Dorothy L. Sayers isn't a name as familiar as Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie in the contemporary mind, but like Dame Agatha she was a member of the famous "Detection Club" - that group of authors who collectively created the "Golden Age" of detective stories. Sayers was also one of the earliest female graduates from Oxford University, as well as having translated Dante's Divine Comedy to English.
Whose Body? is the first of her crime novels, and the introduction to Lord Peter Wimsey, her main character. Rather famously, and probably a bit scandalously for the time (1923), Lord Peter begins the novel with the exclamation "Oh damn!", as he is mid-way to an auction and has realised he's forgotten the catalogue of the rare books on offer. Yes, we're clearly in the realms of the upper class here - Sayers herself described Lord Peter as a combination of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster, which seems like a fair summary of the man.
The significance of an upper-class "gentleman detective" is related to the question of what's often referred to as the "professional amateur" in crime fiction. While it's at least vaguely plausible that a policeman or private detective will have a series of adventures worthy of chronicling, it's much less likely that a "civilian" will just happen to be on the scene of murder after murder, at least not without arousing the suspicion of the police. Much as I've always enjoyed Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, I do wonder how she was able to thwart as many would-be murderers as she did.
Hence the concept of the "gentleman detective". Lord Peter is the younger son of the Dowager Duchess of Denver and belongs squarely to that class of well-educated British people who, at least until the end of the Second World War, really didn't need to work for money. His older brother is the Duke of Denver and sits in the House of Lords when not running the estate at Duke's Denver, leaving Lord Peter to lounge about, collect old books, dine at clubs and solve crimes, in roughly that order. While some of the policemen he deals with seem to resent this last activity, Sayers helpfully gives him a friend on the force - Inspector Charles Parker - who is more than content to be "interfered with".
The set-up here is quite memorable. The Dowager Duchess informs Lord Peter that an architect doing some work at Duke's Denver has found a naked body in his bath. Naked, that is, with the exception of a pair of pince-nez glasses. Lord Peter can hardly resist the puzzles - both of the corpse's identity and that of the killer - and seems to relish the task even more when the official investigation sees the young architect arrested.
Sadly, this is where a lot of the interest disappears. Sayers' plot is heavily reliant on coincidence - Parker, in particular, seems to have an amazing ability to be in precisely the right place to identify telling details which begin to link his seemingly-unrelated investigation with Lord Peter's - and characters are frequently introduced with no logic behind their appearances. While this was, as mentioned earlier, Sayers' first Lord Peter story, it doesn't get around the fact that stronger characterisation is needed throughout. The connection between Parker and Lord Peter makes no sense for about half the novel, and Lord Peter's residual shell-shock from the war (later to become a significant feature of the character) is introduced in a way which makes it appear to be an attempt at catching a suspect out, rather than a "real" ailment.
A lot of this, I feel, is due to the very short length of the novel. My copy is a scant 140 pages, which really makes it more of a novella or an overgrown short story than a full-blown novel. Never let it be said that I don't like my crime fiction to have a rollicking plot, but sacrificing characterisation in order to do it really isn't the way forwards.
All in all, this really isn't my thing. Sayers is an accomplished author - her contribution to the multi-author The Floating Admiral is just as good as her better-known contemporaries - but Lord Peter just falls flat here.
Skip this one. One star.
Monday, 31 October 2016
Wednesday, 26 October 2016
"The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories" (Maxim Jakubowski, ed.)
Whitechapel, London, the dying days of summer 1888. Somewhere in the shadows of London's notorious slums, among a motley collection of "unfortunates", recent immigrants, money-lenders, down-and-outs, drunks, drug addicts and those coming to find their enjoyment among these classes a woman is found brutally murdered. Over the coming months, she will be joined by several others - all of them prostitutes, all of them killed brutally. Finally, on 9 November of this same year, one final, almost cinematically vile, murder will be committed and then - at least according to most sources - the fiend is heard from no more.
Such are the bare facts about one of history's most infamous serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Onto this sketch, over the years, have been embroidered all manner of theories, counter-theories, and facts and fictions, giving rise to the concept of "Ripperology", a hobby which I must confess to participating in. The "Canonical Five" murder victims (some would suggest six or even seven victims, and still others contend that there were fewer, but most specialists agree on five) are probably the most well-known Victorian prostitutes, and the minutiae of the life and activities of a wide range of policemen and potential suspects have been scrutinised again and again for more than a century afterwards.
For those keeping score at home, Wikipedia lists more than 100 potential suspects, although I should add that some of these are quite possibly identical figures known by pseudonyms, as Whitechapel was the kind of place where anonymity was a real virtue. While many of these figures, such as Joseph Barnett, Alexander Pedachenko and Severyn Koslowski, are more well known to specialists, there are also names such as Lewis Caroll, the artist Walter Sickert and even the Duke of Clarence on the list, although these tend to be taken less seriously.
