Matthew Condon - "Three Crooked Kings"

Matthew Condon is a journalist with the Courier-Mail here in Brisbane, as well as an author of crime fiction. Somewhere in between these two commitments, he has also found time to write what has turned into a trilogy of true-crime works analysing the events leading to the Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland. In fact, there's been a fourth publication in the same vein, dealing with the experiences he had doing his research and writing, so perhaps "trilogy" isn't quite the right term. Three Crooked Kings is the first instalment of this account - and in fact my copy makes it clear that the project was only meant to be a two-volume work at the time.

Having grown up in Brisbane in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the events of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, which eventually outlined institutional corruption in the Queensland police and government, are things which I at least have a vague understanding of. I can recall asking my parents who "Fitz, Gerald and Quiry" were after hearing a mention of the inquiry on the evening news at one point, and names like Terry Lewis, Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the like are ones which have always rung proverbial bells for me.
In fact, it's somewhat unusual to think that there's an entire generation of young people for whom none of these names really means much. As a historian, that's more than a bit concerning.

Three Crooked Kings traces the career of Terry Lewis from his first day in the police in 1949 through to his "exile" in western Queensland in the 1970s, a time-frame which should automatically explain to many readers that the "Fitzgerald-era corruption" wasn't just limited to the 70s and 80s. Indeed, the police force which Lewis joins is not exactly a paragon of virtue, and there are mentions of various scandals earlier in history as well.
We also meet the other two "kings", of the so-called police "Rat Pack" - Tony Murphy and "Silent" Glen Hallahan. Hallahan has the interesting distinction of being the first Queensland public servant to be charged with corruption, although Condon points out that this was almost in spite of - rather than because of - the work of the police investigating him. Jack "Bagman" Herbert, another central figure in the Fitzgerald Inquiry, also makes several appearances.
Condon was in fact asked by Lewis to tell his story, and has been able to let most of the other central figures tell theirs as well (either to him directly or otherwise). The book is full of direct quotes from the policemen, often juxtaposed with their official statements at the time which suggest that their memories may not be as accurate as they would like to think.

Condon is also able to situate the 40s-70s in Queensland history, and explain that the events he writes about didn't occur in isolation. Many infamous crimes of the era are investigated, with names like Betty Shanks playing a role early, along with the perhaps lesser-known "Sundown Murders", which brought Hallahan a level of fame. Later, we are taken to the Whiskey Au Go Go bombing and the McCulkin murders (eerily topical reading now, with the case having been re-opened), and no less a figure than the former "celebrity criminologist" Paul Wilson (also eerily topical now, for other reasons) makes a cameo appearance.
But this isn't a mere recitation of crime and gangsters. Condon makes the point repeatedly that the police corruption was known - or at least tacitly noticed, perhaps - by politicians on both sides. The work of anti-corruption crusaders such as Colin Bennett and Ray Whitrod is set against the close relationship of figures like Commissioner Frank Bischof and Premier Frank Nicklin, to say nothing of Lewis' own friendship with Bjelke-Petersen.
Key social events are also brought into the frame. The description of the riots during the South African rugby union team's tour of Brisbane is very important in explaining an event which is often misunderstood even now. Perhaps more amusing, though, is the attitude of Bischof and Lewis to the (earlier) flourishings of rock music and "bodgie" culture, with young men dressing in that style being given neat shirts and ties to wear instead.

As a side-note, it's very striking as a Brisbanite to read about events in one's own home town. At one point, Lewis moves from a house at the end of the street I'm living in to one not too far from a travel agency my family has used for years. Later, he meets the new Police Minister at an end-of-year ceremony at the secondary school a few streets from my old apartment, and then returns a truant to another local school.

What really works here, though, is Condon's writing style. To say that a book is written by a journalist and shows it can often be an insult, but not here. Condon stays on top of a very complex story and his narrative crackles from the page. Instead of chapter divisions, the book is divided into the relevant decades, with little sub-headings dividing the action into bite-sized chunks. These headings feel almost like newspaper headlines, and serve to remind the reader that the focus will now be shifting to politics, or Sydney, or Murphy, or whatever else it may be.
Condon's journalistic background shows through, too, in that the action is constantly building. One key piece in the puzzle here is the story of prostitute Shirley Brifman, and even knowing what her fate is, it's hard not to get a sense of foreboding as she moves closer and closer to it. There is a real sense throughout of the pieces of the puzzle being moved together on all sides, which moves what could have been a bland narrative into page-turner territory.

