Since I wrote my last review of his work, the Icelandic crime novelist Arnaldur Indriðason has achieved a slightly unusual milestone, courtesy of the politics of his homeland. The new Icelandic Prime Minister is one Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who holds an MA degree in the work of the novelist, which may well make Arnaldur the first crime novelist to have been studied academically by a senior politician anywhere in the world.
All of this is a side-note to 2012's Outrage (originally published in 2008 as Myrká), of course, which is itself a somewhat peculiar novel even by Arnaldur's customarily austere standards.
The action begins with a rather enigmatic prologue, in which a man prepares himself for a night on the town. It's clear that the unnamed man is up to something sinister, and by the time he's found himself talking to a young (unnamed) woman, we begin to realise that his aim is the use of a date-rape drug of some description.
But all is not as it might seem, though. As the dead body is found, it emerges that it's the man who has been killed, with no sign of any woman nearby - only a woman's shawl, with a strange smell which Detective Elínborg recognises as tandoori spices. Moreover, we learn rapidly that the man's bloodstream is full of rohypnol, all of which points to something much more complex than first thought.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a case for Detective Erlendur, that gaunt, irascible character familiar from the rest of Arnaldur's novels. Strangely, Erlendur is completely absent from this novel, having travelled to the east of the country in an attempt to reconnect with his roots. The investigation, therefore, is conducted by Elínborg in the main, with Sigurður Óli providing some level of support.
The effect of this is somewhat bizarre to the reader, as Erlendur is as synonymous with Arnaldur's work as Wallander is for Henning Mankell or Hercule Poirot for Agatha Christie. While Mankell wrote a number of non-Wallander novels, and Christie had a small group of "starring detectives" (as well as trying her hand at a Poirot investigation in which Poirot himself stays at home), it is still a jarring realisation that Erlendur is absent and we're really getting the "B-Team" doing the investigation. Talented author though Arnaldur is, Elínborg and Sigurður Óli have never really been fleshed out as three-dimensional characters before, and remain similarly underdeveloped by the end of the this case. We know a bit more of Elínborg's private life, but I'm not convinced I really "know" the character the way I do Erlendur.
Arnaldur's novels almost always involve motives arising from the relatively distant past, and Outrage is no exception. Elínborg moves between the unnamed fishing village where the victim was born, the drug-dealers of Reykjavík and even the suburban town of Akranes in the quest to resolve this murder - and to try and clear up an unsolved disappearance from half a decade earlier.
The victim - Runólfur - gradually emerges as a thoroughly objectionable figure, and it is to Arnaldur's credit that he's able to change the focus of the novel from "justice for the victim" to "justice for other victims", as the logic of investigating Runólfur is all but openly questioned by a number of characters.
As in the best Scandi-Crime, Arnaldur holds up a mirror to his society and isn't at all concerned about showing things warts and all. Prescription drug abuse and a willingness to minimise the impact of sexual assault are both shown as "norms" in Iceland. So, too, is the clash between traditional society - such as Runólfur's mother, who is known in her village for never having been to Reykjavík - and the hyper-modernity of the capital.
On occasion, this leads to some genuinely amusing moments. Elínborg's interviews with an elderly woman who is terrified of electro-magnetic waves and who provides an important clue are sensitively-written but still very funny. The same, in fact, can be said for the way in which the woman's clue is revealed to actually be a clue.
That being said, some portions of the solution appear to have been phoned in, as the saying goes. The final use of the "tandoori shawl" clue feels a bit padded out, as well as being slightly too reliant on coincidence to be plausible. In Arnaldur's defence, though, it's possible to argue that the genuine lack of Indian cuisine in Iceland could produce a situation like the one Elínborg discovers.
In customary fashion, Arnaldur's conclusion leaves as many questions as it provides answers. Having read a number of this series, it's a technique which works very well, as the entire point is that "life goes on", rather than everything having been wrapped up neatly and "closure" provided to everyone involved. It may be slightly disconcerting to readers encountering the Reykjavík CID for the first time, though. These novels are an acquired taste.
Not exactly Arnaldur at the peak of his powers, but a good read nonetheless. I continue to live in hope that the earlier pair of Erlendur novels will see an English translation someday. 4 stars.
[NOTE: In accordance with Icelandic names, all Icelanders here are properly referred to by their first names only]
Tuesday, 19 December 2017
Tuesday, 12 December 2017
"The Snowman" film review
While this is a blog of book reviews, I feel that it is important to devote some attention to the recent film adaptation of Jo Nesbø's The Snowman. In my review of the novel, I indicated that the promise of the cast of the film was very high. Sadly, however, those expectations don't appear to have been borne out.
The Snowman is, to be entirely honest, a deeply frustrating film. There is no reason why - given the material, the actors and the director - it shouldn't have been one of the best films of the year, and yet it routinely drops the ball when it has the opportunity to do something genuinely spectacular.
My first problem with the film is that it falls into the common trap of letting all the actors use their natural accents, rather than getting them all to sound Norwegian. I suppose in some regard this is because much of the filmgoing public doesn't necessarily know what Norwegian accents sound like, but it actively destroys the realism of the plot. As a result, Michael Fassbender plays Hole with his Irish accent with overtones of something generically Scandinavian (I have a great deal of respect for Fassbender as an actor, and it is gratifying to see that he's at least made an effort here). Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Rakel with a French accent, which is bizarre, and Val Kilmer's Gert Rafto has an American accent, which is a complete waste of time. In Kilmer's defence, Rafto is from Bergen which has a very distinctive accent for most Norwegians, but I doubt that Kilmer's American tones are what they would have expected either.
Secondly, the film dispenses with a number of the subplots in the original novel. The complex motivations of Katrine Bratt, for example, remain almost entirely unexplained and her ultimate fate is radically different to that in the novel - so much so that I'm not sure how the mooted sequel (which I honestly doubt will be made now) would have worked.
Yes, there are certain aspects of Snowman's plot which require the written word, rather than the camera shot, to maintain their tension, but excising nearly 75% of a character (JK Simmons' Arve Støp moves from a key figure to a peripheral distraction) in the name of the visual makes no sense at all.
Thirdly, and most damningly, the film really doesn't know what genre it wants to be in. The novel is a thriller, and a very tense one at that. The marketing for the film presents it as something closer to an urban horror film with a slasher-esque villain. Just as so many Hollywood comedies overplay their hands by having the funniest bits in the trailer, the same is true with this film's jump-scares, for the simple reason that there actually aren't a great many in the original plot (one or two are invented for the screen, but that's another story).
Having eviscerated Nesbø's plot and made a mockery of the setting - much of the film was actually filmed on location, which further makes the accents bizarre - it emerges that Thomas Alfredson really didn't know what to do with what was left as a director.
Alfredson has previously directed the recent version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and can clearly handle complex plots, so the fact that he clearly phoned this one in is baffling. He's on record as complaining about a lack of time to prepare overall, as well as to do all the shooting he wanted to in Norway. While both of these may well be valid points, the fact that he's come out and said as much sounds remarkably unprofessional. A good director should be able to overcome such difficulties, rather than use them as excuses.
Again, the bones (or most of them) of Nesbø's original plot are there, and there's some particularly good acting in parts. Sadly, this doesn't add up to a particularly faithful re-creation of an absolute classic of recent crime fiction. I'm tempted to say that it works on some level, but while I'm glad I saw it, it really doesn't work at all.
The Snowman is, to be entirely honest, a deeply frustrating film. There is no reason why - given the material, the actors and the director - it shouldn't have been one of the best films of the year, and yet it routinely drops the ball when it has the opportunity to do something genuinely spectacular.
My first problem with the film is that it falls into the common trap of letting all the actors use their natural accents, rather than getting them all to sound Norwegian. I suppose in some regard this is because much of the filmgoing public doesn't necessarily know what Norwegian accents sound like, but it actively destroys the realism of the plot. As a result, Michael Fassbender plays Hole with his Irish accent with overtones of something generically Scandinavian (I have a great deal of respect for Fassbender as an actor, and it is gratifying to see that he's at least made an effort here). Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Rakel with a French accent, which is bizarre, and Val Kilmer's Gert Rafto has an American accent, which is a complete waste of time. In Kilmer's defence, Rafto is from Bergen which has a very distinctive accent for most Norwegians, but I doubt that Kilmer's American tones are what they would have expected either.
Secondly, the film dispenses with a number of the subplots in the original novel. The complex motivations of Katrine Bratt, for example, remain almost entirely unexplained and her ultimate fate is radically different to that in the novel - so much so that I'm not sure how the mooted sequel (which I honestly doubt will be made now) would have worked.
Yes, there are certain aspects of Snowman's plot which require the written word, rather than the camera shot, to maintain their tension, but excising nearly 75% of a character (JK Simmons' Arve Støp moves from a key figure to a peripheral distraction) in the name of the visual makes no sense at all.
Thirdly, and most damningly, the film really doesn't know what genre it wants to be in. The novel is a thriller, and a very tense one at that. The marketing for the film presents it as something closer to an urban horror film with a slasher-esque villain. Just as so many Hollywood comedies overplay their hands by having the funniest bits in the trailer, the same is true with this film's jump-scares, for the simple reason that there actually aren't a great many in the original plot (one or two are invented for the screen, but that's another story).
Having eviscerated Nesbø's plot and made a mockery of the setting - much of the film was actually filmed on location, which further makes the accents bizarre - it emerges that Thomas Alfredson really didn't know what to do with what was left as a director.
Alfredson has previously directed the recent version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and can clearly handle complex plots, so the fact that he clearly phoned this one in is baffling. He's on record as complaining about a lack of time to prepare overall, as well as to do all the shooting he wanted to in Norway. While both of these may well be valid points, the fact that he's come out and said as much sounds remarkably unprofessional. A good director should be able to overcome such difficulties, rather than use them as excuses.
Again, the bones (or most of them) of Nesbø's original plot are there, and there's some particularly good acting in parts. Sadly, this doesn't add up to a particularly faithful re-creation of an absolute classic of recent crime fiction. I'm tempted to say that it works on some level, but while I'm glad I saw it, it really doesn't work at all.
Jo Nesbø - "Phantom"
Hary Hole again intends to disappear at the end of The Leopard, but the Norwegian capital clearly has a hold over Jo Nesbø's famously dark detective, as 2012's Phantom (Norwegian: Gjenferd, originally published 2011) opens with the scarred and newly-metallic-fingered Hole returning to Oslo. Hole has changed, though, as he is now definitely no longer a Norwegian policeman, and has in fact been working in what might be termed "debt collection", or perhaps "standover tactics" in Hong Kong, a development hinted at towards the end of the earlier novel.
Oslo, too, has changed. The police no longer turn a blind eye to drug dealing in certain parts of the city, and in asides we learn that the more "traditional" drug of heroin has been replaced by something known as "violin". Hole's adversaries from The Leopard - Mikael Bellman and his loyal underling Truls Berntsen - remain in their police careers, with Bellman re-assigned to head the division focusing on organised crime, which appears to focus on a criminal known only as "the man from Dubai".
So what's brought Hole back from the Orient this time? He initially requests permission from his former boss to investigate the murder of a young junkie, Gusto Hanssen. This is an unusual request, since the case appears to be straightforward, and a suspect has already been arrested. There is, of course, more to it than that - Oleg, the son of Hole's former girlfriend Rakel - is the arrested suspect. While mother and son had left Norway after the events of The Snowman, it emerges that they have returned, and that Oleg has gone off the rails, falling in with drugs and petty crime. Hole, perhaps unsurprisingly, blames himself and simply can't believe that the boy he knew a few short years before could have killed someone else.
On meeting Oleg - in a particularly touching series of scenes - it is revealed that the young man blames Hole for his troubles as well, and much of the early plot of the novel is played against the need for the father-son relationship (such as it was) to be restored.
Hole's investigations into the murder take him further into the new underworld in Oslo, uncovering a complex web of political and personal corruption uniting crime, the police and the government, and where it is never entirely clear who is using whom. In many ways, this investigation owes a lot to the classic noir fiction from the USA more than half a century ago. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to have seen Sam Spade or any of the other key figures of that style of fiction conducting inquiries.
The weakness of the novel, to be honest, is the sheer complexity of this corruption. Nesbø relies quite heavily on a "narrative" from the deceased Gusto Hanssen to explain some of the more abstruse points, as it gradually emerges that this may not have been a "regular" murder of a junkie or drug dealer. Unfortunately, Hanssen's exposition of the plot doesn't always keep pace with Hole's investigation, and the former detective is left more than once chasing up a red herring which the reader already knows the resolution to.
This isn't always a problem, due again to that self-same complexity. There were just as many points where I was grateful that Hanssen would explain something Hole's narrative had hinted at - or vice versa. All of this probably militates against the novel being good "beach reading", a comment I find slightly ironic as I in fact did read this during a holiday at the beach.
Perhaps more than many of the Hole novels, Phantom requires an awareness of the past incidents in Hole's chequered career. His delicate relationship with Rakel plays a considerable role in the plot development here, as do the favours he had earned during The Redeemer. Moreover, the experience of reading the earlier instalments will demonstrate whether Hole really is the detective the reader wants to follow. Nesbø again pulls very few punches, and has no qualms about putting his man into some very tough situations, both physically and ethically.
4 stars overall, for a very complex plot which somehow holds together.
Oslo, too, has changed. The police no longer turn a blind eye to drug dealing in certain parts of the city, and in asides we learn that the more "traditional" drug of heroin has been replaced by something known as "violin". Hole's adversaries from The Leopard - Mikael Bellman and his loyal underling Truls Berntsen - remain in their police careers, with Bellman re-assigned to head the division focusing on organised crime, which appears to focus on a criminal known only as "the man from Dubai".
So what's brought Hole back from the Orient this time? He initially requests permission from his former boss to investigate the murder of a young junkie, Gusto Hanssen. This is an unusual request, since the case appears to be straightforward, and a suspect has already been arrested. There is, of course, more to it than that - Oleg, the son of Hole's former girlfriend Rakel - is the arrested suspect. While mother and son had left Norway after the events of The Snowman, it emerges that they have returned, and that Oleg has gone off the rails, falling in with drugs and petty crime. Hole, perhaps unsurprisingly, blames himself and simply can't believe that the boy he knew a few short years before could have killed someone else.
On meeting Oleg - in a particularly touching series of scenes - it is revealed that the young man blames Hole for his troubles as well, and much of the early plot of the novel is played against the need for the father-son relationship (such as it was) to be restored.
Hole's investigations into the murder take him further into the new underworld in Oslo, uncovering a complex web of political and personal corruption uniting crime, the police and the government, and where it is never entirely clear who is using whom. In many ways, this investigation owes a lot to the classic noir fiction from the USA more than half a century ago. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to have seen Sam Spade or any of the other key figures of that style of fiction conducting inquiries.
The weakness of the novel, to be honest, is the sheer complexity of this corruption. Nesbø relies quite heavily on a "narrative" from the deceased Gusto Hanssen to explain some of the more abstruse points, as it gradually emerges that this may not have been a "regular" murder of a junkie or drug dealer. Unfortunately, Hanssen's exposition of the plot doesn't always keep pace with Hole's investigation, and the former detective is left more than once chasing up a red herring which the reader already knows the resolution to.
This isn't always a problem, due again to that self-same complexity. There were just as many points where I was grateful that Hanssen would explain something Hole's narrative had hinted at - or vice versa. All of this probably militates against the novel being good "beach reading", a comment I find slightly ironic as I in fact did read this during a holiday at the beach.
Perhaps more than many of the Hole novels, Phantom requires an awareness of the past incidents in Hole's chequered career. His delicate relationship with Rakel plays a considerable role in the plot development here, as do the favours he had earned during The Redeemer. Moreover, the experience of reading the earlier instalments will demonstrate whether Hole really is the detective the reader wants to follow. Nesbø again pulls very few punches, and has no qualms about putting his man into some very tough situations, both physically and ethically.
4 stars overall, for a very complex plot which somehow holds together.
Thursday, 23 November 2017
Ian Rankin - "Beggars Banquet"
Published in 2002, Beggars Banquet (the punctuation is inspired by the Rolling Stones album) contains a range of Ian Rankin's short stories written between 1991 and 2000. In contrast to Rankin's earlier short-story collection - A Good Hanging from 1992 - not all of these are Rebus stories, in fact, the good DI Rebus only appears 7 times across the 21 stories on offer here.
Short stories in crime fiction are always a risky proposition in my view. The best of them manage to showcase the creative side of the authors in a very condensed fashion - Agatha Christie, for example, was as much in control of her art in shorter form as she was at novel length. At their worst, the short story amounts to permission for the author to do away with the subtleties of plot and rely on coincidence and rather flimsy clues to present a solution which usually wouldn't stack up in the longer form.
Rankin's short stories here, at least those which deal with detection and the solving of crimes (read: Rebus stories), tend to be better than those worst examples, but not quite at the heights that his best novels can reach. The entertaining "Face the Music", for example, features Rebus at his maverick best dealing with a daylight robbery from an audio-visual shop, and the plot could easily have been spun out into at least part of a novel without much effort. "Trip Trap", on the other hand, sees Rebus jump to a conclusion - admittedly a rather obvious one - based on tissue-thin evidence, and the resolution of "Castle Dangerous" relies far too much on coincidence to be plausible.
Among the non-Rebus stories, there are similar tallies of hits and misses. "Principles of Accounts" is a genuinely tense game of cat-and-mouse with a truly surprising twist at the end, while "The Wider Scheme" falls flat with a twist which is telegraphed far too early in the piece.
There are some more "experimental" pieces, too. "Natural Selection" is a well-written (if overlong) dialogue among a group of small-time gangsters in a pub, "The Serpent's Back" takes place in the Edinburgh of the 1700s, and "The Confession" is based around precisely that, becoming quite claustrophobic as it unwinds. "The Hanged Man" even sees Rankin look at what might be termed supernatural themes, albeit rather cursorily, in combination with his customary "Tartan Noir" realism.
For Rankin aficionados, perhaps the most important entry in this collection is the novella "Death is Not The End".
