Dirty War, by Dominique Sylvain -- a definite yes.

9780857052162

MacLehose Press, 2015

originally published as Guerre Sale, 2011

290 pp
translated by Nick Caistor

paperback

Well, this just royally sucks. Not this book, which is quite good,  but the fact that the next book isn't out in translation until October of next year, according to the publisher's website.  I'm the world's most impatient person when it comes to series books -- I read so few of them any more that when I find one I like, I want to read more as soon as possible. And this series I really do enjoy, so waiting is going to be a pain.

The first novel I read by Dominique Sylvain was her The Dark Angel, which I just LOVED. The characters are what made this book work well: the dynamic between retired Commissaire and the blonde American stripper (Lola and Ingrid, in that order) had me in stitches and in awe of just how refreshing these quirky characters are to read.  When I picked up this book, I assumed it was book number two in this series but it's not. According to a few places I looked at, Dirty War is actually book number five; it seems the intervening three series installments are as yet untranslated: La fille du Samouraï, (#2), Manta Corridor (#3) and L'absence de L'ogre (#4). As I've said many times, I really don't understand why we can't have books in translation in their publication order -- it would be nice not to have to backtrack each time, especially in a series that is based on characters like the ones in this series.  Like here, we have to kind of ignore that three books have fallen in a hole with all of the ongoing character development; even more maddening is the fact that in Dirty War, the two main characters are not at front and center of the story, although they're still just as odd and are still working around the police. 

This book is much, much more serious in tone than The Dark Angel. It takes on the form of a political thriller that focuses more on Sacha Duguin, the very gorgeous police inspector who is in charge of discovering who killed a young attorney named Florian Vidal.  The case draws Lola's attention when it turns out that the same method of murder was used five years earlier in the death of  Lola's former colleague, Toussaint Kidjo. Instinctively she knows that such a strange way of killing cannot be entirely random -- so along with Ingrid and a dog named Sigmund, Lola begins her own investigation. Without giving away anything important, it turns out that both murders have ties to Africa.  Vidal's death, however, also captures the attention of a "newly formed national intelligence agency" (according to the cover blurb), whose top guys are reluctant to share information with the Paris police department, resulting in a power struggle.    Sacha is appointed to solve the case, but what he uncovers leads to the titular and resulting "Dirty War" played out among the powers that be.  The stakes are high here for Sacha, in terms of his career, but they're even higher for the opposition trying to prevent the exposure of long-hidden secrets.   

Sylvain could go well beyond just crime fiction if she wanted to; her play on the old fable "Death in Samarkand" that appears both at the beginning and ending of this novel reveals just how very good of a writer she is.  She is also very, very good at constructing a story that turns out to be so meticulously plotted and so ingeniously twisted that it's nearly impossible to put the book aside.  With such an intense storyline, though, she sort of leaves Lola and Ingrid behind, which is so sad for me, but what few scenes they are in are just gold.  It's a shame really, but I see why they have to sort of stay more in the background than they did in the earlier novel.  

I normally am not a fan of thrillers, political or otherwise, but this one never gets down to that level of incredulity that so I see in so many of them; this one is rather intelligent and easy to follow without having to wade through a huge number of intersecting (and often ridiculous, in my opinion) plot lines. What I didn't care so much for was that at the end of this book, things got a bit rushed -- and a lot of the expository bits came out sounding like details of an author's outline.   Sadly, I can't provide an example since doing so, of course, would blow the show. However, I was beyond entertained here, in a great way, and I'm really looking forward to the next one, which seems to pick up where this one ends. I certainly hope so, because waiting 10 months to see where the cliffhanger ending goes is just going to be pure torture!  aarrrggghhh!!!!

Definitely recommended -- but do read The Dark Angel First. 

and thus we come to the end of a brilliant career ...Dark Corners, by Ruth Rendell

9781501119422

Scribner, 2015

228 pp

hardcover

For years now Ruth Rendell and her alter ego Barbara Vine have been aiding me in my dark fiction addiction.  Her style is such that had I received this book with neither title nor author name, I could easily have picked it out as a Rendell novel.  In fact, in my opinion, even though it's entirely different,  this book has almost the same tone as her Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (which I absolutely LOVE and recommend to almost anyone who will listen).  And while I wouldn't say that this one is among the best of her books that I've read,  it is still incredibly good, still bears all of the hallmarks of a Rendell novel,  and I am beyond grateful that it was published. As usual, Rendell interweaves current social and political issues into this book in her own unmistakable way; and, as always, her characters are what drive this most disturbing psychological story.  

The dustjacket blurb (in part) is as follows:

"When his father dies, Carl Martin inherits a house in an increasingly rich and trendy London neighborhood. Cash poor, Carl rents the upstairs room and kitchen to the first person he interviews, Dermot McKinnon. That is mistake number one. Mistake number two is keeping the bizarre collection of homeopathic 'cures' that his father left in the medicine cabinet, including a stash of controversial diet pills. Mistake number three is selling fifty of those diet pills to a friend, who is then found dead."

Just briefly and spoiler free, Dark Corners follows the events that launch from this perfect storm of mistakes, beginning with Dermot who seizes the moment following the news coverage of the death of Carl's friend Stacey and the resulting outpouring of public outrage.  Carl, of course, meant no harm to Stacey, but it was an innocent mistake that ultimately leads to increasingly-unbearable psychological pressure that Carl gradually finds unendurable.   Dermot (a creepy, sleazy vet tech at a pet clinic) witnesses the transaction between his landlord and Carl's overweight, overwrought actress-friend Stacey, and has no qualms about blackmailing Carl, demanding to live rent free after Stacey's death under the threat of ruining Carl's newly-launched career. Dermot is not beyond gloating to himself about the power he holds over Carl, delighting in his ability to "keep Carl exactly where he wanted him." As the pressure ratchets, Carl, who has taken to following Dermot occasionally and sees him out walking with his girlfriend,  is reminded of a phrase from his high school performance of Measure for Measure: "the duke of dark corners," but ultimately it will be Carl who is eventually backed  into a dark corner of his own.

What I love about Rendell's work in general is that a) once you open one of her non-series novels,  you find yourself in a claustrophobic environment where you can't escape the building tension and b) she is able to unearth those "dark corners" that dwell within otherwise seemingly-normal people, and she excels at that here.  Dermot the blackmailer, for example, is a regular churchgoer, never misses a Sunday service. Sex outside of marriage is something untenable for him; he even chides Carl for living with his girlfriend Nicola, saying the situation is  "far from right."  He is also  person who discovers and enjoys power, which becomes even more obvious in his relationship with his new girlfriend.  And then there's Lizzie, a friend of Stacey, who has a job and her own apartment but isn't beyond taking advantage of Stacey's death for her own purposes for the small measure of power the situation affords her.    At the same time, though, one of the  ironies of this tale is that neither Dermot nor Lizzie have that moral guide of conscience running through their heads, while Carl ... well, I'll leave it there so as not to wreck things for the next reader.

If you think about this novel as another in which Rendell explores the darkness of which humans are capable, then it is just as good of a work as many of her other books; I personally felt a bit let down by how things played out at the end, a sort of haphazard coming together of coincidence. Then again, as I noted about another Rendell novel some time back, she often uses coincidence and is aware that she's doing it so it sort of just goes with the territory. Despite that wee niggle, though, Rendell readers do NOT want to miss this book.

