Gilbert Adair - "A Mysterious Affair of Style"

I've reviewed Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd earlier on this blog, and at the time that it was written, Adair apparently intended it to be a standalone novel. 2007's followup, A Mysterious Affair of Style, seems to have come about as a perverse attempt at "never repeating himself", if we give the dedication any credence - Adair realised that because he'd never written a sequel, writing a sequel was therefore something different to do. Nonetheless, here we are.

Style, which of course owes its title to Agatha Christie's debut The Mysterious Affair at Styles, picks up roughly a decade after Evadne Mount and the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe solved the earlier case. Trubshawe is enduring a rather bland retirement, when he happens to renew his acquaintance with Mount after stopping in at the Ritz for a cup of tea.
Mount invites him along to a charity variety performance, which is scheduled to begin with a brief sketch she'd written, and this leads (via a rather interesting, if under-explored, satire on stage whodunits) to a renewal of acquaintances with Cora Rutherford - Mount's long-standing friend and another character from Murgatroyd. The world has moved on since the earlier case, with some off-hand references to the aftermath of the Second World War providing a bit of colour. For our purposes, though, what's more important is that the cinema has replaced the stage as the premier location for actors.
Rutherford is cast in a film by the director Alastair Farjeon, and sees this as a way of reviving her flagging fortunes. Unfortunately, "Farje" has been killed in a fire, and the film is in doubt.

The plot meanders along through all of this before - roughly halfway through - arriving at the dramatic scenes as Rutherford's scenes are filmed. All of this leads to a seemingly impossible murder, committed in plain view of almost everyone on the set, but with very few motives among those who had the opportunity.
Mount and Trubshawe are drafted in by the younger policeman investigating the murder, and gradually discover that while the lack of motive may be true, all the suspects had a strong motive to commit an earlier murder, but yet no opportunity. What can it all mean? Well, in Mount's hands, it leads to the conclusion to the whole mystery and a rather surprising (cinematic, I suspect) denouement.

Does it work, though? Ultimately, no it really doesn't.

As in Murgatroyd, the plot gives Adair plenty of opportunity to come up with bizarre scenarios for whodunits. This time, the scenario's are Farjeon's films, rather than Mount's novels. The problem is, though, that while there are some very creative ideas, Farjeon himself is sufficiently clearly a caricature of Alfred Hitchcock that Adair needs to parody Hitchcock's films. The jokes are clever, but much more heavy-handed than they probably need to be - as an example, An American in Plaster of Paris sees a character with a broken leg attempt to investigate the murder he thinks was committed in the apartment above him, with all comparisons to both Rear Window's plot and An American in Paris' title being entirely intentional. Jokes like this confirm that it's surprisingly easy to be arch and clever without being particularly funny.
Style also gives Adair more of a chance to play around with the form of the classic whodunit. The solution doesn't break nearly as many rules as Murgatroyd did, but the meandering nature of the plot (the murder doesn't occur until about the halfway point, which prompts the characters to make throwaway remarks about how strange a whodunit would be if the murder didn't occur until the halfway point) doesn't really seem like an improvement. There's an awful lot of the characters standing around and waiting for the plot to switch on again, rather than anything genuinely happening - and, sadly, none of the characters are sufficiently three-dimensional to be interesting in the absence of a plot.

In the long run, that's the flaw in Style. Where Murgatroyd didn't quite work as a whodunit but worked as a snarky parody, Style works as neither by trying too hard to be both.

Two stars.

Zane Lovitt - "The Midnight Promise"

Published in 2012, Zane Lovitt's full-length debut The Midnight Promise earned some favourable reviews, and the author has gone onto publish at least one more novel - not a sequel to this one, though. It's an interesting read for a number of reasons.

The first reason is stylistic. The Midnight Promise is described on the front cover as "a detective's story in ten cases". Rather than being a conventional novel, this is actually a series of ten loosely-linked short stories (three of which had previously been published elsewhere), chronicling the adventures - and misadventures - of "Private Inquiry Agent" John Dorn.
The crime short story is, of course, just as venerable a form as the novel. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple have all plied their trade over that form (Holmes more so than the others). The quirk of having the stories loosely linked, though, is an interesting one. Dorn's cases here appear to have taken place over a relatively short period of time, and his decisions and actions in one have an impact on the next. The nearest analogy which comes to mind would be Agatha Christie's collection The Labours of Hercules, in which Poirot attempts to emulate his mythical namesake. Christie territory, however, this is not.

The second reason for the interest here is that Dorn isn't a particularly likeable - or even successful - character. We're not dealing with an incorruptible paragon of justice, by any means. We're not even in the Raymond Chandler noir-fiction world of hard drinking gumshoes who welcome mysterious dames into their office, usually played by Ingrid Bergman.
We're in suburban Melbourne, instead. Dorn is a youngish man who is barely making ends meet in his work, despite being favoured by a moderately high-profile lawyer who employs him to track down information about clients
For fans of Australian crime, the tone here is probably closer to the film Gettin' Square than the Underbelly series. There are no big-time drug kingpins on offer or anything that dramatic. Everyone from Dorn down to the people he investigates is just trying to make a living as best they can.

And therein, I feel, lies the problem. Dorn isn't a character who's particularly interesting to follow. Yes, there's a slightly vicarious thrill of wondering how he's going to derail this case, but there's minimal character development over the 280-odd pages he occupies, and little to explain why he frequently turns out to be...well...a bit of a dickhead, to use the Australian vernacular.
Lest it be said that Dorn is perhaps an anti-hero, I don't think he quite rises to those heights either. The resolutions of most of the cases come without Dorn's input, and a lot of the time that makes him appear to be a spectator in his own stories, which ruins the effect.

To Lovitt's credit, the scenarios he gives Dorn are quite interesting at times. The opening case ("Amnesty") is drolly amusing, and the payoff to "Comedy Is Dead" is quite cleverly-handled, even if it's been telegraphed a few pages earlier. For a private detective who doesn't really get many glamorous investigations, Dorn does at least get some interesting cases.

The downside here, and it's a major one, is that Lovitt's technique is limited. Almost all of the stories are told in roughly the same non-linear way, in which the twist appears in the middle of the plot but at the end of the story. The scenes where Dorn narrates about what happened later on (at the trial, a lot of the time) feel tacked on and an exercise in padding a good idea into a long enough story to publish. Occasionally, too, Lovitt seems unsure whether to make his twist obvious with a sort of "summary" at the end or leave the reader to put the pieces together, which sometimes results in neither option being appropriately followed through.
Indeed, this "telegraphing twists" thing even extends to the very brief introduction, which provides more information than it should about later events.

