Review of City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance (Snubnose Press, 2012)

Nearing his fiftieth birthday, Crowe has been released from prison and has headed back to Memphis.  Whilst inside the ‘Old Man’ has died, a more brutal leader has succeeded him, and the criminal landscape has changed.  The new leader might have ordered a hit on Crowe when he was in prison, but after the death of his wife to a religiously inspired serial killer he wants him to use his talents as an enforcer to exact revenge.  Crowe is prepared to oblige, but also has revenge in mind.  His plan, however, is violently derailed and he finds himself up against a radical Christian sect who have ‘rescued’ a set of serial killers to do ‘God’s work’.

The strengths of City of Heretics are the principle character of Crowe, the sense of context and place, and the general story arc and hardboiled nature.  Crowe is getting on in age, but is unwilling to hand in the towel, and despite not quite being as robust as he once was he has the wits and experience to hold his own.  And he’s not about to let pain and poor odds get in his way, despite being put up against his own past and a gaggle of serial killers loosely controlled by a religious group.  The narrative has a nice pace as it builds to bloody climax and I loved the closing couple of pages.  That said, it took a little while before the book clicked into place and I was firmly hooked in; I had a hard time buying the character of Rad; and I found the prose a little uneven at times, sparkling in some places and a little flat in others.  Admittedly, all minor stuff in the grand scheme of things.  Overall, an entertaining hardboiled tale that turns into a real page turner with an ending that makes me want to read the sequel, assuming one is in the pipeline.

Social media etc

On Monday it was year since I started using Twitter and Facebook.  I’m a sporadic user of Facebook, which I find tends to be more personally focused.  It’s a different story with Twitter.  Despite my deep scepticism as to the utility of 140 character posts before starting, I’ve found Twitter to be useful on a host of fronts - discovery, dissemination, conversation, identification.  Through following journalists, academics and book bloggers (I’m pretty choosy who I follow - people who have interesting things to share; I’m not interested in personal info and what people are wearing or eating, or where they are; or in following back for the sake of it), I’ve a constant stream of news and links to stories, articles and new books, letting me keep on top of developments in fields I’m interested in and to find new, interesting scholars and authors.  I can also share my own work, whether that be blog posts, papers or books, and that of others, and I have little doubt that people have discovered interesting stuff through my tweets.  I’ve also had a series of interesting conversations with folk, and identified potential contributors for events and projects.  Put short, it’s become a core part of my academic life.  I would have scoffed at that suggestion a little over a year ago.  My handle is @robkitchin

Review of The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin (Viking/Penguin, 2010)

1947 in Melbourne, Australia, and Charlie Berlin is back working as a detective after serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force, flying night missions over Germany.  He’s returned to find himself at the bottom of the pile, his colleagues having advanced whilst he was away, and with a head full of demons after being shot down and housed in a prisoner of war camp in Poland.  When the railway payroll is yet again robbed, he’s packed off to the small rural twin-town of Albury-Wodonga to investigate.  By sending him alone to solve a case that has already confounded others it seems that his bosses have set him up to fail, and the local cops are hardly welcoming of the arrival of a city detective.  From his base at The Diggers Rest Hotel, Berlin sets about tracking down the armed gang of robbers with the help of a rookie constable and a beautiful, feisty local reporter, who both see Berlin and the case as a way to better things and places.  Berlin though is not just taking on the gang, but also the memories that haunt him, especially the horror of the anti-aircraft fire, the death march back towards Germany from his Polish camp, and the execution of a young Jewess.

The Diggers Rest Hotel won the Ned Kelly Award for best crime fiction novel in Australia in 2011.  McGeachin drops the reader into rural Australia in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with its small town politics, social unease about change, and folk traumatised through what they’d experienced or lost.  He is especially strong at characterisation, populating Albury-Wodonga with an interesting set of people, all struggling in some way to make do, or get on, or come to terms with the past and the present.  In particular, Charlie Berlin and Rebecca Green make for an enjoyable, feisty pairing.  Add in a compelling storyline of Berlin investigating a set of payroll robberies by an armed gang and you have a very nice mix - a strong sense of place and historical and social contextualisation, wonderful characterisation, and interesting plot, told through engaging prose.  Although the resolution was credible, the only slightly jarring element was the ending, which seemed to come about ten pages too soon and left a couple of threads dangling that are hopefully dealt with in the next book in the series.  Overall, a very enjoyable read on several levels.

Lazy Sunday Service

We watched a thoughtful and moving Japanese movie last night called Departures (which won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2009, and loads of other awards). A young man loses his job as a cello player in a Tokyo orchestra and moves back home to his small town with his wife.  Seeking work he answers an advert to work in 'departures', thinking it might be a travel agency.  Instead, it is to undertake the ritual of preparing the dead for their coffin.  Given the taboos concerning death in Japanese culture, it is a job that few people want, including the young man.  But it is work and it is cathartic and allows him to see the world afresh, even as those around him shun him. The film was beautifully shot, well acted, and had a very good script.  One of those films that makes you think about life - and in this case, also death.  I'd recommend to anyone who enjoy reflective, thoughtful movies.


