Review of ‘The Historian’ by Elizabeth Kostova

Poenari Castle, Romania

This was always going to be a hard sell for me.  Not only do I not like vampire fiction or film series, all of which tend to take themselves far too seriously (with the exception of the tongue-in-cheek British series ‘Being Human’), but I also am tired of being associated with vampires simply because I originally come from the Carpathian mountains.  To be precise, my father comes from the place where the so-called Dracula’s castle stands in ruins, Cetatea Poenari.

I’ve become somewhat tired of explaining that the vampire myth has always been far stronger in Bulgaria and Serbia, even in Greece, rather than in Romania.  That Vlad Ţepeş the Impaler was indeed a historical figure but has nothing to do with the pale Count imagined by Bram Stoker, and indeed, very little to do with Transylvania.  That the bad press Vlad received during his life and especially after his death was deliberately promoted by political rivals. Yes, he was a bit of a tyrant, creative in his cruelty and ruthless in meting out punishment – your everyday despot of the Middle Ages, then!

Vlad Ţepeş, the Impaler, Prince of Wallachia (1456-1462) (died 1477) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, I tried to set all of that aside and read Elizabeth Kostova’s book about the search for Vlad the Impaler’s real grave with an open mind.  It is a novel where the real hero is historical research itself.  It owes much to the original ‘Dracula’  novel by Bram Stoker, and it is all about a story within a story within a story, with letters and stories by different characters in different periods (some historical, some more recent) creating a sense of time-travel.

The unnamed main narrator was a sixteen year old girl when she discovered an ancient volume and a secret stash of letters addressed to ‘My dear and unfortunate successor’. Gradually, despite her father’s reluctance and fear, she uncovers the innermost secrets and horrors of her family’s past, including how her mother and father first met.  Narrators past and present travel all over Europe, finding emblematic documents in obscure libraries and taking in many eerie sights on and off the beaten tourist track.  Along the way, they encounter strange characters, dangerous librarians and the living dead.  They also find corpses, missing friends and each other in the process.  All in all, it makes a change from the vampire type novels aimed at the Young Adult market, but some may find the insistence on documentary detail and the lengthy descriptions slow down the action.

I quite enjoyed the first few chapters, the gradual quickening of horror, the Victorian style and atmosphere (although it is set in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s). But it just felt too long and repetitive after a while and yes, there were inaccuracies. The characters all seem to have the same voice, regardless of their period, culture or sex.  If you want examples of thrilling research and discovery combined with love story or complicated action, A.S. Byatt’s ‘Posession’ or Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ are much better.  I have to admit that from about page 300 onwards (only half-way through), I skimmed through the chapters, simply because I did not want to admit defeat and abandon the novel.

I read this book as part of my Global Reading Challenge, aided and abetted by Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise.  It is my contribution to the wildcard category – the Seventh Continent – an alternative setting you might not normally consider for crime fiction.

Reviewing Some of My Reviewing

OresmanLibrary, nymag.com

In an idle moment (ha! as if I ever have those!), I was going through the book reviews I have written over the past year or so of blogging, both on this site and on the Crime Fiction Lover website.  I wanted to see if there were any patterns emerging.

Well, the first and most obvious pattern is that I read a LOT of crime fiction – I would say about 80% of my reading is dedicated to this genre.  And sometimes I worry that this will affect my own writing, as I also write in this genre.  Will I become too influenced by the writers I admire?  My excuse is that I read such a variety of books, from shaky debuts to authors at the height of their powers, from all over the world, with all sorts of different cultural influences and styles, that I am safe.

Within the crime fiction genre, over the past year I have read 26 police procedurals, 10 thrillers (of the high-octane action variety), 10 psychological thrillers (of the ‘hide under the covers and shudder’ variety), 7 ‘form-busters’ – that don’t fit neatly into any category, 6 classic detective novels, 5 cosy mysteries, 5 noir, 1 medical thriller and 1 historical crime novel.  After some pondering, I came to these conclusions:

1) Police procedurals are the most popular form being written today (and I include forensic teams or psychological profilers in that category, as they work so closely together).

