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

Most nominated ...

There were nine authors who had three or more books nominated in the Classic Crime Fiction Curriculum Challenge. Way out in front was Agatha Christie who had a phenomenal 12 books nominated, demonstrating a great strength in depth to her writing and her long lasting popularity. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd emerged out of the pack to make it onto the final list of ten books. The nine authors and their nominated books were:

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventure of the Final Problem

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely; Lady in the Lake, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye

Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library, Evil Under the Sun, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The ABC Murders, Five Little Pigs, Murder at the Vicarage, Murder is Easy, The Crooked House, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Death on the Nile, Cat Among the Pigeons, And Then There Were None

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, Red Harvest

Ngaio Marsh, A Surfeit of Lampreys, Death in a White Tie, The Nursing Home Murder

Ross MacDonald, The Drowning Pool, The Moving Target, The Chill, The Underground Man

Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart

Dorothy L Sayers, Strong Poison, Gaudy Night, Whose Body?, The Nine Tailors, Five Red Herrings, Murder must advertise, Busman’s Holiday

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar

Review of Grift Sense by James Swain (Ballantine Books, 2001)

Tony Valentine spent thirty years as a cop policing the gaming industry in Atlantic City. Not long after retiring to Florida his beloved wife dies and he starts a new life as a consultant to casinos around the country keen to use his encyclopedic knowledge of fraudsters, cheats and their various scams. When the down at heel Acropolis Resort in Las Vegas is hit three nights in a row by a seemingly unknown player who has a knack at winning at blackjack, they contact Valentine for his opinion. The pit boss suspects the dealer, Nola, is giving tells, but the evidence isn’t so clear. Panicking the casino has Nola arrested, but it looks like she’s going to walk free and they beg Valentine to travel to Vegas to get to the bottom of the scam. At first he’s reluctant, but an impending visit from his wayward son changes his mind. Once in the boiling city, holed up in the tacky, passed-its-sell-by date Acropolis, Valentine realises that he’s been dragged into something much bigger than a simple card scam.

Grift Sense is a comic, crime caper where the only character that isn’t a caricature is Valentine. That’s just fine by me as that’s part of what makes these kinds of novels work – people who are larger than life, being too stupid, too greedy, too tainted, too mad, bad or narcissistic, and leading lives that most of us are fascinated by but wouldn’t want to emulate. Whilst the writing is quite perfunctory, the dialogue is snappy, the plotting is sound, and the story rattles along at a jaunty pace, with some nice twists and turns. Moreover, it’s clear that Swain knows the gaming world and its policing and scams well, using that knowledge to good effect. All in all, a fun book that passed a few pleasant hours.

The Lazy Sunday Service

My discovery of the week is the blog Confessions of Ignorance, which has ampled demonstrated how ignorant I am about a lot of things! There are only a couple of posts a month, but they're quality, thoughtful stuff.

My posts this week
Classic crime curriculum
Investment magnet for Islamic finance
Slowly going cross-eyed
Review of The Song is You by Megan Abbott
Cover art seduction
It's time to examine the Irish economical model not simply the economy
Review of Kamikazi by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Review of Kamikaze by Raymond Lamont-Brown (Cassell, 1997)

Kamikaze is a history of Japan’s suicide warriors during the latter stages of the Second World War. Most often associated with the pilots of planes who deliberately tried to crash into allied shipping (there were 2,940 such attempts between Oct 1944 and Aug 1945, the vast majority of which failed in their mission), kamikaze’s also included mini-submarines and also entire ships (for example, the battleship Yamato sailed toward the US fleet in April 1945 with only enough fuel for a one way trip – it never made contact being sunk by US planes with the loss of 3,063 men). Given that the protagonists died and left little in the way of records, the paucity of Japanese material, and the US military’s blackout of kamikaze tactics during the war, Lamont-Brown does a reasonable job of pulling together the relatively limited material available. The narrative is a little dry in places, becoming quite list-like and lacking in personal testimony or stories, and the structure is a little jumbled, but nevertheless I found the book fascinating.

In Admiral Halsey’s words, ‘American’s who fight to live, find it hard to realise that another people will fight to die.’ And this was certainly a point I kept reflecting on – the willingness of some Japanese fighters to selflessly give up their lives in what were quite clearly futile attacks for the greater good of Japan and the Emperor. The logic of the attacks was to discourage the American advance, and in particular the invasion of Japanese territory, by demonstrating how bloody and costly the battle would be. And whilst the American’s quite clearly feared and were distressed by such attacks, they quickly worked out how to deal with them, although a number of ships were hit and some sunk (for example, between 17 Feb and 30 July in Iwo Jima and Okinawa theatres 146 allied vessels received some significant level of damage from kamikaze attacks, of which 48 were scrapped or sunk). Perhaps the Indianapolis was the most significant ship to be sunk, attacked by either a mini-sub or conventional torpedo on July 29, 1945. In his memoirs, Truman admitted that the vessel carried a third atomic bomb intended for Niigata.

I’ll leave the last words to a letter sent by a young kamikaze to his parents.