There are perhaps a few minor criticisms to make. Lewis' receipt of a Churchill Fellowship is mentioned, and he is described as "the first" recipient, which isn't strictly true, as there are several recipients every year. I'll admit to a personal connection here, as family history features someone who was also one of "the first recipients", in the plural.
Of probably greater concern is the lack of any pictures or a "dramatis personae" at the start of the book. Condon frequently describes pictures from newspapers in detail, and I feel that a short "plate section" would be useful in a situation like this, particularly as a number of the key buildings have also been renovated or destroyed over time as well. Perhaps the concern was that not including such a thing maintains the momentum of the work better.
Likewise, while Condon does a great job of keeping his cast of politicians, police and criminals straight, a list of exactly who's who may not have gone astray. As mentioned earlier, there is a generation for whom "Terry Lewis" and "Joh Bjelke-Petersen" are figures in history books only, while "Roger Rogerson" (who makes a cameo appearance investigating the Whiskey Au Go Go bombing) is simply a convicted criminal. Without photos of the key figures or a quick outline of their identities to refer to, these names may not mean overly much.

All in all, though, this is a fantastic telling of a very complex and important story in the development of Brisbane (and Queensland) from a small country town to the capital of the "Deep North" and beyond. It reads cinematically at times, and I do hope that someone somewhere takes the time to either convert Condon's work into a documentary or even a drama series, as it would make a particularly fine Underbelly instalment should that series come back to the screen.

Five stars. Heartily recommended.

Åsa Larsson - "The Savage Altar"

"Larsson", to many people, is a name synonymous with Scandi-Crime, as Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy has been responsible for breaking the style into the global consciousness. One might think, therefore, that Åsa Larsson has rather a lot to live up to. As it turns out, however, Åsa's debut novel The Savage Altar (Solstorm in the original Swedish, also known by the title of its US edition as Sun Storm) was in fact published in 2003, two years before Lisbeth Salander's first appearance. It was even translated a year before Anglophone readers got to meet Salander, but seemingly not to quite the fanfare.

Larsson's background is slightly unusual, and explains many of the plot choices in Savage Altar. Her grandfather was the Swedish Olympic skier Erik Larsson, who went on to be a Laestadian priest in the north of the country. Her father Lars was likewise a preacher, while Larsson herself trained as a taxation lawyer. As a result, we have a thriller set in the north of Sweden with a taxation lawyer investigating a religious movement. That may not sound like the most promising of beginnings, but it definitely works here.
The regions of Sweden tend not to get quite as much coverage in crime fiction as Stockholm does, although there are some notable exceptions. Henning Mankell, for example, has Wallander at least based near Ystad in the south, while Mons Kallentoft features the Linköping area quite prominently. In stark contrast to the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan Stockholm, the regions tend to be much more rural and perhaps even inward-looking than the capital does, and this plays well for a novelist who can capture that mood. Larsson's vision of the north is bleak, with dark winter days and massive snowdrifts dominating the plot here - Scandinavia writ large, I feel.

Savage Altar is a remarkably restrained novel, with only one murder setting the plot into motion. We're introduced to the victim - religious celebrity Viktor Strandgård - as he is killed in the middle of the megachurch he works for, and while there are threats made and a very menacing atmosphere promising more murders, none actually happen. For a debut novel, this is quite striking, as it's very easy to bathe a plot in blood and gore if the excitement flags slightly.
Larsson's investigator character is Rebecka Martinsson, a young tax lawyer working in Stockholm but born in the northern town of Kiruna. The victim's sister Sanna is an old friend, who contacts her for help as the media picks up on the story. Martinsson travels to Kiruna and gradually finds herself drawn back into a complex web of relationships and history that she'd hoped to leave by moving south for her studies. Her connections to Sanna and Viktor, for example, are anything but straightforward, and are relayed in flashbacks at key moments in the plot.
We are also given a parallel view of the police investigating the case, particularly the heavily-pregnant Anna-Maria Mella, her second-in-command Sven-Erik Stålnacke and their reviled chief prosecutor Carl von Post. While the focus is squarely on the Rebecka Martinsson side of the plot, the police are well-drawn characters and it will be interesting to see if they continue to make appearances later in the Rebecka Martinsson series. Significantly, this is one of the few Scandi-Crime novels (aside, perhaps, from the aforementioned Millennium series) in which the police are seen as a nuisance and a difficulty, rather than unequivocally a force for good.

