The Village of Eight Graves: Seishi Yokomizo

“I had a terrible feeling about this.”

The Japanese crime novel, The Village of Eight Graves, from Seishi Yokomizo is number 35 in the Detective Kindaichi series. The title, and the subsequent legend about how this remote village got its name, pulled me into the story right away. The village, we are told, is located “amid the desolate mountains on the border of Tottori and Okayama prefectures.” It sounds like a miserable place. If you are going to live in the middle of nowhere, it should at least be picturesque, but this area renders poor farming. With its “inhospitable climate” the villagers can barely grow enough food, and the “main industries” are charcoal making and cattle. In the 16th century, 8 rebel samurai fled, and arrived at the village with a considerable amount of gold. All is well at first, but a reward is posted for the rebel samurai. The villagers decide to murder the samurai and keep the gold. The villagers got the bounty for the dead samurai but never found the gold. …

After this incident, terrible things began to happen in the village. It was as though the villagers were cursed with bad luck, and then one day a member of the powerful Tajimi family went berserk, killed seven members of his own family and punctuated the slaughter by the ultimate party trick, self-decapitation. Interesting to note, the Tajimi family had been major players in the murders of the 8 samurai. ..

Since this incident, “hereditary madness had been passed down through the generations of the [Tajimi] family.” Fast forward to the 1920s. …. Yoko Tajimi, a married man, “developed an infatuation” for a teenage girl named Tsuroko. Yozo carries her off, locks her in his storehouse, and repeatedly rapes her. Yozo refused to let her go and her terrified family persuaded Tsuroko to become Yozo’s mistress. She agrees and is released from imprisonment but still mauled by Yozo. It’s a horrible situation with Yozo’s “crazed ferocity” that “no ordinary woman” could tolerate. Tsuroko keeps running away but this only provokes Yozo’s “crazed fury.” And the villagers keep begging Tsuroko to return, so there’s an atmosphere of terrified collusion. Eventually Tsuroko becomes pregnant and has a baby boy named Tatsuya. Rumours swirl through the village that the child may be the son of the local teacher, Kamei, the man Tsuroko loves, and honestly, the villagers should keep their friggin’ mouths shut! Tsuroko runs off after Yozo brands the baby with burning hot tongs. Subsequently Yozo goes on a killing frenzy and slaughters 32 villagers. Yozo disappears.

26 more years pass, and now it’s post WWII Japan….Tsuroko and Yozo’s child is now a man of 29. He fought in WWII and returned home to Kobe. His mother is long dead and his stepfather has been killed during the bombing. Tatsuya, who has no idea about the violence in his past, is contacted by a lawyer who asks to see identity papers and then asks to see Tatsuya’s scars from the decades-old branding. The lawyer explains that he has been hired by a wealthy man, a relative of Tatsuya’s to locate him. Tatsuya finally learns of his bloody past and then receives an anonymous letter telling him never to return to the Village of Eight Graves. The letter warns that if he dares to return, “there will be blood!” But the killings start right away–even before Tatsuya gets to the Village of Eight Graves. Tatsuya’s life is spinning out of control–long-lost relatives, buried treasure, death threats, murder, ancient curses, a beautiful woman, hereditary madness all of these await Tatsuya at the Village of Eight Graves.

It takes a while to get into the story, and it has its slow moments, but it’s gripping once all the characters slot into place. The story’s establishes that the villagers have constructed an unhealthy society of murder and cooperation with violence. Tatsuya’s narrative is particularly interesting as it’s easy to imagine his feelings when he discovers his bloody, violent past and confronts the possibility of hereditary madness:

Maybe I did have some dark later ego lurking inside me, and this other me was committing all manner of horrors without my knowing it.

Review copy

Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

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The Execution of Justice: Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novel, The Execution of Justice opens with our drunk narrator, lawyer Felix Spät offering the reader an explanation of past “events that led to the acquittal of  a murderer and to the death of an innocent man.” He says he needs to “think through the steps I was lured into taking, the measures I took, the possibilities left undone.” It soon becomes clear he’s questioning the justice system and he’s preparing for a “just murder.”

Back in time to what seems an open-and-shut murder case. Retired from both law and politics, Dr Isaak Kohler is in a taxi accompanying a British minister to the airport. He asks the chauffeur to make a sidetrip to a restaurant. Leaving the dozing politician in the taxi, Kohler walks into the restaurant and without saying a word, shoots Professor Adolf Winter. Then with no evidence of panic, he walks back outside, gets into the taxi and leaves. Later, with the police on the hunt for a presumed fugitive from justice, Kohler rather coolly attends a concert.