My posts this week:

Review of Icelight by Aly Monroe
Some tasty US imports
Some media pieces from today
Review of Liar Moon by Ben Pastor
Killing time
Still living in a haunted landscape

Killing Time

‘Tom.’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Are you in or out?’

‘I just told you, I’m thinking.’

‘What’s there to think about?’ the dealer asked.

‘The ten bucks in the middle of the table.’

‘It’s like playing with a sloth!’

‘Let him think,’ the fourth player said. ‘It ain’t gonna make a difference to who wins the pot.’

‘Except we’ll all be a few minutes nearer to the ever after with nothing to show for them.’

‘Like that matters.  Since retirement what have any of us have done except kill time?’

‘Tom?’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Jesus.’

'Get another beer and stop rushing the man.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Liar Moon by Ben Pastor (Bitter Lemon Press, 2012)

September 1943 and Wehrmacht Major Martin Bora wakes in an Italian hospital minus a hand, with the doctors fighting to save his leg, a victim of an attack by partisans.  The Italian government have recently switched sides, dividing the country into two, with the North still controlled by the Fascists.  As he starts to make his recovery he is asked to help the local police investigate two cases: the murder of a local Fascist hero, and an escaped mad man who has taken to killing people indiscriminately.  Reluctantly he agrees, forming an uneasy alliance with Inspector Sandro Guidi, aware that the case is politically charged and that he still has to perform his usual duties.  The murder seems a relatively open-and-shut case, the main suspect being the victim’s young widow, but neither Bora or Guidi are convinced of her guilt, though for different reasons.     

The real strength of Liar Moon is the character of Martin Bora and the moral ambiguities around his persona and actions.  He’s reserved yet direct, determined, ruthless, and principled, driven by a deep sense of conviction and his aristocratic family tradition.  He’s a soldier in an army of a corrupt and corrupting regime, trying to hold the line between murder and killing, on the one hand relentlessly hunting down partisans and on the other subverting the hunt for Jews.  And losing his hand and nearly losing his leg is not going to slow him down.  Moreover, he remains loyal and dutiful to his wife, despite their failed marriage.  My sense is that regardless of the storyline, he’d be an interesting character to spend some time with.  In Liar Moon, Pastor places him in an interesting historical terrain - Northern Italy just as Italy changes sides - and pairs him with an Italian police inspector to investigate the death of a local Fascist.  She creates a nice sense of place and history, and captures the awkward relations between Axis allies.  For the most part the plot worked well, but faltered at the resolution, which was contrived and came too much from left-field.  This was a shame as the story was coasting along very nicely up to that point.  Nevertheless, this was a thoughtful and enjoyable tale and if the other books in the Bora series are translated I’ll be reading them in due course.

Some media pieces from today

The formal announcement of my ERC Advanced Investigator award has received a whole bunch of media attention today.  Here is the TV piece from the six and nine o'clock evening news on RTE1.   Earlier, I did radio pieces on Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1) and KFM.  The Irish Times covered it twice (here and here), and there were pieces in the Irish Daily Star, Journal.ie, Silicon Republic, Tech Central, and Business and Leadership. 

Some tasty US imports

A nice parcel turned up in the post today.  Five crime novels from the US, all of which I picked on the basis of recommendations and best of 2012 lists.  Now I have to work out where to slot them into the to-be-read pile, though I'm saving Devil in a Blue Dress for my trip to LA in April.

Review of Icelight by Aly Monroe (John Murray, 2011)

The winter of 1947 and London is in the grip of a big freeze, with limited fuel supplies and food and clothes restricted by rationing.  Peter Cotton has been reassigned from colonial intelligence in the Foreign Office’s Colonial Service to Operation Sea-snake, designed to try and protect valuable assets from American pressure to tighten security and the homophobic and paranoid attentions of MI5, MI6 and a MP who has established his own intelligence network.  One such asset is Alexander Watson, an atomic scientist who is vital to Britain’s attempts to join the nuclear age, who picks up men for fleeting sexual encounters.  Aided by Derek, a rent-boy in South London, and Sergeant Dickie Dawkins of Special Branch, Cotton tries to keep a watching brief on Watson and others, but then the scientist is arrested and he is pulled into the murky world of inter-agency rivalries and their hired help in the form of a pair of Glasgow razor boys.  The issue is no longer simply protecting Watson, but how to also protect himself.

