One of the quirks of the "boom" in Scandinavian crime fiction in the past decade or so has been that a number of authors were translated from roughly the middle of their series, rather than from the beginning.
Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series is one of these. The first two novels to see English release were the fifth and third of the series (in that order, somewhat eccentrically), which for a while meant that Hole's first two outings were only available in Scandinavian languages. So keen was I to read them that I'd actually begun to look into obtaining the Swedish translations of the Norwegian originals when finally word came out that they had been translated into English and would be released.
These two novels are very atypical in relation to the rest of Hole's exploits, in that the action takes place almost entirely overseas. The Bat (released in 2012, originally published as Flaggermusmannen in 1997) sees Hole investigating a murder in Australia, while he's sent to Bangkok in Cockroaches (2013, originally published in 1998 as Kakerlakkene). The brilliantly-evoked Oslo atmosphere of the later novels is missing in favour of the more exotic - at least for a Norwegian - setting.
The Australia of The Bat is, frankly, a bit off-key. I can't be so sure about Cockroaches' Bangkok, although Nesbø does manage to work in some suitable period detail - this is the Bangkok of the Asian Financial Crisis, where the baht is incredibly unstable and the economic boom Thailand had experienced is screeching to a halt.
Hole, too, is a different man. His complicated personal life is nowhere to be seen, beyond his sister's Down Syndrome. This is years before his fateful meeting with Rakel and her son Oleg, and even a long time before he develops his complicated friendships with such enduring characters as Ellen Gjelten, Beate Lønn, and the rest of the Oslo Crime Squad. All things considered, he's actually rather deferential to Bjarne Møller when ordered to fly to Bangkok, although the perceptive reader will notice that his first meeting with Tom Waaler doesn't exactly set them up to be bosom friends.
Hole is sent to Bangkok in order to investigate the murder of the Norwegian ambassador, Atle Molnes. Molnes, it emerges, was found dead in what may or may not be a brothel (one of the characters makes reference to acts which aren't quite legal or illegal, and that seems to be the world in which this hotel exists), by a prostitute dressed - somewhat incongruously - as Tonya Harding.
Aside from the general desire to avoid a scandal, as Molnes has political connections to the Christian Democrats in Norway, Hole's mission is to resolve the murder as quickly as possible. Of course, as those of us who know the byzantine ways Hole's mind works can probably already guess, "as quickly as possible" is just not going to happen. Secrets and lies get in the way, both at the embassy and among the ambassador's family, and Hole's famous instincts are put to the test on several occasions.
Cockroaches is an improvement over the more linear plotting of The Bat, but it's clear that Nesbø was still finding his feet as a novelist in this early Hole outing. The multi-faceted plots familiar to readers in the more recent novels are simply not there, although some political and financial corruption does surface as Hole investigates.
Overall, though, there's still not the abiding sense of character that Nesbø would later develop. Hole is a sort of "everyman with advantages", rather than the complex and deeply flawed figure he would soon become. There's a sense here that he could be Sam Spade, simply transported forward in time and given a new nationality.
More broadly, one could question whether this is truly "Scandi-crime" anyway, since it takes place in Bangkok. While it touches on the social considerations that genre tends to, the nature of the plot makes it perhaps more "Thai noir" than anything else.
Two and a half stars. Fans of the series will love it, but it's not Nesbø at his best.
Friday, 1 February 2019
Wednesday, 23 January 2019
Jo Nesbø - "Police"
Carrying on almost directly from its predecessor Phantom, 2013's Police (published in Norwegian in the same year as Politi) sees the Oslo crime squad investigating yet another baffling series of murders.
This time, as a very atmospheric prologue shows us, the victims are themselves policemen. It gradually emerges that they're being killed at the scenes of unsolved murders that they themselves had helped to investigate. Once again, it seems that a serial killer is stalking the streets of the Norwegian capital, and this one has a thoroughly unusual motive.
But where in all of this is Harry Hole? Things were left on a knife-edge at the end of Phantom, and it seems that Hole may not be able to assist his colleagues in the same way as he had previously done. The tall man under guard in the hospital may - or may not - be precisely who we think he is. Will Hole's colleagues, including Katrine Bratt who joins the team from Bergen, be able to unravel this incredibly complicated series of crimes?