It is against this backdrop that we need to consider Maxim Jakubowski's work in collecting 40 short stories - written, it appears, specifically for this volume - on the topic of the Ripper. The majority of the authors aren't names overly familiar to me, although Barbara Nadel and Michael Gregorio both make appearances.
In a collection like this, it's possible to cover almost every base, and that's roughly what happens here. We have aristocratic Rippers, medical Rippers, both likely and unlikely suspects as Rippers, a policeman-Ripper, two or three "supernatural" Rippers and even a couple of crossdressing Rippers. There's even a virtual-reality Ripper, a Ripper on the Titanic, a Ripper in the Klondike Goldfields, a Sherlock-Holmes-unmasks-the-Ripper and a couple of descendants of the Ripper doing their own thing. The only three theories I can't immediately think of making a serious appearance are the thoroughly discredited "Masonic Conspiracy", Conan Doyle's "Jill the Ripper" hobby-horse and the "Sickert-as-Ripper" scenario. This last has probably fallen out of favour following Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer, which is marketed as non-fiction but is realistically a poor attempt at comedy and suggests that Cornwell should stick to her day job.
The authors are a collection of crime, horror and even erotica writers - Nicky Peacock's "Madame X", for example, is what I can only call "erotic horror", which is not something I've met before - as Jakubowski has connections to all three genres. Each definitely puts their own spin on things, and it's quite clear that they've done their research.
Of course, in any collection this large, there will inevitably be some unevenness. There are a number of stories which hint at a solution (people "realise why the killer worked in a certain way", for instance) and then just end at that, and more than a few in which a rather implausible twist-ending is introduced purely as a device to surprise the reader. In one of these cases, a narrator is suddenly revealed to have been unreliable all along and the final two pages feature a range of increasingly implausible actions as a result. A shame, really, as the earlier section of the story built an impressively forboding atmosphere around the concept that another character might just have been descended from the Ripper.
There is also a strong delineation between the British and American authors. The Brits, in general, seem to get the tone just that little bit more right than their cousins tend to. The American authors are often guilty of inserting the odd anachronism into the mouths of the waifs and strays of the East End, or alternatively having them speak in a garbled "Mummerset" accent which just doesn't work either. There are also some unfortunate moments of characters being referred to as the equivalent of "Sir Smith", rather than "Sir John", which really should have been caught somewhere in the editing process.
In fairness, though, there are a few stories which do genuinely work. Rhys Hughes' "The Guided Tour", along with its thematic cousin "Autumn of Terror" by CL Raven are distinctly unnerving in their unwillingness to explain just what the heck's going on (although I can live without Hughes' "metafictional" conceit at the end). "Dear Boss" by Nic Martin is an interesting - albeit clunky towards the end - take on the infamous "Ripper Letters", and Martin Edwards' "Blue Serge" is an unexpected take on both the Ripper and the Dr Crippen cases. As a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian, I would be remiss not to mention Paul A Freeman's "The Simple Procedure", which takes the rather hackneyed idea of the iconic fictional detective turning his mind to the iconic real killer and makes an interesting result of it all.
All up, there's enough here for a Ripperologist or casual reader to find something to enjoy. Whether we all need all forty stories, mind you, is perhaps another question. Jakubowski was half of the team behind a Mammoth anthology of essentially the "state of the art" in Ripperology earlier this century, and I suspect that that would be much the better read of the two.
To borrow, but not to own. 2.5 stars.
Such are the bare facts about one of history's most infamous serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Onto this sketch, over the years, have been embroidered all manner of theories, counter-theories, and facts and fictions, giving rise to the concept of "Ripperology", a hobby which I must confess to participating in. The "Canonical Five" murder victims (some would suggest six or even seven victims, and still others contend that there were fewer, but most specialists agree on five) are probably the most well-known Victorian prostitutes, and the minutiae of the life and activities of a wide range of policemen and potential suspects have been scrutinised again and again for more than a century afterwards.
For those keeping score at home, Wikipedia lists more than 100 potential suspects, although I should add that some of these are quite possibly identical figures known by pseudonyms, as Whitechapel was the kind of place where anonymity was a real virtue. While many of these figures, such as Joseph Barnett, Alexander Pedachenko and Severyn Koslowski, are more well known to specialists, there are also names such as Lewis Caroll, the artist Walter Sickert and even the Duke of Clarence on the list, although these tend to be taken less seriously.
It is against this backdrop that we need to consider Maxim Jakubowski's work in collecting 40 short stories - written, it appears, specifically for this volume - on the topic of the Ripper. The majority of the authors aren't names overly familiar to me, although Barbara Nadel and Michael Gregorio both make appearances.