2) This doesn’t necessarily reflect my personal preference. I like noir far more than that, and I like action thrillers far less than that, for instance.  However, sometimes you have to review books for which you do not have a natural inclination, which makes me wonder if I am doing them justice.  Perhaps someone with more of an appetite for non-stop action scenes would view them more kindly and convert my 3 or 4 stars to 5 stars.

3) I expected my non-English literature to outweigh my English one.  By this, I mean literature that was originally written in a language  other than English (I did in fact read a lot of translations).  However, in the case of crime fiction, I certainly read more English-speaking authors – 37 – than foreign ones – 31.  When it comes to overall literature, perhaps the balance is slightly better: 50/50.  And this, despite the fact that I am in a place where you have to make an effort to find English or American books (that are not translated into French).  That probably does indicate a slight preference for the familiar or a sense of ‘coming home’ to my well-known authors.  Then again, perhaps it just shows a reluctance to step out too far from my comfort zone.

But perhaps the most obvious conclusion is: with all of the business travel and workshop-preparing, and with all of this reading and reviewing, when on earth do I get time to do any writing?

Answers on a postcard, please.

 

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Fiction Pick of the Month April 2013

I read nine books in April, but am a little behind on the reviews.  It was an interesting and very varied month: I got introduced to new authors, new countries and new points of view.

Louise Penny: Dead Cold

Stefan Slupetzky: Lemmings Zorn (in German)

Mari Hannah: Deadly Deceit – review coming up on Crimefictionlover.com

Marcus Malte: Garden of Love (in French) – troubling, unusual storytelling, playing with your mind and perception

Esi Edugyan: Half-Blood Blues

Martin Walker: The Crowded Grave – beautiful sense of place and an easy, fun read despite the grim subject matter (ETA separatists, terrorist plots etc.)

S.J. Bolton: Dead Scared – thrilling read about a spate of suicides amongst Cambridge students

Quentin Bates: Chilled to the Bone – review coming up on Crimefictionlover.com

Petros Markaris: Liquidations à la grecque (Greek original, read French translation) – veridical, if depressing portrayal of a country and a city in profound crisis

Not a single bad read among them, which is unusual. And my pick of the month is the only not-quite-crime-fiction read of them all: ‘Half Blood Blues’, for the self-assured, inimitable voice of a black jazz musician.  The plot was somewhat predictable and yes, there is a bit of a mystery about it, although perhaps not quite enough to call it crime fiction.  It felt very much like ‘Amadeus’ and Salieri’s jealousy of the seemingly effortless genius of his younger rival, Mozart.  It also very nearly won a Booker Prize, which just proves once more that genre distinctions are meaningless and that crime fiction can be very literary, and literary fiction can be very criminal too!

Real Viennese Crime Fiction

This is not really a book review, more of a declaration of love for its setting, and it fits into my Global Reading Challenge, the meme launched by the incomparable Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise.

Ah, Vienna!  City of my heart – no matter how many places I live in, this is the place that feels closest to home, perhaps because I spent most of my childhood there.  Yet it’s not just gold-tinged nostalgia.  I will forever be regarded as an outsider there: no matter how fond how I am of Grinzing and the wooded hills extending beyond it, no matter how familiar I am with every element of the Viennese cuisine, no matter how easily I slip into the lazy lengthened vowels of the Viennese accent.

Viennese Souvenirs

Yet still I thrill to the slightest mention of the city, and I cannot resist any novel that is set there.  Yet somehow, until recently, crime fiction set in Vienna seems to have been written largely by foreign authors. The obvious one to mention is Graham Greene’s ‘The Third Man’.  Both the book and the film are excellent at conveying the disquieting atmosphere of a city on the very border of the Cold War. Frank Tallis has series of novels featuring a psychonalytical detective in early 20th century Vienna, but I found it a bit too rich, like a Sachertorte.  J. Sydney Jones also addresses the same period in Austrian history, introducing real-life literary celebrities, musicians and artists such as Gustav Klimt and Gustav Mahler with his Viennese Mysteries series.