Judged as a long-form debut, The Midnight Promise is a decent offering. Lovitt's not a bad author, by any means, and even John Dorn could work as a more well-rounded character, rather than the slightly-more-than-two-dimensional character he is here. Judged in relation to the rest of crime fiction, however, The Midnight Promise doesn't live up to the standards of the genre just yet.

Two and a half stars.

Chris Carter - "The Executioner"

From its rather gory-looking cover to the tagline "He knows what scares you to death", it's pretty clear the audience that Chris Carter's second novel (after The Crucifix Killer) is aimed at: We're in thriller territory and expecting a pretty high body count.

Originally published in 2010, The Executioner delivers precisely that. We open with a short vignette of an unnamed man being killed in what's implied to be a brutal manner, before being introduced to Carter's two policeman-heroes Robert Hunter and Carlos Garcia, who handle the more unusual homicide cases in Los Angeles. Hunter and Garcia have been called to a church, which has been the scene of a vicious - and, as quickly becomes apparent, different to the one we're first shown - murder of the priest. There are what look like ritual-murder aspects to it, and it's clear that the killer is a very twisted individual indeed.
As promised, things move at a pretty reasonable clip from there. Hunter and Garcia discover that the priest's murder bore an uncanny resemblance to the recurring nightmare he'd had of his own death. As they discover this, the killer strikes again, this time in an entirely different but no less sadistic manner.
Usefully, too, while there are a few glancing references to the events of the earlier novel, there's no need to know what Hunter and Garcia had experienced there in order to follow the plot here. This is handy, since I'd never heard of Carter prior to seeing this novel.

So far, so promising, particularly if gore and fast pacing are your things. That said, The Executioner really doesn't work half as well as it could have done in more assured hands.

The two central characters, Hunter and Garcia, are simply ciphers drawn from central casting. Hunter, somewhat implausibly, has encyclopedic knowledge on a wide range of subjects and keeps deploying this for maximum effect. It emerges that he has a PhD in criminal psychology, which is helpful, but on occasion he seems to require a lecture from Garcia to understand what's going on. These "As You Know, Bob" moments may be useful for the reader in breaking up a long monologue, but they completely remove any sense of realism in the characterisation.
Carter is also a victim of what might be termed "Dan Brown Syndrome" in his writing, the mistaken belief that the research he's done has to be included somewhere, otherwise it's meaningless. As a result, a scene involving some interesting deductive work is interrupted by a discursus on the fact that LA's Little Tokyo neighbourhood is one of only a few Japantowns in the USA. Similarly, the arrival at the scene of the second crime is interrupted by a pointless explanation of why a certan police department was handling the matter. If the major goal of a good thriller is to keep the pace moving relentlessly forward, Carter's inclusion of irrelevant background produces the opposite effect.
Other characters, particularly the police captain under whom the two detectives work, are also two-dimensional cutouts and there purely to impart important knowledge (or, in the captain's case, slam doors and shout at people). The main forensic pathologist even spends a page or so explaining how an autopsy works, which is a waste of everyone's time.

Secondly, Carter manages to deliver some important clues via the hackneyed device of the "psychic teenager". In this day and age, I'm increasingly certain that the only "unexplained psychic" characters really only belong in the more supernatural/detective genre, and even then with extreme caution. The arrival of this character also gives Hunter more of an opportunity to be a human Wikipedia, which is rather a shame.
This character is then involved in what turns out, near the end of the novel, to have been a subplot all along. The usefulness of the subplot is highly debatable, particularly since it seems only to provide Carter with the opportunity to kill (offstage, quietly, and for no apparent reason) a journalist character he'd created to annoy Hunter with. It's not a spoiler at all to indicate that this particular subplot involves someone killing prostitutes, which the journalist patently is not.

Lastly, after promising so much, the conclusion of the main plot-line is rather a damp squib. The only thing which convinces Hunter that they're not on the right track is a "hunch", rather than anything more concrete. Admittedly, after we've strayed into the realms of psychic teenagers, anything is going to be a bit of a guess.
There's even the "killer explains how it was all done" set piece. Well, there's the "Hunter tells the killer how it was all done, with the killer then re-telling things and providing more detail" set piece, which slows things down. Annoyingly, the explanation glosses over the way in which the killer established the priest's fear (the explanation given is roughly "I have money and can do almost anything I want", which is a complete cop-out). I also realise, re-reading one scene for this review, that the second murder in the novel would have been made practically impossible given the killer's explanation and identity.

As a final comment, proofreading doesn't appear to have been high on the list of priorities here, either. The priest's nightmares are "reocurring", rather than "recurring", which grates. Even worse, several characters (and the narrator) use "deducted" as the past tense of "deduce". As a result, Garcia at one point speaks to a woman "who had been crying, he deducted", as if he somehow removed points from her.

The bones of the plot here are good. Carter clearly had a good idea for why a series of murders could be committed. Unfortunately, the writing of the novel was several bridges too far for him, and it shows.

2 stars. Not recommended.

Anthony Horowitz - "Moriarty"

One of the more interesting purely-fictional trends of the last few years has been the commissioning of modern authors to "continue" the work of deceased ones. Sophie Hannah, for example, has continued the adventures of Agatha Christie's iconic Hercule Poirot. The incredibly prolific Anthony Horowitz, for his part, has been responsible for continuing both Ian Fleming's James Bond series as well as furthering the investigations of that ur-detective, Sherlock Holmes. This project began with 2011's The House of Silk (which I intend to revisit for a later review), and has continued at least as far as 2014's Moriarty.

The first thing to say about Moriarty is that it's not really a "Sherlock Holmes novel". It's written in what Horowitz (a TV scriptwriter with experience in everything from Foyle's War to Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie's Poirot) probably wouldn't mind if I described as the "Homes-verse". It's a world in which Sherlock Holmes most definitely exists, but the great man only makes his presence known in his absence - appearing at the end in a standalone cameo investigating a typically strange case alongside Watson.
We are, in fact, at the beginning of the "Great Hiatus". Holmes has been thrown to his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls (referred to by another character as the "Reeking-Back Falls"), in the process ending the life of Professor Moriarty and - seemingly - the criminal empire "the Napoleon of Crime" had established. In a somewhat unusually self-aware manner, our narrator begins by explaining that while these events happened then, he writes in full awareness of Holmes' return and the apparent manner thereof. He refers to Holmes' explanation as being "full of inconsistencies", which is perhaps a diplomatic way of pointing to Conan Doyle's considerable willingness to play fast and loose with plausibility on the matter.

