really big roles in Rome or Milan, but he could certainly ham it up and belt it out’.

Yet although it is well written and quite intricately plotted, I found it difficult to sustain an interest in the story. The sub plot is complicated to an unnecessary and unrealistic degree. The chief villain, who is always in the background, has improbable powers – even, one would have thought, for Calabria. There are arguably too many characters, particularly as a number of them carry the story for a chapter here and a chapter there, which gives them greater importance than is warranted by their role in the story. The film director, for example, seems completely superfluous.  It has been suggested that some of these characters are vehicles for Dibdin’s satire – Jake as the mindless, trendy, rich American with his evangelical wife Madrona and his Rapture Works enterprise, and Aldobrandini as the pretentious film director obsessed with his legacy. But if so, is this the only satire in the book? Is the view of Calabria satire? How is the reader supposed to know? I can’t tell if it is satire or stereotype.

Many other readers and critics would disagree with my less than enthusiastic assessment. When Dibdin died suddenly in 2007 – this novel was published posthumously – his obituaries gave high praise to his work, both his Zen series and his stand alone books. He was admired for his insights into ‘the changing face’ of Italian society, as well as the high quality of his writing and plotting. But this is one of the few times that I’d say watch the DVD rather than read the book.

You can read a different assessment of Didbin’s work here.

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