However, in recent years, there has been a surge of native crime writers telling us of their love/hate relationship with their capital city.  [Because you aren't a real Viennese until you learn to complain about the city and its inhabitants.] Some of them rather obviously cater for the tourist market, much like the Mozartkugeln confectionery.  Some of them are intended for the domestic market (which includes Germany and Switzerland, of course).  None of them have been translated into English yet, as far as I am aware, but I will keep my eyes open for Wolf Haas (many of his books have been filmed for Austrian TV),  Edith Kneifl’s evocations of the Prater fun fair, Andreas Pittler’s novels set in the tumultuous 1930s, Marcus Rafaelsberger who changed his name to Marc Elsberg and now lives in Hamburg, and Alfred Komarek’s melancholy detective Polt, who lives just outside Vienna amidst beautiful vineyards.

But every now and then you find the genuine thing: a book that conveys all of the contradictory atmosphere of this city, everything that charms and frustrates you about it. This author is Stefan Slupetzky and his crime series is about Poldi Wallisch, a.k.a the Lemming for his tendency to engage in self-destructive behaviour.

The book I read, ‘Lemmings Zorn’ (Lemming’s Rage) is the fourth in the series, but I don’t think this is a series you need to read in chronological order.  Not surprisingly, it’s about rage and frustration, about average people trying to make a life for themselves in the city of endless construction sites, unapproachable neighbours and high noise levels. It is also about powerlessness and revenge, about shame and shamelessness.

It starts out as a humorous family saga. It’s a lovely May Day holiday and the streets of Vienna are empty, save for Lemming and his heavily pregnant life partner, Klara. Suddenly, Klara’s waters break, the ambulance fails to arrive and panic sets in.  Until the couple are saved by a stranger, Angela, who helps them with the birth, names the baby and becomes a family friend.  A few months later, however, on Christmas Eve, Lemming has to leave the baby with Angela for a few hours.  When he goes to pick up his son, he makes a gruesome discovery which changes their lives forever.

Macabre humour mixed with slapstick, surrealist dream sequences, philosophical asides and tongue-in-cheek observations, this is a crime novel unlike any other you have read.  I absolutely loved it and laughed out loud throughout.  Whether it would appeal to anyone who doesn’t know Vienna or the black humour of its inhabitants, we won’t know until it’s been translated into English. I do hope someone hurries up and does just that!

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Review: Dead Cold by Louise Penny

‘Dead… what?’ you may well ask, because outside the UK this book was published as ‘A Fatal Grace’.  Somehow, this title was not deemed suitable for the British, but the original title was nowhere to be seen, so I spent quite a bit of time on Goodreads and other sites to find out which book I had just finished reading.  Don’t you love it when that happens?

This is my incursion into Canada for the Global Reading Challenge, that wonderful meme hosted by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise.  And a very frosty, atmospheric journey it was too, set around Christmas in the sleepy village of Three Pines in Quebec.  This is the second book in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series and I picked it at random, simply because it was the only one available at my local library. It is perhaps not the strongest in the series, but I enjoyed the atmosphere and the characters so much that I have already ordered a couple more from abroad.

Every now and then you come across a crime series that has a fully developed world of its own, its own language and in-jokes, the interplay of characters, which you only gradually penetrate, book by book.  It is a pleasure to sink into such a complete and satisfying landscape, and I feel about this series much the same as I felt about Lindsey Davis’s ‘Falco’ series set in Ancient Rome. It’s like meeting an old friend.

Yet, at the same time, this is cosy fiction with an unsettling undercurrent, not just an escapist read. Gamache is a complex, thoughtful, sensitive detective, who never once falls into cliché.  The village seems idyllic, but is of course filled with quirky characters, many of them artists and writers who have dropped out of the big city rat-race.  I especially enjoyed big-hearted and insecure Clara, straight-talking poet Ruth and gay couple Olivier and Gabri.  Yet one member of this peaceful community is responsible for the death of CC de Poitiers, a pretentious, unlikeable woman with a murky past, a ruthless streak and an obsession to become the next big lifestyle guru.  Death by electrocution, no less, while watching a curling game.  And what is the connection with the death of a homeless person back in Montreal?

The plot is not the main thing here, however. It’s all about the wintry atmosphere, the humorous descriptions of curling and the bulky attire inevitably linked to the Canadian climate. I also enjoyed the sly observations about the ‘others’, in this case the Anglos with their contained emotions, never quite saying what they mean. (The author herself is just such an Anglo, it should be noted, but she steps seamlessly into the shoes of the French-speaking community in Quebec.)