Nonetheless, Holmes and Moriarty are both dead, and our story opens in the small Swiss village of Meiringen, where our narrator Frederick Chase - an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency of the USA - meets Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard to investigate the body of the deceased professor.
Jones is an interesting character for Horowitz to have picked up on. While most "updated Holmeses" look pityingly on Inspector Lestrade, Jones is the policeman investigating The Sign of Four and therefore is taken to have a longstanding connection of his own to Holmes. Horowitz in fact goes further, endowing Jones with something of Holmes' deductive reasoning - seemingly cribbed from the great man himself. While Chase is no Watson, being clearly in possession of a strong analytical brain himself, the dynamic becomes something of a Holmes-and-Watson one as the novel continues.
Chase's interest in Moriarty is revealed to stem from his side of the Atlantic. Pinkertons has become aware of the operations of one Clarence Devereux, who appears to be Moriarty's American equivalent, and who was apparently planning to combine his forced with those of his English counterpart. A mysterious coded note (Jones' explanation of how the code can be broken is the equal of any of Holmes' code-breaking efforts and very nearly worth the price of admission itself) gives both men the chance to break Devereux' gang into the bargain, an opportunity neither is willing to pass up.

And so begins an investigation throughout London. While Chase and Jones are hot on Devereux' trail, it seems that a shadowy figure is also interested in his American lieutenants, which serves to complicate matters and make them increasingly dangerous for both men.
It's hard to go into much more detail of the plot without revealing a couple of very impressive twists. While Horowitz telegraphs one of these slightly more than he probably should have done, the more impressive one towards the end of the novel surprised me enough to be "legitimate". The final chapters, explaining how everything had happened, demonstrate that Horowitz played fair with his readers, although the length of the explanation perhaps sounds a bit like an author protesting too much - some of the clues he provides weren't exactly fair ones.

So, does Moriarty work? It does. The focus on the views and attitudes of Scotland Yard towards Holmes and his methods is very clever (there's a very effective scene where Chase is brought into a meeting of the Yard's top brass, many of whom are critical of Holmes' methods and Watson's portrayals of them). While the television series Sherlock showed similar things in its earlier episodes, this is a more sustained examination of how a figure like Holmes could legitimately impact Scotland Yard - some of the police are much less receptive than Jones of Homesian techniques.
There's a good deal of action - much more than typically is the case even in Conan Doyle's novels, let alone the short stories. Some of the violence may be a bit off-putting, particularly as it's recapitulated at the end as all the loose ends are tied up, but we have to remember that this is a contemporary take on Holmes and his era - and violence did after all occur, even if Holmes and Watson tended to take minimal part in it. I won't quite call Moriarty a "page-turner", but the reader will want to know what happens next.
There are, however, a couple of minor niggles. Horowitz doesn't quite get Chase's "voice" right. There are anachronisms (not many) and things-not-quite-American in his dialogue. Jones and the other English characters are likewise guilty of the odd anachronism as well. I'm also slightly sceptical of the logic of writing a continuation of Holmes without (really) including Holmes in it. The standalone short-story at the end of the novel demonstrates that Horowitz is perfectly capable of capturing the Holmesian "tone" much better than he does here.

Overall, three stars. Good, but not truly great

Daniel Smith - "The Ardlamont Mystery"

There has been a fashion for the last few years to revisit momentous crimes from Victorian England (and the Victorian area elsewhere) with the eye of a modern true-crime writer. At best, this produces something as interesting as Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or Rosamond Siemon's even earlier The Mayne Inheritance in Australia. As Judith Flanders' genuinely fascinating The Invention of Murder demonstrates, the era was veritably teeming with exciting criminal trials and celebrity defendants.
This is the vein which Daniel Smith attempts to tap into with The Ardlamont Mystery (2018). Subtitled The Real-life Story Behind the Creation of Sherlock Holmes, this is an examination of an officially unsolved suspicious death which occurred in the 1890s at an estate in Scotland. Smith, for his part, has written two other books connected to 221B Baker Street's famous tenant.

The "mystery" itself deals with the shooting death of 20-year-old Cecil Hambrough. Hambrough, the scion of a landed-gentry family fallen on hard times, had fallen in with one Arthur John Monson who had been appointed to be his tutor. Monson and Hambrough, together with Monson's friend Edward Scott, had gone on a shooting excursion, only for Hambrough to die courtesy of a shot to the back of the head. Was this a tragic accident, as Monson maintained? Or was it something more sinister, as was alleged by the Crown, given Monson's shady background (he can, it seems, best be described with that wonderful Victorian term "scoundrel") and some financial chicanery he had engaged in dealing with life insurance policies? And what about Scott, who promptly disappeared after Hambrough's death?
The reader may well be asking another question, "What's all this got to do with Holmes?" Well, Smith rather tendentiously draws the link that Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn, both eminent early pioneers of forensic science and the inspirations for Holmes, were used as expert witnesses in the trial. Indeed, a third expert witness was a Dr Heron Watson, who Smith argues could well have been an antecedent of Holmes' faithful friend and partner-in-investigation. The Ardlamont case also occurred at around the same time as Holmes fell to his presumed death from the Reichenbach falls, which seems as good as any other reason for each chapter to begin with a quotation from the great detective himself.

And it is here that I need to make the first of my criticisms of this work: It really doesn't do what it says on the tin. A book about the "story behind the creation of Sherlock Holmes" would logically be expected to discuss that, rather than a murder trial occurring around the time that Conan Doyle attempted to end the life of his famous creation (albeit only temporarily, as history shows).
Even the presence of Bell and Littlejohn is in the manner of cameo appearances. There are effective pen-portraits of both men before the action cuts to the scene at Ardlamont itself, and the requisite discussions of what became of both men after the trial ended, but they're rather more in the manner of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern (and almost as interchangeable, if we adopt Tom Stoppard's view of those two) than the central figures Smith clearly wishes they were.

The case itself is at least moderately interesting, perhaps from my perspective more for the fact that the trial was conducted under Scottish law, which meant that Monson was unable to speak in his own defence, and that the unusual verdict of "not proven" was open to the jury. There is some insight into the way that both barristers conducted themselves, although a reader interested in courtroom procedure during the era is much better-off to read Flanders' work mentioned above.
Smith's problem, though, is that he writes in a very "breezy" style which has the effect (unintentional, I think) of gliding over some of the more significant details and then focusing on less significant ones. More is made of a boat the men used for a fishing expedition than the guns they were carrying on the fatal hunting trip, for example. Smith also refers to people by different names at different times - while Monson is always "Monson", Hambrough is occasionally "Cecil", which confuses the matter a bit.

For a book which also claims on its dustjacket to feature Smith's own theory of whodunit and why, this really is more of a blow-by-blow report of the death and the subsequent trial. Smith's own theory (in the penultimate chapter) is relatively long on the "why" of the killing, but builds this theory on a house of cards of supposition. In a way, this is understandable - even a work identifying Jack the Ripper or solving any other famous mystery of the same era is going to have to do that - but coupled with Smith's writing style it feels rather "tacked on".

