The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I enjoyed this week:

We Go Postal: What Gets Our Goat - It's a Crime
Walk the Dark Streets - William Krasner - Big Beat From Badsville
Biggles tale saved me - BBC
Killed at the whim of a hat - International Crime Writers Reality Check
M.S. Power and The Stalker's Apprentice - International Noir
On crime & thrillers: Hemingway on crime - When Falls the Coliseum
Die a Little: Megan Abbott - Crime Scraps
The Darkest Room - Johan Theorin - It's a Crime
Dark Mirror, Barry Maitland - Mysteries in Paradise
An Interview - Captain Joseph Barbelo - Crime Scene NI
Have you read Ngaio Marsh? - Crime Watch

Hello From Earth
Send a message to Gliese 581d, a planet outside our Solar System which may support life, courtesy of the Australian Government. They're collecting statements up to 140 characters long to send on Aug 24th. They clearly think there's something in this as they're moderating the messages to make sure they're appropriate!

My posts:
Review of Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Unhealthy waters - walter, health and place
Review of Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken
Landscapes of Crime - map of European locations of English language mystery novels 1750-1900
Review of Winter Frost by R.D. Wingfield
Saturday Snippet - short section from Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth


Yesterday I made a bench so that when the sun does eventually shine we can sit outside and look at the view from the blue house. It sits over an old tractor axel that we found buried under brambles in the garden. It's a good job I made it yesterday as its drizzling again today and its barely possible to see the other side of the valley, let alone the hills beyond.

Saturday Snipper: Unbearable Lightness ...

I spent an hour on Wednesday evening trying to find some quotes to use in a piece I was drafting on sense of place and crime fiction for Dorte's DJ Krimiblog (posted today). Below is a passage that I didn't use, but liked a lot. It's from The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce that I reviewed a couple of week ago.

We pulled out of Borth and continued gliding silently, hardly picking up speed, towards Ynyslas and Dovey Junction. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon above the flat watery world and threw a horizontal beam that made us squint and duck the dust particles that appeared from nowhere like swarms of gnats. The light had the colour of lemonade - not the stuff from the sweetshop, but the homemade drink, chilled and left on the sideboard in a glass pitcher and craved by children in the Famous Five books with the desperation of cocaine addicts. It filled the carriage with warm pale honey and gilded the golf course and beach and sea, and turned the marram grass on the dunes to golden stubble along the chin of the sky.

I don't know about you, but I'm on that train, dodging dust, squinting out at the estuary landscape and the sea beyond. Great stuff.

Review of Winter Frost by R.D. Wingfield, Corgi (1999)

Winter Frost is the fourth Frost I’ve read this year having discovered the series back in March browsing in Murder Ink in Dublin. I was very familiar with the television series – A Touch of Frost – and was worried the books would be quite dour, slow and formulaic. The Frost books are, however, quite different to the television version being much more humorous, often politically incorrect, and rattling along at a fast pace, interweaving several plot lines as Frost juggles multiple cases.

Frost himself is a conniving, coarse, sarcastic, insolent, ribald, scruffy and persistent cop. He’s disdainful of anyone in authority; shirks paperwork and any job that doesn’t take his fancy; is happy to cut corners, take liberties with evidence, to bluff and lie to get results, and commandeer resources and ask for permission afterwards; and is always making miscalculations and errors, often with dire consequences, although he’s always prepared to take the blame for them and the mistakes of others. In other words, he’s a lovable rogue who ultimately cares about his colleagues and victims and wants justice performed. That justice is eventually realised is often the result of inspired stumbling and luck than carefully managed police work. He also tells awful jokes and uses distasteful humour to deal with the stresses of the job (which is often very funny and I’ve laughed out loud a fair few times with each book).

Wells couldn’t bite at the bait quickly enough. ‘Superior? She’s the same rank as me … a sergeant. She’s done half the time I have, only been here five flaming minutes and she’s made up to a temporary inspector. What has she got that I haven’t?’
‘Big tits,’ said Frost.
Wells jabbed a finger. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there, Jack. It’s sex discrimination in reverse.’
‘I’ve never tried it in reverse,’ said Frost, ‘but where is she?’
‘With a prisoner … a cab driver. He picked this woman up and, instead of taking her home, took her down a side street and raped her.’
‘Bloody hell!’ tutted Frost. ‘I hope she didn’t leave him a tip.’

