Review of The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich (Atria, 2017)

George Meuller has left the CIA and is teaching in a university and writing spy novels when the director calls him in to ask a favour – head to Cuba to look into the activities of Toby Graham, an operative suspected of colluding with Castro’s forces fighting the Batista regime. The FBI are convinced Graham is supplying the rebels with guns and information. Meuller and Graham were college friends and it’s felt that might provide cover for the covert investigation. Reluctantly Meuller agrees, heading to Havana under the pretence of working as a writer for Holiday magazine. He arrives to find a jittery country on the brink of revolution. He falls in with an old acquaintance, Jack Malone, and his wife, Liz, begins an affair with his photographer, and starts to rub against the local FBI agent and the Cuban intelligence services. Graham remains elusive, even when the two finally do meet and Meuller finds himself developing divided loyalties.

Set in Cuba in 1958, The Good Assassin tells the story of George Meuller, a former CIA agent, tasked with assessing whether his friend, Toby Graham, has been supplying Castro’s rebels with arms. Meuller is very much the reluctant, ambivalent spy, slouching round Havana and the Cuban countryside, first trying to make contact with Graham, then trying to assess whether he’s pursuing his own agenda, all the while mildly antagonising the local FBI agent and the Cuban intelligence services. Vidich nicely captures Meuller’s persona and frustration and the unsettled situation of the last few months of the Batista regime. The plot seems to meander along without really changing pace or rising in tension. Occasionally there are dramatic moments, but they too are told in a laconic way, almost as if they are incidental, and their consequences are little explored.  The result is a story that seems quite flat and overly understated. As a consequence I was never quite captivated by the tale, despite some nice prose and occasional choice observations.

Review of The Whitehall Mandarin by Edward Wilson (Arcadia, 2014)

William Catesby has risen from working class Suffolk lad via Cambridge and SOE to a SIS player.  Jeffers Cauldwell is a rich American from the deep south, cultural attache in London, and a communist spy.  Cauldwell and his network of agents are Catesby’s target. Cauldwell is soon caught, but his network remain at large.  When a Russian spy offers his services to British intelligence he reveals that the KGB’s network in Britain has apparently been taken over, most probably by communists who have swapped allegiance to the Chinese.  Moreover, SIS suspect that there’s a spy somewhere near the very top of Whitehall, quite possibly Lady Penelope Somers.  Catesby travels to Moscow and then Vietnam seeking answers, knowing that he is putting his own life in danger.

The Whitehall Mandarin is the fourth in Edward Wilson’s spy novels set in the 1950s/60s.  The premise is an intriguing one – how did the Chinese manage to catch up in the nuclear arms race so quickly?  Wilson’s answer weaves an expansive plot that criss-crosses the UK, United States, Cuba, Russia and Vietnam - touching on events such as the Bay of Pigs, the Profumo affair and British upper class sex scandals, the start of the Vietnam war - with William Catesby seeking to solve the puzzle and plug the leaking of UK secrets.  It’s an ambitious plot and while the book is very readable, the story is somewhat uneven in pace and concentration with some scenes/escapades short and punchy and others drawn out, and the credibility of the plot is stretched to breaking point a few times, not least in the denouement.  The result is an entertaining spy tale, but one that veers towards Frederick Forsyth when it might have better to have stuck more with the John Le Carre undertones.  Nonetheless, I’m looking to the next in the loose series, A Very British Ending.

Review of To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway (Schribner, 1937)

Harry Morgan is a rough and ready sailor and tough guy working as a fishing guide out of Key West and occasionally smuggling any kind of contraband that can’t talk from Cuba into prohibition era US.  Married with three young girls his prime aim to bring home an income to pay the bills.  But after a charter hire runs out on him in Cuba without paying he decides to take up an offer to smuggle a dozen men to the US, playing by his own rules.  A few months later he is still doing runs to Cuba, but is finding it increasingly difficult to outwit the law or those he’s doing business with, but he’s not going to throw in the towel without a fight.