Icelight plunges the reader into the frosty world of London in the Winter of 1947 and the emerging cold war.  Monroe creates a vivid sense of place and of social history, with the shortages of just about everything, the black market, and the feeling that Britain is teetering on the edge of a new age, shorn of its empire and beholden to its ‘special relationship’ with America.  And as relations with the Soviet Union sour and a new political war starts, Monroe focuses on the tensions, rivalries and paranoia that flower within and between British intelligence agencies.  She does so through a captivating but, at times, complex and convoluted plot that involves a fairly large cast of characters.  I don’t mind admitting that occasionally I felt I was wandering in icelight, and at a couple of points I stopped and backtracked to reposition my bearings.  What holds the book together is the premise, some lovely passages of writing (I thought the scene with Cherkesov in a restaurant was wonderful), a general sense of social and historical realism, and some nice characterisation.  Cotton is an interesting lead character, who is worldly, shrewd and standoffish, and is complemented by the more earthy Dawkins, and the other characters are well penned.  Overall and intriguing and entertaining read, that whilst complex is thought provoking and nicely resolved.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've just finished reading Liar Moon by Ben Pastor, set in 1943 in Northern Italy and featuring Wehrmacht Major Martin Bora (review to follow this week sometime).  The first book was Lumen set in Poland in 1939.  Both books are interesting because they explore notions of honour and morality in a time of war; Bora, for example, is prepared to kill but not murder; to hunt partisans but not send Jews to their deaths (or at least give them the opportunity to escape).  According to Goodreads there are eight books in the series, and if the rest are translated from Italian, I'll probably work my way through the set.  As yet, I can't see any plans on the Bitter Lemon Press site for the third book to be released, but I'm hoping that it's in the pipeline.

My posts this week

Review of The Devil I know by Claire Kilroy
The TBR grows ...
Fair dinkum
Contemporary, historical crime fiction set in the 1930-50s
Review of Go With Me by Castle Freeman
The evidence proves otherwise

The evidence proves otherwise

‘I never touched her.’

‘Mr Stevens, you were observed to hit Ms Fenton by two witnesses.  You punched her in the face and broke her jaw.’

‘I was still in the pub.  They saw somebody else attack her.’

‘You broke two fingers in your right hand.  The hand you used to hit Ms Fenton.’

‘I didn’t lay a finger on her.’

‘Are you a habitual liar, Mr Stevens?’

‘Are you a habitual wan...’

‘I see you have a quite a temper.  It makes you violent, as my client can testify.’

‘I’m not lying!’

‘I think you’ll find the evidence proves otherwise.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Go With Me by Castle Freeman (Duckworth Overlook, 2008)

In a small rural town in the backwoods of Vermont Sheriff Wingate arrives at work to find a young woman sleeping in her car, clutching a paring knife.  Lillian claims she is being stalked by Blackway, a local bad cop who lost his job after she complained of being shaken-down.  There’s no evidence though that it was Blackway that smashed up her car and killed her cat.  Wingate’s advice is to leave town before Blackway escalates the violence, but the woman is not going to run away like her boyfriend; she wants Blackway dealt with.  The sheriff sends her to an old sawmill where some of the town’s men gather to drink and chat to ask for their help.  They send her off with Lester, a wily old-timer, and Nate the Great, a massive young man with more brawn than brains.  Whilst the pair feel they are a match for Blackway, Lillian is having second thoughts, but once they’re on his trail there’s no backing out.

Go With Me is a country noir novella, full of atmosphere and sense of place.  The great strength of the book, however, is the characterisation, dialogue and prose.  Freeman’s style is all show and no tell, and with a few deft sentences he paints a vivid picture.  The dialogue is absolutely spot-on, with some very well penned scenes where people are talking over and past each other, or at cross-purposes, or where conversations have nice elliptic loops, and sometimes all of these at once.  The story itself is divided in two main strands.  The first is Lillian’s quest to deal with Blackway aided by Lester and Nate.  The second is four old timers chatting about their chances of success as they drink the day away in the mill.  They are nicely complementary, the second providing a kind of contextual commentary on the first.  The plot moves at a relatively swift pace to a tense conclusion.  Whilst the book worked very well as a novella, and would provide a very good basis for a movie, my sense was the story was a little too linear, with no twists or turns or subplots, and if worked up into a longer piece could have been exceptional.  Nonetheless, Go With Me is an engaging and enjoyable slice of country noir.

Contemporary, historical crime fiction set in the 1930-1950s

Yesterday a colleague asked if I could recommend some crime fiction set in 1930s-1950s.  I jotted down a bunch of suggestions on a sticky note.  Last night I decided it would be better to email her links to various reviews and then decided I might as well share it here.  So, if you're interested in historical crime fiction in this period, then you might like books by these authors (I've only picked one book per author, but there are others reviewed on the blog if you search for them).  If you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment.