In Winter Frost the usual chaotic madness reigns in Denton police station – short staffed, under-funded, badly managed, with several high profile cases on the go. Superintendent Mullet has lent half the staff to the county headquarters for a drugs case, leaving those remaining including the bitter Sergeant Wells, ambitious Liz Maud, and incompetent ‘Taffy’ Morgan to cope. Someone is kidnapping, torturing and then killing prostitutes, two young girls have disappeared, an old skeleton has been found under a garage, there is a spate of burglaries across the town, the local supermarket has been held up at gunpoint, and a gang have ram raided a jewellers. To top it off, not long after Frost has arrested the prime suspect in the young girls disappearances, the seemingly innocent man tops himself thus starting an internal inquiry.

In the main, Winter Frost is a terrific read. Wingfield’s characterization is superb, with well drawn characters who come to life on the page. His dialogue ‘feels’ real and narrative is well written. The first hundred pages or so, in particular, are very well done, sucking you in to the story and providing several laughs. My main issue with the book, as with the other books in the series is that there are too many plotlines. Not that they are difficult to follow, but that there’s no way Frost would be trying to manage so many, especially given the seriousness of the cases. Two missing girls under the age of nine would have meant massive media coverage, an influx of national dailies, and huge pressure from senior police and politicians for a result. The same for a killing spree on prostitutes. The idea that both of these cases would be tackled by the same policeman, who is also looking after several others, and that a drugs case would have staffing priority is ridiculous. While having many plotlines makes for a lot of action it’s really not needed as the book would have worked just as well with just one or two. I don’t want to provide any spoilers, but as with one of the other books, I was also a little disappointed with the ending. That said, Winter Frost is a very entertaining read and I will be buying the last two I'm missing in the series in due course.

If only the television series could have stuck to the bawdy, politically incorrect cop of the books. One of crime fiction’s great characters has had most of the life sucked out of him by the small screen (despite the fine acting by David Jason). I picked up my copy in The Reading Room in Carrick on Shannon.

Landscapes of crime

George Demko, a geographer from Darmouth University in the US, argues that a literary sense of place is essential quality of good crime fiction and one of the key ingredients in the genre’s success. Crimes happen somewhere and detailing the landscape it occurs in and the complex social, political and economic milieu of that locale is often essential part of helping readers get a sense of what occured and why. This happens across scale from inside a room or a clearing in a wood to neighbourhoods and the city or region as a whole and many crime writers set their stories in a single arena so that over time their readers get to know the intricacies of a place. For example, Colin Dextor’s Inspector Morse novels give a vivid portrayal of Oxford; Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch patrols the mean streets of Los Angeles; Ian Rankin's Rebus stalks the underbelly of Edinburgh; Peter Temple's novels are set in and around Melbourne; and Brian McGilloway’s stories criss-cross the Donegal/Derry border. An Irish Times feature recently detailed many others.

The places which feature in crime novels are not however evenly spread. Demko has mapped the locations of crime novels, published in English, from 1750-1990. I'll only detail one of the maps here because I'll probably discuss some of the others at later dates. The map below is for Europe. London and Paris fair particularly well, both the setting for over 500 novels. Next are Berlin and Rome with between 76-150 stories. Then a small grouping of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Prague, Venice and Amsterdam with between 31-75 novels. Clearly French novels had relatively high translation rates into English, but also I suspect that Paris, Rome and Berlin were favoured locales of English authors who wanted to set their mystery abroad. The map also highlights the recent phenomenon of translated, Scandinavian crime fiction which seemed to be pretty much non-existent prior to 1990. In fact, it might be an interesting exercise to update the map, adding in the last 20 years of data or to time slice it to see what places were popular at different periods.


This post is an updated version of my first ever entry on NUIM Geography blog a few weeks ago.