To Have and Have Not is written like a hardboiled noir, played out on Harry Morgan’s boat and the bars and harbours of Key West and Havana.  Hemingway’s prose is deceptively simple, using short declarative sentences to create a tense atmosphere.  Morgan is a hard, suspicious man, somewhat of a bully, misogynist and racist, who has little pity for others or himself, yet other men and women seem drawn to his roughed, abrasive demeanour.  He’s willing to take a risk and to play hard.  Throughout the story his position gets increasingly worse as he raises the risks that he’s prepared to take in order to try and get his life back on an even keel.  Some of the passages create a wonderful scene, such as the charter hire trying to catch a marlin, but the story is uneven and veers off on an extended, unrelated tangent about two thirds of the way that added little to the story and felt oddly out of place.  The tale would have worked much more effectively if it had just stuck to Harry Morgan’s misadventures.

Review of Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura, translated by Peter Bush (Bitter Lemon Press, 2009 [2005])

Mario Conde has long left the police force to make a living trading in antique books, but his detective instincts remain keen. In a decaying mansion occupied by a starving brother, sister and their elderly mother he discovers a magnificent library full of rare and valuable books. His intuition tells him that something is not quite right – why has the collection remained intact for so long when the family have no obvious means of support – but his own perilous financial position compels him to trade with them. Hidden between the pages of one book he finds a news cutting about Violeta del Rio, a sultry bolero singer of the 1950s with a voice and body that men instantly fell in love with, but who mysteriously disappeared just as she started to become famous. His interest piqued, Conde starts to investigate her disappearance, slowly finding himself infatuated with the singer. As he feared, by disturbing the library he has rekindled forces long dormant, and it’s not long before he is accused of murder.

Havana Fever is a slow burner of a novel, rolling along a gentle pace though tension is never far from the surface. Padura writes with colourful and expressive prose, providing sumptuous descriptions of food, music, and literature, as well as long reflective passages on Conde’s life and thoughts. Though he is clearly a skilled wordsmith and storyteller, and I know Havana Fever will appeal to those that love well crafted prose and thick description, my taste is for more action and dialogue and less description and reflection. For large parts of the novel, especially the first half, not very much happens, although the reader gains an insight into Cuban music, literature, a sample of its economy and politics, and the world and friends of Mario Conde. It is not often I read novels in parallel, but I read two novels and one history book whilst also reading this story. In short, Havana Fever is beautifully written and has an interesting plot, but it moved to slowly for this reader.

Other reviews can be found at: International Noir, Independent Crime

Review of If The Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (Quercus, 2009)

It’s only eighteen months since the end of the Weimar Republic and unable to stomach working for the Nazi regime homicide detective Bernie Gunther has quit the police force and taken a job as the house detective at the world famous Adlon Hotel, just a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate. There are rumours of impending race laws, but the Jewish population are already suffering daily humiliation and discrimination, including being expelled from all German sporting organisations. Such anti-Semitism looks like it might draw international condemnation and pressure with the Americans in particular threatening to boycott to the 1936 Olympics, but inexplicably the American delegate visiting Berlin reports to Roosevelt that stories concerning anti-Jewish actions are overly hyped. Two American guests at the Adlon have a vested interest in the decision – the beautiful Noreen Charalambides, a Jewish journalist and aspiring novelist who wishes to expose the truth, and Max Reles, a Chicago gangster, friendly with several high-ranking Nazis, who wants to repeat the mob’s success at the Los Angeles Olympics at rigging the construction contracts. Gunther has problems of his own – he’s managed to accidentally kill a cop and he needs his Jewish grandmother to be airbrushed from history – but he’s also soon unwittingly caught between the two Americans and has two murders to solve – that of a German businessman and a Jewish boxer. The only problem is, very few people want them solved. Twenty years later, having managed to survive the war, Gunther is hiding out in Cuba on an Argentine passport when the ghosts of the case reappear, only the Chicago mob have swapped deals with the Nazis for Batista’s regime.

Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series has a lot of things going for it. First, Kerr’s narrative is colourful and engaging, and he tells a well plotted story. Second, he expertly blends fiction with real people, places and historical events. Third, the books are politically astute and targeted, whilst at the same time being multi-layered, complex and ambiguous. Kerr is vehemently anti-Nazi, but he recognises that post Weimer Republic Germany was a cauldron of competing ideologies and that personal relationships often over-rode ideological differences. So, for example, former colleagues who have become pro-Nazi are prepared to help Gunther out as a personal favour, and vice versa, even though they know his political views. Fourth, in Bernie Gunther he has created one of the finest characters in crime fiction. Gunther is no black and white character with little depth. Rather he’s a resonant, luminous, multi-coloured, complex, compromised and flawed individual. While his heart is roughly in the right place, Gunther is morally suspect on many levels with his personal desires, head strong nature and smart mouth clouding his decision making, often placing him in situations where lying, cheating, stealing, killing, etc. is a necessary solution.

If The Dead Rise Not is a solid addition to the series, but in my view is not quite as good as some of the others in the series (which given the very high standard of the previous books is always going to be a tough challenge). The dialogue was, as ever, sharp and often caustic and very funny. The characterisation was excellent. The story was interesting. My issue was with pacing and coincidence. For me the 1934 period of the book, which was effectively the back story for 1954 period, was too long and drawn out and the 1954 period too short and underdeveloped. My sense was that the balance needed to be shifted to at least a fifty-fifty split in length, with the Cuba part of the plot extended and deepened to cover more of the politics of the time and the mob connections, and provide more details of Gunther’s life post-Argentina (following on from the last book – A Quiet Flame). The ending was also too swift. In addition, the plot hinges on a coincidence in which three characters who have not seen each other in twenty years meet in the one location (on a different continent) in the space of a few hours. I had a hard time buying that. Despite these two issues, the book was still a highly enjoyable read and I look forward to the next instalment in the series.

Review of Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty, Serpent’s Tail (2009)

The Irish crime blogs, Crime Always Pays and Crime Scene NI, have been heaping plaudits on Adrian McKinty for a number of weeks coinciding with the publication of Fifty Grand. Often when I read a book that’s given such strong endorsements I’m left a little disappointed because as good as the book is, it doesn’t quite live up to the expectation. I approached Fifty Grand then with a little bit of caution, especially after the highly negative review in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago. I needn’t have worried - Fifty Grand is good as the hype and then some.

The frozen lake and the black vacuum sky and the dead man pleading for the return of his remaining days.
“There must be some kind of mistake.”
No.
“You’ve got the wrong guy.”
No.
“You’re gonna pay for this.”
Viejo Companero, I’ve paid in advance. And before he can come up with anymore material I unroll a line of duct tape, cut it, and place it over his mouth.

Mercado is a Cuban detective, her brother Ricky works as a journalist for the Cuba Times. Despite their father being branded a traitor, abandoning them as children to escape to the US to start a new life, they have managed to carve out careers for themselves. Then they get news that their father has been killed in a hit and run accident in the ski resort of Fairview, Colorado, an Aspen wannabe, where Hollywood film stars and producers are setting up home in luxury ski lodges. Nobody is brought to justice for the death of the local ratcatcher. To track down her father’s killer and avenge his death Mercado is determined to head to the US regardless of the consequences for her family and colleagues if she fails to return. Faking a trip to Mexico to attend an interview for a university course, she skips over the border and makes her way to Fairview, where the service labour are illegal immigrants under the direction of Esteban, a US-born Mexican, and the local Sheriff runs the town as his own personal fiefdom determined to cash in on the town’s growing popularity. Working as a maid to the rich and famous and posing as an insurance agent Mercado has only a few days to determine who the killer is, take her revenge, and make it back to Mexico before her travel permit expires. But nothing is as simple as it first appears.

McKinty’s narrative is taut, lyrical and well crafted. Fifty Grand is all muscle and no flab. The characterization is superb, the dialogue snappy and real, the story compelling, and the prose often reads like poetry. Mercado is a well drawn character, flawed, determined, conflicted; at sea in a consumerist society of which she has no experience, using her cop instincts to get by. McKinty does an excellent job of exposing modern Cuba and the politics and corruption of small town America and Hollywood celebrity without it ever becoming a sermon. There were a few plot conveniences and coincidences, but then there nearly always are and nothing stuck out as being so improbable that it ruined the story. I was hooked from the first page, gripped by Mercado’s journey and the various twists and turns.

Did I enjoy this book – hell, yes. Criticisms – minor stuff. Do I want to read his other books – right now! (they're already on order)