A Shilling for Candles, by Josephine Tey -- a reread

0684842386
Scribner, 1998
originally published 1936
238 pp

Having just recently finished Jennifer Morag Henderson's excellent biography of the author,  Josephine Tey: A Life (which I'll be talking about here very shortly),  I find myself completely in agreement with her -- the more a Tey reader understands about her life, the easier it is to appreciate  and to understand her work.  I wish the biography had come out sooner; now I feel like I ought to go back and reread more of Tey's crime novels for better perspective.

A Shilling for Candles begins with the discovery of a body on the beach. At first the young woman's death is assumed to be suicide, but based on his observations and an important clue left behind, Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard thinks differently. This should be an easy mystery to solve, since Grant has a ready-made suspect, but that person ends up fleeing.  While the suspect is being hunted, Grant realizes that there are many odd things about the death and life of the dead woman that need to be investigated, but trying to keep things quiet turns out to be impossible since the deceased is popular film star Christine Clay, who had gone into hiding to get away from the world. To say that this is a complicated case is an understatement.  While the hunt is on for his main suspect, Grant finds himself having to examine different lines of inquiry that move him into the shallow world of celebrity, the dead woman's personal history, religious strangeness,  and they even take him into the realm of out-there astrology before the truth is at last revealed. And I have to say, I seriously didn't see that ending coming -- a complete surprise.

Getting back to why knowing something of Tey's life helps to put things into better perspective as a reader,  as I read A Shilling for Candles, I could easily see how much of Tey's experiences had an impact on her character creations.  As just one example (without giving anything away),  Tey had made lifelong friends among a group of women in the theater world, women she'd come to know in her work as  playwright Gordon Daviot.  One of these women was Marda Vanne, whose fictional counterpart Marta Hallard turns up in more than one Tey novel as an actress friend of Grant's.  As another example, when Christine Clay's will is read, it turns out that she's left money to the National Trust, "for the preservation of the beauty of England."  Tey did the same in her will.  Plus, there's the added focus of the pitfalls of fame and fortune in this novel that may play off of Tey's own reluctance to be in the public limelight.

[Sidebar: Tey also worked as a screenwriter and even had this book adapted as a Hitchcock release entitled "Young and Innocent," which I will be watching this evening.]

This is my second time with this book, and I got much more out of it this time around than the last, which is generally the case with me; I think the huge difference was that this time I also had more insight into the author herself.   I have to be honest -- so far my favorite of the rereads has been her The Franchise Affair -- in my very humble opinion, it's among the best of her mysteries and A Shilling for Candles doesn't rate as highly as that one.  That doesn't mean it's not good, just less enjoyable for me personally.

Recommended to people who enjoy vintage crime, but do be aware that many of Tey's ideas in this novel do not conform to modern PC sensitivities. Frankly, I don't really give a fig about whether or not a book written in the 1930s conforms to today's standards of "correctness", but I have read reader responses that include complaints about this issue, so you've been warned.  Overall -- a good read, not great, but it was fun getting to the end.

The Lake District Murder, by John Bude -- A British Library Crime Classic

9780712357166
The British Library, 2014
(originally published 1935)
286 pp

paperback

" -- that's always the way. It's so darned easy to be wise after the event!"

Feeling ever so guilty about straying from reading crime for so long, I'm finally getting myself back on track here, returning to my favorite genre.  Today's  book is The Lake District Murder (1935)  which is not Bude's first novel, but which is my introduction to his work.    His Inspector Meredith made his initial appearance in The Cornish Coast Murder, which I just bought because my resolve to not buy any new books until after the new year begins is definitely crumbling. Good thing I have stronger willpower when it comes to food, but I digress.

Poor Farmer Perryman is looking forward to "roasting his toes at a roaring fire, with a 'night-cap' at his elbow to round off a very convivial evening."  Unbeknownst to him, his plans are unexpectedly put on hold. First, his car "petered out" on the way home to the village of Braithwaite, then second, when he reaches the garage he knows is just down the road, he makes a gruesome discovery while looking for the absent proprietor. There, in a car parked inside a sealed shed, the beam of his flashlight makes contact with a man with no face, giving the farmer "the shock of his life." Investigating further, he realizes that the faceless man is actually "young Clayton," who runs the place.  A can of petrol later, he is winging his way to Keswick, where he finds Inspector Meredith there, finishing up his "arrears of routine work."  It definitely appears to be a suicide, but as Meredith starts looking into it, he's not at all satisfied -- there are a number of clues that just don't add up. As he begins asking questions, it isn't long before he comes to the conclusion that Clayton's death might just be the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and that something is not at all right in this part of the Lake District. However, as he sets about trying to uncover the truth, he finds himself more than once in a "cul-de-sac" of complications.

the village of Braithwaite

The little villages, with their local pubs and surrounding wooded countryside are so real in this book, and I looked for old and new photos of the area as I read.  The novel is also a really good read for armchair detectives such as myself -- there are clues upon clues here, unfolding little by little along with some pretty strange happenings, and the reader is right there along with him as Meredith searches for answers.   More than once I found myself thinking along the lines of "but what about..." or "how can that be?" or "wait ... didn't someone say..." -- in short, I got really involved in this story.  It's just that kind of book that made me really want to know how things were pulled off just as much as Meredith did; it's also the kind of story where I felt his frustrations every time he ended up in one of his cul-de-sacs. But above all else, I enjoy his (apologizing for the triteness) dogged determination -- even when he thinks he has things figured out, he knows he still has to prove his case and doesn't give up. As is noted,

"Whatever faults may be attributed to the British police force by the American or continental critics, a lack of thoroughness is not one of them."

Reading this book now -- in the age where pretty much every cop, PI, or crime solver has to have some sort of angst leaping off of the page or some kind of gimmick -- is rather like a breath of fresh air. In fact, I think that one reason I return to the past so often in my reading is to take a break from the lengths some contemporary writers go to in order to make his or her main characters stick out from all of the rest. But here it's just good old-fashioned police work that some readers have found dull and tiresome to follow, but hey --  even Meredith realizes that solving crime does have its boring moments . For example, while he's freezing outside on a surveillance assignment, we discover

"How he loathed this waiting job! And some people imagined that the detection of crime was an exciting and glamorous pastime! Little they knew about it! Glamourous? Brrr!" 

There's no lengthy, emotional backstory about his life or his marriage here -- his wife puts up with but  isn't too happy with Meredith's long hours, she doesn't want their son following in his father's policeman's footsteps, the son works part-time in a photography shop (but probably deep down wants to be a cop), wants a three-speed Raleigh bicycle,  and that's pretty much all we know about his family life.  Frankly, it's probably enough in a novel where the focus is on solving the crime and getting to the truth of things; Meredith is really quite good at his job and is also human enough to realize and admit that he's made mistakes.