Icelight by Ali Monroe (London 1946)
The City of Shadows by Michael Russell (Dublin/Danzig 1934)
Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon (Istanbul, 1946)
The Envoy by Edward Wilson (S.E. England, early 1950s)
The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst (Paris 1939)
Silesian Station by David Downing (Germany/Poland 1939)
A Lily of the Field by John Lawton (Vienna 1934/London 1948)
A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill (Australia 1931)
Lumen by Ben Pastor (Poland, 1930)
The Holy Thief by William Ryan (Moscow 1936)
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Paris/Berlin 1939-40)
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Arizona, 1931)
The Silver Stain by Paul Johnston (Crete 1942/2003)
Stratton's War by Laura Wilson (London 1940)
A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (South Africa 1952)
Field Grey by Philip Kerr (France/Cuba/Germany 1931/1954)
The Information Officer by Mark Mills (Malta, 1941)
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell (Berlin 1931)
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski (Breslau 1933)
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (Berlin 1940)
Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli (Italy 1945)
HHhH by Laurent Binet (Czechoslavakia, 1942)
Restless by William Boyd (Pairs, Belgium, US 1939-41; UK 1976)
The Last Sunrise by Robert Ryan (India, Burma, Singapore, China 1941/1948)
The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman (Berlin, 1932)
The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland (Russia, late 1930s)
The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris (Scotland 1946)
The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman (Dusseldorf, 1929/30)
Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn (New York/Berlin 1938)
Ostland by David Thomas (Berlin/Minsk 1940/1959)
Echoland by Joe Joyce (Dublin, 1940)
Once in Another World Brendan John Sweeney  (Ireland, 1937)
Death of a Nationalist by Rachel Pawel (Madrid 1938)
The Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (Los Angeles, 1948)
Last Rights by Barbara Nadel (London, 1940)
A Death in Bordeaux by Allan Massie (Bordeaux, 1940)
In Search of Klingsor by Jorgi Volpi (US, Germany, post-war)
Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin (Australia, 1947)


Updated as of Dec 2013

Fair dinkum

After a protracted process and quite a bit of frustration, The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin and A Decline in Prophets by Sulari Gentill, arrived via its second courier from Australia yesterday (thanks, Pauline and Cian).  As I've noted before (here and here) it's blumming difficult to be fair dinkum about Australian fiction when it's nigh on impossible to buy!  Now I've managed to get my hands on these, I'm looking forward to tucking into them.

The TBR grows ...

I've been on a bit of book buying binge over the past couple months and my active to-be-read pile has got up to about 50 books between fiction, popular non-fiction and academic books.  Not large in the context of some people I know, but very large for me (I usually only have about 10-15 in the pile) - all told it's about half a year's worth of reading.  In particular, I've been snaffling up fiction books.  Above is my tbr on that front (easier to see if you click on it) and I've 8-10 others ordered and another 7 or 8 on the kindle.  Given I've been quite selective in my choices, I at least know it's going to be a very good few months of reading!  However, I must stop buying books until I've worked my way through them all!  On the other hand, all the fiction on the pile is only about 4 months of reading, which isn't very long at all really ...

Review of The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy (Faber and Faber, 2012)

Tristram St Lawrence, the son of the Twelfth Earl of Howth, has been living in exile and working as a translator when the transatlantic flight he is on makes an emergency landing in Dublin in 2006.  In an airport hotel he meets Dessie Hickey, a former classmate from school, now a builder-cum-developer.  Tristram’s employer and sponsor, the financier, Monsieur Deauville, is interested in Ireland’s boom and Hickey’s prospects.  He instructs a reluctant Tristram to set up Castle Holdings and to finance Hickey’s scheme to develop a large site in Howth, to the north of the city.  Soon Dessie and Tristram are funnelling European investment money into a shoddy development, bribing politicians, and have become involved in an investment consortium buying up properties in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and China.  Then the Lehman Brothers bank collapses ...

The Devil I Know is a Faustian, allegorical and satirical tale of the boom and bust in Ireland told through the eyes of Tristram St Lawrence and his tragic foray into property development in the dying days of the Celtic Tiger.  Setting the book in the two weeks leading up to the centenary of the 1916 uprising, the catalyst for independence, and using the narrative form of a testimony at an inquiry were inspired choices, setting the excesses of the Celtic Tiger and the loss economic sovereignty against the quest for self-determination, and framing the tale so it speaks directly to the reader.  Kilroy’s prose is light, expressive and witty, and she keeps the story moving at fair clip.  The plot captures the characters (the deluded, naive investor; the jack-the-lad builder/property developer; the social climbing wife, the crooked politician; the greedy corporate financiers; and the faceless European backers), scams, sentiments, rhetoric, politics and naivety of the boom and the disbelief and unworldliness of the crash.  The only bits that seemed to jar a little were the ending, where the story switches to a slightly different, more fantastical register, the lack of any ordinary folk and their role in the property frenzy beyond one scene where they clamour to put down deposits on shoe-box apartments, and the Anglo-Irish background of Tristram, who is portrayed as something of an innocent and deluded dupe, swept along by the party; the Anglo-Irish gentry are not traditionally played in this victim role, although the inversion is interesting in and of itself.  Overall, an entertaining and enjoyable tale of modern Ireland’s rise and fall.