Parts of this were recycled as a subplot in the 1999 novel Dead Souls, and it was an unusual experience reading the novella as the recycling was done almost bodily into the novel. That being said, the two plots of the novella frankly felt undercooked, with the ending of one of them being only marginally more inspired than "...and then I woke up". I'll stick with the more well-rounded treatment in Dead Souls.
The real question, though, with any collection of short stories, is whether or not it's actually something fans of the novelist need in their lives.
Obviously the trite answer is "yes". As the copyright details make clear, all of these stories were published in limited runs and "various authors" compilations. Assembling them all without this handy volume would be a considerable ask.
In saying that, the fan may also be well-advised to look for 2014's The Beat Goes On, which collects all of the Rebus short stories, and therefore covers all of A Good Hanging, the seven Rebus entries here and others. Of course, if one or more of the non-Rebus stories here pique the interest, looking for this volume may be advised.
All told, a combination of hits and misses, and one which has been superseded in many ways. 3.5 stars.
Short stories in crime fiction are always a risky proposition in my view. The best of them manage to showcase the creative side of the authors in a very condensed fashion - Agatha Christie, for example, was as much in control of her art in shorter form as she was at novel length. At their worst, the short story amounts to permission for the author to do away with the subtleties of plot and rely on coincidence and rather flimsy clues to present a solution which usually wouldn't stack up in the longer form.
Rankin's short stories here, at least those which deal with detection and the solving of crimes (read: Rebus stories), tend to be better than those worst examples, but not quite at the heights that his best novels can reach. The entertaining "Face the Music", for example, features Rebus at his maverick best dealing with a daylight robbery from an audio-visual shop, and the plot could easily have been spun out into at least part of a novel without much effort. "Trip Trap", on the other hand, sees Rebus jump to a conclusion - admittedly a rather obvious one - based on tissue-thin evidence, and the resolution of "Castle Dangerous" relies far too much on coincidence to be plausible.
Among the non-Rebus stories, there are similar tallies of hits and misses. "Principles of Accounts" is a genuinely tense game of cat-and-mouse with a truly surprising twist at the end, while "The Wider Scheme" falls flat with a twist which is telegraphed far too early in the piece.
There are some more "experimental" pieces, too. "Natural Selection" is a well-written (if overlong) dialogue among a group of small-time gangsters in a pub, "The Serpent's Back" takes place in the Edinburgh of the 1700s, and "The Confession" is based around precisely that, becoming quite claustrophobic as it unwinds. "The Hanged Man" even sees Rankin look at what might be termed supernatural themes, albeit rather cursorily, in combination with his customary "Tartan Noir" realism.
For Rankin aficionados, perhaps the most important entry in this collection is the novella "Death is Not The End".
Parts of this were recycled as a subplot in the 1999 novel Dead Souls, and it was an unusual experience reading the novella as the recycling was done almost bodily into the novel. That being said, the two plots of the novella frankly felt undercooked, with the ending of one of them being only marginally more inspired than "...and then I woke up". I'll stick with the more well-rounded treatment in Dead Souls.
The real question, though, with any collection of short stories, is whether or not it's actually something fans of the novelist need in their lives.
Obviously the trite answer is "yes". As the copyright details make clear, all of these stories were published in limited runs and "various authors" compilations. Assembling them all without this handy volume would be a considerable ask.
In saying that, the fan may also be well-advised to look for 2014's The Beat Goes On, which collects all of the Rebus short stories, and therefore covers all of A Good Hanging, the seven Rebus entries here and others. Of course, if one or more of the non-Rebus stories here pique the interest, looking for this volume may be advised.
All told, a combination of hits and misses, and one which has been superseded in many ways. 3.5 stars.
Tuesday, 21 November 2017
Mark Billingham - "Lazy Bones"
How do you investigate a murder when the victim is someone the world seems better off without?
This is a question that almost every fictional detective - or at least their creator - has had to grapple with since crime fiction moved from the genteel drawing rooms of Agatha Christie's novels and into the gritty realism readers seem to expect these days. Of course, at least one of Christie's most famous novels sees Hercule Poirot investigating the murder of a character who doesn't seem particularly pleasant, and who turns out to have been much less than that (Murder on the Orient Express), and many of her other victims at least had one or two associates who were pleased to see their demise.
Nonetheless, particularly as the police procedural has become a popular vehicle of storytelling, victims are increasingly likely to have been "shady" at best, and downright repugnant at worst. Most novelists seem to get around this by giving their characters a slightly over-developed sense of justice, or by taking the more "hardboiled" route by creating some kind of an "honour among thieves".
Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne is faced with this dilemma in Lazy Bones, the third instalment (2003) in that series after the twisted plots of Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat. In this instace, the dilemma is caused by the fact that the first victim is a recently-released sex offender, a man who many on the case seem rather pleased "got what was coming to him".
Thorne reluctantly takes on the case and leads a team which appears to be going through the motions rather than full of any real hope of catching the killer, despite the violent brutality of the killing itself. We're thus treated to more of the private lives of the central characters in Billingham's series - Phil Hendricks, the gay gothic pathologist, Dave Holland whose girlfriend is weeks away from giving birth, and Thorne himself with his father in the early stages of dementia. While it's comparatively easy to have the obligatory "pathologist" and "detective partner" characters reduced to two-dimensional ciphers (something which even Ian Rankin can be accused of at times), it's clear that Billingham actually cares enough about his supporting cast to give them lives outside of their work. Hendricks and Thorne have a wonderfully easy friendship characterised by wisecracks and football-related banter, and I really can't think of another example of this being done this well in contemporary crime fiction.
Thorne, for his part, is even given a romantic interest, which gives rise to even more banter among his colleagues.
Billingham, as I've indicated elsewhere, is a comedian and actor who turned his hand to fiction. This isn't to say that the Thorne series is "written for laughs" or even that it plays the comic card to the exclusion of the plot. What it means here is that, in contrast to other authors who have amusing scenes in their novels, Billingham genuinely understands the dark humour inherent in what he's writing.
Thorne, for example, begins the novel in a "Restorative Justice Conference", where a young hoodlum is being made to apologise to the elderly couple he broke into the house of. Where a John Rebus, to take a classic example, would find this a waste of time, Thorne is brilliantly cinematic in his reactions both during and after the event. The later inversion of this scene, where Thorne is able to deliver something of his own "restorative justice" to another young ratbag, is all the more amusing for it.
But it's not all careful parody of corporate doublespeak (although the reactions by most of the police to the edicts of the top brass are clearly written by someone who's had to sit through one too many "strategy" meetings). Thorne's house is robbed at one point, and his colleagues at another station are only able to find the thief because he hasn't been able to sell Thorne's extensive collection of country music CDs, which is the cue for a riff on the musical tastes of several characters.
Importantly, though, Billingham is able to dial back on the comedy when needed as well. Thorne's relationship with his father is a difficult one, and it's clearly complicated by the latter's dementia. There are some brilliantly-drawn scenes involving the two men as the younger comes to terms with the "new reality" of his father's decline.
Of course, the murder of the sex offender isn't the only one in this case, and more victims pile up quite effectively - with a few brief scenes from the perspective of one of them being most effective. Again, these are not men that people tend to feel remorse over the deaths of, and this continues to challenge some of the investigators - as do the all-too-frequent dead ends in the investigation.
It's here where Billingham - who, we must remember, was writing only his third novel at the time - has a little difficulty keeping all the balls in the air at once. We've been treated to little vignettes of a nameless couple coming to terms with a seemingly violent rape, as well as the scenes showing the victims-to-be, as mentioned earlier, but we're suddenly introduced to a middle-aged former policewoman being recruited into a "cold case" review team and following up leads on a seemingly-unrelated matter.
Eventually, all of these threads converge, and Thorne is given a new reason to investigate what has now become a serial killer case. There's slightly too high a level of coincidence in all of this for mine, although Billingham does a respectable job of explaining how it all works out the way it needs to.
The final revelations, while genuinely impressive, were ones I'd been suspecting for roughly the last 100 pages, due (of all things) to another vignette which Billingham inserted to dramatise the appearance of one of the victims. That said, this is the only instance in the Thorne series I'm aware of in which victory is snatched so dramatically from the jaws of defeat, even though there's still a reasonable level of coincidence involved and (in retrospect) some rather heavy-handed foreshadowing.
This isn't exactly "light reading", as sexual violence is never far from the surface of the plot. The plot, too, doesn't always move at the cracking pace that Billingham has made his stock-in-trade over his career, but again this is a third novel and may well demonstrate a writer still feeling his way forward a bit. The trademark Billingham humour and twisted mind, though, are both very readily apparent.
A worthy entry in the Thorne series. 4 stars.
This is a question that almost every fictional detective - or at least their creator - has had to grapple with since crime fiction moved from the genteel drawing rooms of Agatha Christie's novels and into the gritty realism readers seem to expect these days. Of course, at least one of Christie's most famous novels sees Hercule Poirot investigating the murder of a character who doesn't seem particularly pleasant, and who turns out to have been much less than that (Murder on the Orient Express), and many of her other victims at least had one or two associates who were pleased to see their demise.
Nonetheless, particularly as the police procedural has become a popular vehicle of storytelling, victims are increasingly likely to have been "shady" at best, and downright repugnant at worst. Most novelists seem to get around this by giving their characters a slightly over-developed sense of justice, or by taking the more "hardboiled" route by creating some kind of an "honour among thieves".
Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne is faced with this dilemma in Lazy Bones, the third instalment (2003) in that series after the twisted plots of Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat. In this instace, the dilemma is caused by the fact that the first victim is a recently-released sex offender, a man who many on the case seem rather pleased "got what was coming to him".
Thorne reluctantly takes on the case and leads a team which appears to be going through the motions rather than full of any real hope of catching the killer, despite the violent brutality of the killing itself. We're thus treated to more of the private lives of the central characters in Billingham's series - Phil Hendricks, the gay gothic pathologist, Dave Holland whose girlfriend is weeks away from giving birth, and Thorne himself with his father in the early stages of dementia. While it's comparatively easy to have the obligatory "pathologist" and "detective partner" characters reduced to two-dimensional ciphers (something which even Ian Rankin can be accused of at times), it's clear that Billingham actually cares enough about his supporting cast to give them lives outside of their work. Hendricks and Thorne have a wonderfully easy friendship characterised by wisecracks and football-related banter, and I really can't think of another example of this being done this well in contemporary crime fiction.
Thorne, for his part, is even given a romantic interest, which gives rise to even more banter among his colleagues.
Billingham, as I've indicated elsewhere, is a comedian and actor who turned his hand to fiction. This isn't to say that the Thorne series is "written for laughs" or even that it plays the comic card to the exclusion of the plot. What it means here is that, in contrast to other authors who have amusing scenes in their novels, Billingham genuinely understands the dark humour inherent in what he's writing.
Thorne, for example, begins the novel in a "Restorative Justice Conference", where a young hoodlum is being made to apologise to the elderly couple he broke into the house of. Where a John Rebus, to take a classic example, would find this a waste of time, Thorne is brilliantly cinematic in his reactions both during and after the event. The later inversion of this scene, where Thorne is able to deliver something of his own "restorative justice" to another young ratbag, is all the more amusing for it.
But it's not all careful parody of corporate doublespeak (although the reactions by most of the police to the edicts of the top brass are clearly written by someone who's had to sit through one too many "strategy" meetings). Thorne's house is robbed at one point, and his colleagues at another station are only able to find the thief because he hasn't been able to sell Thorne's extensive collection of country music CDs, which is the cue for a riff on the musical tastes of several characters.
Importantly, though, Billingham is able to dial back on the comedy when needed as well. Thorne's relationship with his father is a difficult one, and it's clearly complicated by the latter's dementia. There are some brilliantly-drawn scenes involving the two men as the younger comes to terms with the "new reality" of his father's decline.
Of course, the murder of the sex offender isn't the only one in this case, and more victims pile up quite effectively - with a few brief scenes from the perspective of one of them being most effective. Again, these are not men that people tend to feel remorse over the deaths of, and this continues to challenge some of the investigators - as do the all-too-frequent dead ends in the investigation.
It's here where Billingham - who, we must remember, was writing only his third novel at the time - has a little difficulty keeping all the balls in the air at once. We've been treated to little vignettes of a nameless couple coming to terms with a seemingly violent rape, as well as the scenes showing the victims-to-be, as mentioned earlier, but we're suddenly introduced to a middle-aged former policewoman being recruited into a "cold case" review team and following up leads on a seemingly-unrelated matter.
Eventually, all of these threads converge, and Thorne is given a new reason to investigate what has now become a serial killer case. There's slightly too high a level of coincidence in all of this for mine, although Billingham does a respectable job of explaining how it all works out the way it needs to.
The final revelations, while genuinely impressive, were ones I'd been suspecting for roughly the last 100 pages, due (of all things) to another vignette which Billingham inserted to dramatise the appearance of one of the victims. That said, this is the only instance in the Thorne series I'm aware of in which victory is snatched so dramatically from the jaws of defeat, even though there's still a reasonable level of coincidence involved and (in retrospect) some rather heavy-handed foreshadowing.
This isn't exactly "light reading", as sexual violence is never far from the surface of the plot. The plot, too, doesn't always move at the cracking pace that Billingham has made his stock-in-trade over his career, but again this is a third novel and may well demonstrate a writer still feeling his way forward a bit. The trademark Billingham humour and twisted mind, though, are both very readily apparent.
A worthy entry in the Thorne series. 4 stars.
Wednesday, 5 July 2017
Mark Billingham - "From The Dead"
Mark Billingham's series character Tom Thorne is in many ways an atypical detective to have as the main focus for the sort of hard-bitten police procedural novels that the UK seems to specialise in producing.
On the surface, he's very easy to write off as a John Rebus clone. Sharp-tongued, fond of a drink and with a moderately complicated personal life, he does sound like Ian Rankin's iconic figure. And yet, Thorne is much less of a maverick. A good Thorne investigation - and 2010's From the Dead certainly has elements of precisely that - sees the central character work rather conspicuously with his colleagues, rather than going off on his own track. Additionally, Rebus' rampant alcoholism and soap opera of personal entanglements are replaced with Thorne's ability to stop drinking before he crosses any lines and seemingly-stable relationship with a colleague.
What really set Billingham's series apart from Rankin's or most others, to be honest, is the inventiveness of the scenarios he sets his readers up with. From the Dead begins with two unnamed criminals setting fire to a car with a man inside it, and a throwaway remark from one suggests that the other is faking his own death in the process.
Before this becomes slightly too Guy-Ritchie-esque for its own good, we jump ahead a decade and meet Anna Cunningham, who is busily seducing a man in a sushi restaurant for reasons which become abundantly - and amusingly - clear quite rapidly. Such is Billingham's ability to provide memorable scenes without any real warning.
As the plot begins, it appears that the burning of the car was indeed a death being faked. Alan Langford - a shady businessman - was meant to have been in the car and his widow Donna was found guilty of arranging the hit. She's been released from prison after a decade inside, but has been sent an anonymous letter with a photo showing a man who could only have been her supposedly-late husband looking anything but dead.
Donna enlists the services of a private detective, who in turn involves Thorne as he was the original investigating officer. Thorne is smarting from a more recent trial which appears to be going wrong, as well as dealing with some questions over his relationship, and is understandably reluctant to re-investigate what had apparently been a cut-and-dried case from a decade ago. Events, perhaps unsurprisingly, rapidly convince him that there is indeed something more sinister afoot and the pair pool their resources to rake over the details of events a decade earlier. The matter is complicated further by the disappearance of Donna's daughter, Ellie, whom she suspects Alan of having kidnapped in a final act of retaliation.
Billingham's customary sense of humour shines through at the most unexpected moments in this novel. Thorne conducts part of the investigation in Yorkshire and spends some time comparing the detectives he meets there with his own London-based colleagues and working out the personality types that every team contains, often with amusing results. The officiousness of various superiors is satirised, particularly with the creation of a series of silly policing acronyms, too.
Importantly, though, Billingham never has the humour feel forced. This clearly comes from his background as a comedian and scriptwriter, where the importance of the funny lines seeming natural is key. The dialogue in the investigative team meetings, for example, is entirely plausible, with one young detective's suggestion of "I've been wondering about tax evasion" (as a means of capturing Langford) being greeted with Thorne's immediate response of "I wouldn't try it. It's illegal", the kind of exchange familiar to anyone who's been in a meeting which perhaps took just a little bit too long.
Eventually, the investigation leads Thorne to the south of Spain - the "Costa del Crime", as many of his colleagues term it. This, of course, gives rise to plenty of cultural-misunderstanding jokes (the deadpan riff from a Spanish policeman about the apparent health benefits of cosmetic surgery is vintage Billingham), but the humour never overstays its welcome or overshadows the investigation itself.
If there's a flaw in From the Dead, it would be the pacing of the plot. After the initial flurry of leads, things genuinely peter out until the final 60-80 pages in Spain. While this is more than likely the way an investigation like this would work in the real world, the entire point about crime fiction is that we don't get treated to every single painstaking exploration of a dead end - yes, realism is the key in this style of fiction, but it's realism to an end, rather than realism for realism's sake.
As a result of this, the final few twists in the plot feel more like the result of Billingham having painted himself into a corner rather than the "thrilling conclusion" such a novel really deserves. The blurb on the back of my copy makes a lot of "nothing and nobody are what they seem", which really isn't true. One of the "not what they seem" characters, frankly, had me scrambling back through the earlier chapters to remember just who they were meant to be, which isn't ideal in any regard. The deus ex machina style of ending really feels beneath a writer like Billingham, who seems to specialise in pulling the rug out from under the reader.
In fairness, there is a very sensitively-written coda to the novel in which some earlier loose ends are resolved in unexpected ways which redeems a lot of the issues with pacing. One wonders, in a sense, whether this was the novel Billingham had intended to write, only for From the Dead to appear instead.
This isn't Thorne's finest moment by any means, but it's a very strong read nonetheless. The beauty of the Thorne series is that one doesn't really have to have read the earlier instalments to pick up the next one, so this is not a bad place to start.
3.5 stars.