While I get that these old books are not everyone's cup of tea, they definitely appeal to me, and I'm very pleased that this line of British Library Crime Classics has made some of them more readily accessible to modern readers.

back to the past #17: Death in the Cards, by Ann T. Smith

9781434407382
Wildside books, 2010
originally published 1945, Phoenix Press
256 pp

paperback

I love these Wildside editions -- I have several in my shelves spreading across genres.  They're great facsimile editions which offer readers like myself the opportunity to rediscover old book without having to go into debt buying them.  Sadly, the author remains a mystery to me, since I could find absolutely nothing outside of this book to her credit; I couldn't find any personal information either.  I went through several sources I have at home, including Hubin's great reference work which would normally list a pseudonym as well as at least a birthdate, but got nothing. If I find more later, I'll make an addendum here, but for now, she remains a question mark. That's a shame -- I love unearthing people's histories; they're often very enlightening as well as interesting.  Oh well. I tried.

I did, however, discover two different covers of  Death in the Cards -- the original

and the reprint

both of which as you can see, offer a clue in the cat on the cover. While I won't say why the cat (whose name is Beauty) is important, let's just say that the poor kitty has a role to play, ultimately coming to a pretty sad end.  But the cat is the least of the worries at the old house on Brattle Street, where Paul and Lita Redfern have taken rooms so that Paul can be close to his new professorial job in Boston.

Death in the Cards is not the best book I've ever read from the 1940s, but it did keep me turning pages to find out who killed old Mrs. Carrie Seton, who owns the house and rents out rooms.  The tenants, aside from Paul and Lita, include an anthropologist (Dr. Oglesbie) whose rooms are filled with skulls, a handyman named George from South Dakota, a Navy man (Phillips) who's just finished a tour of duty on a submarine, two elderly, former Beacon Hill women (Miss Lovelace and Miss Brundage) whose fortunes have faded since the social heyday, and Mrs. Seton's granddaughter Caroline.  Within just a few weeks of moving into the place, old Mrs. Seton ends up dead and Paul, who comes across her body, finds evidence that his wife may have been the culprit.  So many things point to her guilt that he hides what he discovers and takes it upon himself to find the real murderer before the police hone in on his wife.  With so many people in the house though, that's not going to be easy -- and the police are eager to bring this case to a close.

Way more interesting to me than the mystery (which quite frankly gets a bit convoluted and even  brings in a Nazi spy as a sort of patsy -- remember, it's still wartime) is that the author takes her readers into the world of Boston's Beacon Hill society in its heyday (and later as fortunes decline) as she recalls Mrs. Seton's life.  As it turns out, the dead woman was not of their ilk -- au contraire, she was a young woman nee O'Toole from Irish stock and from the wrong part of town. She had caught the attention of her future husband who fell for her and was bound and determined to introduce her to his Boston Brahmin world, which did not go over so well and required the help of her old Miss Lovelace, who remained her very best friend and stayed with her long after Mr.Seton had passed on.

It's a good find, probably not of interest to most people unless you're into obscure vintage fiction, and aside from the meandering nature of the story, not a bad read.

Just as an aside, I have pretty much finished my obscure women writers project for this year, but I have been stacking my shelves with many, many more titles and I'll be reading and posting about them as I come to them.  I'll also be inaugurating my page "Forgotten Women Found" here shortly -- so stay tuned. Thanks to all who have commented.

now here's a book I really love -- The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey

9780684842561
Scribner/Simon and Schuster, 1998
originally published 1949
299 pp

paperback

I read this book a very long time ago, but recently it came back to my attention after reading that Sarah Waters had read it, calling it "the first dark germ of The Little Stranger" (one of my favorite books of all time) and a source of research for her The Night Watch.  I've recently been running a series of readings of work by women writers of the Golden Age on goodreads, and I've included The Franchise Affair in the list of five novels after books by Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers.  There's still time if you want to get in on the discussion (let me know) -- because of my vacation we don't actually start until November 15th.

The Franchise Affair is just a perfect gem of a novel, based on the real-life case of Elizabeth Canning in 1753 which you can read about at the Guildhall Library Blog.  Moving the case into contemporary times, Tey also updated this story to reflect various postwar concerns, as Sarah Waters calls them, "moral panics - about 'problem' children and juvenile delinquency, for example - of postwar life."

The main focus here is on the young  Elisabeth Kane (Betty - 15), who  had gone off to a suburb of Larborough to visit an aunt over a school vacation.  She'd  kept in touch with her guardians via postcard for a while, reporting that all was well enough to merit her staying on with her aunt for a while. Her guardians figured that with the school holiday ending in three weeks this shouldn't be a problem, but when she doesn't turn up again at the end of the three weeks, they start to wonder what's going on and write to the aunt to make her come home.   The aunt writes back (rather than phoning or sending a telegraph) that Betty had left for home some two weeks earlier; by communicating via the post, a lot of time was lost and by the time the guardians went to the police, Betty had been missing for four weeks.  Then out of nowhere, the girl returns home, in a "state of complete exhaustion."  Her story was that she'd been "kidnapped in a car" and then two days later she reveals that she'd actually been kidnapped and held by two women who tried to force her into domestic service.  Inspector Grant is sent to interview the two women in question, Marion Sharpe and her mother, who claim to know nothing about Betty and fervently deny any involvement. But things don't look good for the Sharpes who live at a house called The Franchise, since Betty can clearly identify items in the house, the room she was supposedly held in prior to making an escape and even the different-colored tire on the car that supposedly used in her abduction.  Marion Sharpe calls on lawyer Robert Blair, who wants to fob her off on a more criminally-experienced solicitor but changes his mind on meeting the Sharpes and hearing what he considers to be an absurd story.  He makes it his mission to prove Betty Kane is lying, but gets nowhere before the local tabloid drags the Sharpes through the mud, making Betty out to be a pathetic, innocent victim, garnering sympathy from all of the country.  He has an uphill fight on his hands, one that is made worse little by little as the novel progresses.

To say that The Franchise Affair is a good book does it absolutely no justice.  To me, it is one of her very best works, and I've read them all.  Not only does it shine in terms of plot and plot turns, but Tey is also examining postwar British society here.  I can't really divulge much about Betty Kane without ruining things, although what Tey has to say about her in a cumulative way reflects the dangers someone of her sort represented to the social order of the time. The English public is also looked at here --  the tendency for tabloid readers to believe what they read and make judgments based on their impressions with no real facts strikes a chord with our own times of sleazy tabloids in print and online, as well as the non-questioning sheep who believe everything that comes out via social media. Tey's novel also reflects the tendencies of those same judgmental people to make trouble for those under media scrutiny.   And then there's Robert Blair, the attorney who is  "usually so placid, so lazily good-natured," but discovers that with the Sharpe case, he has a "focus of interest," changing "the pattern of his life." Used to a somewhat prescribed lifestyle "without hurry and without emotion," he finds himself actually feeling alive with this case, quite possibly for the first time.   The Sharpes live in a big house that once upon a time had seen better days; now they barely scrape by without servants or money but there are still certain forms that need to be maintained for eyes outside of their gates.   There's so much more to talk about with this novel, but well time and all of that.

