The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas

I’d intended to read Fred Vargas ever since Emma first mentioned this French crime writer, so when she announced that The Chalk Circle Man was one of my Virtual Gift Exchange books, I had no more excuses. Well here it is, almost 6 months later, and I finally read the book–the first of a series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg.

The book begins with Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg freshly transferred as the new commissaire to the 5th Arrondissement in Paris. Adamsberg is originally from the Pyrenees and there’s the general impression from those he works with that he’s more than a bit strange and ”primitive,”  but in reality it’s truer to say that he’s not exactly the most socially competent person on the planet. He certainly hasn’t been promoted due to any glibness or ability to swing office politics in his favour. No, he’s been promoted thanks to a wonderful reputation gained through the solution of four murders.

In some ways, The Chalk Circle Man doesn’t feel as though it’s the first book in a series. There’s a definite sensation that we’ve slipped into a certain time slot of Adamsberg’s life. He’s 45,  in love with Camille, a free-spirited woman who has disappeared by choice, and even though Adamsberg had casual affairs, Camille is always in the back of his mind. The book begins with Adamsberg solving the murder of a textile merchant in his own inimitable fashion. It’s the conclusion to this case that begins to build respect for Adamsberg from his skeptical colleagues.

Adamsberg’s next case involves the appearance of blue chalk circles drawn in the wee hours in various sections of Paris. Items, seemingly random items, are placed within these circles, and while it’s the general consensus that the circles, accompanied by a cryptic message, are the work of some harmless nutcase, Adamsberg is clearly disturbed by them, and he fears the worse. With the discovery of a body inside one of the blue circles, Adamsberg’s predictions are realized. Adamsberg has a serial killer on his hands.

Series books rely on a main character strong enough and interesting enough to pull in a repeat audience. I’ve always seen the appeal of a series character–after all, if you, the writer create a really interesting character–a police inspector let’s say or a PI, why drop them once the last page is turned? The most successful series balance the crime solving with the main character’s personal life, so we readers buy the next book–not because we want to read about the next crime, necessarily, but because we want to hang out with the main character again. And again. Adamsberg is a very appealing character, and his unique approach to crime struck a chord for this reader. There’s a scene early on between Adamsberg and Inspector Danglard (who incidentally is the perfect foil for Adamsberg) in which the two men discuss the subject of murder, and Adamsberg brings up a story from his past, concerning a dog, and he tells this story to illustrate some fundamental beliefs:

“The point of this story, Danglard, is the evidence of cruelty in that little kid. I’d known for a long time before this happened that there was something wrong with him, and that was what it was: cruelty. But I can assure you that his face was quite normal, he didn’t have wicked features at all. On the contrary, he was a nice-looking boy, but he oozed cruelty. Just don’t ask me any more, I can’t tell you any more. But eight years later, he pushed a grandfather clock over on top of an old woman and killed her. And most premeditated murders require the murderer not only to feel exasperation or humiliation, or to have some neurosis, or whatever, but also cruelty, pleasure in inflicting suffering, pleasure in the victim’s agony and pleas for mercy, pleasure in tearing the victim apart. It’s true, it doesn’t always appear obvious in a person, but you feel at least that there’s something wrong, that something else is gathering underneath, a kind of growth. And sometimes that turns out to be cruelty–do you see what I’m saying? A kind of growth.”

“That’s against my principles,” said Danglard, a bit stiffly. “I don’t claim my principles are the only ones, but I don’t believe there are people marked out for this or that, like cows with tags on their ears, or that you can pick out murderers by intuition. I know, I’m saying something boring and unexciting, but what we do is we proceed by following clues, and we arrest when we’ve got proof. Gut feelings about ‘growths’ scare me stiff. That way you start off following hunches, and end up with arbitrary sentences and miscarriages of justice.”

Both men have stories to illustrate their theories about crime and murderers, and these stories, which involved early cases in their respective careers, shaped their thinking. Adamsberg has a level of intuition about crime, so for example, he immediately intuits that there’s something sinister about the blue chalk circles while everyone else think they’re just the work of some harmless nut. Adamsberg, however, does not rely on intuition alone. There were several times in the novel when one small detail doesn’t quite fit with the established narrative of crime, and even though other people are satisfied with the solution, Adamsberg is not.

The crimes in The Chalk Circle Man are conducted by a somewhat implausibly adaptable and clever killer, and the best parts of the novel are the refreshingly bizarre characters connected to the story.  Adamsberg has his own unique approach to solving crimes (which involves a great deal of solitary rumination and scribbling), and his sidekick, the melancholy Danglard, who doesn’t quite know what to think of his new boss, is a single parent swamped with children–including one dumped on him by his ex and her lover. There’s also unpredictable oceanographer Mathilde Forestier who has temporarily given up watching fish to watch humans, including the Chalk Circle Man. She believes in salvaging lost souls–not by charity or pity, but with her warm personality and  generous nature. She has already salvaged seventy year-old Clémence, a creepy spinster who obsesses over the personal ads, now employed to do a little work for Mathilde. Mathilde meets a blind man, Charles Reyer, seemingly by accident, who’s struggling with bitterness at his condition, and she rents a room to him while refusing to allow him to wallow in self-pity.  All these characters are somehow or another connected to the case, and the characters are so much fun, that they lighten the darkness of the crimes.