On the surface, he's very easy to write off as a John Rebus clone. Sharp-tongued, fond of a drink and with a moderately complicated personal life, he does sound like Ian Rankin's iconic figure. And yet, Thorne is much less of a maverick. A good Thorne investigation - and 2010's From the Dead certainly has elements of precisely that - sees the central character work rather conspicuously with his colleagues, rather than going off on his own track. Additionally, Rebus' rampant alcoholism and soap opera of personal entanglements are replaced with Thorne's ability to stop drinking before he crosses any lines and seemingly-stable relationship with a colleague.
What really set Billingham's series apart from Rankin's or most others, to be honest, is the inventiveness of the scenarios he sets his readers up with. From the Dead begins with two unnamed criminals setting fire to a car with a man inside it, and a throwaway remark from one suggests that the other is faking his own death in the process.
Before this becomes slightly too Guy-Ritchie-esque for its own good, we jump ahead a decade and meet Anna Cunningham, who is busily seducing a man in a sushi restaurant for reasons which become abundantly - and amusingly - clear quite rapidly. Such is Billingham's ability to provide memorable scenes without any real warning.
As the plot begins, it appears that the burning of the car was indeed a death being faked. Alan Langford - a shady businessman - was meant to have been in the car and his widow Donna was found guilty of arranging the hit. She's been released from prison after a decade inside, but has been sent an anonymous letter with a photo showing a man who could only have been her supposedly-late husband looking anything but dead.
Donna enlists the services of a private detective, who in turn involves Thorne as he was the original investigating officer. Thorne is smarting from a more recent trial which appears to be going wrong, as well as dealing with some questions over his relationship, and is understandably reluctant to re-investigate what had apparently been a cut-and-dried case from a decade ago. Events, perhaps unsurprisingly, rapidly convince him that there is indeed something more sinister afoot and the pair pool their resources to rake over the details of events a decade earlier. The matter is complicated further by the disappearance of Donna's daughter, Ellie, whom she suspects Alan of having kidnapped in a final act of retaliation.
Billingham's customary sense of humour shines through at the most unexpected moments in this novel. Thorne conducts part of the investigation in Yorkshire and spends some time comparing the detectives he meets there with his own London-based colleagues and working out the personality types that every team contains, often with amusing results. The officiousness of various superiors is satirised, particularly with the creation of a series of silly policing acronyms, too.
Importantly, though, Billingham never has the humour feel forced. This clearly comes from his background as a comedian and scriptwriter, where the importance of the funny lines seeming natural is key. The dialogue in the investigative team meetings, for example, is entirely plausible, with one young detective's suggestion of "I've been wondering about tax evasion" (as a means of capturing Langford) being greeted with Thorne's immediate response of "I wouldn't try it. It's illegal", the kind of exchange familiar to anyone who's been in a meeting which perhaps took just a little bit too long.
Eventually, the investigation leads Thorne to the south of Spain - the "Costa del Crime", as many of his colleagues term it. This, of course, gives rise to plenty of cultural-misunderstanding jokes (the deadpan riff from a Spanish policeman about the apparent health benefits of cosmetic surgery is vintage Billingham), but the humour never overstays its welcome or overshadows the investigation itself.
If there's a flaw in From the Dead, it would be the pacing of the plot. After the initial flurry of leads, things genuinely peter out until the final 60-80 pages in Spain. While this is more than likely the way an investigation like this would work in the real world, the entire point about crime fiction is that we don't get treated to every single painstaking exploration of a dead end - yes, realism is the key in this style of fiction, but it's realism to an end, rather than realism for realism's sake.
As a result of this, the final few twists in the plot feel more like the result of Billingham having painted himself into a corner rather than the "thrilling conclusion" such a novel really deserves. The blurb on the back of my copy makes a lot of "nothing and nobody are what they seem", which really isn't true. One of the "not what they seem" characters, frankly, had me scrambling back through the earlier chapters to remember just who they were meant to be, which isn't ideal in any regard. The deus ex machina style of ending really feels beneath a writer like Billingham, who seems to specialise in pulling the rug out from under the reader.
In fairness, there is a very sensitively-written coda to the novel in which some earlier loose ends are resolved in unexpected ways which redeems a lot of the issues with pacing. One wonders, in a sense, whether this was the novel Billingham had intended to write, only for From the Dead to appear instead.
This isn't Thorne's finest moment by any means, but it's a very strong read nonetheless. The beauty of the Thorne series is that one doesn't really have to have read the earlier instalments to pick up the next one, so this is not a bad place to start.
3.5 stars.
Wednesday, 21 June 2017
Mark Billingham - "Rush of Blood"
"Domestic Noir" is a term which gets thrown around a bit recently in discussions of crime fiction. Essentially, the style involves taking a crime but showing the way that it breaks open the quiet domestic facades that the characters have erected. In some ways, of course, this is not a new technique - Sherlock Holmes occasionally unearthed society scandals in his pursuits of criminals, and any number of the "Golden Age" novels of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries feature marital infidelity, mental illness, sexual peccadilloes and other subplots as well as Poirot or Marple's triumphant unmasking of the killer.
For my part, one key antecedent of the style is JB Priestley's unnerving play An Inspector Calls. Here, the highly respectable facade of a wealthy family is systematically destroyed by Inspector Goole (retitled as the more anodyne "Poole" in one filmed version of the play) and his investigation of a woman driven to suicide. Priestley's play, which is compulsory viewing by anyone interested in the creation of dramatic tension, ends on an ambiguous note, which is not something the modern purveyors of the style tend to adopt.
Mark Billingham, on the other hand, is an unusual name to associate with the "Domestic Noir" style. Or, perhaps, with crime fiction at all.
Billingham was originally - and still is, occasionally - a stand-up comic of some repute. He first crossed my radar, however, as the hilariously inept soldier Gary opposite Tony Robinson's venal Sheriff of Nottingham in the BBC's Maid Marian and her Merry Men, one of those wonderful programs made for a young audience and featuring plenty of slapstick and stupidity but also replete with puns and political references to keep adults entertained. Billingham's writing career can be said to have begun with a co-writing credit in the episode Tunnel Vision with parodies of everything from "Sonic the Hedgehog" to fantasy roleplaying games and the then-proposed Channel Tunnel involved.
Subsequently, Billingham has become well-regarded for his series featuring DI Tom Thorne. Thorne began as something of a John Rebus clone, only minus the worst of his Scottish inspiration's complex personal life, but has developed very much into his own character. A hallmark of Billingham's Thorne series has been the incredibly twisted setups - copycat serial killers, apparent resurrections and the deliberate causing of locked-in syndrome are all par for the course. While there is humour to be found in Thorne's world, it is truly pitch-black, even more so than many of the Scandinavian stars.
Not wanting to confine his attentions to one character, Billingham has also written a small number of standalone novels in which Thorne plays a very limited role (a voice on the end of a phone call, or a peripheral detective at a crime scene, for example). 2012's Rush of Blood is one of these novels.
The novel opens in a slightly non-linear fashion, and deals with the preparations for a dinner party hosted by Angie and Barry, a married couple living south of London. The guests are two other couples - Sue and Ed and the unmarried Dave and Marina. The six met, it emerges through flashbacks, on holiday in Florida where they all happened to stay at the same resort for a week of sun and relaxation.
Something else happened during their stay as well - the mysterious disappearance of the young daughter of one of the other guests, an American. This event has unsettled each of the British characters in its own way, and unsurprisingly proves to be a central topic of discussion at the dinner party.
As time goes on - and the other couples take their turns at hosting their own dinner parties - the case is investigated by the police in Florida, as well as their counterparts in London when details need to be confirmed. Someone, somewhere is hiding something. The reader is privy to that fact quite early in the piece, courtesy of some very effective scenes told in first-person by the killer (this is, everyone agrees, the sort of disappearance without a happy ending) and a clever technique of providing overviews of conversations without going into detail about who is saying what - or when exactly anything was said.
Being the domestic noir that it is, each character has their own dirty secrets, and these are slowly hinted at throughout the narrative. Depending on the nature of the secrets, their revelation causes further layers of mistrust among the group.
The action really begins to snowball, though, when another child is kidnapped. Even the "killer"'s sections become more tense at this point, and it becomes clear to the group around the dining tables that the stakes are higher than they realised.
In concept, therefore, Rush of Blood has a lot going for it, and not just that domestic noir is very "of the moment".
It doesn't entirely work, though. The final few twists revealing the identity of the killer seem just too contrived to make sense. It's not quite a case of the least- (or even the most-) obvious character turning out to be the killer, but the reader's reaction is more likely to be either "So what?" or "That doesn't make sense" than the hoped-for "Wow!" when the final pieces of the plot are finally fitted together.
Additionally, there are some bizarre loose ends which remain completely unresolved. Dave and Marina, in particular, are characters who deserve a lot more "air time" as the conclusion draws near, and some very important questions about their motivations are left unanswered. It's an easy thing to miss in the intensity that this style of writing requires, but in the hands of Billingham it really ought to have been handled better.
Perhaps most problematically for a novel in this style, though, the characters aren't properly delineated enough to become "real". Barry at one point remarks that he's actually younger than Ed, despite the latter's fast friendship with the very much younger Dave, but for much of the plot the two older men could be practically interchangeable. The same goes for their wives, to be honest. While the police aren't customarily as well-rounded in this style as they might be in others, the two police characters here (one American, one British) are positively two-dimensional, which is a real shame when Billingham has previously created wonderful characters throughout Thorne's station.
The other concern with this novel is that it genuinely doesn't feel like Billingham's writing. His earlier standalone work In the Dark preserves much of his borderline-sadistic plotting and pitch-black humour, but neither of these are really in evidence here.
The plotting has already been touched on, but the humour in Rush of Blood consists more of people making attempts at witty repartee around the dinner table. Full marks, I suppose, for capturing people attempting to be funnier than they are, but there's none of Billingham's customary crackle of dialogue.
To be honest, if it weren't for the fact that my copy identifies the author in large font on the cover, I'd almost wonder if this were either Billingham trying to write like someone else, or someone else attempting to mimic Billingham. Either way, it's a poor mismatch between author and style - and considering the popularity of domestic noir on both page and screen (one thinks here of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train as but two recent examples in both locations), one which may wind up dating poorly as well.
All in all, I'll stick to the Thorne series. 1 star.
For my part, one key antecedent of the style is JB Priestley's unnerving play An Inspector Calls. Here, the highly respectable facade of a wealthy family is systematically destroyed by Inspector Goole (retitled as the more anodyne "Poole" in one filmed version of the play) and his investigation of a woman driven to suicide. Priestley's play, which is compulsory viewing by anyone interested in the creation of dramatic tension, ends on an ambiguous note, which is not something the modern purveyors of the style tend to adopt.
Mark Billingham, on the other hand, is an unusual name to associate with the "Domestic Noir" style. Or, perhaps, with crime fiction at all.
Billingham was originally - and still is, occasionally - a stand-up comic of some repute. He first crossed my radar, however, as the hilariously inept soldier Gary opposite Tony Robinson's venal Sheriff of Nottingham in the BBC's Maid Marian and her Merry Men, one of those wonderful programs made for a young audience and featuring plenty of slapstick and stupidity but also replete with puns and political references to keep adults entertained. Billingham's writing career can be said to have begun with a co-writing credit in the episode Tunnel Vision with parodies of everything from "Sonic the Hedgehog" to fantasy roleplaying games and the then-proposed Channel Tunnel involved.
Subsequently, Billingham has become well-regarded for his series featuring DI Tom Thorne. Thorne began as something of a John Rebus clone, only minus the worst of his Scottish inspiration's complex personal life, but has developed very much into his own character. A hallmark of Billingham's Thorne series has been the incredibly twisted setups - copycat serial killers, apparent resurrections and the deliberate causing of locked-in syndrome are all par for the course. While there is humour to be found in Thorne's world, it is truly pitch-black, even more so than many of the Scandinavian stars.
Not wanting to confine his attentions to one character, Billingham has also written a small number of standalone novels in which Thorne plays a very limited role (a voice on the end of a phone call, or a peripheral detective at a crime scene, for example). 2012's Rush of Blood is one of these novels.
The novel opens in a slightly non-linear fashion, and deals with the preparations for a dinner party hosted by Angie and Barry, a married couple living south of London. The guests are two other couples - Sue and Ed and the unmarried Dave and Marina. The six met, it emerges through flashbacks, on holiday in Florida where they all happened to stay at the same resort for a week of sun and relaxation.
Something else happened during their stay as well - the mysterious disappearance of the young daughter of one of the other guests, an American. This event has unsettled each of the British characters in its own way, and unsurprisingly proves to be a central topic of discussion at the dinner party.
As time goes on - and the other couples take their turns at hosting their own dinner parties - the case is investigated by the police in Florida, as well as their counterparts in London when details need to be confirmed. Someone, somewhere is hiding something. The reader is privy to that fact quite early in the piece, courtesy of some very effective scenes told in first-person by the killer (this is, everyone agrees, the sort of disappearance without a happy ending) and a clever technique of providing overviews of conversations without going into detail about who is saying what - or when exactly anything was said.
Being the domestic noir that it is, each character has their own dirty secrets, and these are slowly hinted at throughout the narrative. Depending on the nature of the secrets, their revelation causes further layers of mistrust among the group.
The action really begins to snowball, though, when another child is kidnapped. Even the "killer"'s sections become more tense at this point, and it becomes clear to the group around the dining tables that the stakes are higher than they realised.
In concept, therefore, Rush of Blood has a lot going for it, and not just that domestic noir is very "of the moment".
It doesn't entirely work, though. The final few twists revealing the identity of the killer seem just too contrived to make sense. It's not quite a case of the least- (or even the most-) obvious character turning out to be the killer, but the reader's reaction is more likely to be either "So what?" or "That doesn't make sense" than the hoped-for "Wow!" when the final pieces of the plot are finally fitted together.
Additionally, there are some bizarre loose ends which remain completely unresolved. Dave and Marina, in particular, are characters who deserve a lot more "air time" as the conclusion draws near, and some very important questions about their motivations are left unanswered. It's an easy thing to miss in the intensity that this style of writing requires, but in the hands of Billingham it really ought to have been handled better.
Perhaps most problematically for a novel in this style, though, the characters aren't properly delineated enough to become "real". Barry at one point remarks that he's actually younger than Ed, despite the latter's fast friendship with the very much younger Dave, but for much of the plot the two older men could be practically interchangeable. The same goes for their wives, to be honest. While the police aren't customarily as well-rounded in this style as they might be in others, the two police characters here (one American, one British) are positively two-dimensional, which is a real shame when Billingham has previously created wonderful characters throughout Thorne's station.
The other concern with this novel is that it genuinely doesn't feel like Billingham's writing. His earlier standalone work In the Dark preserves much of his borderline-sadistic plotting and pitch-black humour, but neither of these are really in evidence here.
The plotting has already been touched on, but the humour in Rush of Blood consists more of people making attempts at witty repartee around the dinner table. Full marks, I suppose, for capturing people attempting to be funnier than they are, but there's none of Billingham's customary crackle of dialogue.
To be honest, if it weren't for the fact that my copy identifies the author in large font on the cover, I'd almost wonder if this were either Billingham trying to write like someone else, or someone else attempting to mimic Billingham. Either way, it's a poor mismatch between author and style - and considering the popularity of domestic noir on both page and screen (one thinks here of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train as but two recent examples in both locations), one which may wind up dating poorly as well.
All in all, I'll stick to the Thorne series. 1 star.
Jo Nesbø - "The Leopard"
At the end of Harry Hole's previous case, The Snowman, the alcholic Norwegian detective had expressed a desire to disappear and never be found again. He could hardly be blamed for this, as the final stages of that investigation had seemingly cost him any hope of a return to his former relationship with his ex-partner Rakel and her son Oleg, as well as costing him his right middle finger in a particularly violent clash with a deranged serial killer. Hole, therefore, disappeared from view.
By the opening of Nesbø's eighth novel starring Hole, his disappearance has taken him as far as Hong Kong. Apparently, he would have wanted to go further still, but was removed from his flight for his drunken behaviour and has found a home - of sorts - in the rabbit-warren that is Chungking Mansions (referred to as "Chungking Mansion" here) amid the petty criminals and drug addicts in that infamous building.
Such is the rather bleak opening of the novel known in English as The Leopard (published in translation in 2011, published in the original Norwegian in 2009). The title is slightly less than impressive in translation, as it refers to a throwaway line from one character that the leopard is particularly well-suited to stalking its prey. The Norwegian original is titled Panserhjerte, which translates roughly as "Armoured Heart" and is a reference both to constrictive pericarditis (which plays a minor role in the plot) and Hole's gradual development of such a thing.
Hole is being sought - and eventually returned to Oslo - by the young policewoman Kaja Solness as it appears that another serial killer is on the loose in the Norwegian capital. Two young women have died by drowning in their own blood, and shortly after the narrative begins a third is murdered in what can only be described as an excessively violent manner. Despite Hole's reluctance, he is persuaded back to Norway with the news that his father is dying.
On arrival in Oslo, it also emerges that Hole has landed in the middle of a territorial dispute between the Crime Squad, his normal division, and Kripos, an elite team designed to solve more complex and serious cases. In traditional Hole fashion, he weighs into this dispute by beating up one of the Kripos top brass and creating his own small unit within Crime Squad to investigate the murders anyway.
As the body-count climbs, the investigation extends to enlisting the help of Katrine Bratt, Hole's partner from the Snowman investigation, who provides some welcome comic relief, as well as a brief trip to Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in search of an exotic torture device which appears to have been used. Cinematic though the African scenes are in The Leopard, Nesbø's facility in creating a convincing non-Norwegian setting is still slightly limited. His Africa is much more convincing than his Australia in an earlier Hole case (or even than the cutaway scenes in Australia here), but there's still an air of unreality about it - the proverbial brushstrokes are too broad and intense to hit the level of reality that his native Norway achieves here.
The plot - and particularly the killer's motive - is remarkably complex. Even though it becomes apparent early in the novel that what links the victims is a night at a remote mountain cabin, the exact details of why this would lead to brutal murders are obscure until very close to the end, and this tension is maintained at a very high level.