The Franchise Affair can be read by mystery/crime fiction readers across the board, except for those people who trend toward kickass thriller stuff  ... it is so well done that it will appeal to pretty much everyone. Tey was a gifted writer, but in this book, she's gone beyond her norm and given readers a book that should, in my opinion, be considered a classic. It is an incredibly superb book that all aficionados of British crime fiction/mysteries should read.

the final chapter of the Öland Quartet : The Voices Beyond, by Johan Theorin

9780857520067 
Transworld Publishers/Doubleday, 2015
originally published as Rörgast
translated by Marlaine Delargy
462 pp

paperback

For now, it seems that if you live in America and you want to read this book, you'll have to order it from the UK like I did or sit patiently and wait for it to be published in this country.  The second choice wasn't even an option for me -- as soon as I'd heard it was available, I had to have it; it went on vacation with me where I read it stretched out in a long lounger chair from which I didn't move while reading.   I have really enjoyed all of the books in Theorin's Öland Quartet up to this point, and I have to say that for a final entry, The Voices Beyond is an absolute page turner.  Despite the fact that there are nearly five hundred pages in this book, the story moves very quickly, but what I loved about this book is that it moves back and forth in time, revealing that the past most definitely has a strong hold on the present.  And as always, Theorin here is a master of atmosphere that just doesn't quit.  If you have to end a series, this is definitely the way to do it.  

It's tough not to get sucked into the story from the beginning.  If you've followed Theorin's Öland Quartet series so far, you will definitely remember Gerlof Davidsson.  When Gerlof was young in 1930,  he was part of a group of people digging a grave in the churchyard for Edvard Kloss. Once the body was lowered into the grave and covered up, the small group of gravediggers hears noises coming from where they'd just put the coffin --  a series of knocks that Gerlof Davidsson never forgets over the course of his lifetime.  Flash forward to the present and we find Gerlof back on the island of Öland for the summer holidays, staying at his home with his grandchildren.  In the middle of one night when he is sleeping in his boathouse, he is awakened out of a sound sleep by pounding on the door where he discovers a young boy, Jonas Kloss, wet and terrified.  It seems that Jonas has had a horrific encounter on what he calls a "ghost ship," and has managed to escape.  Because of Gerlof's own past, he has no trouble believing Jonas' account, and after he calms him down a bit, Gerlof starts asking questions.  What Jonas tells him lands Gerlof smack in the middle of a mystery that will take the reader back in time, moving ever slowly into the present where the past still exists in some minds.  It is a dark story that gets darker as the book (and the Swedish summer) moves along, revealing not only a modern-day mystery but also the failed dreams of a young boy who gets caught up in a situation not of his own making.  

Unlike my usual cautionary self, I have nothing negative to say about this novel which (with apologies for the old cliché) kept me glued until I turned the last page.  It is a fine story, difficult to read at times because of the sheer cruelty and inhumanity that Theorin so deftly reveals here, but perfect for someone like me who is very much into the darker side of human nature.  Cozy readers or readers of tamer Scandinavian crime fiction beware -- this is an incredibly dark and at times bleak novel, nothing at all cutesy here. It's an example of Scandinavian crime at its best.   One more thing -- even though it's #4 in Theorin's quartet, it is very possible to read this book as a standalone, but my advice is to take each book in its order of publication and to not let this one be your introduction to the series: read Echoes from the Dead, The Darkest Room, The Quarry all before you tackle The Voices Beyond -- there is a lot of history here of some of the characters that you won't want to miss.  

Super book -- I'm just sorry that it isn't widely available in the US right now so that more crime fiction fans can read it.

back with Black: Even the Dead

 9781627790666
Henry Holt, 2015
287 pp

paperback (my ARC copy from LTER and the publishers -- thank you!)

Even the Dead is number seven in Black's (aka John Banville) Quirke series which begins with Christine Falls, one of my favorites in the entire series.  My guess is that Even the Dead just might be the last Quirke novel --  there is just something I gleaned from the story that makes me feel that way. If not, we'll say I'm wrong and call it a day, but to me it just has that last-of-series feeling.  This one is a bit more subdued than the other Quirke novels -- not nearly as dark in tone but still quite good.  And it is a must read for anyone who's been following this series.  

Set in  "mean and mendacious"  Dublin of the 1950s, a city where the small group behind the powers that be maintain control through a mix of religion, politics, and money, Even the Dead opens with a dead man on the pathologist's slab, being worked on by Dr. David Sinclair, Quirke's assistant and the guy Quirke's daughter Phoebe's been seeing for a while now.  Chief pathologist Quirke is not even at the hospital but rather convalescing from events that started in an earlier story.  The police are certain that the body belongs to a suicide, but Sinclair thinks otherwise and to be sure, he reluctantly calls his boss in for a consultation.  It is actually just what Quirke needs -- being back at work -- and he puts his recovery time aside and goes back to work.  The dead man, Leon Corless,  is the son of a very well-known Communist agitator (this is the 1950s, remember), and Quirke confirms Sinclair's findings that this was no mere accident and definitely not suicide.  While Quirke is getting back into his post-convalescent swing, Phoebe has an adventure of her own when she is contacted by a former classmate who confides to Phoebe that she is both pregnant and in very serious danger.  Phoebe barely remembers her, but sensing that the girl is completely in earnest, she hides her away at a family home.  When she returns later to check on her, the girl is gone, lock stock and barrel, leaving Phoebe feeling despondent:  after all, 

"A person had been given into her care, troubled and terrified, whom she had tried to help, and, somehow, she had failed."

 Phoebe turns to her father, who turns to his friend Inspector Hackett for help both on the Corless case and on the girl's disappearance -- and it isn't long until they discover that the two cases are quite possibly related.

As always in this series of novels, Black's writing is tip-top -- he has a way of not only creating a clever plot but also characters that manage to stay under my skin and make me impatient for the next installment, especially in the main character Quirke, who was driven by "an absence of a past," and who 

"... was aware of no great thirst in himself for justice and the righting of wrongs"

with

"...no illusions  that the world could be set to rights, at least not by him, who could not even set right his own life." 

However, as the story continues and Quirke's present crosses his past, things begin to change, leading to an extremely powerful ending I never saw coming.  

Even though (in my opinion)  Even the Dead is not as dark as its predecessors, there is still a deep,  underlying noirish current that runs throughout the story, which certainly kept me turning pages to see where Black was going to take things. I love this entire series and this newest book did not disappoint.  I would truly hate to see this series end, but as I said earlier, it's written so that it feels like it might just be the last -- here's hoping it's not.  

Who's going to like this book? Certainly readers who've followed the series in order up to now, and readers who enjoy the darker side of crime and characters without going to the darker extreme of true noir.   Cozy fans stay away -- there is nothing, I repeat, nothing even remotely cutesy or nice in this entire book.    Also, since much of this book strays into Quirke's past, it would be doing oneself a disservice to start the series with this novel -- each and every book should really be read in publication order.  

As long as Banville continues to write as Benjamin Black, I'll continue reading what has turned out to be one of my very favorite series of crime novels ever.   I hope I'm in for much, much more. 

from the UK: Before It's Too Late, by Jane Isaac

9781910394618
Legend Press, 2015
282 pp

paperback (from publisher, thank you!)

I was well over the halfway mark in this novel when I realized something -- I hadn't seen any swearing, blatant sex or gratuitous violence anywhere.  Kudos to the author for that. Not that I mind swearing so much,  but I can do without extraneous sex and violence that does little or nothing for or gets in the way of the main story line.