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The Silence of the Rain in Brazil

Cover via Amazon

Brazil has long been one of my favourite countries – although I can only claim a very short (two-week) personal acquaintance with it.  However, I have danced to its music, rejoiced in its football victories and read all the news I could about this beautiful, dramatic, troubling and troubled country.  I have also succumbed to its literature and gone through bouts of a rigorous diet of Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector and Machado de Assis.  I have even read one book of crime fiction set in the country, written by the American Leighton Gage, which was my Crime Fiction Pick for August 2012. But until now, I had not read any crime fiction written by a bona fide Brazilian author.  Now, thanks to the challenge set by Kerrie through the Global Reading Challenge, I have been introduced to Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza and his pensive detective Inspector Espinosa.

Ambitious executive Ricardo Carvalho is found shot in his car in the parking garage just outside his office in the centre of Rio.  It may look like suicide, but the weapon and the victim’s briefcase have gone missing.  So the police initially believe it is murder: a car-jacking or robbery gone wrong, as is so often the case in the mean streets of Rio.  However, Inspector Espinosa is not content with obvious explanations.  He wonders about alternative scenarios. Could Carvalho’s  work at the rather shady international mining company Planalto Minerações have led to his killing, or could his beautiful, independently-minded  wife have finally taken her revenge for his relentless womanising? Then Carvalho’s secretary, Rose, disappears before she has time to disclose something important to his wife.  Both the police and the readers believe they now have a straightforward procedural, with interviewing of witnesses and sifting through clues, but the book suddenly changes gears.  We now see the story through the eyes of Max, a small-time crook who witnessed Carvalho’s death.  As each of the characters operates from greed, lust and other very human flaws, the story gets more and more complicated.

‘The Silence of the Rain’ is the first novel in the series and perhaps it has a ‘first novel’ talent for breaking the rules of the crime genre.  The book starts with a prologue that seems to give away the whole story… but it cleverly hides as much as it reveals.  The point of view shifts from third person to first person not in a clearly-signposted, regular fashion as we have become accustomed with modern crime fiction. Instead, Inspector Espinosa goes to bed in third person and wakes up in first person, which I found a little disconcerting.  Just when you think you have a handle on the story, the perspective changes, which is a very interesting technique and which I felt really enriched the story.  However, it does not necessarily play by the Anglo-Saxon ‘rules’.  We also find here one of the most imaginative methods of killing someone (even when handcuffed) that I have ever come across in crime literature – although perhaps a step too far for many readers.

This book offers an atmospheric description of the beauty and squalor of Rio de Janeiro and its inhabitants, as well as a rich panorama of a polarised society of haves and have-nots, where police corruption is expected and human vices are taken advantage of. But the reason I will be coming back for more books in the series (if I can get my hands on them) is because I am charmed by a detective who inhabits a different space and time from most people.  Espinosa is an avid hunter of books rather than of criminals, susceptible to female charms but is not quite sure how to talk to women.  He is a detective who lets different types of cheese accumulate in his fridge, opens a beer and is filled with world-weariness, who hates making decisions, who is basically a gentle, thoughtful man, as he  ’…started thinking about death – not about the abstract idea of death, but about specifically how much time he had left.  Aged forty-two, on a Saturday night, in a bachelor pad in Copacabana.  He decided he was already dead.  He went to bed.’

I wonder in what mood he will wake up next time.

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Time to Read for Fun

I log all of my reading and TBR now on Goodreads, as it helps to keep a semblance of order.  (Although I know full well that chaos lurks underneath!)  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that 7 of the last 10 books I read (and certainly all of the books that I’ve read so far in March) have been books sent to me by publishers for book reviews.

Not that I am complaining! It’s not that I don’t enjoy these books, and I am grateful to the publishers for exposing me to authors or translations which I may not have  come across otherwise.  But reading books for the purpose of reviewing is different: it’s WORK.  I have to read them with pen in hand, making notes of characters’ names, or a phrase that grabs my attention, or a thought which I need to explore further.  Also, because I review for a crime fiction website , the books I get to review all fall into this category.  Plus, I have signed up for the Global (crime fiction) Reading Challenge, so even my ‘spare time’ reading has turned completely mysterious.