In a collection like this, it's possible to cover almost every base, and that's roughly what happens here. We have aristocratic Rippers, medical Rippers, both likely and unlikely suspects as Rippers, a policeman-Ripper, two or three "supernatural" Rippers and even a couple of crossdressing Rippers. There's even a virtual-reality Ripper, a Ripper on the Titanic, a Ripper in the Klondike Goldfields, a Sherlock-Holmes-unmasks-the-Ripper and a couple of descendants of the Ripper doing their own thing. The only three theories I can't immediately think of making a serious appearance are the thoroughly discredited "Masonic Conspiracy", Conan Doyle's "Jill the Ripper" hobby-horse and the "Sickert-as-Ripper" scenario. This last has probably fallen out of favour following Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer, which is marketed as non-fiction but is realistically a poor attempt at comedy and suggests that Cornwell should stick to her day job.
The authors are a collection of crime, horror and even erotica writers - Nicky Peacock's "Madame X", for example, is what I can only call "erotic horror", which is not something I've met before - as Jakubowski has connections to all three genres. Each definitely puts their own spin on things, and it's quite clear that they've done their research.
Of course, in any collection this large, there will inevitably be some unevenness. There are a number of stories which hint at a solution (people "realise why the killer worked in a certain way", for instance) and then just end at that, and more than a few in which a rather implausible twist-ending is introduced purely as a device to surprise the reader. In one of these cases, a narrator is suddenly revealed to have been unreliable all along and the final two pages feature a range of increasingly implausible actions as a result. A shame, really, as the earlier section of the story built an impressively forboding atmosphere around the concept that another character might just have been descended from the Ripper.
There is also a strong delineation between the British and American authors. The Brits, in general, seem to get the tone just that little bit more right than their cousins tend to. The American authors are often guilty of inserting the odd anachronism into the mouths of the waifs and strays of the East End, or alternatively having them speak in a garbled "Mummerset" accent which just doesn't work either. There are also some unfortunate moments of characters being referred to as the equivalent of "Sir Smith", rather than "Sir John", which really should have been caught somewhere in the editing process.
In fairness, though, there are a few stories which do genuinely work. Rhys Hughes' "The Guided Tour", along with its thematic cousin "Autumn of Terror" by CL Raven are distinctly unnerving in their unwillingness to explain just what the heck's going on (although I can live without Hughes' "metafictional" conceit at the end). "Dear Boss" by Nic Martin is an interesting - albeit clunky towards the end - take on the infamous "Ripper Letters", and Martin Edwards' "Blue Serge" is an unexpected take on both the Ripper and the Dr Crippen cases. As a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian, I would be remiss not to mention Paul A Freeman's "The Simple Procedure", which takes the rather hackneyed idea of the iconic fictional detective turning his mind to the iconic real killer and makes an interesting result of it all.
All up, there's enough here for a Ripperologist or casual reader to find something to enjoy. Whether we all need all forty stories, mind you, is perhaps another question. Jakubowski was half of the team behind a Mammoth anthology of essentially the "state of the art" in Ripperology earlier this century, and I suspect that that would be much the better read of the two.
To borrow, but not to own. 2.5 stars.
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Gilbert Adair - "The Act of Roger Murgatroyd"
Gilbert Adair isn't an author commonly associated with crime fiction. Indeed, until I came across some mentions of his Evadne Mount trilogy, he wasn't even an author I'd associated with anything much. He earned his stripes as a literary critic and translator, it appears, having famously translated a novel from French which didn't use the letter e - the translation does the same thing.
Adair, it seems, was a keen fan of the postmodern and wordplay, and many of his other works of fiction work in this regard. For reasons I'm yet to find a good explanation for, though, he turned to detective fiction in the final years of his life, with Roger Murgatroyd being released in 2006 and its sequels A Mysterious Affair of Style in 2007 and And Then There Was No One in 2009 (Adair died in 2011).
As fans of Agatha Christie may have already picked up from the titles, the Mount trilogy are modern - or perhaps postmodern - takes on the "Golden Age" detective stories that Dame Agatha and her associates in the Detection Club turned into the true art form they are regarded as now. If the term doesn't mean so much to some readers, think of all the classic tropes of detective fiction: British middle- and upper-class characters, country houses, snowdrifts ensuring that only people in the house could have done it, servants providing comic relief, police as sort of well-meaning duffers, everyone with secrets and motives and plots falling just the right side of convoluted. Odds are that you will have just visualised the kind of thing that Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot or one of the many other great detectives could be counted on to solve.