Nesbø is not above resorting to many of his favourite tricks, too. Supporting characters are introduced in deliberately ambiguous ways only to reveal their true purpose in the narrative much later, and there are a few instances where key information is (briefly) withheld from the reader in order to heighten the tension. While these tricks have been a hallmark of Nesbø's work from the outset, his skill in deploying them in both Snowman and Leopard is much closer to that of an experienced film director who knows that playing certain music can elicit particular reactions from the audience.
A word of warning about the plot, too. Where the killer in Snowman was almost entirely insane, the murderer here has a sense of almost icy rationality, as well as a strongly sadistic streak. The various acts of violence performed here - particularly as the novel reaches its climax - are most definitely not for the faint-hearted. It seems that Nesbø has even apologised for some of the more graphic moments, in fact, which may make some readers consider their choice.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that The Leopard faces is that it's the followup to The Snowman. While Nesbø had been a successful novelist in Scandinavia before that novel was translated, he was by this time very much "The next Stieg Larsson", according to much of the popular press. Just like the director trying to follow an Oscar-winning film, Leopard was always going to be judged in the light of its incredible predecessor.
By and large, it works. Hole is clearly carrying the scars of his previous case, and acquires more over the course of this one (both physical and mental) and his resignation from the police force at the end of the investigation is more than likely a small mercy. That said, he had resigned at the end of the previous case, too, so the question must be asked of what horrors he might encounter next. The long-running Rakel subplot is still present here, even if Rakel herself is not, and it's clear that her influence is felt in many aspects of Hole's life. The obligatory "damsel in distress" Hole finds himself entangled with is also presented sensibly and with clear motives for her actions.
That said, there are some negatives. As well as the earlier points regarding the African detour, there's a very long period during which an alibi isn't properly tested. Perhaps this might be the "seasoned crime-fiction reader" in me talking, but the "shock" that certain characters have on finding that a particular cast-iron alibi is nothing of the sort seemed artificial to me, especially as it had been all-but-explained some 100 pages earlier.
Additionally, the almost-byzantine complexity of the killer's plot feels like an exercise in what are often termed "plot tokens" (the almost-irrelevant things which allow the plot of a story to proceed) being collected. All is made clear at the end - unusually, through the simple method of the killer outlining what happened - but there were a number of steps the plot took which really seem irrelevant.
Lastly, The Leopard features the trick used in The Snowman of having multiple "semi-endings" where it genuinely appears that the solution has been reached (apart from the fact that the reader is left holding 200-odd pages of unread novel, sort of thing). Where the earlier novel deployed these with devastating effect, this one seemed content to let things calmly fizzle out, which rather spoils the emotional effect of realising that the unspeakably evil killer who's been arrested is actually not quite that.
Nonetheless, this is another highly-recommended instalment in Harry Hole's career. Even if lightning hasn't completely struck twice, it comes very close to having done so.
4.5 stars.
By the opening of Nesbø's eighth novel starring Hole, his disappearance has taken him as far as Hong Kong. Apparently, he would have wanted to go further still, but was removed from his flight for his drunken behaviour and has found a home - of sorts - in the rabbit-warren that is Chungking Mansions (referred to as "Chungking Mansion" here) amid the petty criminals and drug addicts in that infamous building.
Such is the rather bleak opening of the novel known in English as The Leopard (published in translation in 2011, published in the original Norwegian in 2009). The title is slightly less than impressive in translation, as it refers to a throwaway line from one character that the leopard is particularly well-suited to stalking its prey. The Norwegian original is titled Panserhjerte, which translates roughly as "Armoured Heart" and is a reference both to constrictive pericarditis (which plays a minor role in the plot) and Hole's gradual development of such a thing.
Hole is being sought - and eventually returned to Oslo - by the young policewoman Kaja Solness as it appears that another serial killer is on the loose in the Norwegian capital. Two young women have died by drowning in their own blood, and shortly after the narrative begins a third is murdered in what can only be described as an excessively violent manner. Despite Hole's reluctance, he is persuaded back to Norway with the news that his father is dying.
On arrival in Oslo, it also emerges that Hole has landed in the middle of a territorial dispute between the Crime Squad, his normal division, and Kripos, an elite team designed to solve more complex and serious cases. In traditional Hole fashion, he weighs into this dispute by beating up one of the Kripos top brass and creating his own small unit within Crime Squad to investigate the murders anyway.
As the body-count climbs, the investigation extends to enlisting the help of Katrine Bratt, Hole's partner from the Snowman investigation, who provides some welcome comic relief, as well as a brief trip to Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in search of an exotic torture device which appears to have been used. Cinematic though the African scenes are in The Leopard, Nesbø's facility in creating a convincing non-Norwegian setting is still slightly limited. His Africa is much more convincing than his Australia in an earlier Hole case (or even than the cutaway scenes in Australia here), but there's still an air of unreality about it - the proverbial brushstrokes are too broad and intense to hit the level of reality that his native Norway achieves here.
The plot - and particularly the killer's motive - is remarkably complex. Even though it becomes apparent early in the novel that what links the victims is a night at a remote mountain cabin, the exact details of why this would lead to brutal murders are obscure until very close to the end, and this tension is maintained at a very high level.
Nesbø is not above resorting to many of his favourite tricks, too. Supporting characters are introduced in deliberately ambiguous ways only to reveal their true purpose in the narrative much later, and there are a few instances where key information is (briefly) withheld from the reader in order to heighten the tension. While these tricks have been a hallmark of Nesbø's work from the outset, his skill in deploying them in both Snowman and Leopard is much closer to that of an experienced film director who knows that playing certain music can elicit particular reactions from the audience.
A word of warning about the plot, too. Where the killer in Snowman was almost entirely insane, the murderer here has a sense of almost icy rationality, as well as a strongly sadistic streak. The various acts of violence performed here - particularly as the novel reaches its climax - are most definitely not for the faint-hearted. It seems that Nesbø has even apologised for some of the more graphic moments, in fact, which may make some readers consider their choice.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that The Leopard faces is that it's the followup to The Snowman. While Nesbø had been a successful novelist in Scandinavia before that novel was translated, he was by this time very much "The next Stieg Larsson", according to much of the popular press. Just like the director trying to follow an Oscar-winning film, Leopard was always going to be judged in the light of its incredible predecessor.
By and large, it works. Hole is clearly carrying the scars of his previous case, and acquires more over the course of this one (both physical and mental) and his resignation from the police force at the end of the investigation is more than likely a small mercy. That said, he had resigned at the end of the previous case, too, so the question must be asked of what horrors he might encounter next. The long-running Rakel subplot is still present here, even if Rakel herself is not, and it's clear that her influence is felt in many aspects of Hole's life. The obligatory "damsel in distress" Hole finds himself entangled with is also presented sensibly and with clear motives for her actions.
That said, there are some negatives. As well as the earlier points regarding the African detour, there's a very long period during which an alibi isn't properly tested. Perhaps this might be the "seasoned crime-fiction reader" in me talking, but the "shock" that certain characters have on finding that a particular cast-iron alibi is nothing of the sort seemed artificial to me, especially as it had been all-but-explained some 100 pages earlier.
Additionally, the almost-byzantine complexity of the killer's plot feels like an exercise in what are often termed "plot tokens" (the almost-irrelevant things which allow the plot of a story to proceed) being collected. All is made clear at the end - unusually, through the simple method of the killer outlining what happened - but there were a number of steps the plot took which really seem irrelevant.
Lastly, The Leopard features the trick used in The Snowman of having multiple "semi-endings" where it genuinely appears that the solution has been reached (apart from the fact that the reader is left holding 200-odd pages of unread novel, sort of thing). Where the earlier novel deployed these with devastating effect, this one seemed content to let things calmly fizzle out, which rather spoils the emotional effect of realising that the unspeakably evil killer who's been arrested is actually not quite that.
Nonetheless, this is another highly-recommended instalment in Harry Hole's career. Even if lightning hasn't completely struck twice, it comes very close to having done so.
4.5 stars.
Saturday, 17 June 2017
Henning Mankell - "The Fifth Woman"
After another draining investigation, Kurt Wallander begins his sixth case on holiday with his elderly father in Rome. This had been planned towards the end of Sidetracked, as the two men finally began to find common ground - sadly in the face of the senior Wallander's diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Returning from the Italian capital, Wallander almost has a new lease on life, but we all know it can't last.
Henning Mankell's The Fifth Woman (originally published in Swedish as Den femte kvinnan in 1996, translated to English in 2000) is the result of this knowledge that we as the readers have. Indeed, even before the dishevelled Wallander makes an appearance in the novel, we've been treated to an enigmatic preface dealing with a woman being killed in a remote region of North Africa and the vague sense that something less than positive is about to happen.
For Wallander, the investigation begins with a puzzling case. He and Ann-Britt Höglund are called to a florist where a break-in has occurred, but nothing was taken. Tempting as it is to write this off as a prank, both Wallander and Höglund have their doubts when they see a small pool of blood on the floor of the shop.
Wallander's curiosity is also piqued when a heating-oil deliveryman reports the disappearance of Holger Eriksson, one of his clients. The reader is already aware that something has happened to Eriksson, and it is perhaps unsurprising that this disappearance quickly escalates into a murder investigation. The body-count, also surprising nobody, climbs from there.
The legacy of the previous case seems to haunt Wallander throughout this novel. As the violence behind Eriksson's murder becomes more apparent, the locals around Ystad organise themselves into self-defence militias in response to the seeming inability of the local police to handle yet another violent killer in their midst.
In some ways, the Sweden of The Fifith Woman is a Sweden developing into the society familiar to readers of more contemporary crime fiction. Wallander at one point muses that the difference is that Swedes no longer darn their socks, and are willing to throw things away when they're no longer useful. If this can apply to socks or other consumer items, he wonders, perhaps it can also apply to human life. The short step towards Stieg Larsson's Stockholm is very apparent, particularly as we learn that the victims of the killer here can also be described as "Men who hate women".
While The Fifth Woman contains an intriguing puzzle around the killer's identity, it feels as though Mankell may have simply tried too hard here. The "Chinese box" (Wallander's words) surrounding the solution is too intricate to be opened through dogged detective work alone, and the key breakthrough is a very unconvincing series of coincidences roughly two-thirds of the way through the novel. From this point, to give Mankell his due, the plot rights itself and races towards a more convincing conclusion, but the narrative disjunct is still jarring.
Much of the early sections of the novel are taken up with Mankell's other pet interest - Africa. Outside of his successful novel-writing career, he was the founder of a theatre in Mozambique and a strong advocate for that continent. As well as the mysterious death at the outset of this novel, there's a long digression dealing with Swedish mercenaries in the Katanga conflict in the then-Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1950s and 1960s. While this is interesting, the angle ultimately remains completely unresolved and feels more like Mankell demonstrating the breadth of his interests rather than writing a novel. My edition clocks in at just under 600 pages, for example, and could have lost a good 100 of them without losing any of the drama had this exposition been trimmed.
That said, Mankell makes up for his heavy-handed display of his research with some surprisingly touching scenes dealing with Wallander's family. His relationship with his father seems to have finally stabilised, only to be cut cruelly short during this investigation (this isn't a spoiler), and his daughter Linda seems able to interact with him as an adult - rather than as the sort of overgrown child Wallander seems to have in his mind. In fact, it is in this novel that Linda first confesses her interest in a police career of her own.
Wallander's difficult relationship with Baiba Liepa in Riga is seemingly no closer to a resolution, either. During quieter moments in this case, he wonders if perhaps retirement from the police is the solution, in order to give the two of them a private life outside of Ystad. Somehow, this seems an unlikely outcome, particularly given Wallander's previous flirtation with retirement in The Man Who Smiled.
The Fifth Woman is far from a bad novel. Mankell is still more heavy-handed with his plotting than one would normally expect by a veteran of six novels, but the novel works substantially more often than not, and is definitely a rewarding read. One is left - once again - wishing that Kurt Wallander would have things go his own way.
3.5 stars.
Henning Mankell's The Fifth Woman (originally published in Swedish as Den femte kvinnan in 1996, translated to English in 2000) is the result of this knowledge that we as the readers have. Indeed, even before the dishevelled Wallander makes an appearance in the novel, we've been treated to an enigmatic preface dealing with a woman being killed in a remote region of North Africa and the vague sense that something less than positive is about to happen.
For Wallander, the investigation begins with a puzzling case. He and Ann-Britt Höglund are called to a florist where a break-in has occurred, but nothing was taken. Tempting as it is to write this off as a prank, both Wallander and Höglund have their doubts when they see a small pool of blood on the floor of the shop.
Wallander's curiosity is also piqued when a heating-oil deliveryman reports the disappearance of Holger Eriksson, one of his clients. The reader is already aware that something has happened to Eriksson, and it is perhaps unsurprising that this disappearance quickly escalates into a murder investigation. The body-count, also surprising nobody, climbs from there.
The legacy of the previous case seems to haunt Wallander throughout this novel. As the violence behind Eriksson's murder becomes more apparent, the locals around Ystad organise themselves into self-defence militias in response to the seeming inability of the local police to handle yet another violent killer in their midst.
In some ways, the Sweden of The Fifith Woman is a Sweden developing into the society familiar to readers of more contemporary crime fiction. Wallander at one point muses that the difference is that Swedes no longer darn their socks, and are willing to throw things away when they're no longer useful. If this can apply to socks or other consumer items, he wonders, perhaps it can also apply to human life. The short step towards Stieg Larsson's Stockholm is very apparent, particularly as we learn that the victims of the killer here can also be described as "Men who hate women".
While The Fifth Woman contains an intriguing puzzle around the killer's identity, it feels as though Mankell may have simply tried too hard here. The "Chinese box" (Wallander's words) surrounding the solution is too intricate to be opened through dogged detective work alone, and the key breakthrough is a very unconvincing series of coincidences roughly two-thirds of the way through the novel. From this point, to give Mankell his due, the plot rights itself and races towards a more convincing conclusion, but the narrative disjunct is still jarring.
Much of the early sections of the novel are taken up with Mankell's other pet interest - Africa. Outside of his successful novel-writing career, he was the founder of a theatre in Mozambique and a strong advocate for that continent. As well as the mysterious death at the outset of this novel, there's a long digression dealing with Swedish mercenaries in the Katanga conflict in the then-Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1950s and 1960s. While this is interesting, the angle ultimately remains completely unresolved and feels more like Mankell demonstrating the breadth of his interests rather than writing a novel. My edition clocks in at just under 600 pages, for example, and could have lost a good 100 of them without losing any of the drama had this exposition been trimmed.
That said, Mankell makes up for his heavy-handed display of his research with some surprisingly touching scenes dealing with Wallander's family. His relationship with his father seems to have finally stabilised, only to be cut cruelly short during this investigation (this isn't a spoiler), and his daughter Linda seems able to interact with him as an adult - rather than as the sort of overgrown child Wallander seems to have in his mind. In fact, it is in this novel that Linda first confesses her interest in a police career of her own.
Wallander's difficult relationship with Baiba Liepa in Riga is seemingly no closer to a resolution, either. During quieter moments in this case, he wonders if perhaps retirement from the police is the solution, in order to give the two of them a private life outside of Ystad. Somehow, this seems an unlikely outcome, particularly given Wallander's previous flirtation with retirement in The Man Who Smiled.
The Fifth Woman is far from a bad novel. Mankell is still more heavy-handed with his plotting than one would normally expect by a veteran of six novels, but the novel works substantially more often than not, and is definitely a rewarding read. One is left - once again - wishing that Kurt Wallander would have things go his own way.
3.5 stars.
Monday, 5 June 2017
Jo Nesbø - "The Snowman"
While Jo Nesbø had carved out a successful career in his native Norway, it was 2007's The Snowman (Norwegian: Snømannen) which, when translated in 2010, really propelled him into the big time where Scandi-Crime is concerned. As often happens in these matters, such propulsion had very little to do with Nesbø himself. In this case, it had more to do with the popularity of Sweden's Stieg Larsson and the Millennium series, the third volume of which had been published in English at about the same time. Suddenly, Scandinavia was the place in which to set crime fiction, and with Larsson no longer alive to contribute further adventures of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist (the more recent continuation of that series notwithstanding), someone else had to fill the gap.
For that reason, at the very least, it makes sense that my edition of The Snowman has a cover blurb identifying Nesbø as "The next Stieg Larsson", even though fans of the Swede may not necessarily find themselves in familiar hands when discovering Harry Hole.
The Snowman is, in many ways, the novel Nesbø had been threatening to write throughout the first few of Hole's cases. Picking up almost where The Redeemer left off, we are rapidly plunged into Nesbø's trademark pitch-black incarnation of Norwegian society and Oslo in particular.
Hole is attempting to deal with the death of his former investigative partner Jack Halvorsen and the disappearance of his former superior Bjarne Møller. Outside of work, his ex-partner Rakel seems to be even closer to her new love interest Mathias than before, and this presents its own set of challenges both for Hole and Rakel's son Oleg who has taken a shine to the unconventional policeman. So far, so much as expected.
Hole and his new colleague Magnus Skarre are sent to investigate a missing person report. Birte Becker, the attractive young wife of physics professor Filip Becker, has disappeared in the middle of the night with the only clue being her scarf left on a strangely menacing snowman in the front yard of the Becker house. While both detectives begin this investigation as they would any other disappearance, Hole's new colleague Katrine Bratt unearths some unfortunate similarities between Becker's disappearance and those of other young mothers around Oslo and further afield. Hole - who seems to spend much of his time practicing "speed-cuffing" chair legs in his office - becomes increasingly convinced that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands.
In what can only be described as Nesbø's customary manner, this isn't just any serial killer. The body count climbs rapidly and is heading towards double digits before 200 pages of the novel have elapsed. Squeamish readers should also take note that "The Snowman", as the killer is soon nicknamed, takes particular delight in torture and sadism, and the fates of many victims are described in a higher level of detail than is typical even in today's blood-soaked crime fiction.