Naturally since there are dozens of witnesses, it seem as though there’s no doubt that Kohler is the killer (that or he has a twin). At first it seems that the plot will explore not ‘who-did-it’ but why?

Kohler is tried and convicted. Thriving in prison and claiming his life has improved considerably, Kohler sends for down-on-luck lawyer Felix Spät and hires him to investigate the murder “under the presumption” that Kohler was  “not the murderer.”

“I want you to reinvestigate my case.”

I flinched.

“Meaning you want me to appeal it, Herr Kohler?”

He shook his head. “If I were to pursue an appeal, that would necessarily imply that there is something wrong with my sentence, but there is nothing wrong with it. My life is a closed case, it’s been led away. I know that the warden sometimes thinks I’m a fraud and you, Spät, probably think so too. That’s understandable. But I am neither a saint nor a devil, I’m simply a  man who’s discovered you don’t need anything more to live than a cell, hardly more than you need to die, a bed will do for that.”

Kohler also employs a retired professor, Knulpe, to research “the consequences of murder.” He adds, “the idea is to plumb the depths of reality, to measure exactly what effects one deed has.” Given the plot (and the title) ‘Justice’ is under examination here. It’s really a clever title which could mean a) the death of Justice or b) the implementation of Justice. Kohler tells Felix to create an alternate scenario, an alternate reality to the crime if you will, and of course while defense lawyers often assume that tactic, in this case, Felix’s relationship with his client is fraught with moral dilemmas. Kohler isn’t saying he didn’t do it.

“You are to create a fiction, nothing more.”

“But you are, in point of fact, the murderer, and that makes you fiction quite meaningless,” I declared. 

“That’s the only thing that gives it meaning, Kohler answered. “You’re not supposed to investigate reality at all–our good old Knulpe is doing that–but rather one of the possibilities behind the reality.”

Yes Kohler is a smooth talker….

With Kohler playing mind games, Felix takes the job and lives to regret it.  In spite of this somewhat convoluted approach to the case (or perhaps even because of it) the plot’s premise has allure. Unfortunately, in its execution, there’s that word again, this rather metaphysical crime novel is a chore to read. After finishing it, I read that this book was started in 1957 but was not completed until 1985. Perhaps this explains the listless plot which could have been good if given some different treatment.

Review copy

Translated by John E. Woods.

The Lady Killer: Masako Togawa (1963)

Earlier this year I read Masako Togawa’s The Master Key–a rather claustrophobic novel set in a decaying apartment house. Time to try The Lady Killer also from Pushkin Press’s Vertigo line of crime novels. This novel which pivots on revenge concerns a married Lothario whose approach to casual sex and one-night stands assumes nightmarish proportions as a serial killer hunts women in post WWII Tokyo.

Unhappy, overworked, 19 year-old Keiko Obana is not used to bars or drinking alcohol, but one night, with life stagnant and despressing, she makes the fatal error of entering a bar and drinking too much. She’s easy prey for a man who picks her up, has sex with her and then walks out of her life. It’s a simple one-night stand, casual sex with no repercussions, right? IMO casual sex is an oxymoron–not from a moral point of view, but from a consequences (long-term, short-term) viewpoint. Yes I’m sure that many people manage it effectively but other people are far too brittle and Keiko, a virgin, is one of those brittle people.

Fast forward six months and Keiko, pregnant and alone, commits suicide. Meanwhile the man who seduced her, married Ichiro Honda, continues to lead his double life. With his affluent wife safely stashed in Osaka, he lives in hotel rooms and hides his various disguises, all aimed at the seduction of young, lonely women, in a rented apartment.

Honda had a way with women. He had the faculty of penetrating their psychology at the first meeting. Was the woman interested in the arts? Very well, he would be a musician or a painter. 

Honda is a narcissist. He keeps a detailed journal, “The Huntsman’s Log,” of his conquests and he’s adopted the methods of a killer. He stalks women, and then frequently presents himself as a foreigner, faking a coy vulnerability to catch his prey off guard. When some of the women from his past are murdered, Honda, who really wants to think it’s a coincidence, finds out the hard way that his actions have consequences.