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd falls into the Marple category, particularly as Evadne Mount is a female amateur detective, rather than the professional male investigator such as Poirot (or, to take an example from another author, John Dickson Carr's Dr Gideon Fell who is as good as a professional investigator). Mount is in fact a crime novelist herself, which most likely serves as a tip of the hat to Poirot's occasional associate Ariadne Oliver. Given the chance to do some sleuthing of her own, she jumps at the opportunity and spends a good deal of the novel getting in the way of the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe.
The plot takes place in and around ffolkes Manor (the two lower-case letters are themselves a nod to the era, as a lot of the upper classes had names like that) in roughly the 1930s - there are mentions of "the War" with a clear link to the 1914-18 conflict - during a Christmas gathering. Colonel and Mrs ffolkes have invited a group of their friends (exactly the sort of people you would expect in a novel like this) to spend the Christmas period, along with their daughter Selina and her friend Donald. Together with the two younger ones comes Raymond Gentry, a gossip columnist, whose murder sets the plot in motion.
As a murder, it's quite a clever one. One of the great traditions of the Golden Age was the "locked room mystery", and as crime fiction has moved away from that genteel era a lot of the art form of having a dead body in a room locked from the inside with no evidence of anyone going in or coming out has been lost a bit, but that's how Gentry is found. Suspicions are rife, and Trubshawe (and Mount) have their work cut out for them in finding a way through a very tangled web.
Where Roger Murgatroyd suffers a little, to be frank, is in not quite knowing what it wants to be. A lot of what I'd read about this novel suggested that it was a very clever send-up of the Golden Age mystery, but Adair's humour doesn't quite seem to translate so well. There are some amusing moments - the scene below-stairs where the cook doesn't "hold with ideas" (or jokes, later on) and one of the maids tries to recount the plot of one of Mount's novels, complete with malapropisms and general confusion is a particularly good example - but the humour tends to be more in the vein of an arched eyebrow than a proper laugh.
Some of this may be because the best of the Golden Age novels actually are quite funny themselves. While it's easy to laugh at David Suchet's impeccable television performance as Poirot, his pedantic nature is just as amusing on the printed page, and the same is true of Miss Marple's home-spun wisdom. Catch a performance of Christie's iconic The Mousetrap and you'll see genuinely funny dialogue and a thoroughly twisted murder mystery in perfect counterpoint. Therefore, I did catch myself wondering at times whether the Golden Age really needed a send-up in quite the same way as some other styles of novel perhaps do. In fairness, there's a particularly clever dig at the custom of having "maps" or "plans" at the start of many of these novels - one is provided, but it's completely irrelevant, and Mount then discourses on such a thing as she explains everything at the end.
Secondly, some of the detection isn't in keeping with the "rules" of the style. While there's nothing to say that you can't write a Golden Age novel while having certain clues kept back from the reader until the end (Mount does a pivotal piece of sleuthing completely offstage), it just doesn't feel right. Say what you want about Christie's famously intricate plots, but even Murder on the Orient Express is scrupulously fair in giving the reader every conceivable clue to solve the crime. The fact that we still can't is our error, rather than hers.
There are also, perhaps, slightly too many telegraphed plot twists for my liking. I won't reveal any of them here, but I tend to prefer my everyone-gathered-in-the-study scene to feature moments where I wonder how on earth I didn't realise that the clue was what it was, rather than ones where I think "Saw that coming".
That said, one real highlight throughout is in Adair's willingness to pay homage to those who went before him. Mount is offended when people describe the murder as being similar to those in her novels for the simple reason that she leaves locked-room murders to John Dickson Carr (and rightly so, the man's ability in this regard was nonpareil), and she later invokes the "little grey cells" to work out the solution. At one point, she even makes a passing reference to Carr's immortal "Locked Room Lecture" from The Hollow Man.
But it's not only this. Mount and others are constantly providing synopses of her own novels, all of which are squarely in the Golden Age tradition. A "re-written" Oedipus Rex as a courtroom drama would seem slightly unusual, but we're also treated to the plot of a novel in which the crime is "solved before anyone knew it had happened" (due to the detective's rather intimate knowledge of the thief's anatomy), the solution to a novel in which an English teacher identifies his killer by a grammatical quirk and brief descriptions of plots involving one identical twin murdering the other and a victim being killed while singing "Auld Lang Syne" and nobody noticing he was dead. While there are vague hints at some of the classics of the style hidden away there - Agatha Christie's notebooks apparently contain a lot of discussions of "twin murders" - these give a certain bizarre flavour to everything.
All in all, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is an interesting little entry in the files. Judged purely as a murder mystery, it lacks several key ingredients. Judged as a parody of the style, it is likewise a bit lacking. As a loving homage to the genre, though, it's far from bad.
Recommended with reservations. Three stars.