The murder investigation unfolds in a way which can only really be compared to the "village cosy" murder mysteries of the Golden Age. Practically everyone involved in the megachurch has something to hide, and the revelation of how and why the crime was committed ties together a number of these secrets in a surprising way. Were it not for the oppressive winter, the general sense of foreboding (and probably the reliance on emails and phones), one could almost see Miss Marple handling at least parts of this investigation. The results may have been slightly different, though.
Larsson has achieved a very successful drawing of a small community with its secrets. There are frequent explanations that characters knew that all was not well because of what wasn't being said, in that way that only a small town can really achieve. That said, it's also very clear that she has a deep love for the north of her country, with some very evocative scenes of the Aurora Borealis and even the tranquility of deep snowdrifts turning up in the middle of the more tense passages.

The quirk of having two of the central characters (Sanna and Rebecka) being slightly less than "reliable" is an interesting one. Sanna is described as "fragile" early on, and exactly what role she has played in events is still a relatively open question as the novel ends. For her part, Rebecka isn't the detached investigator most crime fiction features - she's in this quite deeply even as the novel begins, and many of her attempts to find out the truth are stymied by her connections to the witnesses, suspects and victim.
In lesser hands, this would become very complicated and probably an excuse for either the police to swoop in and solve everything or the rather hackneyed everyone-gets-kidnapped-by-the-murderer scene, but this isn't how Savage Altar plays. The climactic revelation scene does hew relatively closely to the customary thriller tropes of victory being pulled from the jaws of defeat, but such revelation as there is comes as rather a surprise. It's not a complete blindside, but certainly a surprise.

The "religious" and "tax" themes here do turn up every now and again. Most of the Kiruna characters have the ability to quote scripture quite easily, and a slight elision of one passage provides an important clue. While this is slightly unusual, particularly in light of the relatively secular Swedish society these days, it is in keeping with the rural setting.
Larsson's expertise in the Swedish tax code comes through as she begins to uncover part of the motive, too. Financial thrillers can be relatively dull in this regard (see Michael Ridpath's earlier work as a good example), but the scene in which Martinsson confronts one of the suspects with allegations of financial impropriety is spellbinding. She fairly spits her accusations at her target, and these are intercut with flashbacks to her previous interactions with this person. A scene like this is crying out to be filmed, frankly.

I genuinely can't recommend this one enough. Åsa Larsson has written a debut novel which many more experienced writers would have difficulty writing over the length of a career. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye out for a copy of her followup.

Unreservedly recommended. Five stars.

Roslund & Hellström - "Two Soldiers"

Anders Roslund and Börje Hellström are a crime-writing duo from Sweden. Roslund is a journalist by training, while Hellström's background is as a criminal himself and now a campaigner for prison reform in Sweden. The duo have achieved some fame outside of the Scandinavian region, with Tre sekunder (translated to English as Three Seconds) being one of the "it" books that everyone seemed to have read in the crime fiction world after its translation in 2010.

Two Soldiers (Två soldater in Swedish) is the followup to that novel, and takes place in a similarly gritty-realist Stockholm and surrounding areas. Indeed, just as Three Seconds dealt with the imposing Aspsås Prison on the outskirts of the Swedish capital, a lot of the action in Two Soldiers deals with the same institution. Here, though, the main focus is on an escape from the prison, where the earlier novel dealt with an attempt to place an undercover agent inside the prison.
Our two main characters are Leon Jensen and Gabriel Milton, leaders of the Råby Warriors gang, which is in the process of adopting the name "Ghetto Soldiers" - a name which several of the police describe as being rather childishly American, but which there seems to be a sense of authenticity about. Jensen and Milton are 18 years old, and quite clearly belong to the same milieu as the American gangsters they idolise. It's hard to imagine things ending well for them, and it's hardly a spoiler to say that they don't end particularly well for them.
Jensen is incarcerated in Aspsås, leaving Milton to run the gang from the outside. It is implied, though, that Jensen is still pulling the strings, as there are excerpts of a long letter that he writes Milton containing a variety of instructions for how the gang is to operate as well as how Milton's girlfriend Wanda Svensson is to behave. Much of the focus, too, is on Jensen and the manner in which he exerts his influence over much of the rest of the prison population - I was surprised at times when a character would reiterate that he was only a young man, as he didn't seem to be at all.