Review of Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken, Irish Academic Press (2009)

Inspector John Mallon (1839-1915) was the first Catholic to reach the position of Assistant Commissioner in the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), having climbed the ranks through clever police work and political skill. During his life time, and for a considerable period afterwards, Mallon was the most famous policeman in Ireland, having successfully led the investigation into the 1882 Phoenix Park murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish (Chief Secretary of Ireland) and Thomas Burke (Under-Secretary), and crushed the so-called Invincibles, a secret band of republicans who carried out the attacks and who sought Irish independence from Britain. McCracken’s book sets out Mallon’s career and in particular his role in suppressing Irish revolutionaries in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The DMP was divided into six divisions (A-F) and the elite G Division, the detective branch. Mallon joined the DMP in 1858 and was transferred to G Division in 1862 at the age of 22. He served most of his career in G Division, much of it focused on combating politically motivated crime.

Given the very rudimentary nature of forensic science at the time, Mallon’s modus operandi was to try and prevent a crime occurring in the first place by breaking apart conspiracies through informers and intimidation (though not the use of agent provocateurs which he strongly opposed). In solving a crime he would use an extensive network of paid informers (who were often compromised by their own sheer poverty) and would play the protagonists off against each other so that they would inform on each other in an effort to try and save themselves. They were strategies that worked incredibly effectively much to the detriment of the republican cause and much to the liking of moderate nationalists who wanted to achieve home rule through non-violent means and unionists.

McCracken’s book is a fairly pedestrian piece of historical biography. While the book is fascinating in places, the writing is rather dry and it lacks the flair and story-telling of much contemporary popular history. Whilst the book is an academic text, it is undoubtedly meant to appeal to a wider, generalist audience, and I suspect some will struggle to stay engaged. Personally, I would have liked the book to be more widely situated and contextualised by the broader historical frame of Ireland in the late nineteenth century and in particular the nature and politics of policing. This would have helped to explain the wider situation in which Mallon was operating. Some of this context is there in places, particularly in relation to specific events, but not enough of it. At one point, McCracken berates Mallon’s biographer of 1910, Frederick Moir Bussy, for always returning to the case of the Invincibles and the Phoenix Park murders, something that McCracken repeatedly does himself, not unsurprisingly given it was his career highlight, the yardstick against which his subsequent endeavours were measured.

Overall an interesting enough read. I got roughly what I wanted, which was to see how the Dublin Metropolitan police operated and the strategies of detection they used. I picked up my copy in The Reading Room in Carrick on Shannon.

Unhealthy waters?

Back to reading academic stuff alongside the novels after a two week break. I spent yesterday afternoon reading a draft of the opening chapter of a book on water, health and place written by a colleague, Ronan Foley. The book focuses on the symbolic meanings and material interaction with the healing powers of water, and what in the literature is called therapeutic landscapes – places that lead to well-being – and in particular spas, bath-houses, springs, holy wells, and seaside resorts. Looks like its going to be a good one when its published next year.

Researching this kind of thing seems like a good gig to me as the prime way to find about spas is to spend time in them and he’s been tramping off all over world to experience spas in different places. I also have a colleague in the UK who researches alternative therapies which means she has to spend two weeks each year in a secluded Spanish villa doing yoga and getting massages and so on at the tax payer’s expense. Does she enjoy her research! Perhaps I need to change focus to exclusive, boutique hotels in exotic places, but I digress.

What this got me thinking about is crime novels set in places with supposed healing waters but which are decidedly unhealthy for the guests. I thought I’d give him a reading list so he can balance all this 'water is good for you' shtick. Any suggestions?

Talking of water, I picked up The Shape of Water by Andrea Camirelli last week so expect a post on that at some point soon.

Review of Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, translated by Bernard Scudder, Hodder (2008, in Icelandic 2005)

I’ve read a couple of good reviews of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s second novel, My Soul to Take, so I decided to pick up the first book in the series, Last Rituals. Scandinavian crime novels seem to be flavour of the month at the minute and Sigurdardottir joins her compatriot Arnauldur Indridason in setting her stories in Iceland.