Lazy Sunday Service

I bought Icelight by Aly Monroe and Ratlines by Stuart Neville yesterday in the local bookshop.  Given I'd just finished Castle Freeman's Go With Me, I decided to moved Icelight to the front of the TBR pile.  I'm a 130 pages in and enjoying it, but I'm wondering whether I've made a mistake reading book three of the series without having read books one and two.  The main character, Peter Cotton, is a bit of enigma and I suspect I would have a better handle on him and his backstory if I'd read the first two. Oh well, nothing for it but to keep going and backfill at a later date.  Do you read a series in order or skip around?

My full review of Icelight is here.

My posts this week
Dictionary proofs arrived
Review of The Silver Stain by Paul Johnston
Literary noir crime fiction
Favourite cover of 2012
Review of Broken Dreams by Nick Quantrill
The game is up

The game is up

Shivering.  Teeth chattering.  Breath steaming in the cold night air.  In the distance a sharp whistle answered by two barks and barely audible voices.  Pinpricks of light dance through bare branches.  Losing his nerve, Lonny tumbles out from his hiding place and sets off through the forest, his thin clothes and brittle skin snagging on brambles.  Another whistle, this time closer and to his right. He veers left, his foot catching on a root, and tumbles into wet leaves.  Cursing he rises and hobbles on, knowing that he should have never had stopped; that the game will soon be up.



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Broken Dreams by Nick Quantrill (Caffeine Nights, 2011)

After the death of his wife two years previously, Joe Geraghty has been trying to put his life back together again, working as a private investigator in Hull.  He’s been hired by a local business man to investigate an employee’s absenteeism.  On the night he’s jumped and mugged, the woman he has under surveillance is murdered.  Initially considered a suspect, he starts his own investigation into her death.  Married to a prime mover in the regeneration of Hull, the woman had a tangled personal life, including dealings with Frank Salford, a racketeer who has seemingly gone straight.  Salford is also a key figure in the other case he’s looking into, that of a woman who disappeared a number of years earlier.  Along with his colleagues, Don, a retired cop, and Don’s single mother daughter, Sarah, Geraghty works to solve the cases, sometimes working with the police, other times ploughing his own furrow.

The strength of Broken Dreams is the contextualisation and sense of social reality concerning Hull, its decline and faltering regeneration, and its people.  Quantrill doesn’t romanticize the city, portraying its gritty urbanity, yet he clearly has soft spot for the place.  Geraghty is a likeable enough character who is tenacious, slightly vulnerable, and doesn’t always take the most sensible course of action, and the other characters were well drawn and engaging.  The writing is fairly workmanlike, but has good pace and is all show and no tell.  For the most part the plot worked well and was quite compelling, with a good entwining of the main and subplot.  However, there were a couple of editorial niggles that seemed to jar a little and the ending seemed to fall apart somewhat.  On my reading, there seemed to be only two incidental clues pointing to the killer - neither enough on their own or together to prompt the conclusion that the person was guilty of murder.  Moreover, there was no material evidence and no basis for a confession; Geraghty seemed to just intuitively know who it was.  This was a pity as the plot had been unfolding nicely until then with several potential suspects in the frame.  Nonetheless, Broken Dreams is an interesting PI tale and a promising start to the Geraghty series.

Favourite cover of 2012

Picking my favourite cover of 2012 was a relatively straightforward affair.  Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds is both striking and clever.  A really brilliant piece of artwork.  If only all covers had this amount of attention.  I also have to say that I really liked JT Lindroos cover for my own book, 'Killer Reels' - another striking and clever image.

Literary noir crime fiction - looking for suggestions

I've been having a browse back over my best reads selections for the last four years.  There's three sub-genres of crime novel that I clearly like more than others: literary, noir, screwball noir, twentieth century history (esp. 1930s-1950s) - fiction that is dark, humorous and philosophical.  Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke pressed all three buttons, as did We are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston, and Secret Dead Men by Duane Swierczynski.  Two of those buttons are pressed by books such as Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, Brodeck's Report by Phillipe Claudel, Field Grey by Philip Kerr, Mixed Blood by Roger Smith, The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, The Holy Thief by William Ryan, Small Crimes by Dave Zeltserman, The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain, Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst, Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, and I could go on.  Now I like lots of other types of crime fiction as well, but these kinds of books are consistently amongst my favourite reads.

What I'm after is suggestions for authors/books that fit the 'literary noir' label; books that make you think about life rather than simply being entertaining.  Recommendations? 