Now, you may know I absolutely love crime fiction, but I do also need a break from it every now and then.  I need a gentler read (or a demanding, experimental, pretentious literary read) by way of contrast.  To keep me fresh and eager to return to my old love.  So, although I still have a pile of books to review, I also want to make sure I plan in some time to read more widely.

The last non-crime book I read (back in February) was ‘Kokoro’ by Natsume Soseki, a writer so well-known in Japan that he is pictured on the 1000 Yen note.  I had read this as a student – supposedly in Japanese, but I seem to remember cheating and reading the translation alongside the original.  This was a new translation, much more colloquial and lively than the previous one, perhaps even a bit too chatty for the rather serious, contemplative nature of the story.  It is so interesting comparing different translations, though, that I wish I had the time to do this more frequently.  I also want to spend some time reading books in the original and then comparing them with their translations into English.

So, what am I going to attempt this month? First of all, a true classic: Carson McCullers’ ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’.  I have a weak spot for misfits and outcasts, and this is full of such characters.  Plus, I find it amazing that such a young writer could write so accurately and eloquently about life on the margins of society.

Just in case I get too depressed, I also have a lighter read up my sleeve, which should have me laughing out loud in recognition: Peter Mayle’s ‘Toujours Provence’.

Do you prefer to read all in one genre, or do you feel the need to balance your reading with something completely different at times?  And what are your ‘go to’ reads in such a situation?

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Deon Meyer: Thirteen Hours

This is the first South African crime fiction novel that I’ve read, but on the strength of it, it certainly won’t be the last.  I have to admit it’s all thanks to Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise and her Global Reading Challenge.  That is the greatest value of book bloggers and reading challenges – they push you just beyond your normal everyday boundaries.  And you discover that in many cases these boundaries were entirely in your own imagination.   Why had I never explored South Africa before (although I have a deep affection for the country, having been there several times on business trips)?  Because it is so much easier to fall into the familiar authors and patterns of reading, obviously, but perhaps also because I feared that the very real, everyday brutality of South Africa would make its crime fiction unbearable to read.

That is, however, far from the truth.  Deon Meyer does not make for comfortable reading, but there are no graphic scenes of torture or gratuitous violence here (unlike some other books I have read recently).  Instead, the Afrikaans writer gives us a very perceptive picture of the tensions and contradictions in the South African society, beneath the initial optimism and affirmative action of the Rainbow Nation.  His main detective, Benny Griessel, a middle-aged, doting Dad, is an Afrikaaner, but his colleagues are Xhosa, Zulu, English, coloured.  They have two cases to solve.  The first seems an open and shut case: the murder of a music producer in his own Cape Town home, his drunk wife found passed out next to him with no memory of the previous evening.  Griessel, a fellow (recovering) alcoholic, cannot believe that the wife, a formerly successful singer in her own right, could have shot him. But before he can get too deeply involved, he is called to another crime scene.  A young American backpacker has been found murdered outside a church, and there soon are indications that a second girl is on the run for her life.  Traumatised by what she has witnessed, she dares not trust anyone, least of all the police. While dodging the ruthless pack of men pursuing her, she manages to place a call to her father back in the States.  And so the American Consulate and local politicians put pressure on the police to find the missing girl, although no one knows why she is being hunted down with such ferocity.

Although this book (and Deon Meyer more generally) is being touted as an edge-of-the-seat suspense writer in the Harlan Coben, Lee Child and Simon Kernick, I actually found Meyer’s style more relaxed.  It’s not that there isn’t enough exciting action throughout the book, but there is also plenty of breathing space.  The pacing is such that we have time to meditate on corruption and justice, to find out more about Griessel’s family situation and to discover Afrikaans music. The social commentary is ever-present, yet never overdone, never slowing down the action.  And I admit I am biased: Cape Town is one of my favourite cities in the world, but I loved the atmospheric recreation of its different neighbourhoods and felt I was running alongside the girl up the steep slope of Lion’s Head.