The "aftermath" discussion also touches on Monson's legally-significant civil case against Madame Tussaud's, which established the principle of "libel by innuendo" (Monson's waxwork was located close to, but not inside, the "Chamber of Horrors", which a jury held was an imputation of his guilt, even though nothing was written to that effect). This is an important point of law, but Smith prefers the comedic element of Monson being awarded one farthing in damages, rather than a discussion of the more important issue.

Overall, this is a book which really fails to hit the targets it aims at. Smith's bibliographical note indicates that this was something of a labour of love for him. That, at least, is a good thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't translate into a particularly essential read.

Two stars.

Deborah E. Lipstadt - "Denial: Holocaust History on Trial"

Rarely does a book cross my radar which combines my interest in crime with what I intend to be my career of history, but Deborah Lipstadt's memoir of what became known as "the Irving Trial" is precisely that. Originally published as History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier in 2005, the book as been re-titled to link to the 2016 film, which starred Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt and Timothy Spall as David Irving.

Some background may be important here, although Lipstadt provides a reasonable amount thereof in the "prologue" to the main section of the book.
Lipstadt wrote a book in 1993 titled Denying the Holocaust, in which she described David Irving as a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite. Irving, who at that stage was a reasonably respected historian of Nazi Germany, albeit one seen as having a slightly eccentric view of Hitler's culpability on the matter, sued both Lipstadt and the publishers for libel. Significantly, he sued under British libel law, where the burden of proof is placed on the defence. Lipstadt and her publishers, therefore, had to prove that her accusations were substantially true. Had they not defended Irving's lawsuit, they would have essentially conceded this his interpretations were the correct ones.

While this perhaps doesn't sound like the grounds for a particularly gripping read, nothing could be further from the truth.
After a rather slow buildup, in which Lipstadt goes over her family background and early academic history, the preparations for and execution of the trial itself are genuinely fascinating. Lipstadt's team makes the early decision that neither she nor any Holocaust survivors should testify, in order to avoid Irving making the trial personal, and in order to keep the focus on his own words. Instead, a "dream team" of international experts is assembled, including luminaries such as Richard J Evans, Robert Jan van Pelt and others, to give specific insights into the errors of fact and interpretation that Irving perpetrated in his work.
The majority of the book consists of relatively short chapters in which a different aspect of the trial is discussed. Van Pelt's architectural expertise is brought to bear on the question of the design of the Auschwitz gas chambers, for example, and Irving attempts to critique certain of the points van Pelt makes. What is perhaps most striking throughout these exchanges is that Irving's lack of scholarship becomes clear quickly - almost alarmingly quickly. While Lipstadt makes the point in a note at the start that she's elided some of the longer exchanges in the interests of readability, and we always need to remember that her experts are demonstrably at the "top of the tree" in their fields, it's astonishing just how quickly some of Irving's nonsense unravels. His mutually-contradictory criticisms about the design of the gas chambers, for example, would be amusing if it weren't for the fact that he seems to seriously hold the views.
A particularly heated exchange is that between Irving and Richard Evans, which appears set to turn into a personal slanging match. Lipstadt's lawyers are concerned that Evans may be making the wrong impression, but he turns it around in what I understand from people who've seen him in full flight to be typical style.

In the end, despite some rather concerning remarks towards the end of the trial, the judgement holds that Irving is indeed anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier. This section, and the rather half-hearted conclusion in which Lipstadt receives emails from lots of people and Irving launches a somewhat bizarre (and unsuccessful) appeal is rather less than satisfying. I don't know whether that's simply because it lacks the drama of the preceding section, or whether it's to do with the fact that the outcome is already known and a matter of historical record. Lipstadt, rather annoyingly, also uses the section to link the Irving trial to matters of Middle Eastern politics.

Sadly, for Australian audiences, there are also two of our countrymen (countrywomen, in fact) who don't exactly come up smelling like roses. The relatively obscure Michele Renouf makes a small appearance, as does the eternally-frustrating Helen Darville/Dale, the infamous literary fraud. I have an exceptionally minor personal connection to the latter and will refrain from commenting on her further.

Nonetheless, for a topic which could easily be a bland and legalistic one, this is definitely a book which will surprise. The gruesome details of the Holocaust are kept to a minimum (always a risk when that topic is written about), as are the less interesting legal niceties. It's also a very interesting explanation of what it is that historians really do.
Lipstadt makes the point several times - as does Evans - that the point about history is that there are events that genuinely happened. It's possible to debate some of the details (there is a well-described summary of the different schools of thought about how Hitler arrived at his decision to eliminate the Jews), but the events themselves are beyond question. The fact that a "smoking gun" - an official order signed by Hitler himself starting the Holocaust - cannot be found doesn't, despite Irving's apparent belief to the contrary, mean that it didn't happen on his orders.

Four stars.

Colin Channer (ed.) - "Kingston Noir"

If you're anything like me, "Kingston, Jamaica" evokes images of dreadlocked Rastas, "a government yard in Trenchtown", and probably Sanka Coffie and Derice Bannock trying to raise funds for the Jamaican bobsled team. All of these images - with the exception of Sanka and Derice, who aren't real people, it turns out - are probably entirely true, but there's clearly a lot more to the Jamaican capital city than that, which is where Colin Channer's edited collection comes in.

A quick word may also be worthwhile on this series. Akashic Books is a publisher of genre fiction, and has embarked on the noble project of assembling collections of noir short stories from a wide range of different places. Most of the obvious American locations have been covered (in some cases, multiple times over), and the series has expanded to the Caribbean, Africa, much of Europe, the Middle East and parts of East Asia. Australian readers should take note that there isn't - yet - a "Sydney Noir" or a "Melbourne Noir", much less a "Brisbane Noir", despite the possibilities such locations would afford.
The objective with these collections is for the authors - many of whom seem to be locals - to contribute an original story set recognisably in one location in the city. The requirement for an original story may be waived in some of the American volumes (to judge by their titles), but Channer's foreword makes it clear that it's very much the case here. Having read a number of edited short-story collections, I consider this to be a strength of Akashic's approach, as edited collections frequently have an "odds and ends" approach, with authors dashing off any old partially-realised sketch they have sitting around. Channer explicitly says that his brief wasn't to accept this sort of thing. While the requirement to have the story set in a specific neighbourhood probably means more to anyone who's actually been to Kingston, it does still create a sense of location for me as a non-visitor.

