Review of Peepshow by Leigh Redhead (Allen and Unwin, 2004)

Simone Kirsch always wanted to join the police force.  The police, however, do not want her given her time working in peepshows and as a stripper.  Undaunted she’s taken an evening class as a private investigator and gained her license.  With her first case she’s dropped in at the deep end, investigating the murder of Frank Parisi, the notorious owner of The Red Room, one of Melbourne’s premier strip clubs.  To provide added motivation, Frank’s older brother has kidnapped her friend Chloe, demanding a result within two weeks or he’ll end her life.  Looking for fast answers Simone heads undercover in The Red Room trying to find clues while baring all.  She’s soon on the trail of a corrupt policeman, is being pursued by another, has fallen in lust with a rockabilly guitarist, and trails round Melbourne’s sex industry, usually with a hangover.  With the clock ticking down, Simone seems out of her depth, but she’s determined to try and shed her water wings and to find the killer and save her friend.

In the late 90s/early 00s I read a whole bunch of tart noir tales involving sassy, smart female PIs who usually got themselves involved in dangerous, madcap adventures with a side-line in romantic/lustful romps.  Peepshow fits neatly into the sub-genre, but with sex/sexy dial turned up to eleven.  Leigh Redhead provides a vivid glimpse in the peepshow and stripping side of the sex industry, and leaves little to the imagination with respect to the sex life of her lead character, Simone Kirsch, a stripper turned private investigator.  Simone’s task is to find the killer of a strip club owner under threat that her friend, Chloe, will die if she fails.  Given that the police have failed to turn up any clues it’s a tall order.  Thrown into the mix is a colourful set of strippers, a corrupt cop, a rockabilly band, two suitors – a guitarist and an undercover cop – and a lot of champagne and drugs.  The result is quickly paced romp laced with plenty of humour.  There’re not too many surprises in the telling, but the story is good explicit fun and sets up the series well.  Simone Kirsch is certainly breaks the usual PI mould and I’m looking forward to her next case.

Review of Easy Streets by Bill James (2004, Countryman Press)

For years there’s been an understanding between Desmond Iles, a cop with a short temper and ambition, and Mansel Shale and Ralph Ember, two underworld bosses who run a substantial part of the city’s drug trade -- the police will turn a blind eye as long as they conduct their business in an orderly fashion.  However, a relaxation of the government’s attitude to drugs, plus a plentiful cheap supply, has meant the marketplace being flooded.  As profits plummet, various factions set about restructuring who the main players are, seeking alliances and bumping off rivals.  After a small time criminal’s house is firebombed, killing him and his young daughter, Iles and Harpur seek to restore order in their own unconventional way.

Easy Streets is the twenty first tale in the Harpur and Iles series.  It’s the first one I’ve read and I’m not sure it was the ideal introduction.  The start felt like joining an on-going conversation and it took a little time to work my way into the story.  In fact, the whole tale felt like an episode of a long running television show; more a snapshot into a much longer narrative than a fully-formed, self-contained story.  The tale is told from a handful of perspectives: that of the shady, seedy cops, Iles and Harpur, and the upwardly mobile criminals, Mansel Shale and Panicky Ralph Ember.  Where it excels is with respect to the dialogue in which characters can often be talking past one another as they ignore what the other has to say, and it is often darkly comic.  Overall, however, whilst interesting, it lacked a strong hook that would shift it from crime soap opera to something more substantial.

Review of The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin (Phoenix, 2004)

Moscow, May 1876.  A young man enters Alexander Gardens, propositions a rich young woman, then when rejected puts a pistol to his head and pulls the trigger.  The case is initially ruled as a tragic suicide, but novice detective, Erast Fandorin, is not convinced.  Suspicious of the circumstances of the death and the conditions of the will he starts to investigate.  He is soon drawn into the orbit of a beautiful woman with a harem of gentleman admirers and is witness to a murder.  Having persuaded his boss to allow him to follow the trail, Fandorin heads from Moscow to London, slowly becoming aware that he has stumbled on a worldwide conspiracy, placing his life in mortal danger.