Police is Jo Nesbø, if not at his finest, certainly at his most complex. Even as the plot spirals towards its dramatic conclusion, there are two or three more suspects introduced who are at least plausible killers. There's mental illness, and mental illness suffered by at least three important characters no less. There's even a strong implication that one of Hole's colleagues is killed by a separate killer, which is a plot thread I rather hope is examined in a later novel.
Oh, and the police corruption hinted at in Phantom is front and centre by now. The odious Mikael Bellman seems intent on cementing his position as the Oslo chief of police, but this may have to come at the expense of his doggedly-loyal underling Truls Berntsen who has been suspended from the police over some suspicious payments he's received. There's less of a focus on Berntsen in this novel, but I get the strong sense that Nesbø really enjoys writing such a thoroughly objectionable character.
There's a fair bit of gore involved, too. Some of the deaths involved are pretty cinematic in their execution, and a few of the investigating officers find it all too dramatic as well.
Does it all work? Well, it's hard to give a definitive answer without giving too much of the plot away. What I can say is that Nesbø is just about able to keep all the balls in the air most of the time.
There are a few scenes (even the final chapter) which rely on the sneaky technique of setting the reader up to think they're watching one thing, only for it to be something completely different in reality. That's a relatively common trope in Nesbø's writing, and I can hardly begrudge him falling back on what he knows best, but when you can point to perhaps five instances in which it's used in a 600-odd page novel, perhaps that's a bit unfortunate.
It's also clear to see why Nesbø keeps attempting to write Hole and his team out of existence. This is a novel which goes to some pretty dark places and hints at even darker ones to come. Writing something like that every couple of years would take it out of many people.
A 3.5-star rating here. There may just have been too much going on for this to work perfectly.
This time, as a very atmospheric prologue shows us, the victims are themselves policemen. It gradually emerges that they're being killed at the scenes of unsolved murders that they themselves had helped to investigate. Once again, it seems that a serial killer is stalking the streets of the Norwegian capital, and this one has a thoroughly unusual motive.
But where in all of this is Harry Hole? Things were left on a knife-edge at the end of Phantom, and it seems that Hole may not be able to assist his colleagues in the same way as he had previously done. The tall man under guard in the hospital may - or may not - be precisely who we think he is. Will Hole's colleagues, including Katrine Bratt who joins the team from Bergen, be able to unravel this incredibly complicated series of crimes?
Police is Jo Nesbø, if not at his finest, certainly at his most complex. Even as the plot spirals towards its dramatic conclusion, there are two or three more suspects introduced who are at least plausible killers. There's mental illness, and mental illness suffered by at least three important characters no less. There's even a strong implication that one of Hole's colleagues is killed by a separate killer, which is a plot thread I rather hope is examined in a later novel.
Oh, and the police corruption hinted at in Phantom is front and centre by now. The odious Mikael Bellman seems intent on cementing his position as the Oslo chief of police, but this may have to come at the expense of his doggedly-loyal underling Truls Berntsen who has been suspended from the police over some suspicious payments he's received. There's less of a focus on Berntsen in this novel, but I get the strong sense that Nesbø really enjoys writing such a thoroughly objectionable character.
There's a fair bit of gore involved, too. Some of the deaths involved are pretty cinematic in their execution, and a few of the investigating officers find it all too dramatic as well.
Does it all work? Well, it's hard to give a definitive answer without giving too much of the plot away. What I can say is that Nesbø is just about able to keep all the balls in the air most of the time.
There are a few scenes (even the final chapter) which rely on the sneaky technique of setting the reader up to think they're watching one thing, only for it to be something completely different in reality. That's a relatively common trope in Nesbø's writing, and I can hardly begrudge him falling back on what he knows best, but when you can point to perhaps five instances in which it's used in a 600-odd page novel, perhaps that's a bit unfortunate.
It's also clear to see why Nesbø keeps attempting to write Hole and his team out of existence. This is a novel which goes to some pretty dark places and hints at even darker ones to come. Writing something like that every couple of years would take it out of many people.
A 3.5-star rating here. There may just have been too much going on for this to work perfectly.
Tuesday, 6 November 2018
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.
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.
Thursday, 25 October 2018
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.
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.
Sunday, 21 October 2018
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.
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.
Friday, 5 October 2018
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
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
Tuesday, 2 October 2018
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.
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.
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