The story follows a recently divorced lawyer, Thora Gudmundsdottir, hired by a wealthy German family to enquire into the death of their son, Harald, a history student who was in Iceland to study witchcraft in the seventeenth century. Harald, a fanatical student and follower of black magic, was found dead in the university, his eyes gouged out and his body decorated with strange symbols and modifications. Unhappy with the police investigation and convinced that the wrong man is in custody, Harald’s family have hired Thora to aid their German investigator, Matthew Reich, who has no knowledge of Iceland or Icelandic. Together they slowly start to piece together the last days of the young student and his secretive group of friends to uncover what really transpired, whilst finding time to tease and flirt with each other.

When Thora was leaving the table, he put his hand on her shoulder. ‘One final thing, Frau Gudmundsdottir.’
She turned around.
‘I forgot to tell you why I’m convinced that the man in police custody is not the murderer.’
‘Why?’
‘He did not have Harald’s eyes in his possession. They had been cut out.’

I have to admit that while I thought the story was essentially interesting, I found I never really warmed to Last Rituals. On the positive side, I thought that Thora was an engaging character, more upbeat and humorous than most Scandinavian characters, and the discussion about Icelandic witchcraft was fascinating. The general level of the story telling, however, I struggled with. The plot was relatively straightforward, and I had the killer pegged a long way from the end, and the characterisation was generally fairly basic. I found some of the writing quite clunky and long winded at times; some of the scenes seemed contrived to discuss particular things, rather than flowing as part of the narrative; and many of the conversations were stilted (if you read them aloud they just didn’t seem like natural conversations to my ear). I wasn’t sure if the latter was a function of translation and perhaps they worked fine in Icelandic. There were some nice touches throughout, but not enough of them, and I felt the subplot involving Thora’s two children was underplayed and disappeared altogether at times and merited much further elaboration. Overall a mildly enjoyable first novel, but nothing startling.

For other (more positive) reviews see:
Eurocrime click here and here
(Another) 52 Books
Crime Scraps
It's a Crime

(just about scrapes)

The Lazy Sunday Service

(The picture right is the Snake House Bus Stop, which should probably be moved onto the Route 62 in Glasgow - see the two posts from Big Beat From Badsville. I found it at Top 10 buildings shaped like animals!)


Posts I enjoyed this week:

Ten Little Herrings - L C Tyler - It's a Crime
Why the Mystery Genre Isn’t a Genre at All - Dial M for Murder
"Sorry hen, it's just ma wee snake" - Big Beat From Badsville
Here's a better idea (plus radio show) - Detectives Beyond Borders
Forgotten Books Friday (John Creasy - Gideon's Fire) - In Reference to Murder
I Came, I Saw, I Trampled - Big Beat From Badsville
Review: Black Seconds, Karen Fossum - Mysteries in Paradise
Bookshelf#1 - the wrap up - Kittling Books
Review of Johan Theorin, The Darkest Room - International Noir
An Unkindness of Ravens - DJ's krimiblog


My posts:

Review of Black Delta Night by Jessica Speart
Stealing honey - bees nests in the meadow
Review of The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
It happened right here! - interactive map of Boston crime
Review of Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty
Saturday Snippet - short section from Election Fever/Saving Siobhan


And for anyone interested in what became of the swallow chicks, here they are the day before they flew the nest

Saturday Snippet

This may or may not turn into a regular slot. If it does it'll feature a snippet of a draft of somthing I've written or whatever I'm presently reading (similar to Dorte's Bait in the Box). Anyway, this is a short scene from Election Fever/Saving Siobhan (the title has swapped back and forth a dozen times).