The Winter Queen is a historical conspiracy tale, following the exploits of a dashing young detective, Erast Fandorin, as he seeks to foil a dangerous plot in late nineteenth century Moscow.  It’s billed on the cover as ‘Sherlock Holmes meets James Bond’, the tale is knowingly a little fanciful, focusing on the dastardly plans of a shadowy organisation.  Whilst it’s got many of the essential ingredients for such a story, the only real mystery is how the detective could not fathom the conspiracy when it is in plain sight to the reader.  Moreover, the conspiracy requires a little too much suspension of disbelief at times.  Fandorin is portrayed as a hero with much promise as a detective, and whilst he does manage to solve the case by following his intuition, he is also naive and makes some very poor decisions along the way, relying on the intervention of others and luck.  The result is that after a decent start the story is largely held together by its swashbuckling endeavours, its portrayal of upper class Moscow and its hierarchical societal structures, and pace.

Review of The Secrets of Rue St Roch by Janet Morgan (Penguin, 2004)

In 1995 Robert Bruce and his wife Janet Morgan opened a chest belonging to Robert’s father.  In it they discovered all the files belonging to a First World War spy ring run by Major George Bruce from a house on the Rue St Roch in Paris.  Rather than following protocol and filing or destroying the papers, Bruce had decided to maintain a personal archive of all the letters and coded newspaper stories concerning a successful train-spotting cell in Luxembourg.  The volume and scope of the material, along with subsequent interviews with the ring’s descendents, enabled Janet Morgan to construct a fascinating account of how the ring was created, how it operated, the personalities involved and their trials and tribulations, the politics of intra- and inter-service rivalries, and what the ring communicated to British intelligence. 

The lynch-pin to the operation was Madame Rischard, an upper-class house-wife to a Luxembourg doctor, who manages to travel from Luxembourg, through Germany and Switzerland to Paris to see her son, who is fighting for the French.  There she becomes stranded, having left Switzerland illegally, and is persuaded after many attempts by Major Bruce to become a secret agent and to set up a spy ring in her native country.  The aim of the ring was to collect information on all of the German supply and troop trains crossing the country and their destination, thus giving an indication of where future attacks might occur.  Whilst Madame Rischard, after intensive training in codes and espionage, was to travel back to her country by train via Switzerland, her fellow spymaster was to be flown in via a balloon drifting over enemy lines.  Baschwitz Meau, a Belgian soldier, was captured by the Germans, but escaped five times from prisoner of war camps before finally make it back to Allied territory.  An adventurer by nature, he volunteers to be infiltrated into Luxembourg to aid Madame Rischard in setting up the ring and collecting information.  There they are aided by Madame Rischard’s husband who tends to railway workers, a local teacher who writes newspaper stories that include a secret code, a local newspaper who publishes the stories, and a handful of railway workers.  The newspaper is sent to a priest in Switzerland, who then passed it on to British intelligence.  For the last nine months of the war the ring supplied detailed information that helped the allies determine the German’s battle plans.  After the war they were all decorated by British and French authorities.

The book is nicely written and constructed, and is full of detail about the whole operation -- perhaps too much detail in places, slowing the narrative a little.  Moreover, the personalities involved and their complex interplay are brought to life. Overall, an insightful and interesting read.

Review of The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004)

Baseball has often been considered the most individual of team sports, and because of its tightly formulated format and rules can be easily captured by summary statistics.  From the very start of the game in the mid-nineteenth century fans and the media have charted player and team performances through various batting, pitching and fielding measures.  Since the 1970s some of these statistics have influenced management decisions on trades, contract negotiations, and on-field plays, with their authority growing in the last two decades to the extent that every professional baseball team now employs a stats unit and uses a plethora of computer packages to help augment all kinds of decisions in the club and dugout.  Alan Schwarz’s The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics charts the evolution of measuring games through box scores, basic summary statistics, more complex measures and algorithms, companies that compile and sell stats, the development of dice and card games utilising baseball stats, statistic societies and initiatives, books and chewing gum cards, the media’s use of stats to help fans follow games via newspapers, radio and TV, and their seepage into decisions by coaches and general managers.  The book has both historical depth and width of coverage and provides an engaging account by focusing on key personalities and the innovations they added to baseball’s statistical landscape.  For the most part the structure works well, but starts to struggle in its account of developments from the early 1970s up to the present.  In part, this is because there are a number of parallel developments that fracture the timeline.  The final chapter on academic attempts to make sense of baseball statistics is perhaps the weakest chapter, and the book suffers at its end because there is no concluding chapter that summarises the main thread of the argument or postulates as to what developments might or should emerge in the future.  Overall, however, an interesting read.