Adair, it seems, was a keen fan of the postmodern and wordplay, and many of his other works of fiction work in this regard. For reasons I'm yet to find a good explanation for, though, he turned to detective fiction in the final years of his life, with Roger Murgatroyd being released in 2006 and its sequels A Mysterious Affair of Style in 2007 and And Then There Was No One in 2009 (Adair died in 2011).
As fans of Agatha Christie may have already picked up from the titles, the Mount trilogy are modern - or perhaps postmodern - takes on the "Golden Age" detective stories that Dame Agatha and her associates in the Detection Club turned into the true art form they are regarded as now. If the term doesn't mean so much to some readers, think of all the classic tropes of detective fiction: British middle- and upper-class characters, country houses, snowdrifts ensuring that only people in the house could have done it, servants providing comic relief, police as sort of well-meaning duffers, everyone with secrets and motives and plots falling just the right side of convoluted. Odds are that you will have just visualised the kind of thing that Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot or one of the many other great detectives could be counted on to solve.
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd falls into the Marple category, particularly as Evadne Mount is a female amateur detective, rather than the professional male investigator such as Poirot (or, to take an example from another author, John Dickson Carr's Dr Gideon Fell who is as good as a professional investigator). Mount is in fact a crime novelist herself, which most likely serves as a tip of the hat to Poirot's occasional associate Ariadne Oliver. Given the chance to do some sleuthing of her own, she jumps at the opportunity and spends a good deal of the novel getting in the way of the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe.
The plot takes place in and around ffolkes Manor (the two lower-case letters are themselves a nod to the era, as a lot of the upper classes had names like that) in roughly the 1930s - there are mentions of "the War" with a clear link to the 1914-18 conflict - during a Christmas gathering. Colonel and Mrs ffolkes have invited a group of their friends (exactly the sort of people you would expect in a novel like this) to spend the Christmas period, along with their daughter Selina and her friend Donald. Together with the two younger ones comes Raymond Gentry, a gossip columnist, whose murder sets the plot in motion.
As a murder, it's quite a clever one. One of the great traditions of the Golden Age was the "locked room mystery", and as crime fiction has moved away from that genteel era a lot of the art form of having a dead body in a room locked from the inside with no evidence of anyone going in or coming out has been lost a bit, but that's how Gentry is found. Suspicions are rife, and Trubshawe (and Mount) have their work cut out for them in finding a way through a very tangled web.
Where Roger Murgatroyd suffers a little, to be frank, is in not quite knowing what it wants to be. A lot of what I'd read about this novel suggested that it was a very clever send-up of the Golden Age mystery, but Adair's humour doesn't quite seem to translate so well. There are some amusing moments - the scene below-stairs where the cook doesn't "hold with ideas" (or jokes, later on) and one of the maids tries to recount the plot of one of Mount's novels, complete with malapropisms and general confusion is a particularly good example - but the humour tends to be more in the vein of an arched eyebrow than a proper laugh.
Some of this may be because the best of the Golden Age novels actually are quite funny themselves. While it's easy to laugh at David Suchet's impeccable television performance as Poirot, his pedantic nature is just as amusing on the printed page, and the same is true of Miss Marple's home-spun wisdom. Catch a performance of Christie's iconic The Mousetrap and you'll see genuinely funny dialogue and a thoroughly twisted murder mystery in perfect counterpoint. Therefore, I did catch myself wondering at times whether the Golden Age really needed a send-up in quite the same way as some other styles of novel perhaps do. In fairness, there's a particularly clever dig at the custom of having "maps" or "plans" at the start of many of these novels - one is provided, but it's completely irrelevant, and Mount then discourses on such a thing as she explains everything at the end.
Secondly, some of the detection isn't in keeping with the "rules" of the style. While there's nothing to say that you can't write a Golden Age novel while having certain clues kept back from the reader until the end (Mount does a pivotal piece of sleuthing completely offstage), it just doesn't feel right. Say what you want about Christie's famously intricate plots, but even Murder on the Orient Express is scrupulously fair in giving the reader every conceivable clue to solve the crime. The fact that we still can't is our error, rather than hers.
There are also, perhaps, slightly too many telegraphed plot twists for my liking. I won't reveal any of them here, but I tend to prefer my everyone-gathered-in-the-study scene to feature moments where I wonder how on earth I didn't realise that the clue was what it was, rather than ones where I think "Saw that coming".
That said, one real highlight throughout is in Adair's willingness to pay homage to those who went before him. Mount is offended when people describe the murder as being similar to those in her novels for the simple reason that she leaves locked-room murders to John Dickson Carr (and rightly so, the man's ability in this regard was nonpareil), and she later invokes the "little grey cells" to work out the solution. At one point, she even makes a passing reference to Carr's immortal "Locked Room Lecture" from The Hollow Man.