Lucky for me, there are 8 Commissaire Adamsberg novels in English from Vargas (including one graphic novel & the eighth in the series to appear this year). I have some catching up to do. So many thanks to Emma for choosing The Chalk Circle Man.

Translated by Siân Reynolds.

A White Arrest by Ken Bruen

“See, you gotta let ‘em see you’re the most brutal fuckin’ thing they’ve ever seen.”

I read and thoroughly enjoyed London Boulevard some time ago, so when I was offered a copy of A White Arrest, I grabbed it. After finishing London Boulevard, I picked over this author’s back list and discovered that A White Arrest,  the first part of a trilogy followed by Taming the Alien and The McDead, was OOP and pricey if you could find it. Now back in a $9.99 kindle version is the entire The White Arrest trilogy. People can bitch as much as they want about the evils of the kindle, but for many crime fans, electronic readers have brought back some fantastic titles. Case in point.

First things first: A White Arrest, and a term I’ll admit I’d never heard before, is  an arrest that is “the pinnacle of a policeman’s career,” and now that I’ve given that description, I’ll say that it seems extremely unlikely that Irish Detective Sgt. Brant, the antihero of this story is ever going to get white anything. That’s because Brant isn’t exactly a by-the-book copper. He’s crude, coarse, a sexist who leaves a trail of complaints in his wake. Brant’s boss is Chief Inspector Roberts, and they are known in the department as R and B:

The relationship twixt R and B always seemed a beat away from beating. You felt like they’d like nothing better than to get down and kick the living shit out of each other. Which had happened. The tension between them was the chemistry that glued. Co-dependency was another word for it.

Both men have hellish personal lives. Roberts has a fancy house and an even fancier wife, and together they have a teenage daughter who just got kicked out of private school. While Fiona Roberts pulls the disapproving Ice Queen routine on her hubbie on a nightly basis, her afternoons are spent on the sly buying sex from studley, oiled young men. Whereas Roberts’ expensive and complicated home life is poison, Brant is now single and his flat is a “one room basic unit. He kept it tidy in case he scored.”

To complicate matters, Brant fancies Fiona Roberts, and there is some debate whether this misplaced lust is genuine or whether it springs from a desire to cuckold Roberts. Every interaction between Brant and Roberts is fraught with tension–Brant, for example, insists on calling Roberts Guv–even though he’s told repeatedly to knock it off. On another level (and one I’ll admit I delighted in) there’s an ongoing literary duel between the two coppers about the best crime writer. Brant is a fan of Ed McBain, and he owns a prize collection of his favorite author’s books in his grotty council flat in Kennington with “one whole wall devoted entirely to books.” He owns the entire Ed McBain series, “two shelves were given to the Matthew Hope series” and the bottom shelf is the home of the Evan Hunter books–or as Brant likes to think “the three faces of the author.” When Brant isn’t quoting McBain, he’s trying to get Roberts to read him, and the fact that Roberts rejects McBain only underscores Brant’s view of his boss’s serious character flaws. Here’s Brant trying, unsuccessfully once again, to get his boss to read McBain.

I’ve another McBain for you.

He tossed a dog-eared book on to the desk. It looked like it had been chewed, laundered and beaten. Roberts didn’t touch it, said: “You found this in the toilet, that’s it?”

“It’s his best yet. No one does the Police Procedural like Ed.”

Roberts leaned over to see the title. A food stain had obliterated that. At least he hoped it was food. he said: “You should support the home side, read Bill James, get the humorous side of policing.”

“For humour sir, I have you–my humour cup overflowed!”

In spite of the fact that tension flows between Brant and Roberts, they work well together, and oddly enough Roberts protects Brant at crucial moments. When the novel begins Brant is in no small amount of trouble.

All his little perks, minor scams, interrogation techniques, his attitude, guaranteed he’d be shafted before the year was out. A grand sweep of the Met was coming and they were top of the list. Unless … Unless they pulled off the big one, the legendary White Arrest that every copper dreamed about. The veritable Oscar, the Nobel prize of criminology. Like nailing the Yorkshire Ripper or finding the shit-head Lucan. It would clear the books, put you on page one, get you on them chat shows. Have Littlejohn kiss yer arse, ah!

So those are our coppers, well a couple of them. There’s also WPC Falls “the wet dream of the nick. Leastways she hoped she was. A little over 5′ 6″ she was the loaded side of plump, but it suited her.” And there’s young, weak Brant wannabe PC Tone who imitates his idol and feels “dizzy with the macho-ness” of unaccustomed phrases and actions.

Now to the crimes: there are no less than two serial murders taking place. A gang of young racist thugs begin by murdering drug dealers and then move on to other targets, and then there’s a total psycho who’s bumping off members of the England cricket team in spectacularly exotic fashion. R & B are on the trail of the killers with Brant determined to get his White Arrest and wipe his dirty slate clean.

In spite of Brant’s abrasive, coarse personality, there’s the core of twisted idealism alive and well festering in his perverse heart. In between ripping off pizza delivery boys, and harassing Indian newspaper vendors, Brant, a crime film and fiction aficionado freely quotes from some of his favourites and would like to style himself on the Ed McBain novels:

For some perverse reason he finds that Ed McBain in the police procedural comes closest to the way it should have been. Long after he’d dismissed Dixon as a wanker. his heart still bore the imprint of Dock Green. In Brant’s words, television had gone the way of Peckham. Right down the shitter.