‘Hey, mister.’ The boy poked the socked foot. ‘Mister.’
Grant woke with a start. ‘What! What?’ He blinked his eyes and instinctively bought a hand up to rub them clear of sleep.
‘Mister. Who are you mister?’ the boy persisted.
‘What?’ Grant realised where he was. ‘Mary’s house. You must be her kids? Chloe and Jack, right?’ He was looking down the length of the duvet to where two small children were standing in their pyjamas.
‘Who are you?’ Jack asked.
‘Grant. My name’s Grant. I’m a friend of your mothers.’ He pushed himself up so he was sitting, leaning back against sofa's arm rest.
‘We want to watch television,’ Jack stated.
‘Oh, yeah, right – you work away,’ Grant gestured at the large flat screen in the corner of the room. ‘I’m getting up now in any case.’
‘You’re fat,’ Chloe said matter-of-factly.
Grant pulled up the duvet defensively. ‘I’m … cuddly.’
‘You have two chins.’
‘That’s just the way I’m sitting.’
‘And you’re going bald.’
‘That’s a sign of virility.’
‘Of what?’ Jack asked.
‘Of, oh nevermind. Besides, you’re small,’ Grant said pointing at Jack, ‘and you’re skinny.’ He motioned at Chloe.
‘No I’m not, I’m tall for my age,’ Jack stated proudly.
‘And I’m fashionably toned,’ Chloe replied primly.
‘You’re what?’ Grant asked confused.
‘Nevermind.’ Chloe mimicked turning to switch on the television. A lurid cartoon appeared.
‘How old are you two?’
‘I’m six and she’s eight. How old are you?’
‘Twenty eight.’ Grant swung his legs round and looked for his shoes. He was still fully clothed from the night before, too tired and wanting to be semi-prepared if anything happened to have removed them.
‘You look a lot older,’ Jack stated.
‘How much older?’
‘You look about fifty,’ Chloe said spitefully glancing over her shoulder.
‘But that would make me a lot older than your mother,’ Grant reasoned.
‘I know,’ Chloe replied still staring at the screen. ‘But you’re fat and you’ll soon have no hair. That’s what older people are like.’
‘You two really know how to give a person a compliment, you know that? Well I’m twenty eight, okay?’
‘Do you play Ludo?’ Jack asked ignoring Grant’s assertion.
‘I haven’t played for a long time.’
‘How about Lego?’
‘Yeah, I can do Lego okay.’ Grant pushed a foot into a shoe and started to do up his laces.
‘I can do laces,’ Jack stated keenly.
‘You can?’ He put on his other shoe.
‘I’ll show you.’ Jack took hold of Grant’s laces and tied a bow.
Grant looked down. ‘Not bad, not bad at all. There’s a shoeshine future waiting for you.’
‘You wanna play Lego?’
‘Sorry, Jack, I have to go out for a while. If your mother wakes up tell her I’ll be back in a bit.’
‘She lies in on a Saturday.’
‘We watch cartoons,’ Chloe said without looking round.
‘Right,’ Grant said standing. ‘I’ll be back in half-an-hour.’ He moved to the door and looked back. Jack had lain down on the sofa and was watching the television. He looked at his watch, six thirty, and groaned.
...

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)

It happened right here!

The level and timeliness of information available to the public on crimes occuring in their neighbourhood is now quite astonishing. In the US spotcrime.com uses a mash-up of police records and Google Maps to provide detailed maps of the precise location of seven types of crime (theft, burglary, robbery, assault, arson, shooting, vandalism), plus the location of arrests. For those unsure of the differences between some of these (and I was never fully sure of the difference between theft, burglary and robbery) they are:

• Theft - taking property belonging to another without that person's consent.
• Burglary - breaking and entering a building illegally for the purpose of committing a crime.
• Robbery - using force or intimidation to take property away from another person in the presence of that person.
• Assault - a physical attempt or threat to use violence with the intent to do harm to another.
• Arson - intentionally setting fire to the property of another or the burning of one's own property to collect insurance.
• Shooting - firing a weapon in order to hit, wound, or kill someone or something.
• Vandalism - the intentional destruction of or damage to the property of another.

If you hover your cursor over a crime location a little box pops up and tells you the nature of the incident that occured there. In some cases it will even tell you the name of the perpetrator and details about them. The map seems to be updated daily and certainly weekly so you can get a pretty much real time view of the crimes occuring in an area.