Eventually, Jensen and some of his associates break out of the prison, and the novel takes a rather abrupt turn away from the gang to focus on Ewert Grens - the "series character" for Roslund and Hellström, if you will - and his police associates chasing the gang and attempting to recapture them.

Grens appears in a similar regard in Three Seconds, where I was left with a very unfavouable impression of him, as he comes very close to ruining the undercover operation at the heart of the novel through his sheer stubbornness. In Two Soldiers, Grens is similarly objectionable, riding roughshod over most of his colleagues and demanding results in unreasonable timeframes. He is also shown to bear grudges, as the events of Three Seconds have resulted in one of the other characters in that novel being promoted through the ranks of the Swedish police and intelligence service - Grens behaves abominably towards the other man. Moreover, Grens has an unfortunate tendency to throw tantrums for very little reason, which hardly makes him the kind of character the reader is going to identify with easily.
Indeed, it's actually very hard to identify with any of the characters here. Aside from Grens, the forces of law and order are championed by José Pereira (Sweden is a highly multicultural society, which explains what may appear to be unusual character names), who has the advantage of being at least a sympathetically-drawn figure. The authors, however, have the unfortunate tendency to re-introduce Pereira every time he appears in a scene - there are near-constant references to his fourteen-year-old twin daughters - and he drops out of the action entirely for much of the third "act" of the novel after trying to read Grens the riot act. If some of the care with which Pereira keeps being re-introduced were given over to some of the other characters' back-stories, perhaps there might have been a higher level of interest.
It's not much easier to identify with the criminals, either. In a well-written thriller, the reader can find themselves on the side of the petty criminals, but Jensen and Milton are simply violent drug-addicted thugs, and the opening 200 pages or so of this 600-page novel are almost a catalogue of their senseless and pornographic violence. Points for realism, certainly, but points at the expense of anything to really focus on.

In many ways, this leads to the broader question of what this novel is really "about". Good Scandi-Crime can hold up a mirror to these seemingly stable societies and show the less palatable underbellies which everyone wishes didn't exist. Think of the social commentary in Larsson's Millennium series, for a very well-known example.
This novel doesn't do that. While the "Ghetto Soldiers" have members who are clearly immigrants or of immigrant descent, the gang is multicultural and there's no particular delineation between the members beyond their names. There's a claim I've seen that Roslund and Hellström focus on the issue of "who the real victim is" where crime is concerned, however all the crimes committed in Two Soldiers are entirely unambiguous as to who the victim is. There's a rather ham-fisted attempt at social commentary as Jensen and Milton's upbringings are examined, but this really is a narrative thread that goes nowhere, so I don't even see any claim of examining the social condition of a depressed community outside Stockholm.
All in all, I'm left with the uncomfortable thought that this was just written for the sensationalist value. Certainly the relish with which some of the violence is described suggests as much.

Lastly, the novel is marred by some genuinely appalling editing choices. The duo have an irritating habit of breaking up long scenes with dashes and then inserting shorter ones for no apparent reason. When one character punches another, for example, the punch actually takes 3/4 of a page to land, as there keep being these little breaks and visions inside the heads of the two people involved.
What I'm sure is meant to be a sense of "urgency" (in a 600-page novel, mind) is conveyed occasionally by having the main text interspersed with other fonts - Jensen's letter, interview transcripts, medical reports, even the readout of a stopwatch for no apparent reason. Occasionally, these turn up in the middle of sentences, which is needlessly jarring. Jensen's letter, too, is displayed in an irritating "handwritten" font, which when coupled with his poor spelling only serves to waste time. On more than one occasion, too, the copyediting for the English version forgets to switch out of the "fancy" typesetting for a bit after the special section is finished. Alternatively, there are switches to events slightly earlier in the plot with no indication at all, not even another of these changes in typesetting.
As a final criticism, all too frequently we switch point-of-view character with a simple reference to "he" or "she", with the authors bothering to tell us that we're now following this or that person a paragraph or two later. This, again, is very jarring, and is one of the strongest indications for me that the novel was written by two individuals, as of course it was.