It’s through Brant that one of the novel’s sub themes is most evident, and that’s the way we tend to need heroes in our lives; there’s PC Tone whose desire to emulate Detective Sgt. Brant leads him on a deadly path, there’s Brant who really wants to be a cop in Ed McBain’s 87th precinct, there’s Roberts who relates to the heroes of film noir, and vicious thug Kevin’s emulation of Charles Bronson in Death Wish and Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. On that note, here’s a free tip: want to know what someone really thinks?… ask ‘em who their heroes are before you take them home to meet mother.

 I read a lot of crime, and sometimes when you read a lot of one particular genre, books blend into each other and the characters and story threads blur: missing teenage girls who walked away from a party and never came back, alcoholic policemen who turn up disheveled and red-eyed for roll-call, the detective who must beat the clock before a sicko-serial killer offs his next squirming teenage captive…. well you get my drift. A White Arrest crackles with originality and delivers sordid details of those on both sides of the fence–Brant is a flawed morally reprehensible human being whose, let’s say, unconventional approaches to crime solution leave a lot to be desired, but he is also at the same time a very unique and very real creation. Brant does awful things to people he deems weaker than himself, but even so there is some sort of moral line he won’t cross. To those who work with Brant, that moral line may seem non-existent, but it’s there nonetheless. Brant with his gleefully nasty larger-than-life-in-your-face-and fuck-you-if-you-don’t-like-it personality is someone I want to read about. Ken Bruen added just enough tiny details to Brant’s character to salvage him from a total wipe-out to someone who has a few deeply hidden human traits that are rarely shown to those within the department. Highly recommended for those who like their crime dirty, dark  and hard-boiled with just the right touch of black humour.

For those interested, to date there are seven novels in the Brant series.

Review copy

Skin by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

“Somebody had a seriously screwed-up upbringing.”

Last year I read and throughly enjoyed the hard-boiled crime novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, from authors Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins. Mickey Spillane is best remembered for his iconic bad-ass anti-hero, Mike Hammer (I, the Jury, My Gun is Quick), and when Spillane died in 2006, he left several unfinished manuscripts along with the instructions that they should go to his long-time friend, Max Allan Collins (The Road to Perdition). The good news for Hammer fans is that Max Allan Collins, Spillane’s natural successor, has put those manuscripts to good use, and as a result new work is surfacing: Kiss Her Goodbye, The Goliath Bone, Dead Street, The Consummata are all Spillane/Collins collaborations. Skin, a short story is the latest work to appear. Mickey Spillane apparently began the story in 2005, and chronologically it places Hammer in one of his last cases before retirement. It’s a slight work in comparison to the other, weighty novels in which violent action slams down hard on the heels of more violent action. Still for fans, Skin, which runs at round 41 pages, brings back Hammer, and I for one am always glad to see this character. Yes, he’s labeled with a lot of very PC-unfriendly words, but for this reader, he’s also a breath of fresh air.

The story begins with Hammer and Pat Chamber, captain of Homicide staring at a mangled pile of flesh that looks like “roadkill” located just off the side of the road. This is Hammer’s grisly find, and it’s an incident which underscores the idea that Hammer is a trouble-magnet.  Along with the unidentifiable flesh is one intact hand, and that hand belongs to missing Broadway producer, Victor King.

Hammer meets King’s wife who also happens to be the prime suspect in her husband’s disappearance. She’s not exactly ruffled by her husband’s disappearance:

The next morning around ten, I was sitting in the lavish living room of Victor King’s penthouse apartment on upper Fifth Avenue, with a view on Central Park. The furnishings were vintage art deco and what wasn’t white was black, and what wasn’t blond wood was chrome, and everything had curves. Including Mrs. King, who was also blond. As expected, she was a very lovely twenty-five or so; the stark red of her silk pajamas matched her finger-and toenails, jumping out at me  like the devil against the white of the couch, her legs crossed, a hand caressing a knee. Her mouth was similarly red, but her eyes were baby blue with blue eye shadow and a sleepy look, like a cheerleader on her third  beer after the big game.

I couldn’t imagine any man wanting to sleep with her, unless he was heterosexual and had a pulse.

So the grieving widow puts Hammer on retainer and he takes the case….

Since this is a short story, and an action-packed one at that, there isn’t much down time and the scenes seem to spin through at warped speed. Soon Hammer has a good idea of what kind of monster he’s hunting, and he delivers his own special Hammer-style justice which has very little to do with judges and courtrooms.

The gristly, hyper-violent Skin places Hammer close to retirement, and in this story, he clearly knows his physical limitations. He hasn’t changed, but he has aged, and so the story’s title has several meanings. Hammer still feels strong sexual attraction to women, but now he’s at the point that he’s not going to take the bait. Instead it’s all business, and Hammer doesn’t believe in leaving loose strings behind.

Review copy from the publisher.

Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

Although the murder that takes place at Heron’s Park Hospital could, in theory, offer any number of suspects, the crime novel,  Green for Danger, set in WWII, qualifies as a classic ‘closed-circle of suspects’ mystery. The book begins by lining up the main characters and exactly how they find themselves at Heron’s Park in Kent. Heron’s Park, a former children’s sanitorium, now serves as a military hospital, and our motley cast of characters are posted there for the war. 