The novel’s premise is intriguing: Honda is a predator who thinks what he does is harmless. He gives women what he decides they want by filling a void in their dull lives. He has no clue about the damage he does, and the serial killer seems to deliver the coup de grâce.

The Lady Killer creates two predators: a serial seducer and a serial killer. The author creates similarities between the Modus Operandi of both emphasizing Honda’s calculated approaches such as “drinking the stale blood” of one woman’s “missed romance” and seeing women as “no more than tinplate targets at a shooting gallery in a fair.” The killer is on the heels of the seducer, and Honda is soon in so deep, he can’t see a way out.

While The Master Key examines the lives of spinsters and widows, The Lady Killer takes a cold hard look at the lives of the lonely women who step out into social life. The novel is strongest for its descriptions of Tokyo night life with its tinsel attractions, where “the aroma of Tokyo seemed to be compounded of darkness and neon.” Unfortunately, for this reader, the story became rather lurid and distasteful in its details and concluded with a long exposition which wrapped up the story.

Review copy

Translated by Simon Grove

The Gravedigger’s Bread: Frédéric Dard (1956)

I’m well aware that the layman imagines all sorts of things about our profession. Or rather, he finds it hard to admit it’s an ordinary profession. Yet I can assure you that gravedigger’s bread tastes just the same as other people’s.

Frédéric Dard’s The Gravedigger’s Bread is another well crafted, tightly written noir tale from Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint. This is a classic tale of adultery and murder. Think The Postman Always Rings Twice but add more twists and turns as ill-fated lovers attempt to outrun Fate.

This short novel takes us right into the heart of our first person narrator’s life. Blaise Delange, a man with a checkered past, unemployed and desperate, has been funded by a friend in order to seek employment at a rubber factory in a provincial town. By the time Blaise arrives, the job is gone. When Blaise finds a wallet stuffed with 8,000 francs, he considers taking it as a “consolation prize,” but then he thinks about the beautiful, sad, badly-dressed blonde woman who dropped the wallet and decides to return it. The owner is Germaine Castain, the wife of the town’s only undertaker. Blaise visits their depressing home and walks into a scene of marital misery.

Then I went up to the door and drove the yellowish little man back into the interior of his shop. The inside was even more wretched than the outside. It was cramped, dim, lugubrious and it smelt of death. 

One look at Achille Castain, an ugly, unhealthy, brutish man old enough to be Germaine’s father, tips Blaise to be careful how he proceeds. Blaise can see that all is not well in the marriage, and so he lies about where he found the wallet. He realises that Germaine can’t possibly love this disgusting man, and yet Achille, rather than treasure a wife that is so much younger and beautiful, abuses her and treats her like an indentured servant. Why did they marry? Why is Germaine, who has no children to consider, staying with this man?

A few hours later, Achille offers Blaise a job, and Blaise, attracted to Germaine and curious about this incongruous marriage, decides to stick around. Turns out that Blaise is a terrific salesman, and soon Blaise, an opportunist, is selling up: talking grieving families into buying fancier coffins which reflect status, guilt, or loss. Achille thinks he knows his customers (after all they all live in this small, dull town), and so he makes the mistake of selling what he thinks the family will spring for, rather than attempt to work on other, latent emotions.

“You see Delange,” he said. We can’t expect anything on the business front here. It will be the second-lowest category and a pauper’s coffin.”

“Why do you foresee that?’

“The fact that it’s the grandfather. That’s ten years now they’ve been spoon-feeding him and changing his sheets three times a day. If they could they’d stick him in the dustbin.”

Soon, there’s an unhealthy, tense, claustrophobic little triangle at the bleak, depressing funeral home with Blaise watching and fantasizing about Germaine, and Achille watching Germaine with suspicions that she has a secret lover….

The Gravedigger’s Bread does not take the conventional path. I thought I knew where the story was headed, but the plot was more complicated, with Fate interacting more capriciously, cynically and cruelly than anticipated.

I’ve read several Dard novels, and here they are in the order of preference:

The Executioner Weeps

The Wicked Go to Hell

Bird in a Cage.

Crush

The King of Fools

The Gravedigger’s Bread goes straight to the top of the list.

Review copy

Translated by Melanie Florence

The Master Key: Masako Togawa

“Fate! It can stab you in the back any time, upsetting the most carefully thought out activities. Fate doesn’t care what the upshot is.”