Before It's Too Late is a police procedural on the lighter side. It's not light enough to fall under cozy but not nearly as dark as my normal fare, and much lighter in tone than most of what's out there on bookstore shelves as we speak.   There is an angsty main character, DI Will Jackman, who is still grief stricken after an accident that left his wife paralyzed and unable to function.  Jackman has a daughter Celia, a university student whose inner strength Jackman relies on at times when his fails.  He had moved his family to Stratford-upon-Avon when Celia was young, because it was a "pretty sleepy town when it came to serious crime,"  but at the moment,  the police are currently stumped over a missing person case that turned into murder.  Smarting over the lack of information in that case,  Jackman finds himself tasked with investigating another young woman gone missing -- a university student named Min Li, whose case becomes "high profile" with quick results expected.  Sadly, not much evidence has surfaced in this case either, except for some CCTV footage that may offer clues to her last sighting.  But here's the thing -- the reader knows where Min Li is -- her narrative runs through the book parallel to that of the investigation, while the bad guy gets some brief air time here with his story as well.   Jackman and his people have to find Min Li as quickly as possible and things become even more urgent when another university student goes missing.

It's a good book that will keep you turning pages to figure out the who; there are a couple of plot twists involved that make the armchair detective's work just a little bit harder.  The story isn't overwhelmed with Jackman's angst (a plus);  the author gives you just enough information about him to start fleshing him out as a character.  Isaac also reveals the nature of "political policing," as ego, ambition and well-placed friendships override one cop's need for solid detective work, which Jackman can't stand; another well-crafted part of this novel is the focus on the Chinese community and how interactions with outsiders actually work.  Very nicely done and very insightful.  The only thing I wasn't overly fond of was the kidnapped girl's narrative -- first and foremost, it's a bit too melodramatic for my taste and second, well, I can't really explain this one without spoiling things so I'll leave it for others to discover.

I'd say if you've got one foot out the cozy door and are looking to up your crime game without diving headfirst into gritty noir, Before It's Too Late is a fine transition from cutesy to criminal, with enough edginess to make it compelling reading.  I appreciate that Ms. Isaac didn't feel the need to add in all manner of extraneous stuff that many modern writers feel is necessary -- she proves that sometimes a good story can be had without trying to attract every possible audience by using all of the usual over-the-top creepy sex and violence that seems to be a mainstay these days.  It can be done, folks, and it's a refreshing change.

Again, my thanks to the publisher for my copy.

Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? by Stephen Dobyns

9780399171451
blue rider press/Penguin, 2015
351 pp

hardcover (from the publisher -- thank you!)

Before anyone gets all freaked about the dog on the cover smoking a cigarette, no animals were harmed  (or caught smoking) in this novel.  The smoking dog represents just one scam run by a couple of very odd people who solicit money over the phone, telling selected callers that their help is needed to Free Beagles from Nicotine Addiction.  Another selected group of unwary customers gets calls to support Prom Queens Anonymous (directed at fading beauties who never quite grew out of their prom queen days) while yet another specifically-targeted group receives pleas to support Orphans from Outer Space.  So don't worry about the dog or go and boycott the book because the dog may incite teens to take up smoking -- nothing like that goes on here.  But I just know someone will complain or take offense -- you heard it here.

I laughed myself silly throughout the first half of this book and a little beyond.  When I'd finished the book very very late last night, I took a look at what readers on goodreads had to say and discovered that I must have a strange, quirky sense of humor because not a whole lot of people found this book at all funny.  Then again, I'm known for enjoying the unconventional and the strange. My point is that it's a novel that may not appeal to everyone, but if you like snark and sarcasm, you'll find plenty of it here.

I won't get too much into plot but the novel begins with a horrific accident in which a motorcycle rider is sliced to ribbons and decapitated.  How is that funny, you may ask. Well, it's not, but everything that follows starts from this incident.  Based on several factors, the investigating officers are not so sure that it was indeed an accident but rather a carefully-planned murder.  The main character in this novel (Connor) just happens to be on scene  and gets stuck there; while standing around he meets another guy (Sal) who is stranded waiting for the accident to be cleared.  This fateful meeting will have major repercussions when Connor, certain that he knows the guy or that he's at least seen him before at a Detroit casino where he used to work, calls his brother to ask about him. He doesn't realize it but Connor has just stepped into a major hornet's nest involving the FBI, the witness protection program and a crazy Harley fanatic who goes by the name of Fat Bob.

a Fat Bob Harley, photo from Adam Campbell, 2014 at Cruiser. 

It's not so much the story but the characters who really drive this novel -- and there are any number of lunatics who populate this book. The two cops have a serious "passive-aggressive" thing going on in their work partnership.  Manny Streeter is crazy about karaoke and has spent a lot of money turning one of the bedrooms into a karaoke lounge complete with tables and rules; his partner, Benny Vikström really wants out of the partnership but finds that the only way out is to become a bike cop.  He also catches a lot of flak on the job when people joke about him being a "famous Swedish detective."   The scam artists at Bounty Inc. are just insane but they have given Connor a job working for them and say they are prepping him to take over the business; even the bad guys are sort of silly, with one exception, a crazy lunatic named Chucky. There's also a homeless guy who thinks he has a tail every time he gets through a bottle of Everclear.   Then there's Connor himself, the guy who through no fault of his own ends up in more than one situation he's having trouble keeping under control.  There really isn't one sane person in this book and when you combine them all what you get is a rather crazy mix of characters who keep things beyond lively.  You also get a murder mystery in and among all of the absurdity here, but it's more about the people than the story.

Now the downside to this book is that even though it's terribly clever, at the end it was like I was watching a movie. It's like the novel was really fun up to that point, but the ending had all of the trademarks of those films that feature the hapless hero and all of the crazies in his/her orbit. I could actually see things playing out in my head exactly to form.   If you've read this book you'll know precisely what I'm saying; if not, well you will.  I would like to think that the author did this on purpose, but who knows. So the bottom line is this: as the dustjacket blurb notes, it is an "entertainingly absurd" novel, and it made me laugh out loud for most of the book.  I don't know that I'd say it's a novel for everyone, because clearly some readers couldn't get into the humor of it all.  I say if you come into it with no expectations, making your mind a blank slate and not worrying about the whole mystery/crime thing, it will probably make for fun reading.  I have this tendency to root for the offbeat, so it was a good read for me.

Mr. Bazalgette's Agent, by Leonard Merrick -- A British Library Crime Classic

9780712357029
British Library, 2013
originally published 1888
139 pp

paperback

 Not only did I thoroughly enjoy this book, which ended up with an incredibly ironic twist that made me laugh out loud, but I've found myself now wanting to tackle the entire series of British Library Crime Classics.   I have an intense fondness for these old novels.  They may come across as silly and outdated to some readers (which I totally understand)  but they have some of the best story lines that aren't mucked up by all kinds of extraneous stuff --  which is a) what I see in a LOT of today's crime fiction/mystery output, and b) the reason I just don't buy that much contemporary crime any more. Plus, they come with a bonus -- for me, history geek-person-fanatic, they open up a window into the past.  This particular book was written in 1888 and it speaks volumes.