One of the main characters, Gervase Eden has a lucrative practice in Harley Street where his patients are mostly lonely, wealthy women. He’s a bit of a playboy and is not averse to injecting a patient with water and charging steeply for it.  Eden is married, but this relationship has faded into the background–only to be conveniently recalled when a recently-ditched inamorata becomes too pushy. Dr. Moon is an older well-loved local surgeon. A long-time widower whose only child died, Moon doesn’t mind being wrenched away from his lonely home and sent to Heron’s Park. Mr Barnes is the local anesthesiologist who attended a child who subsequently died during a surgery. He’s received anonymous letters that blame him for the death, and he looks forward to his time in the army as a chance to escape the scandal and the parents’ accusations.

Three of the other possible suspects are V.A.Ds. (Volunteer Aid Detachment–civilian women who volunteered for the war effort.) In this case, the V.A.Ds are given a little nursing training and set loose in Heron’s Park Hospital. These young women are: Jane Woods, known as Woody, Esther Sanson, who becomes a V.A.D. partly to escape from her overbearing parent, and Frederica Linley, who volunteered to be a V.A.D to escape from her new stepmother. There’s also a Sister Marion Bates, a civilian nurse who looks forward to working in a military hospital as a way to possibly meet “some nice officers.”

Britain is at war, and there may be bombs hailing down from the skies, but still regular life goes on, and the hospital–a place where a diverse set of characters are cast together–is a hotbed of passion and jealousy. Marion Bates had a fling with Gervase, and she’s still besotted with him even though he ended the relationship and is now chasing after Woody. Barnes and Frederica Linley are planning to marry, but recently Frederica’s eyes have been wandering off towards Gervase, and the attraction is mutual. Strange little emotional encounters between doctors and nurses take place next to sedated, injured patients. There’s a lot going on at Heron’s Park….

One night, after a particularly bad air-raid, local postman, Joseph Higgins, who was part of a rescue squad, is brought in with a fractured femur.  He’s scheduled the next day for what should be a fairly routine operation, but inside the operating room something goes horribly wrong. What at first appears to be an anesthetic death inquiry turns into a murder case. Inspector Cockrill, wearing a “disreputable old mackintosh,” is summoned to Heron’s Park and so begins his investigation.  Cockrill, an easy man to underestimate, knows that another murder will soon follow the first….

Green for Danger which hails from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction should appeal to fans of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Although murders are committed, the violence, such as it is, is rather clinical, and the novel rests on Cockrill’s detection skills. It’s impossible to read the book without joining in with the investigation, and I’ll admit I didn’t guess the identity of the murderer. While the characters are drawn nicely, they are mostly types–and for this reason, in spite of the fact that this is WWII with bombs dropping from the sky, the plot has the flavour of a British country house mystery–and perhaps this is partly because the characters are largely from the upper classes with a slightly condescending peek towards the working classes. 

Although the characters are types rather than fully-fleshed characters, Green for Danger reflects the times. At one point, Dr Moon makes a poignant observation to Barnes about his son who was killed in an accident years earlier:

Well, well–I can find it in my heart now to be grateful, I suppose; now that the war’s come, I mean. He’d have been of age, you know; I’d have had to send him off, to see him go off to France or the East or somewhere… I’d have had to wait and hunger for news of him; he might have been posted missing, perhaps or killed, and without any news of what had really happened. It’s that telegram business…. I don’t think I could have borne it, if she’d been alive. The gods act in their own mysterious ways, don’t they, Barney? Who would have thought in all these years that I could ever have found it in my heart to say that I was glad that my boy had been killed?

In the Introduction Marion Babson explains that Green for Danger was one of the “foremost” books of the period which depicted “ordinary life under the blitz.” The Introduction includes some biographical information about the author along with some wonderful quotes about life working and living during the blitz. Christianna Brand’s first novel, Death in High Heels was a best seller in its time after which she was “informed by the authorities” (sounds ominous) that the most valuable war effort she could contribute was to keep writing books as she was “bringing desperately needed foreign currency into the country.”  For those interested, Green for Danger was made into a film starring Alastair Sim as the imitable Inspector Cockrill.

My copy courtesy of the publisher, Mysterious Press and Open Road Media.

The Retribution by Val McDermid

“I won’t deny that the people who do this kind of thing fascinate me. The more disturbed they are, the more I want to figure out what makes them tick.”

I’ve been reading Val McDermid for several years now, and that makes me a fan. I first came across this versatile author through the book The Mermaids Singing which was, as it turned out, the first in a new series. This series teamed together psychologist Tony Hill with DI Carol Jordan, and these books then formed the basis for a television series, Wire in the Blood. I use the term versatile when describing McDermid because while she’s a prolific writer who sticks to crime, she’s capable of seismic shifts while still keeping within the perimeters of the genre. She’s written a number of stand-alone psychological novels ( A Darker Domain, A Place of Execution) which are comparable to the best psychological novels written by Ruth Rendell, and in 2011 she wrote the crime novel Trick of the Dark which featured a lesbian detective. This novel that may well herald a new series character. There’s also the Kate Brannigan series–a series which features a Manchester PI –much lighter fare for McDermid, and the Lindsay Gordon series. It’s all a matter of taste of course, but I think McDermid’s stand-alone psychological crime novels are her finest work.