Review of The Silver Stain by Paul Johnston (Creme de la Crime, 2012)

Athens based, private investigator Alex Mavros specializes in finding missing persons.  When the star of a Hollywood movie being filmed on the island of Crete refuses to continue playing her role until her missing assistant is found, Mavros is flown in to track her down.  The movie - Freedom or Death, about the invasion of Crete by elite German paratroopers in the Second World War - has stirred up bad memories, especially between an elderly English and former SOE agent and the German owner, and former paratrooper, of the hotel where the movie crew are staying.  The former accuses the latter of war crimes, yet the latter is well regarded having contributed millions to the local economy and preserving heritage, and the former lives in a lawless enclave in the hills.  As Mavros starts to investigate the woman’s disappearance he’s soon caught up in other local rivalries in the movie team, local politics, and criminal gangs, and also co-opted by the German hotel owner to recover some stolen ancient coins.  Within a couple of days, however, he has recovered the coins and the traumatised missing woman but at the cost of a deadly vendetta.  Moreover, he’s discovered that his own father played a pivotal role in the resistance against the German occupation, a role that has been falsely rewritten.

The Silver Stain uses the context of the making of a Hollywood movie about the past to examine both what happened then and its present day repercussions.  Johnston does an excellent job of keeping both the past and present in frame, using the tale to illustrate how the past is variously remembered, used and contested, and how its legacy continues to rumble on.  As such, the historical and political context and sense of place are particular strengths of the story, as is the characterisation.  There is a fairly large cast, but each actor is well penned and vivid, and Mavros is an engaging lead character as the wily detective.  The storyline itself is compelling, however, the plot strays towards being overly complex, with a large number of subplots, and it depends on an awful lot of coincidences to work.  Moreover, Mavros too often succeeds where the odds are stacked against him, which pushed the narrative towards Indiana Jones territory a little too often.  Whilst these plot devices create a lot of action and twists and turns, they also undermine the credibility of the story, particularly in the latter third.  Less, I feel, might have been more.  Nevertheless, The Silver Stain is an entertaining and enjoyable tale that rattles along at a fair clip.

Dictionary proofs arrived

I took receipts of the proofs for the Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography this morning.  2,104 entries across 585 pages (315,000 words) which have to be diligently read by February 1st.  Along with first semester exams and teaching a full module over the third week in January they should keep me busy.  It might be a quiet month of book reviewing, though I have two lined up for later this week.

Lazy Sunday Service

So the first week of the new year has already zipped by.  Although I've spent it in rain soaked Ireland, virtually I had a few pleasant days in Crete courtesy of Paul Johnston's The Silver Stain, the review of which I'll post sometime next week.  A week of reading in the winter sun would be nice right now.  Instead, I'll be spending the coming week reading and marking exam scripts under grey skies.  Oh well.

My posts this week
Review of Dig Two Graves by Eric Beetner
The year that was ... 2012 retrospective
December reviews
Best reads 2012
Around the world in 2012
Review of I Hear Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty
New to me authors in 2012
Do we need to start building houses again?
2012 reading and reviews
Spinetingler best reads 2012
One drop three drip

One Drop Three Drip

One    Two    Three    Drip

One    Two    Three    Drip

One    Drop   Three    Drip

Four four time.  Perfect.  Sometimes it plays in a weird rhythm.  Five eights or ninths.  Like strange Asian music. 

Sitting on the damp concrete, my back against the mildewed wall, I tap out a beat on my knees, my foot tapping an imaginary bass drum.

Occasionally there’s a misbeat ...

One    Two    Drip  Drip    Four 

.. and I add a jazz flourish.

You never can quite trust the slow leak.

It used to drive me half demented.  Now it’s the soundtrack to my life.

One    Two    Three    Drip



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Spinetingler best reads 2012

The editors over at Spintingler Magazine have put up their best of 2012 reads.  I'm delighted that my short story, Nearly Extinct, which was published at All Due Respect in September, made one of the lists.  A warning before you visit their list - it may do some damage to your wallet - it did mine, with a number of the titles selected now in my virtual shopping basket. 

2012 reading and reviews

My resolution last year was to read less books and write more.  In the end, I read more and probably wrote more as well.  Here's my reading pattern for the last three years, with page counts courtesy of Goodreads.

Number of books

Number of pages

 

 

All 109 of my 2012 reviews can be found on the book review tab above.  The geographic spread of countries visited is here.

Beyond the books reviewed on this blog, I also read more news media, social media, and academic articles in 2012.  

The plan this year is to, yet again, look to reduce the number of books read (probably to about 80) and do more writing.  As to whether that happens or not, we'll see.  I've already read two books this year.