But it's not only this. Mount and others are constantly providing synopses of her own novels, all of which are squarely in the Golden Age tradition. A "re-written" Oedipus Rex as a courtroom drama would seem slightly unusual, but we're also treated to the plot of a novel in which the crime is "solved before anyone knew it had happened" (due to the detective's rather intimate knowledge of the thief's anatomy), the solution to a novel in which an English teacher identifies his killer by a grammatical quirk and brief descriptions of plots involving one identical twin murdering the other and a victim being killed while singing "Auld Lang Syne" and nobody noticing he was dead. While there are vague hints at some of the classics of the style hidden away there - Agatha Christie's notebooks apparently contain a lot of discussions of "twin murders" - these give a certain bizarre flavour to everything.
All in all, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is an interesting little entry in the files. Judged purely as a murder mystery, it lacks several key ingredients. Judged as a parody of the style, it is likewise a bit lacking. As a loving homage to the genre, though, it's far from bad.
Recommended with reservations. Three stars.
Monday, 10 October 2016
Henning Mankell - "The White Lioness"
Before I really get started with the first review here, I should probably make two quick points.
The first is that while I'm going to be reviewing novels which are frequently part of a series, I won't necessarily be starting from the beginning of the series, just because I read the earlier ones ages ago. I will at some point go back and review the earlier ones, too, so don't worry about that.
The second is that I absolutely love Scandinavian crime fiction. Expect to see a lot of it here.
So, with that in mind, let's look at Henning Mankell's third "Wallander" novel, The White Lioness or Den vita lejoninnan in its original Swedish.
While Scandi-Crime has - justifiably - become stratospherically famous in the years since Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series hit the shelves and the cinema screens, the style was bubbling away for a good couple of decades beforehand in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Iceland and Finland have been slightly later arrivals on the stage, but they've achieved their own successes more recently. The late Henning Mankell, for example, released his first "Wallander" novel in Sweden in 1991, although it was only translated into English in 1997.
The White Lioness is, as mentioned above, the third in the series featuring the idiosyncratic Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander, and was originally published in 1993, with the first English translation turning up in 1998. It is important to keep the publication date in mind here, as the plot turns on things like telex machines, typewriters and Apartheid South Africa, rather than their more modern equivalents.
Lioness is described on the cover of my copy as a "Kurt Wallander thriller", and it fits squarely in that genre rather than any of the other types of crime fiction out there. The focus, although it takes a short while to get there, is on a countdown to a planned assassination in South Africa, the preparations of which cause a murder in Sweden. The reader is privy to the parallel investigations by South African and Swedish police, but it's only in the final quarter of the novel that Wallander puts at least enough of the pieces together to achieve success.
The concept of the countdown is quite strong, in fact, with a lot of dialogue between the group planning the assassination focusing on the date and how many days it will be until the plan can go into effect, and the scenes in Sweden often containing lines to the effect that it was early April and so on. I often think of these as being films or TV shows waiting to happen, as Mankell is almost writing instructions for establishing shots of clocks or calendars in order to build the tension further.
Of course, the Wallanders have been filmed both in Swedish and in English since. The Swedish edition dates from 1996, while Kenneth Branagh's performance in English was filmed two decades later. I'm yet to get my hands on either series, although I suspect that Branagh would be one of the few actors who could seem authentic as Wallander.
Strangely, certainly in comparison to the first two novels in the series, I wouldn't quite say that this is as much a "Kurt Wallander" novel as it is a novel which involves Wallander. Yes, Wallander and his colleagues in the Ystad police in southern Sweden play a role in the resolution of the plot, but as half the action occurs on another continent and without any input from Sweden at all, it feels as though Mankell - who had considerable interests in the post-Apartheid society in southern Africa overall - was perhaps keener to write a novel set in the Republic but included Wallander and Sweden in order to sell more copies.
A lot of the enjoyment of good Scandi-Crime is to be had in the rough-around-the-edges main characters (Wallander himself, but also such figures as Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole and Arnaldur Indriðason's Inspector Erlendur are all good examples here), but Wallander seems to pale into the background here. There's an amusing scene with his elderly father in the early chapters, as well as some interaction with his daughter, but a lot of the rich characterisation that introduced all three Wallanders to the audience in Faceless Killers and The Dogs of Riga just doesn't quite seem to be there, which is rather a shame.
Another concern I have with Lioness is the reliance on real-world figures. In the South African chapters, key scenes focus on FW de Klerk and Pik Botha, with Nelson Mandela a more peripheral figure for much of the novel.
Obviously it's difficult to write about planning an assassination in early-90s South Africa without at least making reference to the central players in the drama of that country at that time, but Mankell has considerable difficulties making these men seem authentic. Some of this may be due to the fact that the events he was writing about were still happening at the time - de Klerk spends a lot of his time wondering about his legacy, which is slightly ironic given that he and Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year the novel was written - but some of it just feels heavy-handed. Of course, we can't fault Mankell for having Mandela think at one point that he may not have much time left, having reached the age of 70. I doubt that anyone would have imagined he would reach the age of 95, as he did.
