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.