New to me authors in 2012

Of the 109 books I read in 2012, 78 of them were by 77 authors that were new to me.  Some of these authors are well established and I'm a little embarrassed I've not tried them before now (e.g., Val McDermid, Agatha Christie - though I've watched dozens of TV adaptations of their books).  Some were debut authors.  Of this list, I'd be more than happy to read another book by all of them and that is precisely my plan this year - to try and catch-up with back catalogues and new offerings of authors I've read before, as well as discover some new authors.  I already have books by half a dozen or so of the below list on my to-be-read pile.  

Tollesbury Times Forever by Stuart Aylis ***.5 Dig Two Graves by Eric Beetner ****.5 The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal ***.5 HHhH by Laurent Binet *** Restless by William Boyd **** A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady ***.5 Snapshots by Paul Brazill ****.5 The Point by Gerard Brennan ***** Hill Country by R. Thomas Brown **** Manchester 6 by Col Bury ***.5 Storm Front by Jim Butcher ***** A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton **** Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie ***.5 The Science of Paul by Aaron Philip Clark **** Ghost Town by Michael Clifford ****.5 Resistance by Matthew Cobb ***** The Eighty Five Billion Euro Man by Donal Conaty *** No Sale by Patrick Conrad **** The Rocksburg Railroad Murders by K.C. Constantine ****.5 The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin **** The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming ***.5 Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing ***.5 Only a Game? by Eamon Dunphy **** When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson **** Money Shot by Christa Faust **** Cadaver Blues by J.E. Fishman ***.5 A Long Silence by Nicolas Freeling ** The Great Crash 1929 by JK Galbraith *** The Imitation of Patsy Burke by John J Gaynard **** A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill ***.5 The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies *** A Death in Tuscany by Michele Giuttari *** The Information by James Gleick *** The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman *** Brenner and God by Wolf Haas **.5 The Dead Detective by William Heffernan *** Dead Harvest by Chris F Holm **** In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B Hughes **** The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg ****.5 The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson **** Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon ****** A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller **.5 Death in the City of Light by David King *** Crime at Christmas by C.H.B. Kitchin *** We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay ***** The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay ****.5 Where the Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska ***.5 Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis **** The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey *** Death on the Marias by Adrian Magson ***.5 Blood Tears by Michael J Malone ***** The Black House by Peter May *** Head Games by Craig McDonald ***  White Heat by M.J. McGrath ***** Even Flow by Darragh McManus**** The Vanishing Point by Val McDermid **.5 Devil's Peak by Deon Meyer ****.5 Kiss Me Quick by Danny Miller *** A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore ***** Ghost Money by Andrew Nette ***.5 Old School by Dan O'Shea **** Lumen by Ben Pastor ***.5 Red Ribbons by Louise Phillips ***.5 The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollack **** Dust Devils by James Reasoner *** Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson **** The City of Shadows by Michael Russell ***** The Last Sunrise by Robert Ryan *** The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman ****.5 Homicide by David Simon ***** Choke on Your Lies by Anthony Neil Smith **** Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith *** Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella ***** A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis **** Or The Bull Kills You by Jason Webster *** Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig ***.5 The Envoy by Edward Wilson ***** The Last Policeman by Ben Winters ****

Review of I Hear Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail, 2013)

It’s April 1982 in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland.  The hunger strikes only formally ended a few months previously, the assembly lines of DeLorean Motor Company are operating in North Belfast, and Argentina has just invaded the Falklands.  Detective Inspector Sean Duffy and his sergeant discover a headless, cut up body in a suitcase, dumped at an abandoned factory.  The age of the victim and a distinctive tattoo suggest he was an American veteran of the Second World War.  They’ve few other clues to go on and the US authorities and special branch aren’t being helpful.  Regardless, Duffy and his colleagues push on with the case making a little headway before hitting a brick wall.  Just as it’s about to become a cold case they’re given a cryptic clue.  Despite warnings not to proceed, Duffy pushes on determined to solve the murder regardless of the consequences.

I Hear Sirens in the Street is the second book in the Sean Duffy trilogy.  The first, The Cold, Cold Ground was one of my best reads of 2012.  This book has many of the same qualities - good historical contextualisation and intertextuality, politically and socially; well-penned, credible characters; a good balance between on and off-duty storylines; and strong sense of place.  In particular, the interaction between characters is very good and some of the dialogue sparkles, the prose is often wonderful, and Duffy is a compelling lead character - complex and flawed yet likeable.  Where the story is a little weak at times is with respect to pace and plot.  For the most part the story flies along, but in the middle section the pace slackens and the narrative felt a little slow and padded.  With respect to plot, there were a few elements of questionable credibility or acted as obvious plot devices.  They served the story and made for a dramatic climax to the book but nevertheless jarred a little.  Overall, I Hear Sirens in the Street is a compelling and entertaining read and I’m very much looking forward to reading the final instalment in the trilogy.