The Master Key from Japanese author Masako Togawa is another entry in the Pushkin Vertigo line. Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve read several books from this series, and that I’m a huge fan of the Frédéric Dard titles.

The Master Key is set in the bleak, dark K Apartments for Young Ladies. At one time, the rules and regulations regarding occupants and visitors were strict. Men were not allowed to stay overnight, and of course, all the occupants were female. The over 100 occupants are no longer “young ladies” but longtime tenants who are “old maids.” The apartment building is now rundown, and depressing, and its “one hundred and fifty rooms connected by dark corridors into which the sunshine never penetrates,” are representative of the lives of the residents. “The long years have wreaked havoc on both the building and its inhabitants.”  The lives of these women, who were once vibrant and successful, are sad and depressing, and there’s a horrible irony to the name of the building, along with the idea that the residents were once segregated from men in order for their virtue to remain intact.

Here are some of the residents:

Katsuko Tojo, one of the receptionists who has limited mobility.

Noriko Ishiyama, a former art teacher, a mad hoarder who roams the halls at night seeking fishbones to chew

Suwa Yatabe, a violinist whose career was cut short by the mysterious paralysis of a finger

Professor Toyoko Munekata who is devoting herself to completing her husband’s manuscripts.

The building is about to be moved, and this is an event that causes tremendous anxiety and upheaval in the lives of some of its residents. Plus the master key, which opens all 150 rooms is missing, and some of the residents harbour secrets that they are desperate to protect. …

I liked The Master Key, but unfortunately I guessed the central twist early on, so that took the fizz out of the novel’s Big Reveal. The creepy atmosphere of the building and its mostly forgotten residents is well created and the detailed lives of the residents are incredibly sad.

I’d rank it below the Dard novels, Boileau and Narcejac’s Vertigo & She Who Was No More, and Piero Chiara’s The Disappearance of Signora Giulia, but above Resurrection Bay, and the Augusto de Angelis novels. So in other words, somewhere in the middle. But still, it’s wonderful to read some newly translated Japanese crime fiction, and Pushkin Vertigo has another Togawa title for publication: The Lady Killer

Review Copy

Translated by Simon Grove

Resurrection Bay: Emma Viskic

Emma Viskic’s Resurrection Bay, a novel about organised crime and police corruption, is published by Pushkin Press Vertigo, and it’s the first in a series featuring Caleb Zelic. Private Investigator Zelic and Frankie Reynolds, his alcoholic, ex-cop partner specialize in corporate security, and they are hired to investigate a string of warehouse robberies with net losses in the millions.  When the book opens, “Gaz” Senior Constable Marsden, who was moonlighting for Zelic “earning a bit of extra cash,” is brutally executed in his home.

It had been a flash of fuck-I’m-good inspiration over Friday-night beers with Gaz. A solution to a job that was way too big for them. One that Frankie had tried to talk him out of accepting. Why the hell hadn’t he listened to her?

Zelic, who is deaf, received a panicked text from Gaz right before Gaz was murdered, and Zelic is the one who finds Gaz’s brutalized body.  As Frankie and Zelic dig into the case, trying to find a connection between the robberies and Gaz’s murder, they meet a terrified witness. It soon becomes clear that they are on the scent of something big….

Zelic, Frankie and Zelic’s ex-wife team up to solve the robbery case and Gaz’s murder. It’s one of those situations where they have little choice. The police are hostile and smell a connection between the murder and Zelic’s drug-dealing brother, and so Zelic and Frankie are squeezed into continuing the investigation even though they are being warned off. Whoever is behind Gaz’s murder makes sure that Zelic and Frankie feel intimidated; they’ve made someone very nervous–someone who doesn’t like loose ends.

Zelic’s deafness, obviously, in his line of work, presents some unique challenges. Viskic shows the casual cruelty heaped upon the disabled, and how Zelic has learned to cope with nastiness, prejudice and the inference that his deafness is often equated with mental deficiency. We also see how Zelic’s deafness has spurred the development of other skills-including the realization that he’s often underestimated.

How to read people’s hands and eyes. How to know when a sideways glance meant he should run, when it meant he should throw the first punch.

Resurrection Bay is getting a lot of good press. With an emphasis on action, the book swerves into thriller territory, which isn’t my favourite crime presentation.  I’ve been impressed with Pushkin’s Vertigo line of crime reads, but contrary to popular opinion, I wasn’t wild about this novel. I guessed one of the major baddies from almost the beginning of the book, and then the whole ex-wife thing seemed a little cliched.