All of this, though, points to the difficulty in writing about real people and events in medias res as it were. Something as dramatic and dynamic as the early 1990s in South Africa could easily have made Mankell's plot either irrelevant or scarily prescient in a moment, so he's forced to play it very safe, with the real characters feeling like two-dimensional extensions of their public personae.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to write a fictionalised extension of real-world events. Even if nothing else, Frederick Forsyth produced a masterclass in this in The Day of the Jackal (to which Lioness clearly owes a considerable debt). The key difference, though, is that Jackal was published in 1971 and set in 1963, as well as featuring predominantly fictional characters, rather than real ones.
On a more positive note, Lioness does show Swedish society at what - in retrospect - was the cusp of several important changes. Having the murder victim as a real estate agent, as well as having a witness lament the job opportunities in provincial Ystad in 1993, is a clear nod to the Swedish economic crisis of the early 1990s. Additionally, the inclusion of three Russian characters, two of whom are ex-KGB operatives, points towards the effects of immigration from the former Soviet Union (something which Mankell touches on in the earlier Dogs of Riga). Interestingly, one of these KGB operatives is burned quite horribly in his car, in what I can't help feeling is an inspiration for Zalachenko in the Millennium series more than a decade later.
Also of note is a throwaway line while the Ystad team are attempting to track the assassin, who is by now flying back to Africa. One of the policemen remarks that there couldn't be many Africans going through Swedish border controls over a given day, a comment which may have been true then but surely not now in light of the vibrantly multicultural Sweden of the 2010s.
Overall, The White Lioness is decently-plotted and shows Mankell's willingness to experiment beyond the confines of his "natural" Swedish setting - something he would do increasingly in later novels. Taken purely as a Kurt Wallander novel, it is a slight disappointment, and I do wonder if I would have been as "sold" on the series had this been my first exposure to it. I would suggest starting with Faceless Killers, as there are some references to earlier events, and the overall effect is better.
Three stars.
The first is that while I'm going to be reviewing novels which are frequently part of a series, I won't necessarily be starting from the beginning of the series, just because I read the earlier ones ages ago. I will at some point go back and review the earlier ones, too, so don't worry about that.
The second is that I absolutely love Scandinavian crime fiction. Expect to see a lot of it here.
So, with that in mind, let's look at Henning Mankell's third "Wallander" novel, The White Lioness or Den vita lejoninnan in its original Swedish.
While Scandi-Crime has - justifiably - become stratospherically famous in the years since Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series hit the shelves and the cinema screens, the style was bubbling away for a good couple of decades beforehand in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Iceland and Finland have been slightly later arrivals on the stage, but they've achieved their own successes more recently. The late Henning Mankell, for example, released his first "Wallander" novel in Sweden in 1991, although it was only translated into English in 1997.
The White Lioness is, as mentioned above, the third in the series featuring the idiosyncratic Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander, and was originally published in 1993, with the first English translation turning up in 1998. It is important to keep the publication date in mind here, as the plot turns on things like telex machines, typewriters and Apartheid South Africa, rather than their more modern equivalents.
Lioness is described on the cover of my copy as a "Kurt Wallander thriller", and it fits squarely in that genre rather than any of the other types of crime fiction out there. The focus, although it takes a short while to get there, is on a countdown to a planned assassination in South Africa, the preparations of which cause a murder in Sweden. The reader is privy to the parallel investigations by South African and Swedish police, but it's only in the final quarter of the novel that Wallander puts at least enough of the pieces together to achieve success.
The concept of the countdown is quite strong, in fact, with a lot of dialogue between the group planning the assassination focusing on the date and how many days it will be until the plan can go into effect, and the scenes in Sweden often containing lines to the effect that it was early April and so on. I often think of these as being films or TV shows waiting to happen, as Mankell is almost writing instructions for establishing shots of clocks or calendars in order to build the tension further.
Of course, the Wallanders have been filmed both in Swedish and in English since. The Swedish edition dates from 1996, while Kenneth Branagh's performance in English was filmed two decades later. I'm yet to get my hands on either series, although I suspect that Branagh would be one of the few actors who could seem authentic as Wallander.
Strangely, certainly in comparison to the first two novels in the series, I wouldn't quite say that this is as much a "Kurt Wallander" novel as it is a novel which involves Wallander. Yes, Wallander and his colleagues in the Ystad police in southern Sweden play a role in the resolution of the plot, but as half the action occurs on another continent and without any input from Sweden at all, it feels as though Mankell - who had considerable interests in the post-Apartheid society in southern Africa overall - was perhaps keener to write a novel set in the Republic but included Wallander and Sweden in order to sell more copies.