The Retribution is the seventh novel in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series. Since a series detective novel covers the personal life of its main character(s), The Retribution is no exception. Life is marching on for both Carol and Tony. She has just taken a new job in West Mercia and so she’s on the verge of moving out of Bradford when two things stop her in her tracks:

1) A serial killer stalks the streets of Bradford picking up prostitutes, torturing and killing them

2) The bold prison escape of Jacko Vance who’s hell-bent on revenge against Tony and Carol.

Jacko Vance appeared in the second novel in the Hill/Jordan series, Wire in the Blood. While he savagely murdered seventeen teenage girls and a police officer, only one charge stuck, but it’s a life sentence, nonetheless. The novel begins with Jacko Vance’s intricate escape plan from the lower security prison he’s managed to fanangle his way into, and then smoothly segues into the discovery of the corpse of the third victim of Bradford’s newest serial killer.

The novel includes tidbits of forensic information for crime groupies as well as revealing the complexities of the inner-thoughts of two homicidal maniacs. Jacko Vance is a good-looking, manipulative former TV personality who was at one time an athlete until an accident left him with just one arm. Vance is also extremely intelligent:

Escapology was like magic. The secret lay in misdirection. Some escapes were accomplished by creating an illusion through careful planning; others were genuine feats of strength, daring and flexibility, both mental and physical; and some were mixtures of both. But whatever the methods, the element of misdirection always played a crucial role. And when it came to misdirection, he called no man his master.

Best of all was the misdirection that the onlooker didn’t even know was happening. To accomplish that you had to make your diversion blend into the spectrum of normal.

Makes me think of the way Ted Bundy wore a fake sling or a cast in order to sway his victims into seeing him as potentially harmless and in need of help.

 As an evil creation, Jacko Vance strains the bounds of believability at times. This is always a danger when writing this type of novel, and while serial killers can be brilliant, cunning, and athletic all in one, at times Jacko seems more suited for an X-man villain than anything else. While The Retribution is a page-turner, no argument here, the details are gruesome. The novel is certainly concerned with the why, but the how also plays no small role. The term ‘crime novel’ covers such a vast range of material, and those who like cozies will keel over if they read this. No comforting tea and crumpets, no bloodless crimes that occur off the page. Some pages are like reading a crime scene report, so be prepared.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via netgalley.

1222 by Anne Holt

2011 brought a new-found appreciation for Icelandic literature in the form of Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets and The Ambassador, so fast forward to December 2011 and me thinking it would be a good idea to read something seasonal. No Xmas cosy for me. Instead I read 1222 by Norwegian crime author Anne Holt. It’s the sort of novel that makes you glad you’re inside with the doors locked and not stuck in a snowstorm somewhere freezing in Norway.

The action starts immediately with a dramatic train derailment at Finse 1222. We’re in Northern Norway on a trip from Oslo to Bergen in the middle of the worst blizzard recorded in over 100 years. The story is told by passenger, Hanne Wilhelmsen, a  former police officer who left the force after being paralyzed by a bullet still lodged in the spine. Hanne probably never had the best personality, and now she’s even more prickly.  More of that later.

The stunned passengers are rescued and removed from the train and taken to a nearby centuries old hotel. There’s plenty of food, and it’s warm, so all the 268 people have to do is wait out the storm. They should feel fortunate as only one person died in the derailment. Yes there are an assortment of sundry injuries, but it could have been worse, and since a number of doctors were on board the train to attend a conference, at least there’s medical help available. That’s just as well as the passengers and train crew are completely stranded and isolated. Finse 1222 is only accessible by train.  Due to the snow storm,  the televisions in the hotel aren’t working and snowploughs cannot get to the hotel.  

Right after the rescue, it becomes obvious to Hanne that there’s something fishy going on. The train held some anonymous VIP who stayed in a separate carriage surrounded by armed guards, and this person now occupies the top floor of the hotel. Any attempt to connect with the mysterious guest ends up with threats of violence. Nice.

Within just a few short hours, an execution-style murder takes place, and while Hanne and a few other people at the hotel are in on the fact that one of the guests was shot at point-blank range, the truth is, at first, kept from the general hotel population in order to avoid panic. Think stampede.

Since Hanne is a retired police officer, and a famous one at that, she’s expected to take over the investigation by the hotel management. At first she tries to shove the responsibility over to someone else, but when the body count rises and there’s no contact with the outside world in sight, Hanne reluctantly finds herself being dragged back into the world of criminal investigation. Here’s Hanne’s thoughts on the matter:

When it comes to the actual murder, that can wait. There’s no point in starting an investigation here and now. Wait for better weather. Wait for the police. Let them do what they can and this will all be cleared up in no time.

At least that’s what she tells solicitor Geir Rugholmen and hotel manager, Berit Tverre. The few guests who know about the murder can’t understand why Hanne refuses the responsibility of the investigation, but Hanne is one step ahead of everyone else. She reasons that the murderer walks amongst the guests. An overt investigation will provoke panic and paranoia, so she clings to that reason while silently ruminating that an investigation will make the killer nervous.

In the meantime, I thought, there’s a murderer with a heavy calibre weapon wandering around amongst us. In the meantime we can only hope that the intention of the person in question was to murder ** [no spoilers], and that he or she would not dream of harming anyone else. While we are waiting for the police, I thought without saying anything, we could pray to the gods every one of us must believe in that the perpetrator was rational, focused, and did not suspect any of us of knowing who he or she was. And that he or she would have no reason to suspect that anyone might be starting to investigate the case here and now.