This is my second entry in the 2018 reading Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review copy

The King of Fools: Frédéric Dard (1952)

“Poor Ivanhoe,” she sighed. “You have no idea what fools heroes can be.”

In Frédéric Dard’s novel of nightmarish obsession, The King of Fools, Jean-Marie Valaise is on a solo holiday in Juan-les-Pins. It was a holiday he’d intended to take with his long-term girlfriend, the elegant, self-contained and uber self controlled Denise:

I should have been with Denise. but we had broken off just two days before leaving, on some petty pretext. For a moment, I had considered cancelling my trip, but then decided the Côte d’Azur would be a timely distraction, and left anyway. I regretted it now. Holiday resorts are best approached in a happy frame of mind, or they can seem more depressing than all the rest. Truth be told, my sorrow was not acute. Rather, I experienced a feeling of intense disenchantment that left me weak and vulnerable. I felt the nagging torment of physical regret too. With Denise, the act of love had been easy, and reassuring. 

One day, Jean-Marie sees a woman getting into his car. The incident turns out to have been a mistake, but the woman, who didn’t leave a wholly favorable impression, left a bag with a thousand francs inside. That night, Jean-Marie spots the woman at a local casino. She seems, for this second meeting, to be almost a totally different person, elegant, beautiful and cultured. Jean-Marie, normally a cautious man when it comes to money, throws discretion to the winds, gambles and loses, but no matter, soon he’s chatting and half in love with Marjorie Faulks, the Englishwoman he met earlier that day.

Jean-Marie meets Marjorie a third time when she invites herself into his hotel room while he’s in the shower. While Jean-Marie’s awkwardness is smooched over by Marjorie, still the incident seems bizarre. She breaks the news that she’s married, but Jean-Marie, who’s decided that Marjorie is bitterly unhappy, pulls her in his arms for a kiss. They part, but promise to write….

Denise shortly shows up at the resort and quickly sniffs out Jean-Marie’s mood. After all they’ve been together for years, and they have a strong commitment to each other as friends but not as lovers. They break up a couple of times every year, and yet always get back together. Jean-Marie’s feelings for Marjorie are different: it’s intense, an obsession he can’t control.

After a letter from Marjorie, Jean-Marie dashes off to Scotland where he sinks into an abyss of deception, but not before Denise warns him that he thinks he’s some sort of hero leaving to ‘rescue’ Marjorie, and that it will end badly.

While I wasn’t entirely convinced by the character of Marjorie (she’s a cipher), I was convinced that Jean-Marie, a man whose passions up to this moment had been tepid and controlled, could totally lose it on holiday. Passion unexpectedly overwhelms him; it’s a new feeling, and although there are plenty of warning signs, he doesn’t pay attention. Jean-Marie’s life, a life in which passion takes a back seat to common sense, is completely derailed when he meets Marjorie. This largely happens because his guard is down, and Marjorie has a sly way of trespassing without seeming to do so.

Most of the action takes place in a dreary Edinburgh, with the weather matching the atmosphere of the novel. There’s a large cat-and-mouse section, and Jean-Marie’s life descends into an almost surreal kind of hell, with the novel’s great, ironic twist, in common with many titles in the Pushkin Vertigo line, arriving at the end.

For those interested, here’s a list of Dard books read so far in order of preference

The Executioner Weeps

The Wicked Go to Hell

Bird in a Cage

Crush

The King of Fools

Review copy

Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie

The Executioner Weeps: Frédéric Dard (1956)

“She’d sprung from the night, just for me.”

Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint continues to impress with The Executioner Weeps from Frédéric Dard. This latest Dard novel follows on the heels of Bird in a Cage, The Wicked Go to Hell, and Crush. The King of Fools is due to be released in the US in September, 2017.

In The Executioner Weeps, Daniel, a successful French artist is in Spain on a working holiday when late one night, on a remote lonely road, his car hits a beautiful young woman. She has no identification, no luggage–except for a now crushed violin. Daniel suspects that this young woman may possibly have thrown herself under the car. Since he’s miles from civilization and the woman’s injuries are fairly superficial, Daniel decides to take her back to Casa Patricio, a modest beachside hotel located near Barcelona, and proceed from there. When the woman wakes up, she’s suffering from amnesia.