Over the 11 stories here - one of which is provided by Channer himself, and another of which is by no less a figure than Marlon James some three years before his Booker Prize win - we're treated to a lot of the seamy underbelly of this Caribbean metropolis. There are shady private eyes (Kwame Davis - "My Lord", which opens proceedings), anatomised reactions to a crime (James' "Immaculate", a disturbing read at times but one of the real standouts), conspiracy caper stories (Christopher John Farley's madcap "54-46 (That's My Number)") and all points in between.
Not all the stories are created equal, by any means. Farley and James are both in complete control of their craft, with James' story deliberately featuring more loose ends than one would normally expect. Ian Thomson's "A Grave Undertaking", in contrast, builds to what should have been a truly satisfying twist but fizzes to a rather tame and unsatisfying conclusion. Marcia Douglas' "One-Girl Halfway Tree Concert" appears to have pretensions of being a tone poem, rather than a straight work of fiction, and suffers as a result as well.
Jamaica is clearly a character in all of these stories, even if the Kingston distrcts themselves aren't areas I know. A great many of them feature skilful use of Jamaican patois (Douglas has written her story entirely in this rich language), and there's a constant temptation to read them aloud to tap into the oral story-telling heritage of which most of them are a part.

As befits stories written by locals, too, this isn't your stereotypical Jamaica. The characters don't all sit around smoking ganja and listening to Bob Marley, although reggae plays a role in a couple of the stories (one features the suggestion that a relationship is official when the boy asks the girl to listen to Shabba Ranks). The underworld to which many of the characters belong, too, isn't the universe of rudebwoys familiar to some from dancehall music and others from The Harder The Come. The exception to this, perhaps typically, is Farley's caper story, which specifically compares a crime lord to Jimmy Cliff's character in that iconic film. An understanding of reggae culture really isn't the assumed background here, although it can help - as in Channer's "Monkey Man" which name-checks a number of iconic producers.

An edited collection of short stories will just about always suffer somewhat from the need to ensure that all contributors are pulling in the same direction. While not everyone does so here, the successes more than make up for the few failings. I do wonder how much my appreciation of these stories would change were they set in a location I knew better, although there are a couple of Akashic Noir collections set in such places I'll review later, so we'll be able to find out.

4 stars.

Donna Leon - "The Golden Egg"

Not all of Guido Brunetti's cases involve actively investigating crimes. 2013's The Golden Egg is one of the better examples where a "mystery" certainly exists, but the nature of any crime committed remains murky.

Donna Leon begins her 22nd trip into Brunetti's world in typical fashion. Vice-Questore Patta summons Brunetti to see if he can make discreet enquiries about a mask shop in one of the campi of the city. It seems that the proprietor of the shop has taken to displaying their wares on tables in the campo itself, despite not having the licence to do so. In what should surely qualify as an "only-in-Venice" moment (but is probably the kind of thing which happens elsewhere as well), there are implications for the son of the Mayor of the city, depending on the outcome of Brunetti's queries.

While Brunetti begins this line of investigation, his wife tells him that a deaf-mute man who had worked at their local dry-cleaner has died. Paola is concerned about what could have caused this death, and Brunetti is only too happy to make his own private enquiries about what seems to be a rather bland death by misadventure.
This is until the man - Davide Cavanella - turns out to have had no official existence. In Italy, as in much of the rest of Europe, national ID cards are issed to everyone, and Cavanella didn't have one of these. Neither did he leave any other trace going through life, even a school record at the one school in Venice designed to teach sign language, or a disability pension. Pathologist Ettore Rizzardi points out that without anything like this, an identification will need to be made by a relative, and Cavanella's mother is reluctant to be drawn on any of the particulars of her son's death, or his life.
By this point, of course, Brunetti's curiosity has got the better of him, and a careful private investigation ensues. As is relatively common in Leon's novels, the story of Cavanella's life is unearthed gradually, and involves numerous blind alleys and plenty of drinks in Venetian bars before the full sordid back-story is revealed.

The Golden Egg also represents a return to prominence of Brunetti's Sicilian colleague Griffoni, who had been sidelined in several recent investigations. Despite her lack of a Venetian background, her understanding of what Brunetti refers to as "a certain type of woman" proves pivotal in obtaining key pieces of information.

While there are fewer domestic scenes in The Golden Egg than are perhaps par for the course, the opening exchanges around the dining table are vintage Leon. Brunetti's family have devised a strange game where they tell a story from the end to the beginning, deliberately setting each other up with increasingly outlandish premises. Coming from a family with a strong line in word-play myself, this felt particularly authentic.

As ever with Donna Leon, if you know what you're getting yourself into, this is a terrific read. Brunetti never breaks a sweat, and neither will the plot have that result on the reader. In some ways, staging a novel like this in contemporary Venice comes closer than might sound possible to Miss Marple's St Mary Mead, in that Venice is a small town where most people know most people and just about everyone has secrets. Not quite the "rural cosy" that Agatha Christie pioneered, perhaps, but an "Adriatic cosy" is the next best thing.

Four stars.

Henning Mankell - "Firewall"

With 2002's Firewall (originally published in Swedish in 1998 as Brandvägg), Henning Mankell's brooding Kurt Wallander is really given the chance to reflect on his career.

Indeed, we first meet Wallander in this instalment as he attends the funeral of one of the characters from Sidetracked and ruminates on the legacy of the sadistic killer in that case. He also reminisces about his self-imposed exile at the start of The Man Who Smiled and the discoveries he makes about a former colleague in One Step Behind. For a character who personifies the "noir" side of "Scandinavian Noir", this is almost too gloomy as an opening.

Thankfully for the reader, events occur quickly to shake Wallander out of his typical reverie. Two young girls have been arrested for a violent and seemingly-random attack on a taxi driver, and Wallander has been given the job of trying to establish a motive. One of them manages to escape police custody, while Wallander's actions in relation to the other result in an internal police investigation being opened - yet another cloud over the head of this gifted but idiosyncratic policeman.
Shortly after this event, a power outage in southern Sweden is found to have a particularly gruesome cause, eventually leading Wallander and his team to suspect a link with a man who seems to have had a heart attack after making an ATM withdrawal. This web seems to extend to a mysterious man with a fraudulent Hong Kong-issued American Express card, which sets up a particularly Byzantine investigation, much of which is conducted in that quaint version of cyberspace which existed barely two decades ago, before the internet became what it is today. There is also a brief detour to Mankell's beloved Africa, this time Angola.

Wallander's personal life is its usual complicated self as well. With his relationship with Baiba Liepa clearly in past tense, he finally is persuaded to put a personal ad in the newspaper, which leads to an intriguing subplot of its own. Linda, Wallander's daughter, also makes a few small appearances, mainly in order to make her father worry about the secret she seems to be keeping from him.