The map above (click to enlarge) shows downtown Boston and parts of Cambridge for between 4th June and 4th August. Robberies seem to be most prevalent in the downtown; there are a cluster of burglaries around Columbus Park; a fair few thefts in Cambridge; and a cluster of assaults in Cambridge near to MIT and around Lower Roxbury.

Crimespot also provide maps of crimes in cities all round the world (including a search facility for those not listed) I'm not sure of the source of the data for some places. In Dublin, Ireland, the address data seems to be stripped out of newspaper reports. Crime data in Ireland, as far as I am aware, is hampered in two respects. First there are no postcodes in Ireland making it difficult to record its precise location, and second, as a result, crime is recorded against the responsible garda station not its location. The result is it is extremely rare to see meaningful maps of crime in Ireland at a local scale.

For those living elsewhere you might be able to view what crimes are occuring in your neighbourhood. How to interpret this data or its uses is a whole other ball game. Perhaps I'll cover that in another post at some point.

Review of The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke, Orion (2007)

James Lee Burke is often considered one of America's top crime writers. The Tin Roof Blowdown is the sixteenth novel in the Dave Robicheaux series and it opens as Hurricane Katrina sweeps in from the Bay of Mexico and wreaks havoc on the city of New Orleans. As those people left behind in the city try to cope with high floods, electrical outages, panic and death, Bertrand Melacon, his brother Eddy, and two friends go on a looting spree in a rich neighbourhood where Otis Baylor and Tom Claggart have stayed behind to defend their properties. A few months previously the four young hoods had viciously gang-raped Baylor’s daughter. Now they rip apart his neighbour’s house after finding hundreds of thousands of dollars and blood diamonds hidden in wall cavities. As they make their getaway someone shoots two of the looters, killing one, paralysing the other. Dave Robicheaux is drafted in from New Iberia to help with the deluge of carnage and to try and help restore order, and his best friend Clete Purcel is trying to track down Bertrand and Eddy Melacon for bond agents. Soon both are drawn into the case, which takes a turn for the worse when they discover the house the Melacon’s looted is Sidney Kovich’s, one of the city’s most notorious mobsters. In the hunt to recover the money and diamonds Robicheaux’s family is drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it. The city might have been the Great Whore of Babylon, but few ever forgot or regretted her embrace.
What was its future?
I looked through my windshield and saw fallen trees everywhere, power and phone lines hanging from utility poles, dead traffic lights, gutted downtown buildings so badly damaged the owners had not bothered to cover the blown-out windows with plywood. The job ahead was Herculean and it was compounded by a level of corporate theft and governmental incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside the Third World. I wasn’t sure New Orleans had a future.

I’ve read a few of Burke’s previous books but I had a hard time with The Tin Roof Blowdown. Some of the lyrical prose for which Burke is known is present, and the dialogue is often sharp, but I nearly gave up after the first thirty pages. It felt to me as if two books had been clunked together – one a political commentary on Katrina and its aftermath (particularly in the first 60 pages or so), the other the story outlined above. Rather than letting the story do the commentary (as with the Hans Falada book I reviewed a couple of weeks ago), Burke has whole paragraphs effectively setting out his views on the catastrophe and who was responsible for the mayhem that followed. It simply didn’t work for me. My sense is that Burke let his personal anger and frustration bubble over into the text at the story’s expense.

Added to that the story itself stretched reality to breaking point, with multiple sub-plots that conveniently overlap and opportune lapses in law enforcement procedure. I generally don’t mind that in thrillers, but this time out I just couldn’t buy into it. Robicheaux uses the law when it suits and takes it into his own hands the rest of the time, seemingly without any penalty. The fact that Robicheaux’s still alive at this stage given he’s regularly up to his neck in dramatic cases that always seem to involve violence directed at him and his family is a miracle. I’ve enjoyed the past books, but The Tin Roof Blowdown was, for me, a let down.