For the first half of the book, Daniel spends time trying to discover the woman’s identity. He knows that her first name begins with M, and together they try various M names on for size. Eventually as shards of memory return, the woman settles on Marianne which she is sure is her name. Thrown together by circumstance, it isn’t long before Daniel falls in love with Marianne–even though common sense should tell him otherwise.

I was living the dream that all men have of loving a woman without a past.

He contacts the French embassy, the police, every institution he can think of, but everyone is disinterested in Marianne’s plight and Daniel’s dilemma. The consensus seems to be that someone will eventually come looking for this stunning young woman…

Daniel’s dilemma deepens when he receives a letter concerning an upcoming exhibition is America. He decides to stop waiting for something to happen and using the labels in Marianne’s clothing, he sets out to discover her past himself. Soon he wishes he hadn’t.

This is as much of the plot in this splendid, tightly written noir that I’m going to reveal. The tale begins with a central mystery–the identity of the young woman–Daniel spends half the novel trying to discover the truth and half the novel trying to evade it. The plot, with its sense of creeping dread and impending doom, raises many questions about the nature of love: idealisation, self-deceit, corruption and the love object. Is Daniel protecting Marianne or is he protecting his ideal?

Significantly Daniel decides to paint a portrait of Marianne:

What I set out to show was what I could see in her. She surrendered slowly, easing herself out of her own personality to become what I wanted her to be. I no longer separated my creation from my model. I took a human being and spread it out on a surface that had no limits. 

But when the painting is finished, Daniel is disturbed by the results:

From a painterly point of view, it was first rate. Yet I didn’t like it, because with this particular canvas something strange had happened. I had succeeded in capturing Marianne’s most unguarded expression so well that I could read her character better in my painting than in her face. Now, in the come-hither look in her eye with which she stared at me I detected a bizarre glint which quite disconcerted me. There was a sparkle in it which didn’t seem to belong with the rest of her: it encapsulated a level of sustained attentiveness which was almost disturbing in its intensity.  

The truth, when Daniel finally discovers it, is devastating, and every step he takes just draws him into a sticky web from which there is no escape. There’s a thematic connection here to Vertigo in the way the author explores just how far we will go to maintain fictional narratives that feed our desires and egos.

For  those interested, here’s my Dard order of preference so far:

The Executioner Weeps

The Wicked Go to Hell

Bird in a Cage

Crush

Review copy

Translated by David Coward

Death Going Down: María Angélica Bosco (1955)

“That’s what happens to people who go out at night. Just look how they end up.”

I’ve posted previously on the crime books from Pushkin Vertigo. So far there have been some marvelous reads for crime fans: She Who Was No More, Vertigo, The Disappearance of Signora Chiara and several Frédéric Dard titles (all highly recommended by the way). Vertigo has also released a number of a number of novels from Augusto de Angelis–all much more standard police procedurals. Given the rather dramatic division between the book types (makes me think of Simeon’s Romans Durs vs. his Maigret novels), I’ve formed two figurative piles of books with the Augusto de Angelis on the left and all the other Vertigo titles on the right. That brings me to Death Going Down (original title: La Muerte Baja en Ascensor) from María Angélica Bosco–a police procedural that I’m going to place in the left stack with the Augusto de Angelis novels. However, I’ll add a caveat to that decision later.

Death Going Down opens on a cold night in Buenos Aires as Pancho Soler arrives home drunk to his apartment house. It’s an atmospheric scene as Soler stumbles from his car into the lobby of the building. He has just three minutes of light in the lobby (a regulation we’re told) and he makes it to the lift but sees it’s already in use.

All of a sudden he noticed that the lift shaft had filled with light and at the same moment, as if choreographed, the lobby plunged into darkness.

Someone had come down in the lift. He could make out a blurry shape on the other side of the door. Still leaning on the wall, Pancho moved to one side to make way for the person in the lift but the door remained stubbornly closed. All he could see was the shadow puppet outline of a shape curled up in the corner.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say that Soler opens the door and discovers a dead blonde in the lift. The police arrive, the residents gather, and the investigation begins. …

Death Going Down, a prize-winning crime novel, was published in 1955, and the story’s emphasis is the duplicitous lives lead by those in the apartment house along with the idea that the investigation is clouded by the number of immigrants involved. These relative newcomers to Argentina from Europe have lives shrouded in mystery. Are they victims of the nazis fleeing for their lives or do they have pasts they wish to escape from? And herein lies my hesitation in placing Death Going Down in that figurative left pile of Vertigo titles. Yes it is a police procedural but the refugees & immigrants, flotsam and jetsam from WWII still bring the war to Argentina’s shores a decade later, and that’s a nice twist.