Ultimately, Firewall falls victim to the same problem that rendered One Step Behind slightly less than successful. Mankell creates a genuinely intriguing web of conspiracies and shifting loyalties, but seems unable to "close the deal". The motives of certain characters remain unexplained beyond "being the bad guys", and it's left irritatingly ambiguous as to whether the links between certain events are real or merely coincidental. None of these criticisms get in the way of the plot, necessarily, but they do make the final revelations somewhat unsatisfying and point to an author still not entirely in control of his craft. Considering that this is Mankell's eighth excursion into Wallander's world in slightly over a decade, it's a bit of a worry that such "clunkiness" is still allowed to stand.

What makes Firewall work, though, are the well-written characters. Wallander remains objectionable, but much like his Scottish contemporary John Rebus, it's hard to stay mad at him. Linda is gradually becoming a useful calming influence on Wallander's excesses, and his colleague Ann-Britt Höglund is becoming a much better-developed character with each novel as well. Some more refinement of the plot - perhaps less ambition and globe-spanning conspiracies in favour of a simple well-rounded Swedish-based murder - would really move Mankell into the first rank of crime novelists with whom he is so often compared.

3.5 stars.

Donna Leon - "Beastly Things"

2012's Beastly Things is Donna Leon's 21st outing of Commissario Guido Brunetti. Just like the wines Brunetti seems to spend a lot of each novel drinking, he really only gets better with age.

Beastly Things begins with Brunetti talking to forensic examiner Ettore Rizzardi about an unidentified man whose body was found floating in one of the canals. The man was dressed neatly, and had an unusual physical condition, both of which seem to be clues to his identity. Brunetti also can't shake the feeling that the man's face is familiar, but can't place where he's seen him before.

Before too long, Brunetti and his good friend Lorenzo Vianello are discovering that the man was a vet on the Venetian mainland and was connected to an abbatoir further inland. The revelations of what was really going on at the abbatoir form much of the plot of the novel.

So far, so deceptively simple. But of course, a Donna Leon novel isn't just about the plot. There's so much more going on. Here, for example, Brunetti's children have both started at university and are rapidly discovering that they want to be vegetarians, which plays into Brunetti's own discoveries about how cattle are killed for beef.
Much of the plot involves Brunetti shuttling back and forth from the mainland - almost too much, to be honest - and this gives Leon the chance to ruminate on the differences between the Venice the tourists know and love, and the somewhat seedier towns surrounding it.

Leon's customary humour about the quotidian frustrations of Italian life is also present in droves here.
Brunetti has a wonderfully entertaining discussion with Signorina Elettra about the futility of Vice-Questore Patta's son continuing to take (and fail) his exams to become an accountant. This leads into the typical reservations that Brunetti himself has about the potential influence his father-in-law could exert over his career, given that the man is of noble descent.
In another scene, Brunetti and Vianello muse about the legality and morality of using Signorina Elettra - and her friend at the telephone company - to obtain vast amounts of information about key suspects in the investigation. I've sometimes wondered if Elettra isn't close to being a deus ex machina for Leon to wallpaper over what should properly be weeks or months of painstaking leg-work, but the explanations all the characters give for her abilities and their willingness to use them are at least plausible. This time, the scene extends as far as Vianello trying not to tell the young police-boat captain Foa that having a girlfriend and a fiancee are not mutually-exclusive concepts.
The real standout here, though, is a sort of half-subplot dealing with Brunetti's wife trying to establish what to do about an academic appointment at the university. In typical fashion, Brunetti's advice is couched in terms of his reading of Marcus Aurelius and other classical authors, but the right solution is reached.

While this may seem like a relatively bland review for a novel, by this stage with Donna Leon it really is a case that the reader knows what they're getting. Sparkling dialogue with sharp observations of Italian - and specifically Venetian - society abounds, as does a plot which, while not desperately intricate, takes the reader sufficiently far into the dark underbelly of one of the world's top tourist attractions as to make the place seem just that little more interesting.

Four stars.

Casey Hill - "Taboo"

Hailing from Ireland, "Casey Hill" is another pseudonym for a husband and wife duo, this time Melissa and Kevin Hill. While Melissa Hill is a bestselling author in her own right, it seems that neither had written crime before 2011's Taboo.

On the face of it, Taboo has a lot going for it. It's set in Ireland, which is an area which contemporary crime fiction hasn't really travelled to on anything like the level it could do, it's a very of-the-moment Dublin in which the action takes place (property prices seem to be at just pre-GFC levels, people are constantly bemoaning gentrification), and the main character is Reilly Steel, a young female forensic scientist. The ingredients are there for a decent thriller.
We're introduced to the characters at a reasonable clip, too. Steel is an FBI forensic specialist who's been seconded to the Irish police (the "Guards", as the Irish term is translated to English by many characters) to help establish a modern forensic laboratory. She's Californian, young, blonde, and has an uncanny sense of smell and "instincts" that she deploys at a crime scene by doing what another character thinks is yoga. The other characters given decent air-time are detectives Delaney and Kennedy. Peculiarly, Delaney is often referred to in narration by his first name (Chris), while Kennedy isn't.
As the novel begins, Steel's team is investigating the evidence from a drunken fight in Temple Bar, which allows for a quick overview of what sorts of evidence a good technician can get from something as innocent as a hamburger. Slightly an instance of "as you know, Bob", but as an establishing shot, I'll let our authorial duo get away with it. There's an unidentified body floating in the Liffey, too, before everyone is called to what looks like a murder-suicide in an upmarket area of the city.

The plot moves rapidly from this point, as the bodycount piles up, and usually in inventively gruesome ways. The theme of the killings is that the victims have somehow been forced to break social taboos before being killed, and this leads into some interesting discussions of Freudian psychology in between our regularly-scheduled murder scenes.
In typical thriller manner, chapters are short, and often end with dramatic cliffhangers - characters suddenly have a dramatic realisation before we jump-cut to someone else. The final revelation, when it comes, is suitably dramatic, and there's a fair bit of running around and racing against time to try and deal with an increasingly twisted murderer.

That said, for all its promise, Taboo never really moves beyond the generic. Opportunities to really make the most of the Irish setting aren't taken advantage of (apart from an incredible, and ham-fisted, set of coincidences in the final few chapters), and in fact the only way we really know we're in the Emerald Isle is that most of the male characters talk about drinking alcohol a lot.
The characters, too, are cliched. Steel is strikingly beautiful, whip-smart and has Poirot-esque instincts that keep allowing her to see the evidence her colleagues miss. Delaney is practically hypnotised by her brilliance, and Kennedy's scepticism seems sufficiently strong that it could only ever mask a grudging respect for Steel's unorthodox methods. Even the killer, when we eventually meet them, is a rather bland, two-dimensional serial killer from central casting. This isn't quite a killer with no motive, but the motives ascribed feel like an attempt by the authors to tie up some rather awkward loose ends with a semi-decent outcome, regardless that it sounds more artificial than it should. Everyone seems to have read too much Freud, if I'm honest.
The pacing of the plot, too, is faulty. While the set-pieces where Steel and her colleagues realise the identity of the killer are dramatic, the twist of this character's identity is telegraphed several chapters earlier, and with very minimal attempts to conceal the clues.