Stealing honey

In the last couple of days the two dogs, probably on the trail of a badger or possibly a fox, have come across two wild bee nests in the long meadow grass that have been raked up and the honeycomb plundered (click on the images right to enlarge). We're assuming its the work of a badger given the paw marks in the dirt surrounding them. It's fascinating watching the bees frantically trying to rebuild, pulling grass roots back over exposed holes. I've found a great website called Bees of Ireland run by Trinity College Dublin and I think the species is Bombus Pascuorum (map distribution below - grey dots are recordings pre-1980, red dots post-1980). There are 101 bee species in Ireland (there are 260 in the UK and many more in continental Europe), but only one unique species the Bombus muscorum var. allenellus, which is found only on the Aran Islands. Many of the Irish species are on the 'red list' of endangered species due to loss of habitats, disease and competition. Hopefully our two nests will manage to survive.

Review of Black Delta Night by Jessica Speart, published by Avon Mystery (2001)

Jessica Speart’s twist on the police procedural format is to focus on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through a tart noir lens. Her books follow the exploits of Special Agent Rachel Porter who always gets her men – the lovers (who she usually loses again) and the baddies who are not very nice to animals and either kill or smuggle them illegally. Porter’s feistiness and quest for justice at all costs is perceived as an attitude and disobedience problem by her superiors so as soon as she solves a case, through a madcap sequence of rule bending, stakeouts, chases, double dealing and hot dates, she starts the next in a new location, usually further down the attractiveness stakes.

Black Delta Night finds her relocated to west Tennessee trying to crack down on illegal poaching by Southern rednecks who view the law as something that applies to other folk. Stumbling accidentally on a freezer full of Delta Gold – caviar from the endangered Mississippi River paddlefish – she persuades her reluctant boss to let her go undercover posing as a dirty agent. It soon transpires that ignorant rednecks are the least of her problems as the trade is controlled by the ruthless Russian mafia whose boss has an Elvis obsession. Luckily for Porter, her old boss Hickok and her transvestite, best friend Terri have also moved to Memphis, and are soon joined by her regular old flame Jake Santou, and she stumbles to the inevitable conclusion.

Woody nodded and threw me a wink. “I call all of my wives Tammy. That way I don’t screw up their names when I’m in the throes of passion.”
He was apparently feeling a little frisky right now; spittle had formed at the corner of his lips.
“Why Woody, you’re frothing at the mouth. I hope it’s not anything contagious.”
Woody’s smirk collapsed into an uncertain scowl. “What is that nasty remark supposed to mean?”
“I heard a bunch of rabid coons were trucked into the area, and you know how I worry about you. I’d hate to think one had snuck up and given you a love bite. Then I’d have to decide whether to get you some shots or just shoot you.”

Speart’s books are light, frothy, humorous, engaging and whip along at a nice, quick pace. Her characters often drift toward caricatures, but they are meant to, and the plot has enough twists and turns to make it not an entirely predictable journey. The wildlife angle is a good one, with enough potential scenarios that Porter should never be short of an interesting case. Black Delta Night is a solid enough addition to the series and an entertaining filler for a wet afternoon.

I’d be interested to hear suggestions about either:

a) novels that focus on other agencies involved in crime detection beyond the usual suspects (e.g., the police, FBI)

b) other writers using the tart noir style (I’ve mostly read Lauren Henderson, Katy Munger, Jessica Speart, Stella Duffy and Janet Evanovich)

Tartcity describes tart noir genre thus: "Tart. It's a potent four-letter word. Sweet, sour, sharp, sexy, bad, with a touch of cheesecake. It seemed to sum up the detectives in our segment of the crime fiction genre, the independent-minded female sleuths who are tough enough to take on thugs and corrupt cops, tender enough to be moved by tough, tender men (or women, as the case may be). These are neofeminist women, half Philip Marlowe, half femme-fatale, who make their own rules, who think it's entirely possible to save the world while wearing a drop-dead dress and four-inch heels. "

July reviews

Well, I've managed to keep this going since July 12th! This month's reviews were:

The Twelve by Stuart Neville ****
The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo ***
Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan ***
August Heat by Andrea Camilleri ***
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce ****
Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich ****
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada *****
Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli ****
M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker ****

My book of the month was Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. An astonishing book first published in German in 1947. If you want to know what everyday life in a fascist state is like then you'd do no better than to read this book.