The story is recounted through the diary of our heroine Miss Miriam Lea, who is, as the novel opens, very much down on her luck.  Poor woman -- at age 28, she has no prospects and is facing penury if something doesn't change. She once was an actress, and then became a governess until her past career became known.   Now she's down to her last "four pounds thirteen and sixpence," and her future doesn't seem all that bright.  But everything changes one day when a fellow boarder at her rather sad boardinghouse points her toward a little blurb in the newspaper:

"ALFRED BAZALGETTE, 7, Queen's Row, High Holborn. -- Suspected persons watched for divorce, and private matters investigated with secrecy and despatch. Agents of both sexes. Consultations free."

Making her way to Queen's Row, Miss Lea's hopes to be taken on as a lady detective are seemingly dashed until a full two weeks later when she writes in her diary "I am engaged!"  It seems that Mr. Bazalgette is tasked with locating one Jasper Vining, a banker's clerk who is wanted for fraud and for the theft of some bonds of the Egyptian Unified Loan which he'd handled while working in connection with the stock exchange.  Evidently, Scotland Yard has had no success, and the matter's been handed over to Bazalgette.  Her task: along with another female operative who will accompany her in the guise of a maid, Miss Lea is to

 "find the man; then to be in his company till you have got sufficient information to convince the authorities you have a right to demand an arrest!" 

"The swell" Jasper Vining will probably be hiding out in "capitals or big cities," and Miss Lea and her "maid" Dunstan  are to travel forthwith to Hamburg to begin their search.  She is to stay in the best hotels, dress the part and hopefully make contact. Thus begins a quest that will take Miss Lea and Dunstan on a whirlwind trip through Europe and ultimately across the sea to South Africa in search of this wretched thief and swindler.

I could write so much about this book because there is a LOT hiding under its surface, but I'll  just make a couple of  observations here.  First, in the introduction to this novel, Mike Ashley notes that Mr. Bazalgette's Agent is quite likely the "first ever British novel to feature a professional female detective."  Prior to this one, as he states, there were "quite a few" short stories to do so, but in general, most fictional detectives of the time were men. Well, no surprise there. 

Second, and much more interesting, prior to her appointment as Bazalgette's agent, Miss Lea finds herself in a very tight spot.  She's had a brief stint as an actress,  "until they discovered I could not act," at which point she is taken on as a governess by Lady Edward Jones. However, once her former career is made known to her employers, she is let go after two full years of service.  It seems that Lady Edward Jones does not approve and is 

"unwilling that Master Pelham Jones should imbibe any vulgar tendencies toward art..."

It seems that even though Miss Lea is obviously highly educated, she is also highly unemployable because of her past association with the stage.  However, when called to work for Bazalgette, she refuses to take the small salary she is offered by her employers -- they want to pay her a pound a day; she most adamantly turns it down.  Women, it seems, are very rarely hired on as detectives; when they are, it's temporary.  As she states,

"...on the termination of this undertaking, I should be without an engagement from you, probably find it extremely difficult to return to more ordinary occupations, and have only earned a trifling sum to make amends for the embarrassment." 

To her credit, she holds out for the better sum of thirty shillings a day, but she does recognize that she's pushing her luck here.

It's little things like this (and much more I haven't touched on so as not to put someone to sleep)  that  I appreciate about this novel, and as I said at the outset it has a wonderful, ironic twist at the end that made me laugh out loud.  I won't say what it is or how the book ends, but as I'm squirming in my seat wanting to yell at her for being so daft, things changed in the blink of an eye.  Mr. Bazalgette's Agent is a wonderful book if you are into crime literature of the Victorian era.  Instead of looking at the book as "dated" or "out of touch" with the modern world, it should be appreciated for what it is -- a unique book in its field that allows a  woman in the role of an otherwise mostly-male career. And besides that, it's just plain fun.

...and we're back with another novel by Patricia Highsmith: A Game for the Living

0871132109
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994
(originally published 1958)
282 pp

paperback

"You are about to find out who is responsible for this...but it doesn't matter in the least...It's just a silly game -- a game for the living."  (198)

Right off the bat, I will admit that this is not one of my favorite Highsmith novels.  It's a departure from her usual stuff, which is okay, but she really wasn't all that terrific at putting together an existential whodunit novel which, when all is said and done, describes what I think she was attempting with A Game for the Living. I'm not the only one who has an issue with this book -- according to her biographer, Andrew Wilson, Highsmith herself "came to regard A Game for the Living ... as one of her worst novels," and she wrote in her Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction that this novel "was the only really dull book I have written."  

As the book begins, you actually do find yourself in Highsmith land. Set in Mexico, two very different men are in love with the same woman, both are her lovers, and both are very civilized about the whole thing.  She is also very accommodating; there are no fights between the two men (who are friends), and everyone seems to accept the situation as it is. But, when one of the men returns home from a trip and finds her dead in bed, things start to change.  He, Theodore, is positive that the other man, Ramón, is Lelia's murderer -- after all, he knows that Ramón is prone to violent outbursts.  Theodore has even come between the two a few times when Ramón was on the verge of hitting her.  Ramón had also said that someday he'd "give her up" or "kill himself."  Theodore also realizes that 

"between killing oneself and killing the object of one's passion was not much difference...Psychologically, they equated sometimes."

The two do a sort of mental and emotional dance wondering if the other one is guilty, and matters don't improve when Ramón decides to confess.  But far from being the end of the story, his confession is actually just the beginning.  The limits of friendship are constantly tested in this novel;  Highsmith also uses the novel to explore the nature of guilt.  It's also a book that examines religious belief (which I enjoyed) and art (which I also enjoyed).  Yet, while many of these same themes are to be found in her other novels, looking at it as whole, the book  is a kind of a trainwreck of poor plotting, very little in the way of character development outside of the two main characters, and a lack of intensity that for me is the hallmark of a Highsmith novel.  And then there's that beyond-flat ending.

If my lack of enthusiasm is showing, there are plenty of reasons why.  The biggest one is this: I didn't feel this book like I have the others. If you're a regular Highsmith reader, you know what I mean. I'm at the point where now I have to take breathers between reading her novels because they're so dark and so intense, but I didn't get that here.

I'd say try it but proceed with caution. Do not make this your first Highsmith novel or you may never go back to another one.

an Italian crime double feature: Game of Mirrors, by Andrea Camilleri and Black Run, by Antonio Manzini

Two crime novels from Italy which couldn't possibly be any more different from each other are the topic of today's conversation.  For one thing, Game of Mirrors is Camilleri's 18th series entry while Manzini makes his crime debut with Black Run.  For another, the two main characters, Montalbano and Schiavone are like polar opposites of each other.  Montalbano is the good-natured detective we've all come to know and love, while Schiavone, if you'll pardon the bluntness of my expression here, starts out as a complete asshat.  In Schiavone's defense, there are a number of reasons for why things are like this with him (one big one you don't really comprehend until  the last pages of the book), but he is definitely what I'd call a most unlikable kind of guy.  However, I'm not someone who needs to love the characters in books I read, and when all is said and done Black Run is a good series opener. But more later.  First, Game of Mirrors.