Perhaps the biggest criticism I have for Taboo, though, is the lack of real gore. If you're going to write a novel about a genuinely twisted serial killer, particularly one who forces victims to do unspeakable things, simply hinting primly at the unspeakable things really doesn't work.
One of the taboos "broken" by the killer is hinted at for three chapters before someone finally expressly states what the victim was made to do. Another victim may not even really have been "forced to break a taboo" (homosexuality in this case), as none of the characters seem to agree on the facts regarding his death, while a third victim is only semi-described before Steel is informed that she's urgently needed for the climax of the novel.

I'm not saying that every single victim needs to be described in loving detail. What I am saying, though, is that you can't write a novel about violent crime - particularly not one where the blurb indicates that you created a pseudonym "to delve into darker aspects of fiction" - and suddenly come over all prim and proper the moment there's any risk that you might have to actually, you know, write about violent crime.
As a crime-fiction fan, I've read and enjoyed everything from Agatha Christie's politely murdered victims through to the cinematic violence of Stieg Larsson and the twisted motives of Mark Billingham's characters. While I recognise that true-crime, particularly that of serial killers, isn't everyone's cup of tea, I'm happy to call myself a ripperologist into the bargain. Surely, by now, we can all be adult enough to pick up a book about a violent serial killer and expect to encounter the same without being disappointed.

It appears, particularly from the final scenes of this novel, that Reilly Steel is intended to be a series character. If so, she can solve future crimes without me.

1 star.

Colin and Damon Wilson - "Serial Killers"

Serial Killers is one of those books you sometimes see on the bargain table at a bookshop and wonder if it's of much interest. Despite a lurid-looking image of Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez on the cover and a table of contents covering all the obvious names (Jack the Ripper, Ramirez, Bundy, Dahmer, Chikatilo, Holmes, Gacy, Brady and Hindley, Zodiac, BTK) and a few less obvious ones, this really is a "quickie book", with minimal research, no analysis and only marginal editing.

The phenomenon of the serial killer is fascinating - just look at the crime-fiction and true-crime shelves in your local bookshop and there will be endless variations on the theme in both fictional and non-fictional form. A proper discussion of what makes a serial killer makes great reading, too, particularly when enlivened with examples of the more infamous names and what made them tick. The process of catching a killer, particularly some of the more devious ones, makes great reading, as does the "one that got away" genre, of which Ripperology is but one example.
What we have here, though, is a series of relatively short potted biographies of the various killers, generally with a focus on sex and sexuality, and no real attempts to tease out themes and concepts across more than a century of criminality. Many of the biographies go out of their way to claim lurid sexual motives for the killer in question, including an insistence that Jack the Ripper had this motivation, which is still very much a live debate. Where there's even a hint of homosexuality, that angle is also played up mercilessly, and the reader could be excused for thinking that some 90% of serial killers are same-sex attracted, which is not exactly the case.
Criminologists are cited at times, but usually only by their surnames and in passing. Given that the book has no bibliography, it's impossible to chase up some of the more spectacular assertions ascribed to these experts, most of whom are usually referred to merely as "experts" or "criminologists".

To cap the poor-quality nature of this book, the editing is sloppy and non-existent in places. Dates are often transposed, names (including that of one of the killers!) are misspelled, placenames are rendered in a variety of ways on the same page, one foreign jurist has his name conflated with his title. One of my favourite moments, though, features a misspelling of "murderers" as "murdered", which completely alters the meaning of a passage.

The more infamous figures - particularly those I've named earlier - all have several book-length treatments written by more respectable authors and, particularly in the more recent instances, many of the police investigating the crimes themselves. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of these over this sensationalist nonsense.

Zero stars.

Lars Kepler - "The Nightmare"

Exploding onto the Scandi-Crime scene in 2009 with Hypnotisören (The Hypnotist in English translation), Lars Kepler became something of a publishing phenomenon in what was even by then a near-saturated market. Unlike other novelists in the same field, "Kepler" wrote under a pseudonym, which resulted in an early debate over "his" identity. One strong candidate, apparently, was none other than Henning Mankell. In late 2009, "Kepler's" identity was revealed as the married couple Alexander and Alexandra Ahndoril.

Originally published in 2010 under the enigmatic title Paganinikontraktet, the second Kepler effort saw English release in 2012 as The Nightmare. The original Swedish title ("The Paganini Contract") does eventually make sense towards the end of the novel, but I suspect the change was designed to grab the Anglophone reader's attention, as well as to relate slightly better to the bulk of the plot.
And what a plot it is! In stark contrast to Mankell - who would have seriously gone out on a limb were he the author of these novels - The Nightmare is a full-tilt, pedal-to-the-metal thriller, much as The Hypnotist was earlier. While this is the second appearance of Kepler's series character, the Finland-born Swedish policeman Joona Linna, there's very little in the way of character development in this novel, and I doubt that a reader who hasn't already met Linna in his earlier case would be disadvantaged by jumping in at this point.

The Nightmare begins with the discovery of a woman's body on a deserted boat in the Stockholm Archipelago. She's been drowned, but her clothes are completely dry. Almost simultaneously, a routine police check uncovers the body of a man hanging from a noose attached to his ceiling...with seemingly no way for him to have got up to the noose in the first place.
Linna begins to suspect something when the woman is identified as the sister of a prominent Swedish peace activist, particularly as the hanged man was the head of the committee charged with approving arms exports from Sweden. And so begins what can only be described as a high-concept cinematic plot involving chases over several islands of the Archipelago, hitmen, explosions, some alarmingly graphic torture scenes and one remarkable set-piece in the German embassy in Stockholm.

As mentioned earlier, we don't really learn an awful lot about Linna over the course of the novel. He is Finnish, at least to the extent that he reverts to his native language under pressure, suffers occasionally from migraines and has what can only be described as a hesitant relationship with a woman called Disa. If there are more clues to his physical appearance, I can safely say that I didn't pick them up as there was more action going on.
The same can be said for the other characters here, which is the weakness of Kepler's writing style. While we want to know what's going to happen next (the very short chapters frequently end with people bursting into rooms, seeing pursuers closing in on them or generally being left in a tense situation), the lack of characterisation reduces practically everyone to the level of a cypher.
Linna's somewhat reluctant Säpo opposite number, Saga Bauer, is briefly described as being quite beautiful, but even her physical appearance seems to be a means to an end as it allows people to underestimate her strength, speed and analytical skills. Meanwhile, characters with almost no long-term relevance to the plot are unexpectedly given back-stories. Sometimes, this has the effect of creating some level of empathy for the character, but the level of detail is uneven. There are also quite possibly too many characters who have a strong affinity for classical music.
In the hands of a master storyteller like a Mankell, these inconsistencies would be ironed out, and it's not as if the Ahndorils had never written a word before teaming up to be Kepler (although it appears that they had been perhaps more "consciously literary" before being inspired by Stieg Larsson's Millennium series to try crime fiction). It does make the impact of the novel slightly less than it could have been, but in fairness this is a novel all about the action rather than the characters.