There’s a solid assortment of suspects: playboy Pancho Soler, Dr Adolfo Luchter, caretakers Andrés and his bitter wife, Aurora Torres (she hopes the murder victim is the resident she likes the least,) the invalid Señor Iñarra and his family, the abrasive Bulgarian (former resident of Germany) Czerbó and his long-suffering sister Rita, and of course, the murder victim’s husband who married his wife by proxy.

There are three police figures in the book: Inspector Ericourt, Superintendent Lahore, and detective Blasi (my favourite of the three). That’s rather a lot of policemen for a 160 page book, and the result was that I was unable to get a firm grasp on any of their characters–although Blasi is the strongest drawn of the three. Here’s his approach to crime:

What do you do when you’re standing in front of a painting? You adopt different positions until you get the best perspective.

These days a common complaint about crime books is that they are too fleshed out with extraneous detail. In Death Going Down,  the opposite is true, and while I can’t give away spoilers, the plot would have benefitted from further explanation of the past connections between the characters.

Finally, the author made mention of what happened to the victim’s dog, and this was a nice little touch to the tale.

Review copy

Translated by Lucy Greaves

Crush: Frédéric Dard (1959)

“And you will never know how big that green car seemed, or how deliciously it smelt of America.”

Pushkin Vertigo continues its very impressive output of unusual crime books through another venture into Frédéric Dard territory with a third title: Crush, a tale of longing, obsession, and murder. The double meaning of the title becomes horribly clear around the book’s halfway point.

Bird in a Cage and The Wicked Go To Hell , earlier Dard releases from Pushkin Vertigo, were both told by a male narrator. In Crush, we have a seventeen year old female narrator, Louise, who lives in Northern France in a very unpleasant town named Léopoldville. The place is ugly, dominated by a large chemical factory, “chimney stacks spewing out great clouds of smoke that seem to stretch up into the sky for ever before falling back down on the town below,” and the air stinks of cabbage. Things aren’t much better at Louise’s home; she lives with a mother she’s ashamed of and her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Arthur, in a wreck of a rented home.

In common with most of the other people in the town, Louise works in a factory. In order to glam up her dull life, Louise, who longs for escape, begins walking through the moneyed areas of Léopoldville and is entranced by glimpses of the lives of an affluent American couple, Mr and Mrs Rooland. She begins dawdling outside of their home:

At first sight, it looked like the others: two storeys, an arrowshaped weathervane sitting on top of the gable roof, with little stained glass windows and some steps leading up to a front door flanked by light-blue earthenware pots… But what set it apart was a funny sort of feeling that floated in the air around the house. How can I explain it? It seemed like it was somewhere else. Yes, it was a Léopoldville house, but it existed on a sort of desert island all of its own. A tiny, mysterious island, and one where the natives seemed to live bloody well too.

Walking by this house becomes a habit for Louise. She sees the Roolands relaxing on a swing seat sipping whisky at dusk while jazz music plays as background noise.

I can’t tell you how enchanting the atmosphere of that garden was, with the beautiful, shining car, that music, those drinks that you could tell were wonderfully chilled, and that couple, gently swinging while the seat creaked. 

One day, after being slapped by Arthur, Louise gathers the courage to approach the Roolands and she asks them if they want a maid, a rare commodity in Léopoldville, as factory work pays better than domestic service. The Roolands employ Louise, but the dream life Louise saw from the outside doesn’t really exist. The house is a disorganized mess, and Mrs Rooland has a drinking problem. …

Louise, our somewhat unreliable narrator, tells the story in retrospect, in an intimate, near confessional style. As she digs into the Rooland household, managing to live-in and proving through her hard work that she’s indispensable, the spectre of the Roolands returning to America clouds any future fantasies.  Dard includes some foreshadowing, some intense, dramatic scenes of violent weather that match the narrative, and rather ironically, IMO, the American car (s) play a huge role in this tale of betrayal and revenge. To say more would spoil the tale for the next reader, but fans of the Pushkin Vertigo line should enjoy this. Of the three Dard novels released to date, The Wicked Go To Hell is my favourite.

Review copy

Translated by Daniel Seton

(original French title: Les Scélérats)