97801431223774 

Penguin, 2015 

 originally published as Il Gioco degli specchi (2011) 

 translated by Stephen Sartarelli  

 277 pp, paperback

As I said at the outset, Game of Mirrors is the 18th installment in Camilleri's Montalbano series, and from day one I've thoroughly enjoyed each and every book.  That hasn't changed, although it does seem to me that Camilleri has taken a more serious direction this time around.  Salvo is still Salvo though, still eating at Enzo's trattoria, still taking time to meditate on his rock, and still getting in trouble with the ladies while Livia isn't around.  This time it's his new neighbor, the knock-out Signora Liliana Lombardo.  

As usual, Montalbano's strange dream opens the novel, interrupted (thankfully) by a call reporting that a bomb has gone off somewhere.  No one is hurt, thank goodness, but trying to discover who set it off and why is the squad's major challenge.  As the investigation proceeds, Liliana is doing all she can to seduce the Inspector both publicly and privately, leading Salvo to question her motivation.  Not that he's not an attractive man, but still -- even to him she's overdoing it.  While the bombing investigation proceeds, Salvo finds himself under fire from his TV-reporter nemesis Ragonese, but when things start to escalate and dead bodies start turning up, Salvo realizes that someone really has it in for him.  By the time things come to this point, the hunt is on for exactly who this might be, and more specifically, why Salvo himself has become a target.  He is, in short, "faced with a a series of occurrences without any apparent reason behind them." 

Reading this novel, you might notice that this book isn't quite as funny or as critical as the past installments have been and that here the focus seems to be much more on trying to connect the dots between a series of strange crimes.  At the same time, the story has all the same characters, relationships, and dialogue that together with Montalbano's quirkiness have kept me reading through eighteen books.  I think what I enjoy most about this book beyond the usual craziness and the convoluted crimes is Camilleri's flair for catching the people whom one might run into on the streets.  There's a great scene (184,185), for example,  where an old man is sitting in a building's courtyard, smoking a pipe, complaining that he doesn't talk to his daughter because she doesn't want him smoking inside the house.  The old guy is just so perfectly captured here that you can't help but laugh, especially when he punctuates his complaints by spitting "a clot of dense brown material that looked like prune jam."   But please, PLEASE do not let this book be your first introduction to Camilleri's novels -- you will have missed precisely what makes these books so wonderful and so worth the wait for each and every new book.  Getting back to the oddball combination of realistic crazy people in these books is the highlight of each installment.  I will be SO incredibly bummed when this series is over.  

And now, to the new guy, Antonio Manzani and his Black Run.  Frankly, I feel a bit badly about writing 

9780062310040

HarperCollins, 2015

originally published 2013 as Pista nera

translated by Antony Shugaar

255 pp

hardcover

about the two books in the same space, because reading the two is really like reading apples and oranges, if you'll excuse the borrowing of the cliché.  On the back cover, there's a blurb by Camilleri which reads

"Manzini devotes more space to his characters than to events, and the detective story is a pretext for talking brilliantly about Italian society."

and I would have to agree with him wholeheartedly.  Set in the alpine mountains of Val D'Aosta in Italy, the book starts off with a gruesome scene, beginning with a snocat operator  making his way in the dark down  a mountain ski track heading into the village of Crest at the Champoluc ski resort.  He's singing out loud, "hitting the high notes," while cheerfully listening to Ligabue on the radio.  Suddenly, he realizes that the snocat has hit something.  He gets out, and notices feathers being blown about by the wind.  Still uncomprehending, he walks on, until he runs into an "enormous" red stain, "churned into the white blanket of snow."  The next look he takes has him throwing up -- and this is where we meet Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone, who is awakened during a sound sleep and sent out to have a look.  The discovery of a mangled body puts Schiavone in charge of a case that has any number of potential suspects once the dead person is identified.

Schiavone is not, I repeat NOT, your typical crime-solving Chief Inspector. For one thing, he has this bizarre habit of meeting a person and giving them some sort of animal equivalent in his head, genus, species, order, suborder. He's prone to ridicule those who serve underneath him if he finds them lacking.  He is a definite ladies' man but at the same time, comes off as a misogynist; he is also prone to using violence or threats as a means of putting fear into people.  He scoffs at the people of Val D'Aosta as they seem to be beneath him somehow, and he's crooked.   Everything gets compared to Rome, where he'd previously worked before he was sent seemingly into exile where he is right now.  The story of what happened in Rome has to wait until later in the book, but when it comes out, it does sort of give you an idea of why he became what I called an "asshat" at the beginning of this post.  However, he is very, very good at what he does even if you don't agree with his methods or you don't think that's how cops ought to work, and by the end of the book, I actually felt kind of sorry for the guy.  In coming to understand him, something popped out at me right as the book was about to end, where the author describes him as someone who was 

"...struggling to leave behind the ugliest things he'd lived through. Who was trying to forget the evil committed and the evil received. The blood, the screams, the dead -- who presented themselves behind his eyelids every time he shut his eyes." 

He finds himself in "a swamp," which "was always there," where

"... the boundary between good and evil, between right and wrong, no longer exists. And there are no nuances in the swamp. Either you plunge in headfirst or you stay out. There is no middle ground."

While the mystery itself is kind of run of the mill,  as far as the bigger picture goes as Camilleri says, the focus is all on the characters.  As he also notes, Manzini doesn't hesitate to draw attention to problems in "Italian society," which I'll leave the reader to discover.  The bottom line to me is that  while it is definitely tough to warm up to Schiavone until you see where he's coming from, I'm drawn way more to character than to plot so Black Run is most definitely in my wheelhouse.  Personally, I think that readers who've given low ratings to this novel are looking more for a thriller sort of thing that they didn't get and that perhaps they've sort of misunderstood Manzini's emphasis on his main character.  Oh well.  I thought it was a fine debut series novel and I will definitely be waiting for the next one.

crime fiction from Italy

coming soon to a bookstore near you: Smaller and Smaller Circles, by F.H. Batacan

9781616953980
Soho Crime, 2015
357 pp

hardcover (thank you, Soho!!)

In the acknowledgements section of this book the author writes

"The first time I wrote this book -- in 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties -- I was angry: angry about my job, about the state of my country, about the callousness, complacency and corruption that had dragged it there.

The second time I wrote this book -- in 2013, in my forties, having moved back home with my infant son -- I found myself even angrier"  about the state of my country, which seemed even worse than it was in 1996, and about the callousness, complacency and corruption that kept it there."

I'm here to tell you that a lot of that anger shows up in this novel.  And that's a good thing. Let's face it...serial killer novels these days are a dime a dozen, so there has to be something to differentiate the good ones from the ho-hum and the same old same old.  Author F.H. Batacan has found the way to do it.  Her  book Smaller and Smaller Circles (out August 18th)  is not your average hunt-for-the-serial-killer story, but rather a look at how politics, corruption, the church, and the desire for power all get in the way of getting to the truth.  It also examines failure on the part of officials to take action because of the view that some lives aren't as valuable as others and just aren't worth doing anything about.  Heck, I got angry reading this book, and I don't even live in the Philippines.