The investigation, too, covers a lot of ground. Themes such as hereditary illness and madness are to the fore, along with fidelity and the somewhat laissez-faire approach that Scandinavian society takes to it. These are new themes in Nesbø's work, but he also backs them up with some typically sharp jabs at the culture of celebrity in Norway (and around the world), with Hole attempting to interview a suspect live on television at one point, with decidedly mixed results.
Where The Redeemer was possibly a little loose in its presentation of all the important clues, The Snowman is pointedly fair. Every single clue which is relevant in the identification of the killer - and even the killer's motive - is presented in clear view throughout. The fact that the reader will almost certainly miss these no matter how obvious they are is hardly Nesbø's fault, and in fact deserves praise for the utterly crackling plot built around them. There are, in fact, several red herrings which darken the plot further and provide some opportunities for highly memorable set pieces. Again, these are images which may not fade in the short term if you're not into this sort of thing.
Above all, this is an exercise in sheer narrative tension. The earlier Hole novels flirted with different ways of building tension - The Redeemer, notably, is essentially an extended chase scene - but with Snowman, Nesbø's got it down to an art form. Hole's constant unease that the killer knows exactly what his next move will be, coupled with the unpredictability of the killings themselves, makes this an utterly compulsive read.
Nesbø even plays bait-and-switch with the readers. Cut-away scenes to different characters frequently lead in specific directions...apart from when they don't. Characters who seem "invincible" by right are shown to be anything but.
The experience is exhausting by the end of the novel. There's the customary sense of "oh" when a novel ends, but in this case it's tinged with relief that no more of this madness can occur to anyone. One can sympathise with Hole when he announces at the end of the case that he intends to disappear and not be found.
While Snowman continues on from the events of Redeemer, there's no particular need to have read the previous novel to understand this one. The plot arc which has been building silently is recapped at the right moment for maximum impact, and the recurring characters are given enough introduction for the casual reader to understand who they are. There is, however, one important revelation from - of all places - the first Hole novel contained in the plot here, so my customary advice of "start from the first in the series" still stands.
Last but not least, there's a film version of this novel scheduled for an October 2017 release. Tomas Alfredson (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) is directing, and Hole will be played by Michael Fassbender. JK Simmons, Val Kilmer, Chloe Sevigny and Charlotte Gainsbourg are also in the cast. This could well be one to watch out for, as the Hole novels are cinematic in ways the Millennium series weren't on the printed page.
A must-read. Five stars and the strongest possible recommendation.
[Update: I've now reviewed the film version]
For that reason, at the very least, it makes sense that my edition of The Snowman has a cover blurb identifying Nesbø as "The next Stieg Larsson", even though fans of the Swede may not necessarily find themselves in familiar hands when discovering Harry Hole.
The Snowman is, in many ways, the novel Nesbø had been threatening to write throughout the first few of Hole's cases. Picking up almost where The Redeemer left off, we are rapidly plunged into Nesbø's trademark pitch-black incarnation of Norwegian society and Oslo in particular.
Hole is attempting to deal with the death of his former investigative partner Jack Halvorsen and the disappearance of his former superior Bjarne Møller. Outside of work, his ex-partner Rakel seems to be even closer to her new love interest Mathias than before, and this presents its own set of challenges both for Hole and Rakel's son Oleg who has taken a shine to the unconventional policeman. So far, so much as expected.
Hole and his new colleague Magnus Skarre are sent to investigate a missing person report. Birte Becker, the attractive young wife of physics professor Filip Becker, has disappeared in the middle of the night with the only clue being her scarf left on a strangely menacing snowman in the front yard of the Becker house. While both detectives begin this investigation as they would any other disappearance, Hole's new colleague Katrine Bratt unearths some unfortunate similarities between Becker's disappearance and those of other young mothers around Oslo and further afield. Hole - who seems to spend much of his time practicing "speed-cuffing" chair legs in his office - becomes increasingly convinced that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands.
In what can only be described as Nesbø's customary manner, this isn't just any serial killer. The body count climbs rapidly and is heading towards double digits before 200 pages of the novel have elapsed. Squeamish readers should also take note that "The Snowman", as the killer is soon nicknamed, takes particular delight in torture and sadism, and the fates of many victims are described in a higher level of detail than is typical even in today's blood-soaked crime fiction.
The investigation, too, covers a lot of ground. Themes such as hereditary illness and madness are to the fore, along with fidelity and the somewhat laissez-faire approach that Scandinavian society takes to it. These are new themes in Nesbø's work, but he also backs them up with some typically sharp jabs at the culture of celebrity in Norway (and around the world), with Hole attempting to interview a suspect live on television at one point, with decidedly mixed results.
Where The Redeemer was possibly a little loose in its presentation of all the important clues, The Snowman is pointedly fair. Every single clue which is relevant in the identification of the killer - and even the killer's motive - is presented in clear view throughout. The fact that the reader will almost certainly miss these no matter how obvious they are is hardly Nesbø's fault, and in fact deserves praise for the utterly crackling plot built around them. There are, in fact, several red herrings which darken the plot further and provide some opportunities for highly memorable set pieces. Again, these are images which may not fade in the short term if you're not into this sort of thing.
Above all, this is an exercise in sheer narrative tension. The earlier Hole novels flirted with different ways of building tension - The Redeemer, notably, is essentially an extended chase scene - but with Snowman, Nesbø's got it down to an art form. Hole's constant unease that the killer knows exactly what his next move will be, coupled with the unpredictability of the killings themselves, makes this an utterly compulsive read.
Nesbø even plays bait-and-switch with the readers. Cut-away scenes to different characters frequently lead in specific directions...apart from when they don't. Characters who seem "invincible" by right are shown to be anything but.
The experience is exhausting by the end of the novel. There's the customary sense of "oh" when a novel ends, but in this case it's tinged with relief that no more of this madness can occur to anyone. One can sympathise with Hole when he announces at the end of the case that he intends to disappear and not be found.
While Snowman continues on from the events of Redeemer, there's no particular need to have read the previous novel to understand this one. The plot arc which has been building silently is recapped at the right moment for maximum impact, and the recurring characters are given enough introduction for the casual reader to understand who they are. There is, however, one important revelation from - of all places - the first Hole novel contained in the plot here, so my customary advice of "start from the first in the series" still stands.
Last but not least, there's a film version of this novel scheduled for an October 2017 release. Tomas Alfredson (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) is directing, and Hole will be played by Michael Fassbender. JK Simmons, Val Kilmer, Chloe Sevigny and Charlotte Gainsbourg are also in the cast. This could well be one to watch out for, as the Hole novels are cinematic in ways the Millennium series weren't on the printed page.
A must-read. Five stars and the strongest possible recommendation.
[Update: I've now reviewed the film version]
Tuesday, 30 May 2017
Ian Rankin - "The Complaints"
As promised in my last review, I'm going back to Ian Rankin's first Malcolm Fox novel - 2009's The Complaints - in light of the very welcome return of John Rebus. In other words, do the standalone Fox investigations (The Complaints and 2011's The Impossible Dead) stand up by themselves?
The Complaints is, if anything, more of the "complex internal affairs investigation" model of a novel than Impossible Dead is. Most viewers of neo-noir television or film will know the outline - moral ambiguity from the top down, people constantly setting each other up and double-crossing each other and a flawed hero who wants the side of "right" to prevail but has to resort to underhand methods. Such is the novel we have here.
The investigation begins on the tail-end of a success for Fox and his team. Glenn Heaton, a corrupt officer in a neighbouring force, has been suspended pending a trial for his willingness to take bribes from small-time criminals. No sooner has the ink dried on this report, but Fox is given a new investigation - once again directed at one of the force's own. A young detective called Jamie Breck has been identified as having paid a "membership fee" to join a child exploitation website. While Breck hasn't contributed any images (the other half of the membership process), Fox's assignment is to find out whether this has any other explanation, such as fraud.
So far, so simple. Rankin's plots, of course, are never that. Fox's younger sister, Jude, is in an abusive relationship and her partner, Vince Faulkner, disappears after breaking her arm. Faulkner, soon enough, is found dead and Fox is informed as a member of the family...by none other than Jamie Breck.
Fox has occasionally suggested to Jude that she leave Faulkner, and he and his colleagues Naysmith and Kaye have investigated Faulkner's past south of the border, a concern which comes back to haunt them when Fox finds himself in the frame as a potential suspect in Faulkner's murder.
From this promising beginning, however, the plot increasingly veers out of control. Fox is presented as a straight-laced - almost stick-in-the-mud, frankly - type in the opening chapters, but when it suits the purposes of the novel, Rankin is happy to have him pull rank on Breck and buddy up with the younger detective to investigate the crime. Admittedly, this creates the requisite dramatic tension (Breck needing to be sure that Fox is innocent while conducting his own investigation, Fox trying to clear his name while keeping an eye on Breck), but this is done in a very ham-fisted manner.
While there are occasional moments when Breck and his colleagues - some of whom are friends of Heaton, and hold Fox's role in their friend's downfall against him - openly suggest that things "don't look good" for Fox, it's very clear in the "investigative" scenes that the identity of the killer lies elsewhere. Moreover, Fox being a teetotaller, Rankin doesn't even have the luxury of giving him an "alcohol-induced haze" at the key moment of Faulkner's death. We therefore know that Fox is entirely innocent as well.
The worst that can be said of Fox is that he's happy to get in the way of the investigation, which he duly does. This isn't Rebus' amusing willingness to conduct matters "his way" so much as it is a genuinely unintelligent action on Fox's part. Thus, both Fox and Breck find themselves suspended from duty and having to establish the truth of what turns out to be a very murky plot as citizens.
And it is this very murkiness of the plot that is really The Complaints' downfall, I feel. Rankin has clearly come up with a very cleverly-worked Edinburgh underworld, with corruption stretching from organised crime to government and elsewhere, but Fox and Breck's discovery of these links has far too much to do with coincidence and not nearly enough to do with careful investigation. Fox "conveniently" knows a detective at another station (who "conveniently" owes him a favour), and surprises him at a cafe to get some details from him. The detective's sister just happens to be an investigative reporter who can find out more information. And so on.
The original leg of the plot - Breck and the child-abuse website - is largely forgotten as this wide-ranging and rather unorthodox investigation goes on, only to rear its head towards the end of the novel as part of a completely bizarre and never properly-explained double-cross. Admittedly, child abuse isn't a great topic with which to sell books, but this really does come close to a violation of Chehkov's famous dictum of the gun (if there's one on the wall, it has to be used somewhere along the line), which is a shame given Rankin's typically tight plotting.
Rankin also seems to try too hard to give Fox a private life. Rebus' family life - or lack thereof - is a strand running through his more famous creation's adventures, but that builds up organically (his young daughter gradually grows up, for example). Fox is saddled with Jude's dysfunctional relationship and an elderly father from the outset, and given that the former is reduced in many ways to being a "plot token", it all feels very artificial.
Seemingly to compensate, Fox takes an interest in the two female characters given the most air-time in the plot. The journalist - Linda Dearborn - is manifestly younger than he is, but keeps turning up in Fox's thoughts. Meanwhile, one of the team dealing with child-abuse online - Annie Inglis - passes for a love-interest for roughly a third of the plot before almost being written out in what feels like a fit of authorial pique. Her explanation for some of the more obscure parts of the back-story to the plot is missing several parts and is never adequately explained.
All in all, The Complaints feels like Rankin trying much too hard to recapture what worked best with Rebus and failing quite badly. Fox is a wooden character, along with most of the rest of his team. While Breck is likeable enough, he doesn't make a return in The Impossible Dead and seems not to play a role anywhere later (although Rankin has pulled this trick before, so never say never). Faulkner as a murder victim doesn't seem particularly pleasant either - although that's hardly a pre-requisite - but we never really meet him as a person, which is a problem when his domestic situation is as central to the plot as it ostensibly is.
Could Rebus have investigated this instead? No. For a start, Rebus' track record would never have seen him anywhere near Fox's team, and this is patently an "internal affairs" style of case. That said, this is in many ways an investigation which could have been done by more well-rounded characters. As much of the investigation is done by "civilians", essentially, perhaps this would have been a better opportunity for an investigative-journalist character, rather than Fox.
One star, sadly.
The Complaints is, if anything, more of the "complex internal affairs investigation" model of a novel than Impossible Dead is. Most viewers of neo-noir television or film will know the outline - moral ambiguity from the top down, people constantly setting each other up and double-crossing each other and a flawed hero who wants the side of "right" to prevail but has to resort to underhand methods. Such is the novel we have here.
The investigation begins on the tail-end of a success for Fox and his team. Glenn Heaton, a corrupt officer in a neighbouring force, has been suspended pending a trial for his willingness to take bribes from small-time criminals. No sooner has the ink dried on this report, but Fox is given a new investigation - once again directed at one of the force's own. A young detective called Jamie Breck has been identified as having paid a "membership fee" to join a child exploitation website. While Breck hasn't contributed any images (the other half of the membership process), Fox's assignment is to find out whether this has any other explanation, such as fraud.
So far, so simple. Rankin's plots, of course, are never that. Fox's younger sister, Jude, is in an abusive relationship and her partner, Vince Faulkner, disappears after breaking her arm. Faulkner, soon enough, is found dead and Fox is informed as a member of the family...by none other than Jamie Breck.
Fox has occasionally suggested to Jude that she leave Faulkner, and he and his colleagues Naysmith and Kaye have investigated Faulkner's past south of the border, a concern which comes back to haunt them when Fox finds himself in the frame as a potential suspect in Faulkner's murder.
From this promising beginning, however, the plot increasingly veers out of control. Fox is presented as a straight-laced - almost stick-in-the-mud, frankly - type in the opening chapters, but when it suits the purposes of the novel, Rankin is happy to have him pull rank on Breck and buddy up with the younger detective to investigate the crime. Admittedly, this creates the requisite dramatic tension (Breck needing to be sure that Fox is innocent while conducting his own investigation, Fox trying to clear his name while keeping an eye on Breck), but this is done in a very ham-fisted manner.
While there are occasional moments when Breck and his colleagues - some of whom are friends of Heaton, and hold Fox's role in their friend's downfall against him - openly suggest that things "don't look good" for Fox, it's very clear in the "investigative" scenes that the identity of the killer lies elsewhere. Moreover, Fox being a teetotaller, Rankin doesn't even have the luxury of giving him an "alcohol-induced haze" at the key moment of Faulkner's death. We therefore know that Fox is entirely innocent as well.
The worst that can be said of Fox is that he's happy to get in the way of the investigation, which he duly does. This isn't Rebus' amusing willingness to conduct matters "his way" so much as it is a genuinely unintelligent action on Fox's part. Thus, both Fox and Breck find themselves suspended from duty and having to establish the truth of what turns out to be a very murky plot as citizens.
And it is this very murkiness of the plot that is really The Complaints' downfall, I feel. Rankin has clearly come up with a very cleverly-worked Edinburgh underworld, with corruption stretching from organised crime to government and elsewhere, but Fox and Breck's discovery of these links has far too much to do with coincidence and not nearly enough to do with careful investigation. Fox "conveniently" knows a detective at another station (who "conveniently" owes him a favour), and surprises him at a cafe to get some details from him. The detective's sister just happens to be an investigative reporter who can find out more information. And so on.
The original leg of the plot - Breck and the child-abuse website - is largely forgotten as this wide-ranging and rather unorthodox investigation goes on, only to rear its head towards the end of the novel as part of a completely bizarre and never properly-explained double-cross. Admittedly, child abuse isn't a great topic with which to sell books, but this really does come close to a violation of Chehkov's famous dictum of the gun (if there's one on the wall, it has to be used somewhere along the line), which is a shame given Rankin's typically tight plotting.
Rankin also seems to try too hard to give Fox a private life. Rebus' family life - or lack thereof - is a strand running through his more famous creation's adventures, but that builds up organically (his young daughter gradually grows up, for example). Fox is saddled with Jude's dysfunctional relationship and an elderly father from the outset, and given that the former is reduced in many ways to being a "plot token", it all feels very artificial.
Seemingly to compensate, Fox takes an interest in the two female characters given the most air-time in the plot. The journalist - Linda Dearborn - is manifestly younger than he is, but keeps turning up in Fox's thoughts. Meanwhile, one of the team dealing with child-abuse online - Annie Inglis - passes for a love-interest for roughly a third of the plot before almost being written out in what feels like a fit of authorial pique. Her explanation for some of the more obscure parts of the back-story to the plot is missing several parts and is never adequately explained.
All in all, The Complaints feels like Rankin trying much too hard to recapture what worked best with Rebus and failing quite badly. Fox is a wooden character, along with most of the rest of his team. While Breck is likeable enough, he doesn't make a return in The Impossible Dead and seems not to play a role anywhere later (although Rankin has pulled this trick before, so never say never). Faulkner as a murder victim doesn't seem particularly pleasant either - although that's hardly a pre-requisite - but we never really meet him as a person, which is a problem when his domestic situation is as central to the plot as it ostensibly is.
Could Rebus have investigated this instead? No. For a start, Rebus' track record would never have seen him anywhere near Fox's team, and this is patently an "internal affairs" style of case. That said, this is in many ways an investigation which could have been done by more well-rounded characters. As much of the investigation is done by "civilians", essentially, perhaps this would have been a better opportunity for an investigative-journalist character, rather than Fox.
One star, sadly.
Thursday, 25 May 2017
Ian Rankin - "Standing In Another Man's Grave"
"Rebus Is Back" reads the cover of my edition of Rankin's 2012 novel, and back he most certainly is. The most famous member of the Lothian and Borders police - having apparently been retired after 2007's Exit Music - is once again investigating crimes.
The question of how to deal with the age of a series character is one which a number of novelists have had to address, particularly with the rise in popularity of policemen as protagonists. Rankin has admitted in the past that he genuinely didn't expect John Rebus to prove as popular as he has, which meant that with every case he investigated, he drew closer to mandatory retirement age.
In Rankin's favour, simply "retiring" a character is probably a less controversial move than what must still rate as the most infamous attempt at ending a series - Conan Doyle's dramatic scene involving Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty throwing each other off the Reichenbach Falls - as such an act required rather a bit of "un-doing" when popular sentiment demanded Holmes' return, courtesy of a very hasty explanation or two.