What a great introduction to South Africa – if you are going there for a visit, this book will probably tell you more than most guidebooks, as well as being far more exciting and enjoyable.

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Modern German Classic: The Mussel Feast

Written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this book by Birgit Vanderbeke is both domestic and allegorical, examining how all revolutions start with one small act of insubordination.

The story is deceptively simple. A brother and sister and their mother are waiting for the head of the family to show up for supper.  They are having mussels, a food none of them like very much, but which is their father’s favourite meal.  It is a special occasion, they tell each other, father is having a business meeting which may well end in a promotion. As they sit and wait, we find out more and more about this apparently ordinary German family, about the parents’ escape from East Germany and the back-breaking menial jobs their mother had to endure in order to support their father’s studying.  The author does an excellent job of describing the public charm and private horror of an inflexible, tyrannical man, but she doesn’t spare the mother either.  From the daughter-narrator’s point of view, her mother has colluded with her oppressor, switching to ‘wifey mode’ to appease and soothe him.  Yet only a few pages further, we discover that the daughter herself likes to be thought of as ‘Daddy’s girl’ and takes sides with her father to mock the other two members of the family.  The dictator’s policy of divide and conquer seeps in gradually, poisoning everything in sight. The more we find out, the more we discover this is a family reigned by fear and despair.

Presented as an ongoing interior monologue (much of it in just one paragraph), the book is an easy read, partly because of its brevity, but also because of its subtle humour and contradictory statements.  Yet for anyone who has lived in a non-democratic society or in an abusive family, it is a painful read.  It works perfectly well on both levels, describing the gradual descent from praiseworthy public ideals  to subverted, selfish interpretations. Thus, the father’s vision of  ’a proper family’ ends in constant criticism and disappointment that his flesh-and-blood children do not live up to his ideal. His desire to be ‘doing things together’ ends in him spoiling the atmosphere and blaming everyone else when things are not quite perfect.  And ‘investing in the children’s future’ becomes a pointless exercise involving an expensive stamp collection that no one is interested in.

Communism failed not because it didn’t have inspirational ideas, but because it refused to take into account human nature when putting them into practice.  Marriages and families fail because we cannot allow the others to be themselves.  A valuable lesson, presented in an intriguing way, with an ending that is stunning in its shocking simplicity.

I read this as part of my 2013 Translation Challenge and on that note, let me make one small aside. I was sharing this book and my delight that Peirene Press is making such work more available to an English-speaking audience with a group of aspiring or even published writers based here in the Geneva area. I bemoaned the fact that there have been few translations into English of world literature so far, and commented how pleased I was to see some new initiatives.

Their reaction surprised me a little.  OK, a lot!

They said that no wonder that German and French publishers translate so much literature from the UK and the US, because that’s where the best work is produced. (Never mind that they also translate from many other languages.) And that they themselves cannot be bothered to read literature from other countries, because the style is too different ‘from our own’.  Bear in mind that this is not a random group of expats, but keen readers and aspiring writers, who have been living in the local area for many years and usually speak the language very well.  The lack of curiosity and insularity perhaps explains why so little contemporary fiction is being translated into English.  It saddens me, because it feels like people are deliberately limiting their horizons, but what do you think?

English: The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989. The photo shows a part of a public photo documentation wall at Former Check Point Charlie, Berlin. The photo documentation is permanently placed in the public. Türkçe: Berlin Duvarı, 1989 sonbaharı (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Feverish Amounts of Reading

If there’s one upside to being ill (and having that illness drag out so long that you can no longer find anything amusing to tweet about!), it’s that you are forced to lie in bed and do nothing more strenuous than read.  So I am ahead of myself in all of my reading goals, although not quite up to date with the reviews.  Or with any other interesting blog post themes which I had planned.

Anyway, on to some simple arithmetic (my brain is still not able to cope with anything more strenuous).