The situation in the hotel begins to unravel fast, and Hanne finds that she must use her old skills to whether or not she wants to….

I’ve read some reviews that compare this to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and obviously there are some similarities between these two  ”closed circle of suspect” mysteries. In fact the narrator doesn’t fail to make the connection:

I thought about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. I immediately tried to dismiss the thought. And Then There Were None is a story that doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.

The similarities to Agatha Christie must be acknowledged, but those similarities reside in the set-up, and 1222 is refreshingly bitter thanks to its edgy narrator, Hanne, a woman who’s become anti-social almost to the point of pathology. Hanne doesn’t exactly shine in the personality department. In fact she actively tries to keep people away from her by her taciturn comments. Not that I blame her. Here she is with Geir Rugholmen:

He placed his hands on his hips and looked down his nose at me. That look from those who are standing up, the tall ones, the ones whose bodies work perfectly. Strictly speaking, I think it’s perfectly ok to have mobility problems. I want to be immobile; that’s the way I’ve chosen to live. The chair doesn’t really hamper me significantly in my everyday life. It can be weeks before between the occasions on which I leave my apartment. The problems arise when I am forced to go out. People are just desperate to help me all the time. Lifting, pushing, carrying. That’s why I chose the train. Flying is a complete nightmare, I have to say. The train is simpler. Less touching. Fewer strange hands. The train offers at least some degree of independence.

Until it crashed….

 Added to the tension at the hotel is a anti-muslim nut who manages to whip up fear and paranoia amongst the guests. 1222 is apparently number 8 in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series. The fact that I’m jumping late on board didn’t seem to matter; Hanne’s life was fully explained, so no pieces of the puzzle were missing.

Review copy from the publisher via netgalley.

The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen

“In every investigation, there was always a moment when a detective fervently wished that he could have met his victim when he or she was alive.”

Discovering a new crime fiction series presents a dilemma in the form of the number of new books that I may feel compelled to read, so I tend to approach a new series with some inherent skepticism along the lines of: “What separates this series from other books in the genre? This series has to be good enough, original enough to convince me that I want to commit to the lot.” Enter Carl MØrck and The Keeper of Lost Causes by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen.

Detective Carl MØrck is recovering (and I’ll use that word loosely) from a horrendous shooting incident that left one partner dead and another paralysed. Although he suffered a head wound in the incident, nonetheless, he feels guilty that he didn’t react differently to the violent situation. He’s always been considered a problem by his fellow officers, and he’s certainly not the sort of person anyone would consider a “team player” (a horrible term in my book). With his partners dead or out-of-commission, Carl, depressed and feeling guilty that he survived, presents even more of a problem than usual. His ‘superiors’ would like to get rid of him, but under the circumstances they can’t, so instead, responding to political pressure regarding several cold crimes, Carl’s boss devises a solution to isolate Carl so that he does the least damage to the department and morale.

Called in to talk to his boss, Carl, who’s morose, depressed and suffering from “profound indifference,” is surprised to learn that he’s been given a promotion of sorts. He’s to be the head of Department Q–a department devoted solely to the solution of cold case crimes. Carl soon discovers that the reality is a converted basement office and a ‘department’ of one. Carl’s attitude towards his new assignment is basically to play cards and generally coast out the time until his retirement, but then he’s given an assistant, Assad, a curious character whose murky origins include contacts with the criminal underworld and a taste for unconventional techniques and weaponry.  Assad is ostensibly employed to clean department Q and do the occasional odd-job, but his natural curiosity is contagious. Almost against his will, Carl becomes engaged in a cold case crime file.

Carl divides the stack of files that represent the cold crime cases into three piles, and then selects the case of the disappearance of an up and coming politician, Merete Lynggaard. Merete was an extremely attractive young woman whose bright political future was cut short when she disappeared without a trace while on a ferry years earlier. It’s assumed that she was a suicide, and the only possible witness to what happened is Uffe, Merete’s institutionalised, mentally damaged brother.

It doesn’t take long for Carl to uncover some suspicious circumstances in the case–after all Merete had many political enemies, but the fact that Merete maintained a heavily guarded private life doesn’t help Carl’s investigation a great deal. His methodical investigation, aided and abetted by Assad, slowly peels away layers of the past, and Carl becomes convinced that Merete was a victim of foul play.

It’s imperative that a series character is interesting. In Carl, author Jussi Adler-Olsen has created an original, intriguing and sympathetic character. Carl copes with the sort of personal problems many middle-aged men face: loneliness, an argumentative teen and an inability to approach women. Carl’s clumsy attempts to date a woman caused this reader to wince. Years spent at the mercy of his erratic wife, Vigga, have left Carl in a state of emotional limbo: 

First his wife took off. Then she decided she didn’t want a divorce, but instead took up residence in the allotment garden. Next she went through a whole series of young lovers, and she had the bad habit of ringing Carl to tell him all about them. Then she refused to let her son live with her in the garden cottage any more, and in the throes of puberty the boy had moved back in with Carl.