Agatha Christie, too, faced a similar difficulty with her two most famous sleuths. Hercule Poirot had already left the Belgian police by the time he investigated The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and by some counts must have been well past his hundredth birthday by the time of Curtain, his final case. Miss Marple's indeterminate (but still advanced) age may have saved her from the same fate that befalls Poirot, whose faculties are failing him, but it is important to note that the final adventures of both detectives were written much earlier than they were published. Rankin hasn't had this luxury, at least that we know of.
In between Exit Music and Grave, Rankin gave us two novels featuring Malcolm Fox. The Impossible Dead I've reviewed previously and - in a break with my usual custom - I'll go back to re-read The Complaints shortly, as I genuinely feel that it's only with Rebus that Rankin's imagination shines through.
Grave begins - appropriately enough - at the funeral of one of Rebus' former colleagues. On his return from the gravesite, Rebus hears a song by one of his favourite singers which appears to feature the lyric "Standing in another man's grave", only to be a mondegreen for "another man's rain". This mishearing prompts Rebus to wonder about his hearing and his age in general, which may well rate as one of Rankin's few concessions to his character's age.
Rebus, we learn, has found work as a civilian member of Lothian and Borders' Cold Case Unit, a team staffed by former police still with a strong desire to contribute to the force they were forced to retire from. Fans of the television series New Tricks will doubtless recognise the general outline of the place, although the strongly career-oriented leader of his team is perhaps an invention from the whole cloth.
The unit looks to be on borrowed time, with the decision having been taken to centralise cold-case investigations. While this is a clear signal to Rebus' colleagues that full retirement is the next step, Rebus himself is aware that the mandatory retirement age has recently been increased, and is looking to rejoin the police for another few years, much to the chagrin of his supervisor and former colleagues.
By chance, Rebus is contacted by Nina Hazlitt, a woman whose daughter disappeared during the Millennium celebrations and who is certain that a list of seemingly-unconnected disappearances are linked. It emerges that another such disappearance took place only a matter of weeks ago, and the investigation has been assigned to none other than Rebus' old protege Siobhan Clarke and her colleagues at Rebus' old stamping ground of Gaythorne Square.
Despite the reservations of a number of Clarke's team - including, for a while, Clarke herself - Rebus finds himself "attached" to the investigation of the most recent disappearance and trying to make sense of a mysterious photo sent by a number of the women before they disappeared. Of course, Rebus being Rebus, he also finds himself causing a level of disruption to Clarke's office and her relationship with her superior officer James Page (who for a while has to put up with Rebus' constant references to Led Zeppelin, despite being manifestly too young to have realised that he shares a name with Jimmy Page of that iconic group).
Rankin has always taken considerable delight in the humour which comes from Rebus' "old-school" approach to investigations - cultivating sources on both sides of the law, not shying away from physical violence, drinking in slightly too many pubs - and the "cleaner" methods favoured by those above him, and this is a strong theme once again in the plot here. Page - who is dismissed at one point as "an office manager" - is driven to the point of distraction by Rebus' willingness to turn up in precisely the wrong place at precisely the right time.
Importantly, though, there are a number of key subplots in play throughout Grave. When Rebus left the scene in Exit Music, it seemed that "Big Ger" Cafferty, his organised-crime nemesis, was dying in hospital. Early in Grave, we learn that Cafferty has recovered, but is finding that his own methods of work aren't in line with the newer approaches favoured by younger criminals. It appears - and this is something for which we can definitely hope in future instalments - that both Cafferty and Rebus will have a new nemesis in Edinburgh's underworld by the end of the novel.
Also, Malcolm Fox makes an appearance as well. While his ability to carry a novel by himself is up for debate, as a supporting figure he's far from a bad one. Still incontrovertibly on the side of the "good guys", Fox is concerned by Rebus' willingness to share an occasional drink with Cafferty, and even more so when it seems that his unorthodox methods are once again rubbing off on Clarke, who appears to have been tagged as a "rising star" now that she's seemingly freed herself from Rebus' influence. There is even a risk that Fox - who surprises none of Rebus' frequent readers by warning him that there's an immense file of his indiscretions - might have an impact on Rebus' return to the force.
With all of these balls in the air, something most likely has to give in this novel, and I'll admit that the final revelation and the moment at which the "bad guy" is punished felt a bit grafted-on. Even with around 30 pages to go, I had honestly expected this plot to be continued in the next novel, and yet things do wrap up to some extent by the time the final page ends.
That said, Standing in Another Man's Grave has a lot of territory to cover and more to set up - more on both counts than most of the Rebus novels before his retirement. While Rankin has a history of creating solid supporting characters who don't always carry over to the next book he writes (Cafferty, Clarke and the less-used Gill Templer are the three best exceptions to the rule), he's given himself a very strong cast to pick from next time. Even Fox and his team would seem to be in a stronger light as foils or antagonists to Rebus, and a repeat performance from them wouldn't go astray.
The fact that this is a real return to form is also borne out in the crackling dialogue. The Complaints and The Impossible Dead both feature Rankin's snappy one-liners from many of the characters, but his style of humour only seems to work properly in the mouth of a maverick policeman, rather than a goody-goody like Fox and his team. Rebus' dialogue with a doorman at a sleazy nightclub, for example, is Rankin at his best, as is a three-way dialogue among Page, Clarke and Rebus as they leave a particularly gruesome crime scene.
Frankly, if this isn't Ian Rankin at his best, it's Rankin very close to it. Four stars.
The question of how to deal with the age of a series character is one which a number of novelists have had to address, particularly with the rise in popularity of policemen as protagonists. Rankin has admitted in the past that he genuinely didn't expect John Rebus to prove as popular as he has, which meant that with every case he investigated, he drew closer to mandatory retirement age.
In Rankin's favour, simply "retiring" a character is probably a less controversial move than what must still rate as the most infamous attempt at ending a series - Conan Doyle's dramatic scene involving Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty throwing each other off the Reichenbach Falls - as such an act required rather a bit of "un-doing" when popular sentiment demanded Holmes' return, courtesy of a very hasty explanation or two.
Agatha Christie, too, faced a similar difficulty with her two most famous sleuths. Hercule Poirot had already left the Belgian police by the time he investigated The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and by some counts must have been well past his hundredth birthday by the time of Curtain, his final case. Miss Marple's indeterminate (but still advanced) age may have saved her from the same fate that befalls Poirot, whose faculties are failing him, but it is important to note that the final adventures of both detectives were written much earlier than they were published. Rankin hasn't had this luxury, at least that we know of.
In between Exit Music and Grave, Rankin gave us two novels featuring Malcolm Fox. The Impossible Dead I've reviewed previously and - in a break with my usual custom - I'll go back to re-read The Complaints shortly, as I genuinely feel that it's only with Rebus that Rankin's imagination shines through.
Grave begins - appropriately enough - at the funeral of one of Rebus' former colleagues. On his return from the gravesite, Rebus hears a song by one of his favourite singers which appears to feature the lyric "Standing in another man's grave", only to be a mondegreen for "another man's rain". This mishearing prompts Rebus to wonder about his hearing and his age in general, which may well rate as one of Rankin's few concessions to his character's age.
Rebus, we learn, has found work as a civilian member of Lothian and Borders' Cold Case Unit, a team staffed by former police still with a strong desire to contribute to the force they were forced to retire from. Fans of the television series New Tricks will doubtless recognise the general outline of the place, although the strongly career-oriented leader of his team is perhaps an invention from the whole cloth.
The unit looks to be on borrowed time, with the decision having been taken to centralise cold-case investigations. While this is a clear signal to Rebus' colleagues that full retirement is the next step, Rebus himself is aware that the mandatory retirement age has recently been increased, and is looking to rejoin the police for another few years, much to the chagrin of his supervisor and former colleagues.
By chance, Rebus is contacted by Nina Hazlitt, a woman whose daughter disappeared during the Millennium celebrations and who is certain that a list of seemingly-unconnected disappearances are linked. It emerges that another such disappearance took place only a matter of weeks ago, and the investigation has been assigned to none other than Rebus' old protege Siobhan Clarke and her colleagues at Rebus' old stamping ground of Gaythorne Square.
Despite the reservations of a number of Clarke's team - including, for a while, Clarke herself - Rebus finds himself "attached" to the investigation of the most recent disappearance and trying to make sense of a mysterious photo sent by a number of the women before they disappeared. Of course, Rebus being Rebus, he also finds himself causing a level of disruption to Clarke's office and her relationship with her superior officer James Page (who for a while has to put up with Rebus' constant references to Led Zeppelin, despite being manifestly too young to have realised that he shares a name with Jimmy Page of that iconic group).
Rankin has always taken considerable delight in the humour which comes from Rebus' "old-school" approach to investigations - cultivating sources on both sides of the law, not shying away from physical violence, drinking in slightly too many pubs - and the "cleaner" methods favoured by those above him, and this is a strong theme once again in the plot here. Page - who is dismissed at one point as "an office manager" - is driven to the point of distraction by Rebus' willingness to turn up in precisely the wrong place at precisely the right time.
Importantly, though, there are a number of key subplots in play throughout Grave. When Rebus left the scene in Exit Music, it seemed that "Big Ger" Cafferty, his organised-crime nemesis, was dying in hospital. Early in Grave, we learn that Cafferty has recovered, but is finding that his own methods of work aren't in line with the newer approaches favoured by younger criminals. It appears - and this is something for which we can definitely hope in future instalments - that both Cafferty and Rebus will have a new nemesis in Edinburgh's underworld by the end of the novel.
Also, Malcolm Fox makes an appearance as well. While his ability to carry a novel by himself is up for debate, as a supporting figure he's far from a bad one. Still incontrovertibly on the side of the "good guys", Fox is concerned by Rebus' willingness to share an occasional drink with Cafferty, and even more so when it seems that his unorthodox methods are once again rubbing off on Clarke, who appears to have been tagged as a "rising star" now that she's seemingly freed herself from Rebus' influence. There is even a risk that Fox - who surprises none of Rebus' frequent readers by warning him that there's an immense file of his indiscretions - might have an impact on Rebus' return to the force.
With all of these balls in the air, something most likely has to give in this novel, and I'll admit that the final revelation and the moment at which the "bad guy" is punished felt a bit grafted-on. Even with around 30 pages to go, I had honestly expected this plot to be continued in the next novel, and yet things do wrap up to some extent by the time the final page ends.
That said, Standing in Another Man's Grave has a lot of territory to cover and more to set up - more on both counts than most of the Rebus novels before his retirement. While Rankin has a history of creating solid supporting characters who don't always carry over to the next book he writes (Cafferty, Clarke and the less-used Gill Templer are the three best exceptions to the rule), he's given himself a very strong cast to pick from next time. Even Fox and his team would seem to be in a stronger light as foils or antagonists to Rebus, and a repeat performance from them wouldn't go astray.
The fact that this is a real return to form is also borne out in the crackling dialogue. The Complaints and The Impossible Dead both feature Rankin's snappy one-liners from many of the characters, but his style of humour only seems to work properly in the mouth of a maverick policeman, rather than a goody-goody like Fox and his team. Rebus' dialogue with a doorman at a sleazy nightclub, for example, is Rankin at his best, as is a three-way dialogue among Page, Clarke and Rebus as they leave a particularly gruesome crime scene.
Frankly, if this isn't Ian Rankin at his best, it's Rankin very close to it. Four stars.
Saturday, 6 May 2017
Donna Leon - "Drawing Conclusions"
Guido Brunetti's twentieth outing sees us return to Venice once again, and this time at the end of autumn, allowing Donna Leon to indulge in her trademark languid descriptions of that beautiful city as the days shorten and winter creeps in.
Drawing Conclusions opens with a woman returning from a holiday in the south of the country and discovering that her downstairs neighbour had collected her post. On attempting to collect it, she discovers that her neighbour has died of what looks like a heart attack. As there is some blood on the floor, she panics and calls the police - enter Brunetti.
Brunetti has often shown considerable tenacity in previous investigations, refusing to believe that inquiries should be stopped for any reason, and does so again here. He and Vianello wonder whether the elderly neighbour had "been caused to have a heart attack", particularly as their medical colleague Rizzardi is more evasive than normal in his discussions of causes of death. Thus begins an unusual series of inquiries, which often feel designed more to put Brunetti at ease rather than solve any potential crime. The investigation grows to encompass everything from refuges for victims of domestic violence, illegal immigrants and the "guests" of a private nursing home as the revelations gradually appear.
Leon's customary sense of humour is strongly evident throughout the novel. We first meet Brunetti being harangued by Vice-Questore Patta - not because of something he's done or failed to do - but because wine from the north of Italy is (apparently) not as good as that from the south. Brunetti is described as secretly wishing that the restaurant he's eating at would be attacked, so that in the confusion he could at least wound his superior.
Later, Patta's fury at not being informed (at approximately 3 in the morning) of the identity of the deceased knows no bounds. Brunetti is puzzled by this, until Patta explains that the woman in question was the mother of Patta's son's former vet - which is simultaneously an entirely plausible connection in Venice and proof of Patta's view of the world. There is also a very memorable exchange between Brunetti and the ambiguously-moral Signorina Elettra, in which the latter takes pity on government agencies with poor electronic filing systems, as well as explaining that she has carefully set an unpopular officer up as the "real" source of the hacking she has done over the years.
In many ways, though, Drawing Conclusions turns into a series of scenes in need of a plot. Leon's novels don't tend to rely on coincidence too much, but the eventual explanation of a motive feels quite tenuous here, as it deals with a completely unrelated series of events which have never been explained in the previous novels but which all the characters appear intimately familiar with. The final scenes of a Brunetti investigation tend to have an emotional "pull" of varying sorts - frequently, the criminal turns out to be unable to be prosecuted for all manner of reasons - but Brunetti's kid-glove confrontation of a suspect here feels more mawkish than dramatic, too.
There is also a very long exploration of domestic violence which only adds tangentially to the plot. Brunetti's investigations have touched on this issue before, and the scenes here give at least some indication of being "leftovers" from Leon's earlier novels which have been added into the current investigation to pad it out a bit.
Even the final resolution of the plot remains slightly obscure. The exact nature of the crime or crimes committed is never entirely clear - and neither, in fact, is whether they were committed at all. Brunetti's willingness to let the matter slide is admirable, and he's done that sort of thing before, but the fact that there may not strictly have been a "matter" in the first place (one potential crime is well outside the statute of limitations, at least) seems contrived.
All up, Drawing Conclusions is not Leon at her best. Over a series of more than twenty novels (she has published number 27 this year), a misstep like this can be readily excused. If nothing else, it reminds the reader just how good the best entries in the series are.
3.5 stars.
Drawing Conclusions opens with a woman returning from a holiday in the south of the country and discovering that her downstairs neighbour had collected her post. On attempting to collect it, she discovers that her neighbour has died of what looks like a heart attack. As there is some blood on the floor, she panics and calls the police - enter Brunetti.
Brunetti has often shown considerable tenacity in previous investigations, refusing to believe that inquiries should be stopped for any reason, and does so again here. He and Vianello wonder whether the elderly neighbour had "been caused to have a heart attack", particularly as their medical colleague Rizzardi is more evasive than normal in his discussions of causes of death. Thus begins an unusual series of inquiries, which often feel designed more to put Brunetti at ease rather than solve any potential crime. The investigation grows to encompass everything from refuges for victims of domestic violence, illegal immigrants and the "guests" of a private nursing home as the revelations gradually appear.
Leon's customary sense of humour is strongly evident throughout the novel. We first meet Brunetti being harangued by Vice-Questore Patta - not because of something he's done or failed to do - but because wine from the north of Italy is (apparently) not as good as that from the south. Brunetti is described as secretly wishing that the restaurant he's eating at would be attacked, so that in the confusion he could at least wound his superior.
Later, Patta's fury at not being informed (at approximately 3 in the morning) of the identity of the deceased knows no bounds. Brunetti is puzzled by this, until Patta explains that the woman in question was the mother of Patta's son's former vet - which is simultaneously an entirely plausible connection in Venice and proof of Patta's view of the world. There is also a very memorable exchange between Brunetti and the ambiguously-moral Signorina Elettra, in which the latter takes pity on government agencies with poor electronic filing systems, as well as explaining that she has carefully set an unpopular officer up as the "real" source of the hacking she has done over the years.
In many ways, though, Drawing Conclusions turns into a series of scenes in need of a plot. Leon's novels don't tend to rely on coincidence too much, but the eventual explanation of a motive feels quite tenuous here, as it deals with a completely unrelated series of events which have never been explained in the previous novels but which all the characters appear intimately familiar with. The final scenes of a Brunetti investigation tend to have an emotional "pull" of varying sorts - frequently, the criminal turns out to be unable to be prosecuted for all manner of reasons - but Brunetti's kid-glove confrontation of a suspect here feels more mawkish than dramatic, too.
There is also a very long exploration of domestic violence which only adds tangentially to the plot. Brunetti's investigations have touched on this issue before, and the scenes here give at least some indication of being "leftovers" from Leon's earlier novels which have been added into the current investigation to pad it out a bit.
Even the final resolution of the plot remains slightly obscure. The exact nature of the crime or crimes committed is never entirely clear - and neither, in fact, is whether they were committed at all. Brunetti's willingness to let the matter slide is admirable, and he's done that sort of thing before, but the fact that there may not strictly have been a "matter" in the first place (one potential crime is well outside the statute of limitations, at least) seems contrived.
All up, Drawing Conclusions is not Leon at her best. Over a series of more than twenty novels (she has published number 27 this year), a misstep like this can be readily excused. If nothing else, it reminds the reader just how good the best entries in the series are.
3.5 stars.
Sunday, 30 April 2017
Jo Nesbø - "The Redeemer"
Where many Scandi-crime novelists show glimpses of the underside of their social-democratic homelands but provide at least a level of redemption by the end of the case, Norway's Jo Nesbø seems to prefer not to. His main series character Harry Hole, at least, is all-too-frequently exposed to the very worst that Oslo has to offer - and his personal life as a recovering alcoholic with a sister in long-term care with genetic disabilities doesn't seem to provide much hope either.