A lot of the enjoyment of good Scandi-Crime is to be had in the rough-around-the-edges main characters (Wallander himself, but also such figures as Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole and Arnaldur Indriðason's Inspector Erlendur are all good examples here), but Wallander seems to pale into the background here. There's an amusing scene with his elderly father in the early chapters, as well as some interaction with his daughter, but a lot of the rich characterisation that introduced all three Wallanders to the audience in Faceless Killers and The Dogs of Riga just doesn't quite seem to be there, which is rather a shame.
Another concern I have with Lioness is the reliance on real-world figures. In the South African chapters, key scenes focus on FW de Klerk and Pik Botha, with Nelson Mandela a more peripheral figure for much of the novel.
Obviously it's difficult to write about planning an assassination in early-90s South Africa without at least making reference to the central players in the drama of that country at that time, but Mankell has considerable difficulties making these men seem authentic. Some of this may be due to the fact that the events he was writing about were still happening at the time - de Klerk spends a lot of his time wondering about his legacy, which is slightly ironic given that he and Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year the novel was written - but some of it just feels heavy-handed. Of course, we can't fault Mankell for having Mandela think at one point that he may not have much time left, having reached the age of 70. I doubt that anyone would have imagined he would reach the age of 95, as he did.
All of this, though, points to the difficulty in writing about real people and events in medias res as it were. Something as dramatic and dynamic as the early 1990s in South Africa could easily have made Mankell's plot either irrelevant or scarily prescient in a moment, so he's forced to play it very safe, with the real characters feeling like two-dimensional extensions of their public personae.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to write a fictionalised extension of real-world events. Even if nothing else, Frederick Forsyth produced a masterclass in this in The Day of the Jackal (to which Lioness clearly owes a considerable debt). The key difference, though, is that Jackal was published in 1971 and set in 1963, as well as featuring predominantly fictional characters, rather than real ones.
On a more positive note, Lioness does show Swedish society at what - in retrospect - was the cusp of several important changes. Having the murder victim as a real estate agent, as well as having a witness lament the job opportunities in provincial Ystad in 1993, is a clear nod to the Swedish economic crisis of the early 1990s. Additionally, the inclusion of three Russian characters, two of whom are ex-KGB operatives, points towards the effects of immigration from the former Soviet Union (something which Mankell touches on in the earlier Dogs of Riga). Interestingly, one of these KGB operatives is burned quite horribly in his car, in what I can't help feeling is an inspiration for Zalachenko in the Millennium series more than a decade later.
Also of note is a throwaway line while the Ystad team are attempting to track the assassin, who is by now flying back to Africa. One of the policemen remarks that there couldn't be many Africans going through Swedish border controls over a given day, a comment which may have been true then but surely not now in light of the vibrantly multicultural Sweden of the 2010s.
Overall, The White Lioness is decently-plotted and shows Mankell's willingness to experiment beyond the confines of his "natural" Swedish setting - something he would do increasingly in later novels. Taken purely as a Kurt Wallander novel, it is a slight disappointment, and I do wonder if I would have been as "sold" on the series had this been my first exposure to it. I would suggest starting with Faceless Killers, as there are some references to earlier events, and the overall effect is better.
Three stars.
Saturday, 8 October 2016
Welcome!
Welcome one and all to Crime Plotter, a new blog designed to review the best and worst in crime fiction. I'll be reviewing everything from the latest big-name blockbusters through to those classics we all know and love, with hopefully a few you've never heard of before in there as well, and maybe even something a bit different too.
My name's Harry, and I've been a lifelong fan of crime novels. I can still remember bedtime stories of Sherlock Holmes with Dad doing "all the voices", and even the time I was given an Agatha Christie novel ("A Murder is Announced") to keep me entertained on the way to a family function.
I'm also a big believer in helping friends and family discover new books, so I think it's time I expanded that further afield. That's what this blog is going to be all about, so here's hoping you'll find something you like.
Feel free to comment with suggestions of authors or novels I should review, too. I have a big collection of my own which I'll be going through, but please don't think of this as a one-way street.
My name's Harry, and I've been a lifelong fan of crime novels. I can still remember bedtime stories of Sherlock Holmes with Dad doing "all the voices", and even the time I was given an Agatha Christie novel ("A Murder is Announced") to keep me entertained on the way to a family function.
I'm also a big believer in helping friends and family discover new books, so I think it's time I expanded that further afield. That's what this blog is going to be all about, so here's hoping you'll find something you like.
Feel free to comment with suggestions of authors or novels I should review, too. I have a big collection of my own which I'll be going through, but please don't think of this as a one-way street.
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