All told, this is a novel that wants to be many things it isn't. It's overlong and quite disjointed at times, as well as losing sight of what it's trying to achieve. Some of these problems may well come down to the fact that it was written by two people (a co-written novel can be done, as the duo behind Lars Kepler have proven in the Scandi-Crime space), but a lot really just sound like self-indulgent authors being given a blank cheque by editors and publishers.

Give this one a miss. 1 star.

Jim Butcher - "Storm Front"

It's not every day you read a novel which contains the sentence "I was stuck in a frozen elevator, handcuffed to my unconscious friend who was dying of poison while a magical scorpion the size of some French cars tried to tear its way into me and rip me apart." Then again, Jim Butcher's Storm Front is certainly not your everyday novel.

This is the first of the Dresden Files series, which I'd heard about vaguely from a number of places before finally taking the plunge on. What is the Dresden Files? Well, it's a cross between hardboiled noir detective fiction and urban fantasy, with a healthy seasoning of comedy on top. It's crime fiction, but not exactly the crime fiction you might expect.
Harry Dresden, the title character, is a "consulting wizard" in Chicago, the only consulting wizard in the country, it seems. He has a contract of sorts with the Chicago Police Department, where he helps them solve crimes which involve the paranormal, as well as conducting his own investigations from his (typically hardboiled) rundown office where he's chronically behind on the rent.

So, the big elephant in the room, yes there is magic and wizardry involved in this series. This isn't your standard fantasy-novel kind of magic, by any means, though. The potions which Dresden concocts at one point are full of relatively "normal" ingredients, but are described as both smelling and tasting horrible, as well as having slightly unpredictable effects. The murders which start this investigation off, too, are uncompromisingly brutal and a lot is made of how difficult they would be for a wizard to perform. In other words, we don't have the easy cop-out answer of "Well, it was magic" for how a crime was committed - this is well-worked-out magic with rules which can't be broken.
Just as this isn't the standard kind of fantasy novel, neither is it your standard-issue hardboiled gumshoe story. Yes, there are several female characters of debatable morals, cops who wonder whether Dresden is really on their side and some physical violence, but Dresden is not exactly Sam Spade in his view of the world.

As a crime novel, though, this works surprisingly well. It takes the relatively standard plot device of having the detective ("wizard", in this instance) investigating two crimes that may or may not be linked and overlays its magical backdrop onto it. A war between an organised crime figure - who is still Italian-American, a stereotype I'm not sure we'll ever see the end of - and a ring of drug suppliers becomes much more interesting when the drug may have occult powers, not to mention when the detective can have the "showdown" scene with the crime boss by causing a jukebox to melt.
In typical noir fashion, the plot is slightly convoluted, and the revelation of what was really going on comes to Dresden while he's under a direct threat of death himself. A lot of the plot development happens in this way, in fact, which is a good thing in this style of novel.

The dark comedy of the better hardboiled novelists is also present, and in fact sometimes turns into full-blown slapstick or near equivalents thereof. A key witness (a faery) is trapped by magical means and gets just as irritated by that as an entrapped witness in Raymond Chandler would, for example. On a much more impressive note is a scene involving a naked Dresden being attacked on a date by a demon...while his date has accidentally taken a love potion and has something other than escape on her mind. Some things just make more sense when you read them, perhaps.
Even the belief that those with magical powers can cause problems for electronic devices makes an appearance here. Dresden runs into constant problems with phones and the lift in his building, for example, and is also unable to be X-rayed towards the end.

While Storm Front was Butcher's debut novel, the series now extends to 15 entries plus a collection of short stories. It's clear that there was always a plan to do so, as frequent mentions are made of Dresden's background - most notably, he used his powers to kill someone and has thus broken one of the Laws of Magic, resulting in the powerful White Council watching him carefully and even suspecting him of complicity in the crimes throughout this novel.
As in many first novels, Dresden's not an entirely three-dimensional character, but he is given enough of a personality and a background to make the reader very curious about what he might get up to next.