2005's The Redeemer (translated from the Norwegian Frelseren in 2009) picks up where the earlier The Devil's Star left off. Hole has exposed a gun-runner with ties to organised crime known as "The Prince" over the previous two novels, and while he has achieved a level of fame as a result, he remains unpopular with many of his colleagues. More to the point, his superior Bjarne Møller is leaving for a posting in Bergen, and Hole is acutely aware that it has often been Møller's intervention which has kept him on the force.
There is a fair bit of back-story here, and the Hole novels are certainly not ones to jump into "mid-stream". Until comparatively recently, though, this was the only way to do so, as Nesbø has suffered the fate of having his novels translated in the wrong order from Norwegian. It wasn't until 2012 and 2013 that the first two instalments of the story were available in English, despite their original publication in the last years of last century. As a result, new readers are strongly advised to begin with The Bat and work their way forwards - even if nothing else, the occasional references to Hole's investigations in Australia will make sense.
The Redeemer takes place in the lead-up to Christmas, which is evocatively described throughout the narrative. We begin with an impressive polyphonic sequence in which Hole investigates a suspected drug-related suicide, some of the key witnesses for the present investigation establish themselves anda mysterious hitman conducts his job in Paris, before moving on to Oslo as well.
In typically Nesbø style, Hole's investigation of the suicide begins in medias res, and there really isn't an awful lot explaining his leaps of intuition until he resolves the matter over the confusion of his partner, Jack Halvorsen. It does serve, though, as a good potted reminder of the unorthodox and occasionally dangerous methods that Hole uses, as well as providing an update on some of the other recurring characters in the series..
Things really kick off, though, as it becomes apparent that the other characters we met earlier are members of the Salvation Army performing Christmas carols on Egertorget in central Oslo. One of these performers is the one killed by our mysterious hitman, and so the investigation begins.
But that's not all. Due to an unexpected snowstorm, the hitman is forced to spend an extra night in Oslo, where he discovers that the performer he killed was the wrong man.
As a synopsis like that would indicate, this isn't the kind of novel which features an awful lot of rumination by any of the characters. There are some very effective vignettes of the hitman's memories of war-time Croatia (the title of the novel is drawn from his codename of mali spasitelj, "The Little Redeemer") and the brutality of that conflict, but most of what's going to happen here is high-speed chasing by the police and frantic attempts by the killer to stay one step ahead of the law, while attempting to do what he came for in the first place.
Taken purely as a pedal-to-the-metal thriller, The Redeemer misses the mark at times. There's a romantic subplot of sorts which doesn't add anything at all to the main action, and frankly features baffling motives for both parties, but viewing the novel purely in those terms is a mistake.
Hole realises early in the piece that this was a professional hit, rather than simply a one-off crime. He therefore needs to start piecing together the clues to work out who could possibly have wanted a young man in the Salvation Army dead - an answer which takes in everything from the religious morals of what is still quite a closed community through to shady property deals in the centre of the city.
Geographically, too, Hole needs to range between a meeting with Møller in Bergen and a brief trip to Zagreb as it becomes apparent that the killer hails from Croatia. This last, in typical Hole fashion, risks getting him in serious trouble with his new supervisor.
The eventual resolution of the tangled web here is delivered at a similarly high speed to the rest of the plot. While it ties up the loose ends, it does play slightly loosely with the reader, particularly as it deals with a key scene in which Halvorsen is attacked. It also seems slightly implausible for some of the issues of identity to have been ignored in the way that they are, particularly in the post-9/11 world.
To return to the topic of the back-story here, there is a final kicker in the "Prince" story-arc in the epilogue which I certainly didn't see coming. I won't say that it was a true blind-siding, though, as Nesbø's ability with story-arcs is uneven at best. Major events in the relationships between characters seem to take place between novels and are only hinted at, rather than explained fully. Even an element of the "Prince" investigation seems to have taken place in the space between novels, which is a shame as this had become quite an intriguing sub-plot.
Again, the point needs to be made that Nesbø's Norway is much darker even than Mankell's Sweden ever was. In George Martin-esque fashion, he's certainly not averse to killing central characters off, so never get attached to anyone in these novels. Additionally, he's also a fan of the course of action which Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot occasionally took, which is that of letting the criminal be "judged" naturally, rather than by the legal system. That happens here, in rather spectacular fashion.
While I can't recommend Nesbø to precisely the same audience as I would Mankell, I can certainly give him a very strong recommendation. Hole is a difficult character to appreciate, but well worth the effort.
Four stars.
2005's The Redeemer (translated from the Norwegian Frelseren in 2009) picks up where the earlier The Devil's Star left off. Hole has exposed a gun-runner with ties to organised crime known as "The Prince" over the previous two novels, and while he has achieved a level of fame as a result, he remains unpopular with many of his colleagues. More to the point, his superior Bjarne Møller is leaving for a posting in Bergen, and Hole is acutely aware that it has often been Møller's intervention which has kept him on the force.
There is a fair bit of back-story here, and the Hole novels are certainly not ones to jump into "mid-stream". Until comparatively recently, though, this was the only way to do so, as Nesbø has suffered the fate of having his novels translated in the wrong order from Norwegian. It wasn't until 2012 and 2013 that the first two instalments of the story were available in English, despite their original publication in the last years of last century. As a result, new readers are strongly advised to begin with The Bat and work their way forwards - even if nothing else, the occasional references to Hole's investigations in Australia will make sense.
The Redeemer takes place in the lead-up to Christmas, which is evocatively described throughout the narrative. We begin with an impressive polyphonic sequence in which Hole investigates a suspected drug-related suicide, some of the key witnesses for the present investigation establish themselves anda mysterious hitman conducts his job in Paris, before moving on to Oslo as well.
In typically Nesbø style, Hole's investigation of the suicide begins in medias res, and there really isn't an awful lot explaining his leaps of intuition until he resolves the matter over the confusion of his partner, Jack Halvorsen. It does serve, though, as a good potted reminder of the unorthodox and occasionally dangerous methods that Hole uses, as well as providing an update on some of the other recurring characters in the series..
Things really kick off, though, as it becomes apparent that the other characters we met earlier are members of the Salvation Army performing Christmas carols on Egertorget in central Oslo. One of these performers is the one killed by our mysterious hitman, and so the investigation begins.
But that's not all. Due to an unexpected snowstorm, the hitman is forced to spend an extra night in Oslo, where he discovers that the performer he killed was the wrong man.
As a synopsis like that would indicate, this isn't the kind of novel which features an awful lot of rumination by any of the characters. There are some very effective vignettes of the hitman's memories of war-time Croatia (the title of the novel is drawn from his codename of mali spasitelj, "The Little Redeemer") and the brutality of that conflict, but most of what's going to happen here is high-speed chasing by the police and frantic attempts by the killer to stay one step ahead of the law, while attempting to do what he came for in the first place.
Taken purely as a pedal-to-the-metal thriller, The Redeemer misses the mark at times. There's a romantic subplot of sorts which doesn't add anything at all to the main action, and frankly features baffling motives for both parties, but viewing the novel purely in those terms is a mistake.
Hole realises early in the piece that this was a professional hit, rather than simply a one-off crime. He therefore needs to start piecing together the clues to work out who could possibly have wanted a young man in the Salvation Army dead - an answer which takes in everything from the religious morals of what is still quite a closed community through to shady property deals in the centre of the city.
Geographically, too, Hole needs to range between a meeting with Møller in Bergen and a brief trip to Zagreb as it becomes apparent that the killer hails from Croatia. This last, in typical Hole fashion, risks getting him in serious trouble with his new supervisor.
The eventual resolution of the tangled web here is delivered at a similarly high speed to the rest of the plot. While it ties up the loose ends, it does play slightly loosely with the reader, particularly as it deals with a key scene in which Halvorsen is attacked. It also seems slightly implausible for some of the issues of identity to have been ignored in the way that they are, particularly in the post-9/11 world.
To return to the topic of the back-story here, there is a final kicker in the "Prince" story-arc in the epilogue which I certainly didn't see coming. I won't say that it was a true blind-siding, though, as Nesbø's ability with story-arcs is uneven at best. Major events in the relationships between characters seem to take place between novels and are only hinted at, rather than explained fully. Even an element of the "Prince" investigation seems to have taken place in the space between novels, which is a shame as this had become quite an intriguing sub-plot.
Again, the point needs to be made that Nesbø's Norway is much darker even than Mankell's Sweden ever was. In George Martin-esque fashion, he's certainly not averse to killing central characters off, so never get attached to anyone in these novels. Additionally, he's also a fan of the course of action which Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot occasionally took, which is that of letting the criminal be "judged" naturally, rather than by the legal system. That happens here, in rather spectacular fashion.
While I can't recommend Nesbø to precisely the same audience as I would Mankell, I can certainly give him a very strong recommendation. Hole is a difficult character to appreciate, but well worth the effort.
Four stars.
Monday, 24 April 2017
Henning Mankell - "Sidetracked"
If there is one fictional detective the reader constantly wishes would get a lucky break, it must be Kurt Wallander. His personal life isn't pretty, and from his third novel appearance onwards he seems to have more than the typical level of Swedish existential guilt, particularly after he shoots a man in the process of stopping an assassination.
1995's Villospår (translated into English as Sidetracked in 1999) seems to show Wallander in a much better place. His tentative relationship with Baiba Liepa - a woman he met in Latvia while investigating a crime linked to that country - has developed to the extent that she's flying to Copenhagen to meet him, his daughter Linda seems keen to have him play a more central role in her life, and even his irascible father seems to have calmed down. Besides which, it's close on Midsummer.
All is not well, however. Wallander is called to a farm outside Ystad, where a young woman sets herself on fire in front of him. While Wallander and his colleagues are attempting to process this horrific event, a former Minister of Justice is found murdered and scalped. The reader meets this victim slightly before his death, and while the man is hardly shown to be a paragon of virtue, there's definitely a level of sadism here which makes one sit up and take notice.
Henning Mankell's interests in social justice and the dark underbelly of Sweden are very much to the fore here, with a plot extending as far as the Dominican Republic in order for the twists and turns to make sense. The body count climbs higher than Mankell has achieved previously, and for once there is a real sense of danger to Wallander himself - as well as to Linda, who emerges as a much more three-dimensional character than she had previously been in the series.
As the premise might indicate, this is definitely a very dark novel. Sadism is a key ingredient in the murders, as well as elsewhere in the plot, and seems to arrive with minimal warning. There are also a few glimpses into the mind of the murderer, which become suitably foreboding late in the novel but are also quite disconcerting at times.
Mankell's growing ease with the techniques of writing a crime novel are also on show here. The scenes from the killer's perspective are a very strong example of this, as they begin by implying a completely different motive from the one actually in play. Wallander and his colleagues frequently debate whether they're viewing the case the wrong way, and as the tension mounts it becomes apparent that the reader could easily have done the same thing.
There are in fact one or two scenes which feel cinematic in a very good way. A relatively innocent sequence involving missing front door keys morphs into something very sinister, and the moment at which Wallander realises a key piece of evidence was under his nose all along is more than a bit spine-tingling.
And yet, Mankell never ceases to play fair with his readers. The evidence which finally clinches the murderer's identity (or, for the reader, the murderer's motive) has been in plain sight for some time and was even discussed by multiple characters earlier in the novel. Just as in the classic "Golden Age" novels of yesteryear, you can't blame the author when it becomes apparent that you missed it.
Mankell even has the chance to add some extra realism to the plot by having the Ystad police betting on the 1994 World Cup, which Sweden memorably finished third in. Wallander is resolutely not into the sport, but is convinced to bet anyway, at one point predicting a ludicrous scoreline he's talked out of.
The killer even takes advantage of a key group-stage match to strike, and Mankell is careful to have the results of the matches link to reality. We only get as far as Sweden's Round of 16 match against Saudi Arabia, but there are asides about drunken brawls regarding the performance of the then-Swedish goalkeeper and other very important matters in footballing terms.
The only weak note for which Mankell can be critiqued here is the rather odd characterisation of officer Sjösten, a colleague of Wallander's in Malmö who discovers the final victim. Sjösten is presented in a very sympathetic light for several chapters, before he is suddenly required (purely for reasons of dramatic tension) to be confrontational towards a witness.
While real people are of course made of both light and dark sides, Sjösten's sudden change of personality doesn't seem to make sense and I wouldn't be surprised if there had in fact been another character involved here who perhaps didn't make it past the editing stage.
The translation by Steven Murray is generally strong (characters don't use quite so many British turns of phrase as Laurie Thompson has them doing in The Man Who Smiled, for example), but there are occasionally clunky moments.
One such is the tendency - by both translators - to render the Swedish Systembolaget as "the state off-licence", or even "the off-licence". While the concept of an "off-licence" makes sense to British readers, the Scandinavian concept of the government having the monopoly on the bottle-shop sector really doesn't seem to be conveyed by this term. Most other translations from Swedish (to say nothing of those from Icelandic or Norwegian, where the concept also exists) render the term either as "the state liquor store" or (as in the Millennium series) "the System store", which doesn't sacrifice as much clarity as Murray or Thompson may think. The choice of terminology is rendered even stranger, in fact, when we note that Murray (under the pen-name Reg Keeland) is the translator of Stieg Larsson's trilogy into English.
More jarring, though, is the reference to "rape fields" throughout southern Sweden. While "canola" only covers one particular cultivar of this plant, it seems very unusual that Murray didn't render the Swedish raps as "rapeseed". The girl being discovered in the farmer's "rape field" is an unfortunately weird moment (although, at the risk of a spoiler, perhaps it's not the most ridiculous choice of term), and Wallander's reaction to smelling "all the rape" as summer warms up is also a bit strange. Nonetheless, we can overlook this issue in the name of a real page-turner of a novel.
In many ways, this is the point at which Henning Mankell became the big name he remained for the rest of his career. A truly absorbing novel with a genuinely surprising twist at the heart of the plot.
Five stars.
1995's Villospår (translated into English as Sidetracked in 1999) seems to show Wallander in a much better place. His tentative relationship with Baiba Liepa - a woman he met in Latvia while investigating a crime linked to that country - has developed to the extent that she's flying to Copenhagen to meet him, his daughter Linda seems keen to have him play a more central role in her life, and even his irascible father seems to have calmed down. Besides which, it's close on Midsummer.
All is not well, however. Wallander is called to a farm outside Ystad, where a young woman sets herself on fire in front of him. While Wallander and his colleagues are attempting to process this horrific event, a former Minister of Justice is found murdered and scalped. The reader meets this victim slightly before his death, and while the man is hardly shown to be a paragon of virtue, there's definitely a level of sadism here which makes one sit up and take notice.
Henning Mankell's interests in social justice and the dark underbelly of Sweden are very much to the fore here, with a plot extending as far as the Dominican Republic in order for the twists and turns to make sense. The body count climbs higher than Mankell has achieved previously, and for once there is a real sense of danger to Wallander himself - as well as to Linda, who emerges as a much more three-dimensional character than she had previously been in the series.
As the premise might indicate, this is definitely a very dark novel. Sadism is a key ingredient in the murders, as well as elsewhere in the plot, and seems to arrive with minimal warning. There are also a few glimpses into the mind of the murderer, which become suitably foreboding late in the novel but are also quite disconcerting at times.
Mankell's growing ease with the techniques of writing a crime novel are also on show here. The scenes from the killer's perspective are a very strong example of this, as they begin by implying a completely different motive from the one actually in play. Wallander and his colleagues frequently debate whether they're viewing the case the wrong way, and as the tension mounts it becomes apparent that the reader could easily have done the same thing.
There are in fact one or two scenes which feel cinematic in a very good way. A relatively innocent sequence involving missing front door keys morphs into something very sinister, and the moment at which Wallander realises a key piece of evidence was under his nose all along is more than a bit spine-tingling.
And yet, Mankell never ceases to play fair with his readers. The evidence which finally clinches the murderer's identity (or, for the reader, the murderer's motive) has been in plain sight for some time and was even discussed by multiple characters earlier in the novel. Just as in the classic "Golden Age" novels of yesteryear, you can't blame the author when it becomes apparent that you missed it.
Mankell even has the chance to add some extra realism to the plot by having the Ystad police betting on the 1994 World Cup, which Sweden memorably finished third in. Wallander is resolutely not into the sport, but is convinced to bet anyway, at one point predicting a ludicrous scoreline he's talked out of.
The killer even takes advantage of a key group-stage match to strike, and Mankell is careful to have the results of the matches link to reality. We only get as far as Sweden's Round of 16 match against Saudi Arabia, but there are asides about drunken brawls regarding the performance of the then-Swedish goalkeeper and other very important matters in footballing terms.
The only weak note for which Mankell can be critiqued here is the rather odd characterisation of officer Sjösten, a colleague of Wallander's in Malmö who discovers the final victim. Sjösten is presented in a very sympathetic light for several chapters, before he is suddenly required (purely for reasons of dramatic tension) to be confrontational towards a witness.
While real people are of course made of both light and dark sides, Sjösten's sudden change of personality doesn't seem to make sense and I wouldn't be surprised if there had in fact been another character involved here who perhaps didn't make it past the editing stage.
The translation by Steven Murray is generally strong (characters don't use quite so many British turns of phrase as Laurie Thompson has them doing in The Man Who Smiled, for example), but there are occasionally clunky moments.
One such is the tendency - by both translators - to render the Swedish Systembolaget as "the state off-licence", or even "the off-licence". While the concept of an "off-licence" makes sense to British readers, the Scandinavian concept of the government having the monopoly on the bottle-shop sector really doesn't seem to be conveyed by this term. Most other translations from Swedish (to say nothing of those from Icelandic or Norwegian, where the concept also exists) render the term either as "the state liquor store" or (as in the Millennium series) "the System store", which doesn't sacrifice as much clarity as Murray or Thompson may think. The choice of terminology is rendered even stranger, in fact, when we note that Murray (under the pen-name Reg Keeland) is the translator of Stieg Larsson's trilogy into English.