Vigga is painted as annoying rather than evil. In a moment of stray generosity, we might call Vigga a “free spirit” but it would be more accurate to call her exploitative. She wants her freedom from the constraints of motherhood and marriage, but she expects Carl to fund her latest nonsense (an art gallery which features the ridiculous art she and her young lover create). Carl is unable to tell Vigga to take a hike, and so he responds to her demands and seems unable to resolve his ever-extending commitment to her. Obviously this is a subject that will raise its head in future novels, and it’s an interesting twist to the story. Also the relationship between Assad and Carl grows from annoyance to mutual respect. Carl begins to listen to Assad’s suggestions even as he understands the man’s limitations when it comes to questioning suspects. Although this is a crime novel, the plot includes its share of humour, and most of the humour is found in the unlikely relationship between these two men. Assad has a unique appreciation of a female office worker Carl can’t stand (he calls her Ilse the She-Wolf), and Assad causes departmental eyebrows to raise when he begins bringing fragrant baked goods and tea into the basement. Ultimately Carl and Assad work well as a team because they complement each other and they are both outcasts.

The novel is full with of carefully drawn characters and attention to detail. Here’s Carl returning from work:

When Carl got home, he leaned his bicycle against the shed outside the kitchen, noting that the other two occupants of the house were both there. As usual, his renter, Morten Holland, had turned the volume all the way up as he listened to opera in the basement, while his stepson’s downloaded shred metal was blasting out of a window upstairs. A less compatible collage of sounds couldn’t be found anywhere else on the planet.

Morbidly obese Morten, Carl’s renter, a 33-year-old video store clerk, is the “best housewife” Carl has ever known. Morten cooks and cleans for the all-male household:

He’d spent the last 13 of those years diligently studying all kinds of subjects other than the ones having any direct bearing on the three degree programmes in which he was officially enrolled. The result was an overwhelming knowledge about everything except the subjects for which he was receiving financial support and which in future would presumably earn him a living. 

Morten is just one instance of author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s marvellous detailed characters:

An overgrown adolescent and androgynous virgin whose personal relationships consisted of remarks exchanged with random customers at the Kvickly supermarket about what they were buying. A little chat by the freezer section about whether spinach was best with or without cream sauce. 

The disappearance of Merete is a page turner, and the result is a superior, tense crime novel. But much more than that, in The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen created a set of characters I want to return to. Soon.  

Translated by Tina Nunnally

Copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley. Read on my kindle.

The Girl in a Green Raincoat by Laura Lippman

“She preferred dumpster diving in corporate espionage cases over divorce cases. The slime from the dumpster came off in the shower.”

I’ve wanted to try a Laura Lippman novel for some time, so when The Girl in The Green Raincoat fell my way, I grabbed the chance to read it. It’s one episode in the life of Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan, and this is the 11th novel in the series. It didn’t seem to matter much that I was jumping into the middle of Tess’s life, and at this point in her career, she’s a high risk pregnancy at age 35 and stymied on forced bedrest.

Bored to tears, one Sunday, Tess finds herself staring out of the window at dogwalkers lucky enough to walk their dogs (her own dogs, Esskay and Miata, are elsewhere in the house). Her attention is drawn continually to a young woman in a green raincoat, and why is she so noteworthy?  Her dog, an Italian greyhound, sports a matching raincoat. Well if you see a woman and a dog wearing matching raincoats, it’s going to make an impression:

Her eye was drawn to a miniature version of Esskay, a prancing Greyhound, a true gray one, whereas Esskay was black with a patch of white at her breast. The little dog wore a green jacket belted around its middle and moved with the cocky self-confidence of someone used to being noticed. As did its human companion, in a tightly cinched celery-green raincoat that was a twin to the greyhound’s. Hard to tell the woman’s age at this distance, but Tess could make out sleek blond hair, a wasp-waisted figure. She was the kind of pretty woman who would be called a girl into her forties. She ignored the other dog owners, cradling what appeared to be a cell phone against her ear.

But after watching the dog owner and her dog for several days in a row, on Friday the woman isn’t there, but that night Tess sees the Italian Greyhound running around the park with a celery-green leash dangling from his collar.

Tess is convinced it’s a case of foul play, and so from her bed, she organises an investigation of the woman’s disappearance. It doesn’t take too much digging to discover that the missing woman is Carol Epstein, and that her husband, Don,  is a modern-day Bluebeard. The women in his life haven’t fared well, and it doesn’t look good for his latest wife, Carol either. Epstein, who owns a chain of check-cashing outlets, is a real piece of work, and he claims that his wife isn’t missing at all–she’s just away on business.  

A lot of the book’s fun comes from the frequent allusion to film scattered throughout the book. The basic plot is lifted right out of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, of course, and while this is noted early in the book, it’s also a reason why people don’t listen to Tess’s concerns at first. But as the dirt from Don’s past comes to light, Tess gets support for her theory that Carol Epstein met foul play. She rallies her staff and recruits her friend Whitney to go undercover to date this deadly Casanova:

Don Epstein dressed atrociously, in a style Whitney thought of a Bad Florida. Bright patterned shirts worn untucked, slip-on loafers in sherberty colors. And the jewelry! Epstein wore two large rings, not counting his wedding ring, an ID bracelet, and occasionally a gold chain around his neck.