Luckily, in this story, someone actually cares.  It's 1997, and the body of a young boy is discovered in the dump of Payatas, a place which, according to the blurb is  "northeast of Manila's Quezon city...one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose laws enforcement is already stretched thin, ... and rife with corruption." The boy has been eviscerated and the face peeled off. As it turns out, the discovery of this boy raises the body count of similar dead boys to six, a fact noted by Father Gus Saenz, a Jesuit priest who is also a leading forensic anthropologist.  Saenz, along with his partner and protégé Father Jerome Lucero, have been asked to help end this series of killings by Director Lastimosa of the National Bureau of Investigations (NBI). The director understands that the police are not very thorough, that "life is cheap in that part of the city," and that  "little police effort ... is expended toward following up" if the victims are not "wealthy or influential."  If the killer is to be stopped, it will have to be done a different way. However, the Director finds himself at times at political odds with the people around him, some of whom had been hoping for a different man for the position and who are antagonistic toward their boss.  Nevertheless, the Director is adamant that if anyone can help, it's Saenz and Lucero, but they too have their problems, including funding to keep their small laboratory going and the fact that those who head up the police departments refuse to believe that there are any serial killers roaming around. But Lastimosa, Saenz and Lucero have no time to waste -- once they've established a profile of their killer and determine a pattern based on death dates, they know that another killing is just on the horizon.   Saenz is also fighting the Church because of its refusal to sideline a child-molesting priest; the Church refuses to give the man over to authorities to face punishment for his crimes.  Smaller and Smaller Circles is the story of the efforts made to catch a killer despite all of the official (and other) obstacles thrown in the paths of the small handful of people who actually care.  

The story is told via third-person narrative, interrupted every so often with the thoughts of the killer,whose identity remains hidden throughout the story.  Truth be told, this is the gimmicky part of this novel, but fortunately, being inside the killer's head only lasts for a short time here and there. Most of the book centers on the ongoing investigation, but the author manages to weave a great deal of social commentary into her story -- the lackadaisical attitudes of the police; the corruption which has been endemic to this country,  the crimes committed by the highest authorities and politicians in the country, the rampant poverty and extremely poor, often deplorable social conditions faced by many who live there, the connection between Church and secular politics, and much more.  In my opinion, Batacan has very deftly used the medium of crime fiction to give us her take on what's kept her angry enough to write this book.   I will say that for me, the discovery of the "who" was sort of an anti-climax, almost as if the author got to the point of having to tie the various storylines together but wasn't quite sure about how to do it.  On the other hand, it really didn't matter because like most novels I really like, it's much more about the getting there than the actual solution of the crime. I'll also say that Ms. Batacan writes very well, lifting this novel well above most serial-killer novels that are on bookstore shelves as we speak.  

Smaller and Smaller Circles is, for serious fans of crime fiction, a book not to be missed.

"a ballet of the wearing of the nerves": Deep Water, by Patricia Highsmith

9780393324556
Norton, 2003
originally published 1957
271 pp

paperback

"...I don't waste my time punching people on the nose. If I really don't like somebody, I kill him."

So sayeth Victor (Vic) VanAllen,  the main character in Deep Water, which Highsmith described in her Cahier (via Andrew Wilson's great biography Beautiful Shadow) as  focusing on " 'the sniping, griping ambushing,' that can exist between people who are supposed to love one another, locked together 'in a ballet of the wearing of the nerves.' "  Frankly, that describes this book perfectly, but that "wearing of the nerves" is also a great way to describe how I felt during and after reading this novel. Once again, Highsmith had me feeling sympathetic toward a character not too unlike Tom Ripley; even though eventually I'm supposed to be outraged and shocked at things he does, it's still sort of difficult not to feel something for this guy.   I'm really starting to worry about myself here, and that is not a joke.  If there is one thing at which Highsmith excels -- actually there are many things but for me this one is numero uno -- it is her ability to make a reader to see things from the points of view of the psychopaths who populate her books. To them, what they're doing makes perfectly good sense -- we may not believe in real life that murder is any sort of solution, but somehow it's like you can seriously understand why her  people feel compelled to do the things they do.  I often find myself rooting for these people to succeed -- and then I realize that I'm cheering on a murderer who has not one  iota of conscience. But I can't help it. And that's why I'm a wee bit concerned.

The reason Vic comes across as a sympathetic character is because of his wife, Melinda. Vic runs a small but very successful press that produces only a few books each year, beautifully bound but dreadfully dull. The books that come from his press tend to reflect Vic's character -- on the outside he is well put together, but inside he is dreadfully dull, for example, raising snails as a hobby, also into such pastimes as "bee culture" and "cheesemaking."  Melinda, who doesn't at all share his interests, carries on with a number of men, flaunting them in Vic's face by either bringing them home and having them stay until the wee hours of the morning or not coming home because she's stayed with them; she also cares very little that their neighbors and circle of friends all get what's going on. Vic, whose philosophy is that

"everybody -- therefore a wife -- should be allowed to do as she pleased, provided no one else was hurt and that she fulfilled her main responsibilities, which were to manage a household and to take care of her offspring..."  

realizes that because Melinda has a reputation for playing around,  he's acquired a near-saintlike reputation among their acquaintances, which as Highsmith tells us, "flattered Vic's ego."  However, he also admittedly has "an evil side," that he keeps "well hidden."  For example,  he takes near-joyous pleasure in telling one of Melinda's new boyfriends that he'd actually killed one of her previous lovers (referencing an actual murder that has been in the newspaper), a joke that turns into rumor and circulates through Vic's friends. It's not true, of course, but it sends the boyfriend running yet keeps him wondering.  Vic outwardly turns a blind eye to what's going on with Melinda and her series of lovers, but inwardly he's seething -- and this being a Highsmith novel, that pressure isn't going to stay bottled up for long.  When Melinda's latest boy toy is invited to play the piano during a neighbor's party, somehow he ends up dead in the swimming pool -- and Melinda begins to wonder if Vic may have had a hand in his death.

Deep Water is Highsmith's exploration of  "the diseases produced by sexual repression;" as she notes (again from Beautiful Shadow), 

"From this unnatural abstinence evil things arise, like peculiar vermin in a stagnant well: fantasies and hatreds, and the accursed tendency to attribute evil motivations to charitable and friendly acts" (101)

and once again, she takes her idea and runs with it, this time creating a nearly-perfect study of a marriage that's stagnating and in decline. Vic is almost too perfect -- a great dad, househusband, sympathetic employer, and perfect neighbor -- as opposed to Melinda, whose flaws we see from the outset. It is definitely not hard at all to feel pity for Vic as he puts up with his wife and her multiple affairs, and this is really where Highsmith gets into my head.  I always seem to side with the "bad" guy; she makes it so easy to understand his point of view and actually feel a huge amount of sympathy for him.

Highsmith isn't for everyone, and as I'm discovering, it's becoming sort of necessary to space out reading her novels to maintain a measure of my own sanity. At the end of this one, I put the book down and walked away from it in a funk.  She has this way of burrowing deeply into my skin as she burrows into the minds of others -- and it's not always a comfortable feeling, even though so far, I'm absolutely loving her work.  It's not often an author can have that effect on me, but she manages to do so with every novel, at least so far.

definitely and most highly recommended.   Strangers on a Train or The Talented Mr. Ripley are her most famous books, but this one will definitely have anyone squirming throughout the story.