More jarring, though, is the reference to "rape fields" throughout southern Sweden. While "canola" only covers one particular cultivar of this plant, it seems very unusual that Murray didn't render the Swedish raps as "rapeseed". The girl being discovered in the farmer's "rape field" is an unfortunately weird moment (although, at the risk of a spoiler, perhaps it's not the most ridiculous choice of term), and Wallander's reaction to smelling "all the rape" as summer warms up is also a bit strange. Nonetheless, we can overlook this issue in the name of a real page-turner of a novel.
In many ways, this is the point at which Henning Mankell became the big name he remained for the rest of his career. A truly absorbing novel with a genuinely surprising twist at the heart of the plot.
Five stars.
Thursday, 13 April 2017
Jonathan Nasaw - "Fear Itself"
In the wake of the success of The Silence of the Lambs, there was a spate of novels specifically looking at serial killers, and seemingly the more twisted and freakish the better. Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself, from 2003, fits squarely into this category.
The best short summary I could give here would be to imagine Quentin Tarantino writing Hannibal Lecter. In prospect, this should give a high-octane, wittily self-aware plot with some moments of over-the-top gore. Sadly, Nasaw isn't Tarantino, so it falls a little bit flat.
The novel focuses on soon-to-be-retired FBI agent EL Pender and his replacement-to-be Linda Abruzzi. On Pender's last day before retirement, he receives a letter from Dorie Bell, a woman with a crippling phobia of masks. Bell had attended a conference for people with "Specific Phobias", and since that time several of the attendees have died in ways which seem unusual given their phobias (an acrophobe throwing himself from the top of a tall building, for example), and she is concerned that something more sinister is afoot. Oddly, the blurb on the back of the copy I've read misstates some of these details, although it's insignificant in plot terms.
So much the preamble. The plot then sees Pender handling the investigation in California, where Bell lives and where he's gone on a golfing trip to celebrate his retirement, while Abruzzi conducts other parts of the investigation from her desk outside Washington. We're also treated - surprisingly early, by the normal standards for this sort of novel - to the identity of the killer himself, and his attempts to avoid capture and deal with his deteriorating mental state.
There are several good ideas afoot here. The idea of a killer who thrives on fear for the sake of fear is unusual, and in theory could produce a very interesting novel. The plot device of having the investigation conducted on opposite coasts of the USA also works well, although it's rather more hackneyed than Nasaw seems to think.
The difficulty is that Nasaw is a novelist who is very much enamoured of the cliche. Pender isn't just a soon-to-be-retired agent, he's a giant of a man with a high profile in the FBI and a history of rubbing his colleagues the wrong way, so we know almost immediately that he'll have a series of strokes of good luck, as well as a heart of gold. Abruzzi's superiors are petty bureaucrats (Nasaw even renders the term "bureau-crats", to make the point clearer), so the only purpose they serve is to get in the way. Abruzzi herself suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, and Serious Narrative Tension is provided by having her fall over at the wrong time on a few occasions.
But it's the dialogue which really brings Fear Itself down. Pender's comic foil through the early part of the novel is his retired-profiler friend Sid Dolitz (who, incidentally, is clearly being played by Woody Allen in the film Nasaw so clearly wishes he'd written), who keeps delivering witticisms. At one point, Pender asks if Dolitz thinks he (Pender) has drunk too much, with the response being "For a small Irish county, no. For a human being, yes." Clunky dialogue like this continues throughout, with police in the middle of tense moments being able to deliver a snappy line or two, and even a nearly-victim of the killer finding time to correct Pender's references to films. Again, Tarantino can get away with this sort of thing, but it's a very tight line to walk.
There's also a strange lack of place and time in Fear Itself. It was published, as mentioned earlier, in 2003, so while investigations are done online we're certainly not in the realms of smartphones and social media. More unusually, though, the FBI characters seem to divide American history into "pre-Oklahoma City" and "post-Oklahoma City" eras, and everyone is worried about Y2K (we're in late 1999, plot-wise). While 2003 was perhaps relatively soon after the World Trade Centre atrocities to include a reference to that, it feels very quaint to read a novel in which the characters haven't experienced this epochal event, particularly where they "could have done".
Nasaw is an American author, which makes his lack of engagement with any of the geography in the novel even stranger. Events take place in San Francisco, rural Wisconsin and the outskirts of Washington DC, but there's no sense of place anywhere. San Francisco is simply an area in which people live, and despite the buildup to the final events in Washington, there's only one glancing reference to the fact that it's a large city (Abruzzi isn't sure how quickly she can get to her office at one point). The novel could really have occurred anywhere.
All up, this reads as a good idea executed by someone simply not up to it. A lot of American serial-killer thrillers suffer from being written in a way which screams "please option this as a script", and Fear Itself is no exception. It's entirely possible that this could make a semi-decent film, but as a novel it just doesn't cut it.
Two stars.
The best short summary I could give here would be to imagine Quentin Tarantino writing Hannibal Lecter. In prospect, this should give a high-octane, wittily self-aware plot with some moments of over-the-top gore. Sadly, Nasaw isn't Tarantino, so it falls a little bit flat.
The novel focuses on soon-to-be-retired FBI agent EL Pender and his replacement-to-be Linda Abruzzi. On Pender's last day before retirement, he receives a letter from Dorie Bell, a woman with a crippling phobia of masks. Bell had attended a conference for people with "Specific Phobias", and since that time several of the attendees have died in ways which seem unusual given their phobias (an acrophobe throwing himself from the top of a tall building, for example), and she is concerned that something more sinister is afoot. Oddly, the blurb on the back of the copy I've read misstates some of these details, although it's insignificant in plot terms.
So much the preamble. The plot then sees Pender handling the investigation in California, where Bell lives and where he's gone on a golfing trip to celebrate his retirement, while Abruzzi conducts other parts of the investigation from her desk outside Washington. We're also treated - surprisingly early, by the normal standards for this sort of novel - to the identity of the killer himself, and his attempts to avoid capture and deal with his deteriorating mental state.
There are several good ideas afoot here. The idea of a killer who thrives on fear for the sake of fear is unusual, and in theory could produce a very interesting novel. The plot device of having the investigation conducted on opposite coasts of the USA also works well, although it's rather more hackneyed than Nasaw seems to think.
The difficulty is that Nasaw is a novelist who is very much enamoured of the cliche. Pender isn't just a soon-to-be-retired agent, he's a giant of a man with a high profile in the FBI and a history of rubbing his colleagues the wrong way, so we know almost immediately that he'll have a series of strokes of good luck, as well as a heart of gold. Abruzzi's superiors are petty bureaucrats (Nasaw even renders the term "bureau-crats", to make the point clearer), so the only purpose they serve is to get in the way. Abruzzi herself suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, and Serious Narrative Tension is provided by having her fall over at the wrong time on a few occasions.
But it's the dialogue which really brings Fear Itself down. Pender's comic foil through the early part of the novel is his retired-profiler friend Sid Dolitz (who, incidentally, is clearly being played by Woody Allen in the film Nasaw so clearly wishes he'd written), who keeps delivering witticisms. At one point, Pender asks if Dolitz thinks he (Pender) has drunk too much, with the response being "For a small Irish county, no. For a human being, yes." Clunky dialogue like this continues throughout, with police in the middle of tense moments being able to deliver a snappy line or two, and even a nearly-victim of the killer finding time to correct Pender's references to films. Again, Tarantino can get away with this sort of thing, but it's a very tight line to walk.
There's also a strange lack of place and time in Fear Itself. It was published, as mentioned earlier, in 2003, so while investigations are done online we're certainly not in the realms of smartphones and social media. More unusually, though, the FBI characters seem to divide American history into "pre-Oklahoma City" and "post-Oklahoma City" eras, and everyone is worried about Y2K (we're in late 1999, plot-wise). While 2003 was perhaps relatively soon after the World Trade Centre atrocities to include a reference to that, it feels very quaint to read a novel in which the characters haven't experienced this epochal event, particularly where they "could have done".
Nasaw is an American author, which makes his lack of engagement with any of the geography in the novel even stranger. Events take place in San Francisco, rural Wisconsin and the outskirts of Washington DC, but there's no sense of place anywhere. San Francisco is simply an area in which people live, and despite the buildup to the final events in Washington, there's only one glancing reference to the fact that it's a large city (Abruzzi isn't sure how quickly she can get to her office at one point). The novel could really have occurred anywhere.
All up, this reads as a good idea executed by someone simply not up to it. A lot of American serial-killer thrillers suffer from being written in a way which screams "please option this as a script", and Fear Itself is no exception. It's entirely possible that this could make a semi-decent film, but as a novel it just doesn't cut it.
Two stars.
Tuesday, 11 April 2017
Henning Mankell - "The Man Who Smiled"
As with many of his Scandinavian brethren, Henning Mankell's novels were translated to English out of order. In contrast to many others, Mankell's passing in 2015 means that readers at least know that there's a finite number of these novels and can therefore re-assemble the "full story" of Inspector Kurt Wallander, one of the more well-rounded series characters in contemporary crime fiction.
The Man Who Smiled is chronologically the fourth Wallander, having appeared in the original Swedish as Mannen som log in 1994. It was, eccentrically, the seventh translated to English, not seeing an Anglophone publication until 2005. I say "eccentrically", as Wallander's personal life is a key theme in the series, and while it's complicated enough as it is, there seems little reason to mix things up further.
Speaking of Wallander's personal life, that's precisely where this novel opens. Wallander ended The White Lioness in dramatic fashion, fatally shooting a suspect in a tense chase over foggy terrain and doubting his choice even though his colleagues felt that it was entirely justified. The intervening time before the opening of The Man Who Smiled seems to have been tough on him, as he's spent nearly 18 months on sick leave from the Ystad police and actively considering retirement.
In fact, he's been doing more than just "considering" it, having come to the conclusion that it's time to retire, when he's visited by a lawyer he knows. Sten Torstensson, the visitor, explains that he is concerned about the investigation into the death of his father Gustaf - another lawyer - who was killed recently in a traffic accident. Wallander suggests he approach an active policeman, and believes this to be the end of the matter, only for Sten himself to be found dead a few days later.
This double tragedy galvanises Wallander to reverse his decision to retire, as well as spurring him to resolve not to ignore approaches like this in the future (in typical Wallander style, he blames himself for Sten's death), and he's soon back in his familiar office in the Ystad police. His colleagues seem not to have changed much, although the department has gained the highly-regarded young recruit Ann-Britt Höglund, who appears to have arrived with some emotional baggage as well as new ideas about the role of the police in the rapidly-changing Swedish society.
Wallander's investigation - and it really is Wallander's investigation, Mankell is happy to relegate the rest of the department to the background, and really only draws Höglund in three dimensions for most of the novel - takes a series of dramatic turns and rapidly enters Mankell's customary page-turning territory. Financial chicanery, black-market dealings in the developing world, car bombings, suspicious suicides and even a landmine are the order of the day, and the tension ratchets up to a very high level.
Overlaid on this is Wallander's personal life. He's still a workaholic and an alcoholic, and his relationships with his daughter and father are as complex as ever. In the latter case, Lioness saw his father announce his intention to marry his home-help, and this marriage has taken place by the start of the present novel, which of course only serves to complicate things. In addition, having spent 18 months on leave, Wallander feels that his instincts can't always be trusted in certain respects, which presents additional challenges for a policeman more than happy to go it alone in pursuit of a solution.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of The Man Who Smiled is the opening, which reveals at least some of the identity of the killer and a portion of the motive. Little vignettes like these are of course entirely common in crime fiction, but in this instance it has the odd result of moving the novel from standard "whodunit" territory into an unusual attempt at the "whydunit".
This may not be a fair claim, to be honest. The strictest definition of the "whydunit" is one in which we see the crime committed at the outset, but the challenge is to work out the motive (the works of R Austin Freeman, among others, are the landmarks of this style), and we are given at least part of that motive to begin with. The other possibility is to see this as an attempt at the "howcatchem", a style of novel which connects to many of the procedural TV shows (think of the assorted Law and Order spin-offs here) in which we as viewers know exactly how everything went down, but we're still cheering for the police as they painstakingly put the pieces together. Whether it works all the time to translate this to the novel is somewhat up for debate, but I feel it does here, as there's more than enough tension and plenty of by-play with office politics and so on as well.
If there's one point on which the novel falls down ever so slightly, it would be the identity of the villain. A lot of the plot relies on the villain being one step - or several steps - ahead of Wallander and his team, and one almost expects the final scenes to involve the unmasking of a mole in the police department, but this is explained in the end as being due to police carelessness, rather than anything more sinister.
The villain himself gets what can only be called a James Bond moment towards the end, where he "confesses" to a captured Wallander and outlines chapter and verse of what's been going on. Admittedly, most of these facts are known already, but with as many plot threads as this novel has, it was always going to be welcome to bring everything together somewhere along the line, artificial though this final moment may be.
That said, Mankell makes up for the almost cartoonishly omnipotent villain by delivering a climax in which Wallander "persuades" Höglund to ignore the chain of command - which by now is demonstrably getting in the way of the investigation anyway - and race against time to stop a private jet taking off. The result is just the right side of the line between comic and exciting, and it's easy to see why this is one of the novels that both Swedish and British directors have adapted for television.
All told, this is Mankell at his finest. He even finds the time to work in links to the rest of the series, with the re-appearance of a character from The Dogs of Riga, as well as more links to his other passion of Africa. Wallander is a much better-drawn character than he was in The White Lioness, and by the end of the novel there are several other characters who promise a lot for the next instalment.
Four and a half stars.
The Man Who Smiled is chronologically the fourth Wallander, having appeared in the original Swedish as Mannen som log in 1994. It was, eccentrically, the seventh translated to English, not seeing an Anglophone publication until 2005. I say "eccentrically", as Wallander's personal life is a key theme in the series, and while it's complicated enough as it is, there seems little reason to mix things up further.
Speaking of Wallander's personal life, that's precisely where this novel opens. Wallander ended The White Lioness in dramatic fashion, fatally shooting a suspect in a tense chase over foggy terrain and doubting his choice even though his colleagues felt that it was entirely justified. The intervening time before the opening of The Man Who Smiled seems to have been tough on him, as he's spent nearly 18 months on sick leave from the Ystad police and actively considering retirement.
In fact, he's been doing more than just "considering" it, having come to the conclusion that it's time to retire, when he's visited by a lawyer he knows. Sten Torstensson, the visitor, explains that he is concerned about the investigation into the death of his father Gustaf - another lawyer - who was killed recently in a traffic accident. Wallander suggests he approach an active policeman, and believes this to be the end of the matter, only for Sten himself to be found dead a few days later.
This double tragedy galvanises Wallander to reverse his decision to retire, as well as spurring him to resolve not to ignore approaches like this in the future (in typical Wallander style, he blames himself for Sten's death), and he's soon back in his familiar office in the Ystad police. His colleagues seem not to have changed much, although the department has gained the highly-regarded young recruit Ann-Britt Höglund, who appears to have arrived with some emotional baggage as well as new ideas about the role of the police in the rapidly-changing Swedish society.
Wallander's investigation - and it really is Wallander's investigation, Mankell is happy to relegate the rest of the department to the background, and really only draws Höglund in three dimensions for most of the novel - takes a series of dramatic turns and rapidly enters Mankell's customary page-turning territory. Financial chicanery, black-market dealings in the developing world, car bombings, suspicious suicides and even a landmine are the order of the day, and the tension ratchets up to a very high level.
Overlaid on this is Wallander's personal life. He's still a workaholic and an alcoholic, and his relationships with his daughter and father are as complex as ever. In the latter case, Lioness saw his father announce his intention to marry his home-help, and this marriage has taken place by the start of the present novel, which of course only serves to complicate things. In addition, having spent 18 months on leave, Wallander feels that his instincts can't always be trusted in certain respects, which presents additional challenges for a policeman more than happy to go it alone in pursuit of a solution.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of The Man Who Smiled is the opening, which reveals at least some of the identity of the killer and a portion of the motive. Little vignettes like these are of course entirely common in crime fiction, but in this instance it has the odd result of moving the novel from standard "whodunit" territory into an unusual attempt at the "whydunit".
This may not be a fair claim, to be honest. The strictest definition of the "whydunit" is one in which we see the crime committed at the outset, but the challenge is to work out the motive (the works of R Austin Freeman, among others, are the landmarks of this style), and we are given at least part of that motive to begin with. The other possibility is to see this as an attempt at the "howcatchem", a style of novel which connects to many of the procedural TV shows (think of the assorted Law and Order spin-offs here) in which we as viewers know exactly how everything went down, but we're still cheering for the police as they painstakingly put the pieces together. Whether it works all the time to translate this to the novel is somewhat up for debate, but I feel it does here, as there's more than enough tension and plenty of by-play with office politics and so on as well.
If there's one point on which the novel falls down ever so slightly, it would be the identity of the villain. A lot of the plot relies on the villain being one step - or several steps - ahead of Wallander and his team, and one almost expects the final scenes to involve the unmasking of a mole in the police department, but this is explained in the end as being due to police carelessness, rather than anything more sinister.
The villain himself gets what can only be called a James Bond moment towards the end, where he "confesses" to a captured Wallander and outlines chapter and verse of what's been going on. Admittedly, most of these facts are known already, but with as many plot threads as this novel has, it was always going to be welcome to bring everything together somewhere along the line, artificial though this final moment may be.
That said, Mankell makes up for the almost cartoonishly omnipotent villain by delivering a climax in which Wallander "persuades" Höglund to ignore the chain of command - which by now is demonstrably getting in the way of the investigation anyway - and race against time to stop a private jet taking off. The result is just the right side of the line between comic and exciting, and it's easy to see why this is one of the novels that both Swedish and British directors have adapted for television.
All told, this is Mankell at his finest. He even finds the time to work in links to the rest of the series, with the re-appearance of a character from The Dogs of Riga, as well as more links to his other passion of Africa. Wallander is a much better-drawn character than he was in The White Lioness, and by the end of the novel there are several other characters who promise a lot for the next instalment.
Four and a half stars.
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