One other quirk of The Nightmare is its unusual use of tense. Most of the novel is written in present tense, with unannounced flashbacks arriving in past tense. This can be slightly disconcerting for the reader initially.
There is also an unusual reliance on what I can only term the "jump-cut". As in most thrillers, plenty of the action takes place simultaneously, and the secret of the craft lies in keeping all the threads of the story moving rapidly. It's not surprising to see one chapter from one character's perspective and then the next to be events at the same time from someone else's view. Occasionally, though, events turn out to have been in a different order - a phone call proving that one character is still alive, for example, is "received" in one scene some 25 pages before the scene in which it's "made", which is peculiar. Again, a slightly more deft hand in the writing process - or the editing process - would probably have tightened this up.

Also, a quick word on the translation. This generally keeps the plot moving without seemingly inserting extraneous details. I do have to take issue with the consistent rendering of Stockholm street names as "Sveavägen Boulevard", though, which just doesn't make sense.

While I've been critical of this novel, it's simply because I hold Scandi-Crime to a very high standard. The Nightmare doesn't quite hit those marks, but is still streets ahead of the average Anglo-American "airport thriller".

3 stars.

Henning Mankell - "One Step Behind"

Midsummer. Sweden. A small group of friends are celebrating the longer days - and the long-awaited arrival of warmer weather - dressed in historical costumes when they're shot by an unknown marksman. If this atmospheric beginning doesn't immediately make the reader think they're in southern Scania and about to follow Kurt Wallander and the rest of the Ystad police, I don't know what will.

One Step Behind (Swedish: Steget efter) is Henning Mankell's seventh Kurt Wallander novel, making its appearance in Sweden in 1997 and its translated appearance in 2002. As with many of Wallander's earlier cases, the age of the novel is immediately apparent to the reader in 2017/2018 - younger characters can't be automatically assumed to have mobile phones, for example, and the circulation of a suspect's photo outside of Sweden takes some time to achieve. Mankell's muted social commentary - the sort of thing which would become a hallmark of Scandi-crime in the post-Stieg-Larsson era - makes its appearance as well, with several characters bemoaning the move towards a more "modern" and "lawless" Sweden as they gradually uncover the crimes here.

Unlike most of Wallander's earlier cases, One Step Behind begins in a rather oblique manner. The murders referred to above are described (tensely, and from the perspective of the killer) in the prologue, but the first Wallander and his colleagues hear about them is the belief of the mother of one of the girls in the group that her daughter hasn't gone on the trip around Europe her postcards seem to indicate that she's taken. Looking again at the age of the novel, it's rather touching to see Wallander asking relatives of the youths involved for handwriting samples (from letters) and musing on how easy it would be to forge the writing of the people in question.
Things become more interesting, though, when Wallander's colleague Svedberg misses work for a few days in a row. Acting on a hunch, Wallander calls on Svedberg's address, only to find a brutal murder scene. The death of one of their own sparks the Ystad force in a way that the missing teenagers hasn't, particularly as they are forced to confront the fact that they really didn't know Svedberg very well at all, making the investigation exceptionally challenging.

In the first of several twists, Svedberg appears to have had almost no private life, even according to his two living relatives (one of whom has made a minor appearance in an earlier case). And yet, as this puzzle begins to unravel, Wallander is met by another puzzle, that Svedberg had seemingly been connected to the disappearance of the teenagers in some way or another, and seems to have been conducting his own investigation during his annual holidays.
Wallander and his colleagues - particularly the increasingly-well-written Ann-Britt Höglund - are faced with a truly baffling mystery involving a telescope, a mysterious woman, the bonds between the teenagers and a killer who can somehow manage to stay ahead of them.

In contrast to Wallander's earlier cases, Mankell has genuinely crafted a remarkable set of puzzles for his characters (and readers) to solve. Wallander is reminded of his former mentor Rydberg's dictum of removing the "extraneous layers", but even the brief vignettes from the perspective of the killer don't give the reader much of a chance to remove those layers.
From a crime-writing perspective, this is a huge leap from the earlier "straight thriller" plots (such as The Man Who Smiled, which is more an exercise in watching Wallander assemble evidence against someone the reader already assumes is the villain, while this character tries to destabilise the case, or Sidetracked with its frequent killer's-eye-view passages). We aren't exactly in the realm of the classic whodunit with its myriad clues and red herrings and the detective summoning all the suspects for a comfortable chat, but there is patently more detective work required to discover the ins and outs of this mystery than earlier ones.

That said, Mankell drops the ball in two important ways here. The first may simply be a product of its time - Svedberg's status as a "confirmed bachelor" leads many characters to assume he was gay, and this subplot seems to bring out the worst in many of the supporting characters (not Wallander and Höglund, admittedly). It's entirely possible, as mentioned, that Sweden in the late 1990s may simply have been less tolerant than it famously is now, and that judging One Step Behind by contemporary standards on this issue may be as pointless as expecting the characters here to communicate by email and smartphone rather than letter and fax.
The second concern, though, is more serious. Mankell gives us a genuinely cold-blooded killer here, but one who appears to have performed certain actions purely to advance the plot, which is most unfortunate. One Step Behind features a brief epilogue where Wallander goes over his interrogation of the killer and asks many of the questions the reader will doubtless have about motive (some of the killer's-eye-view sections imply a very long-game kind of a plan - with a "schedule" of kills, and a reason for one of the more impressive set-pieces). The response, apparently, was that there was "no reason" for these.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a fictional killer performing bizarre actions to make a case more complicated, of course. One of the most famous lines in the cult comedy Clue is Tim Curry's explanation of why one of the victims was found in the bathroom - "Don't you see? To create confusion!" That said, when most of the killer's rationale is "I don't know", it's hard not to feel that the author created a set of puzzles without putting a motive behind them.
A lot of ink has been spilled, and bytes filled, about this sort of thing, and I don't intend to add much more to the debate, but it genuinely does seem a bit of a letdown when someone who is being set up to be one of the more memorable serial killers in recent literature really doesn't have a motive. Even the seemingly-motiveless killings in Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can at least be put down to "men who hate women", while the vague attempts at a motive here are more than a bit facile.

4 stars. Leaving aside the rather weak ending, this is a truly gripping read.