Originally serialised in New York Times Magazine, The Girl in  the Green Raincoat is a speedy, humorous, addictive read. My impression about Lippman books (before actually reading one) is that they are something along the lines of Kate Atkinson, and after reading this novel, I no longer see the comparison. Since this is my first Lippman novel, I can’t judge the rest, but I can say that The Girl in the Green Raincoat has more in common with a cozy than hard or even soft-boiled crime. Any series detective novel must, by necessity, spend a portion of the book on the life of its protagonist since over time readers develop a relationship of sorts with that fictional character; we are interested not only in the crime but in the life and personal problems of the series detective or PI (Andrea Camilleri’s creation Inspector Montalbano’s long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Henning Mankell’s Wallender and his father with Alzheimer’s). Here it seems about 50-50 crime and Tess’s personal life–although the end of the book (a quick read at 170 pages) tilts 100% towards Tess’s life & pregnancy. Given the emphasis on the dilemma of career vs family, child-rearing vs crime investigation, The Girl in the Green Raincoat will probably have more appeal for female readers.

My copy of The Girl in the Green Raincoat came courtesy of the publisher via netgalley and was read on my Kindle.

Frontera Dreams by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

“Out here the narcos have us all on the payroll.”

Mexican author Paco Ignacio Taibo’s intriguing novels featuring private detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne have deservedly gained a following in America. Frontera Dreams, which according to the author is number 7 in the official chronology, is not one of his best. This novella begins when the teenage daughter of actress Natalia Smith-Corona, hires PI Belascoaran. Natalia, a woman who named herself after a typewriter in order to sound “exotic” is missing. Belascoaran knew Natalia in the idealism of his high school days, and he still nurses an unrequited sexual passion for his lost love. The detective sets off to find Natalia, and his search takes him to the surreal border towns of Mexicali, Ensenada, Tijuana, Nogales, Cuidad Obregon, and Chihuahua—La Frontera: “that strange name used to designate a bunch of territories branded by the dubious privilege of sucking face with the United States.”

Thanks to Belascoaran’s long-standing crush on Natalia, she is “like a persistent fragrance in the mind of” this solitary private detective, but the reality is not quite the same. Soon Belascoaran is involved in a mess that includes: an indiscreet Televisa producer, a crazed stalker, the stolen prostitutes of Zacatecas, narcotraficantes, DEA agents, and various colorful characters. Frontera Dreams takes a look at Belascoaran’s past, and his sentimental illusions about Natalia, and then records the detective’s coming to terms with reality concerning the woman who has remained a significant memory for about 20 years.

Frontera Dreams is not Taibo’s best. The novella is sketchy and assumes a prior knowledge and affection for the author’s hero, Belascoaran. If you’ve never read Taibo, then it’s a good idea to start elsewhere, but if you are a Taibo fan (like me), and enjoy this author’s wry sense of humour, you will not be disappointed. Taibo’s novels may seem simply fiction, but as part of the “generation of 68″ the author’s novels cannot be separated from the generation’s “collective memory”: the massacre at Tlatelcoc, for example, and this explains why Belascoaran shed his middle-class life (Days of Combat) to become a PI who meditates on the lives of Che, Pancho Villa, and Emilio Zapata for inspiration.

The ‘official chronology’ of the first 8 Hector Belascoaran Shayne novels:
Days of Combat
An Easy Thing
Some Clouds
No Happy Ending
Return to the Same City
Amorous Phantoms
Frontera Dreams
The Defunct Dead

The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri

“You know what you are Salvo? You’re a colander that leaks water out of a thousand holes, and all I’m ever doing is trying to plug as many holes as possible. “

The Snack Thief is the third novel in the wonderful Sicilian crime series by Andrea Camilleri. These books just seem to get better and better, but perhaps I’m just getting fonder of Camilleri’s protagonist, the irascible, gourmet-food driven Inspector Salvo Montalbano. Opening up a Camilleri novel to read more adventures of Montalbano is like meeting an old friend.

The Snack Thief begins with the death of a Tunisian man who was one of the crew on a fishing boat. Since the man was fired on from a Tunisian patrol boat while in international waters, Montalbano is told that this incident could have serious “international repercussions.” But Montalbano, never one to accept orders from his ‘superiors,’ valiantly tries his best to avoid involvement in the case.

But soon Montalbano is distracted from the Tunisian case by the murder of a local man, businessman Lapecora who’s found stabbed to death in a lift. The case puzzles Montalbano, and the various attitudes of the victim’s neighbours manage to annoy the Inspector–a man not known for his patience. As Montalbano tries to solve the murder, he uncovers some very peculiar information about the victim, and intrigued, Montalbano concentrates on solving the case. Montalbano interviews an interesting assortment of characters–a hen-pecked husband, a jealous wife, philandering husbands, and a brutal hit man.

During the course of his investigation, Montalbano, a connoisseur of gourmet food and a student of human nature, indulges in a great number of elaborate meals while uncovering a vast number of dirty secrets. Montalbano’s long-suffering, long-distance girlfriend Livia makes an appearance (and this causes Montalbano’s housekeeper to disappear). The Snack Thief is not only a delightful read, but for Camilleri fans, the book hints that Montalbano’s existence (which is hardly carefree) is about to change forever. Montalbano is a flawed human being–there’s no argument there. From the way he lies about what food he’s eaten, to the way he refuses to be a ‘team player’ (how I loathe that term). But Montalbano has the sort of flaws we can accept, identify with, and forgive easily.