Around the world in 2012

I managed to travel virtually to 30 countries during 2012 via the books I read.  Here's the breakdown and the full list of titles below.

29:  United States
15:  England
9:  Ireland
5:   Scotland
3:   Germany, France
2:   Iceland, South Africa, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy
1:   Belguim, Sweden, Cambodia, Eygpt, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Laos, Russia, Denmark, Turkey, Australia, Poland, Canada
5:  Multiple countries (including Ireland, England, Austria, Hungary, Poland, France, Germany, Australia, China, India, Burma, Singapore)
3:  Short story collections
11: non-fiction

United States

Edge of Dark Water by Joe R Lansdale *****

Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella *****

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore *****

Storm Front by Jim Butcher *****

The Rocksburg Railroad Murders by K.C. Constantine ****.5

Dig Two Graves by Eric Beetner ****.5

The Pistol Poets by Victor Gischler ****.5

Cypress Grove by James Sallis ****

Money Shot by Christa Faust ****

Even Flow by Darragh McManus****

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollack ****

The Last Policeman by Ben Winters ****

The Science of Paul by Aaron Philip Clark ****

The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson ****

Dead Harvest by Chris F Holm ****

Hill Country by R. Thomas Brown ****

Choke on Your Lies by Anthony Neil Smith ****

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B Hughes ****

Cadaver Blues by J.E. Fishman ***.5

Nobody's Perfect by Donald Westlake ***.5

Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig ***.5

Shaman Pass by Stan Jones ***.5

The Black Box by Michael Connelly ***

Dust Devils by James Reasoner ***

The Shark Infested Custard by Charles Willeford ***

Star Island by Carl Hiassen ***

Head Games by Craig McDonald ***

The Dead Detective by William Heffernan ***

A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller **.5

England

We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay *****

The Envoy by Edward Wilson *****

Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill ****.5

A Lily of the Field by John Lawton ****.5

Restless by William Boyd ****

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin ****

Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter ****

Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis ****

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie ***.5

Where the Devil Can't Go by Anya Lipska ***.5

Tollesbury Times Forever by Stuart Aylis ***.5

Crime at Christmas by C.H.B. Kitchin ***

The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey ***

Kiss Me Quick by Danny Miller ***

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths ***

Ireland

The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway *****

The Point by Gerard Brennan *****

The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty *****

Ghost Town by Michael Clifford ****.5

Red Ribbons by Louise Phillips ***.5

Slaughter's Hound by Declan Burke ***.5

A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady ***.5

Black Sheep by Arlene Hunt ***.5

The Eighty Five Billion Euro Man by Donal Conaty ***

Scotland

Blood Tears by Michael J Malone *****

Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin ****.5

The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay ****.5

White Nights by Ann Cleeves ****

The Black House by Peter May ***

Germany

The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman ****.5

Silesian Station by David Downing ****.5

The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman ***

France

Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson ****

The Imitation of Patsy Burke by John J Gaynard ****

Death on the Marias by Adrian Magson ***.5

Iceland

The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrimur Helgason ***.5

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason ***

South Africa

Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith *****

Devil's Peak by Deon Meyer ****.5

Austria

A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis ****

Brenner and God by Wolf Haas **.5

Czech Republic

Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr ***.5

HHhH by Laurent Binet ***

Italy

Day After Day by Carlo Lucarelli ***.5

A Death in Tuscany by Michele Giuttari ***

Belguim

No Sale by Patrick Conrad ****

Sweden

The Man on the Balcony by Majs Sowall and Pers Wahloo ****

Cambodia

Ghost Money by Andrew Nette ***.5

Eygpt

The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal ***.5

Brazil

Buried Strangers by Leighton Gage ***

Spain

Or The Bull Kills You by Jason Webster ***

Netherlands

A Long Silence by Nicolas Freeling **

Thailand

Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill **

Russia

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith ***

Denmark

Disgrace by Jussi Adler-Olsen ***

Turkey

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon ******

Australia

A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill ***.5

Poland

Lumen by Ben Pastor ***.5

Canada

White Heat by M.J. McGrath *****

More than one country

The City of Shadows by Michael Russell *****

A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton ****

Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst ****

The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming ***.5

The Last Sunrise by Robert Ryan ***

Incompetence by Rob Grant ***

The Vanishing Point by Val McDermid **.5

Collected short stories

Snapshots by Paul Brazill ****.5

Old School by Dan O'Shea ****

Manchester 6 by Col Bury ***.5

Non-fiction

Homicide by David Simon *****

Resistance by Matthew Cobb *****

The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg ****.5

Only a Game? by Eamon Dunphy ****

When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson ****

Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing ***.5

The Great Crash 1929 by JK Galbraith ***

The Information by James Gleick ***

The Untouchables by Shane Ross and Nick Ross ***

The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies ***

Death in the City of Light by David King ***