There are plenty of novels and series out there playing on the "shadow war" concept - people with magical or esoteric knowledge who are trying to prevent unspeakable evil from taking over the world. Indeed, even a certain worldwide best-seller series about a particular boy wizard occasionally takes on this theme. With Storm Front, Butcher has demonstrated that there is another way of taking such a plot and finding more life in it.

Highly recommended. 4 stars.

Dorothy L. Sayers - "The Documents in the Case"

First published in 1930, The Documents in the Case is the only Dorothy L. Sayers novel not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. Perhaps as a result of that, it's much less-known than the leading Wimsey novels.
Documents is also an unusual beast of a thing overall, being an epistolary novel. For those unfamiliar with the term, this is a novel made up of correspondence - in this case, a large number of letters, a telegram or two and some written statements and newspaper clippings. The form was quite popular in gothic literature, and in fact no less a novel than Bram Stoker's Dracula was written that way. The question I asked myself before opening Documents is whether or not the form would work for a murder mystery.

The documents in question are said to have been assembled by the son of the deceased in an attempt to bring his father's killer to justice. None of this is particularly revolutionary information, but it does cause the strange effect of knowing ahead of time who is going to die as we read the novel. This isn't unique, of course - titles such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Lord Edgeware Dies and Mrs McGinty's Dead are all well-known Agatha Christie novels and they make the identity of the victim even more explicit - but this particular death occurs just under half-way through the novel, which is slightly more unusual as crime fiction tends to place the crime a couple of chapters in at the latest.
As a result, we're treated to some very well-rounded characters. Mr and Mrs Harrison live in Bayswater, and the maisonette above theirs is let to Mr Lathom (an artist) and Mr Munting (a writer). The Harrisons have a "lady-help" called Agatha Milsom, and Mr Harrison has a thirty-year-old son from his first marriage. A minor part is played by the woman Mr Munting eventually marries. By reading their correspondence, we are given the interesting quirk of seeing them all through each other's eyes - certain events are misconstrued by one or the other character, and it occasionally requires a number of letters before we arrive at what appears to be the "real" truth behind a given incident. It's a commonplace in Golden Age novels that everyone forms their own impressions of key events and relationships, but actually having to build the "truth" from these impressions rather than being given it by an omnipresent narrator is an interesting quirk.
What is also very impressive here is the differentiation of the different narrative voices. I wasn't entirely convinced by Agatha Milsom's voice, but the two younger men are clearly their own people with distinct personalities and writing styles, as are both of the Harrisons. Considering how difficult it can be to sustain a difference in voice between two characters in a regular novel, this is quite an achievement.

Unfortunately, Documents seems to have made the opposite error from the one which the earlier Sayers novel did. Where Whose Body? sacrificed a lot of characterisation for plot, Documents has a plot which hardly moves for pages and pages while we get these well-rounded characters (and their author, frankly) showing off.
One key plot incident involves a misunderstanding between two characters on the stairs. Most of this is cleared up within roughly five pages, but it later emerges that not everyone knew what was going on. Where most novelists would be content to elide this ("He told her what had really happened", for example), Sayers insists on having all the major players in the incident explain things again. Considering that one of these characters already had access to correspondence explaining it all, that seems completely uncalled-for.
At the inquest, one character's evidence is repeated - at least in part - twice. I'm not sure if this was how inquests would have been conducted at the time, but again it just drags any tension out beyond a reasonable limit.
Additionally, there is a lot of correspondence in which Munting goes on about philosophical matters. All well and good, but this (and some interminable discussions of chemistry) are inserted into the final scenes as the murderer's identity is confirmed. So slow-moving are these, in fact, that I had to re-read them a couple of times to make sure I knew that the killer was indeed the killer. I'm honestly tempted to say that I didn't care by that time.

All in all, this is a murder mystery which wants to be a lot more. Sayers clearly improved her craft considerably in between her debut and this, but by trying to do far too much with the form, she wound up missing the mark considerably.

Skip this one. One star.