I have read 10 books so far in February, all but two of them while I was ill:

1) Linda Gruchy: Death in Spiggs’s Wood - have reviewed it for Crime Fiction Lover

2, 3 and 4 I wrote about  in my review of four women writers  (I read the remaining one back in December)

5) Birgit Vanderbeke: The Mussel Feast – I will review in more depth for the Translation Challenge

6) Fred Vargas: The Ghost Riders of Ordebec – I have been a Fred Vargas fan for years and finally got to read and review one in translation (review will be up shortly on the Crime Fiction Lover website)

7) Boris Vian: Les morts ont tous la même peau – (The Dead All Have the Same Skin Colour)

This is one complicated, angsty, nihilistic and multitalented writer (and also jazz musician, songwriter, playwright, journalist, inventor) – the kind that France seemed to produce so many good exemplars of in the early to mid twentieth century.  Troubled by his lack of financial success or critical recognition as a writer, he wrote a series of potboilers under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, in which his love of American crime fiction is evident.  In this book he is both celebrating and subverting the ‘hardboiled’ genre of writing.   It’s the story of Dan, a nightclub bouncer, who has kept his black roots well hidden and passes for white in a racist society. When his (black) brother Richard appears out of the blue to threaten his happy little status quo, the life he has built together with his blonde wife Sheila and their son, Dan goes on a rampage to protect himself and his lifestyle.  A disturbing and violent book, it nevertheless raises questions about identity, how we choose to define ourselves and how we respond to social pressures.

8) Franck Thilliez: Fractures

A psychological thriller by one of France’s most popular up-and-coming writers of  ’polar’ (crime fiction).  He specialises in thrillers with a medical slant to them (either mental health issues or deadly viruses or bio-experiments) and is set to become better known in English-speaking countries too, as one of his books ‘Syndrome E’ has just been translated and optioned for film rights in the US. ‘Fractures’ is perhaps not one of his best, but a riveting read nevertheless (despite quite a few gruesome scenes) and with an interesting subject: multiple personality disorder.

9) Steve Christie: Good Deed

This is a debut novel, a madcap chase through most of Scotland’s cityscapes.  It starts out with a simple enough mistake: Lucy Kennedy stops for a coffee at a service station just outside Dundee and leaves her car unlocked. Two opportunistic thieves steal something from her car. So far, so normal. Except that Lucy is a drug mule for a very unpleasant Scottish crime lord and his even less scrupulous fixer, Vince. And they will stop at nothing to get back their stolen goods: 2 kilos of pure cocaine. Detective Inspector Ronnie Buchanan of the Grampian police in Aberdeen is soon engaged in the man-hunt of his life, following the trail of Vince’s devastation and mind-games all over Scotland.

The plot twists and turns relentlessly, with lots of violent scenes, narrow escapes and tricks that the two main protagonists play on each other. Perhaps there is almost too much plot in here, a natural mistake for many first-time novelists, and this can be at the expense of the characters.  All in all, an amusing read (reminiscent of Colin Bateman’s ‘Divorcing Jack’), but could have done with some more judicious editing.

10) Arthur W. Upfield: Murder Down Under

My contribution to the Global Reading Challenge for Australia, this classic crime novel introduced me to the philosophical, patient and methodical half-caste Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police.  The inspector uses his holiday to help out one of his protegés from the Western Australia Police and investigate the disappearance of a farmer whose car is found abandoned near the rabbit fence of the large government wheat farm.  Bony goes undercover as a farm labourer, to encourage people to talk freely to him, and soon finds himself involved in a second mystery, that of the enigmatic Mr. Jelly and his lovely daughters. The claustrophobia of a small farming community is perfectly rendered, although I found the casual description of pervasive racism of the 1930s and of the death penalty a bit shocking.

I had never heard of Bony before, but he completely charmed and captivated me. The author does tend to raise him to almost mythical status and give him all the virtues of both races: the wisdom, patience and close observation of nature (tracking skills) of the Aborigines, as well as the analytical abilities and eloquence of a highly-educated white man. Yet the story still feels fresh today, proving that you don’t have to use ‘heart in your mouth’ moments on every page, but can instead take time to build well-rounded characters.

One final thought to conclude this rather rambling post: does the way we feel (physically and mentally) have an impact on how we read books? I found, for instance, that I had enough fever and wild imaginings in my head, and so had no desire to encounter any more hectic pacing and convoluted plot lines. Instead, I was drawn to humour, well-drawn characters and a more cosy atmosphere. Comfort read, perhaps?