‘Beloved parents,
‘Please congratulate me. I have been given the splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day. The destiny of our homeland hinges on the decisive battle in the Southern Seas, where I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree.
‘I shall be the shield for [the] Tenno and die cleanly along with my squadron leader and other friends. I wish that I could be born seven times, each to smite the enemy.
‘How I appreciate this chance to die like a man. I am grateful from the depths of my heart to the parents who have reared me with their constant prayers and tender love. And I am grateful as well to my squadron leader and superior officers who have looked after me as if I were their own son and given me much careful training.
‘Thank you, my parents, for the twenty-three years during which you have cared for me and inspired me. I hope that my present deed will in some small way repay what you have done for me. Think well of me and know that your Isao died for our country. This is my last wish, and there is nothing else I desire.
‘I shall return in spirit and look forward to your visit at the Yasikuni-jinja. Please take good care of yourselves. […]
‘We are sixteen warriors manning the bombers. May our death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal.
‘Written at Manila on the eve of our sortie. Isao.’

Cover art seduction

One of the things I was constantly drawn back to with Megan Abbott's The Song is You was the cover art. Heck, is it good - strong, evocative image and great design. It cries out, 'pick me up and take a browse' - 'go on, you know you want to'. Donna Moore's Old Dogs is another great, striking cover. Much better than the generic, air-brushed and hazy photo covershots that adorn many bestselling novels. I'm having a good think about The White Gallows cover design at the minute as I due to liaise with the designer in the next week or so, and so far I'm really lacking in ideas. Hopefully something will emerge over the weekend.


I know they say that you should never judge a book by its cover, but I'm wondering - how many of us are actually influenced by the cover? I know I bought my first Malcolm Pryce novel purely because the novel screamed 'pick me up' across the bookshop. What book covers have seduced you? And did the book live up to the cover?

Review of The Song is You by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2007)

Jean Spangler, a rising starlet willing to take chances and risks to make the big time, disappears after a night on the town with two Hollywood stars. The only thing found the next day is her handbag containing a cryptic note. Gil (Hop) Hopkins, every star’s friend and publicist, was there that night, and in the following days helped to create a smokescreen to protect his studio’s stars and misdirect the police investigation. Two years later and Iolene, Jean’s sultry friend, tracks Gil down fearing for her life. Jarred by Iolene’s visit, Gil starts to make sure that his web of lies is still intact, but in the process gets drawn into Spangler’s disappearance, retracing his steps that fateful night to discover what really happened to the charismatic young woman intent on stardom.

Megan Abbott’s second novel is a hardboiled expose of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s, revealing how the dark underbelly of the movie business was kept out of the media or was repackaged as glamour and glitz through the gossip magazines and newspapers. Hopkins is a master of spin, operating at the centre of that world, picking up the stars and wannabes who are living on the edge or skeetering out of control, dusting them down and making sure they retain their all-American, clean-living, family entertainment persona. His charm and success though masks his own dark secrets and shabby life – a serial philanderer unhappy in his own company whose wife has left him for his best friend. The Song is You is both an in-depth character study of Hopkins and his work, and a mystery tale of Jean Spangler’s disappearance. With a steady pace, careful plotting and a nice turn of phrase, Abbott spins a dark tale of sex, ambition, blackmail, greed, violence, and psychotic deviance – a tale that gets very dark in places. The characterisation is excellent, and like Ellroy, Abbott manages to evoke the time and place of 1950s L.A., immersing the reader in its the murky world. Overall, an enjoyable, dark story and I’m looking forward to reading more of Abbott's books. My review of Queenpin is here.

Slowly going cross-eyed ...

I’ve spent most of today working on abridging two essays for an edited collection – The Map Reader - I’m co-editing. For some, naive reason I thought this would be a relatively straightforward task - take 50 classic essays on cartography produced over the past 60 years, edit them all down so that they are under 5,000 words each, split them into five sections each with a short introduction and top it with an introductory essay. One of the essays I’ve been working on today was over 20,000 words long in its original form. Getting it down to 5,000 words, wherein its essential argument remains intact and its narrative structure and flow still works okay (and the essay can’t be re-written or added to), has been a real challenge. Much tougher than I was anticipating and I suspect it’s going to take a few passes to tweak and polish. The real killer though is the formatting – having to convert footnotes into Harvard style references is as tedious as it gets (and one of the essays has 177 footnotes!). I’m slowly going cross-eyed …

The classic crime curriculum

Given the comments on Saturday's post, I think it is fairly clear that the consensus is to add Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's, Roseanna, as the final book on the classic crime curriculum. That makes the full list:

James Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Roseanna (1965)
Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance (1934)
Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (1952)

One thing that strikes me about this list is that 1934 was a very good year for crime fiction! I'm looking forward to reading these over the next 12 months. Many thanks for everybody's suggestions. I'll post more on the full list over the coming days.

The Lazy Sunday Service

I've headed off for the weekend to try and wrap up The White Gallows for submission tomorrow. Yesterday I decided to undertake fairly major edits to the ending, adding a new scene, and thankfully I feel much happier now. I forgot to bring Havana Fever away with me, which I'm half way through, but I did pack Megan Abbott's The Song is You. When I'm not immersed in my own fictional landscape of Meath, I've been losing myself in early 1950s Hollywood. Talk about world's apart.

My posts this week
Blind spots
Dublin port company suggests that trade is stabilising
January reviews
Diaspora strategy and uneven regional development
A map day
Farmland prices down, sales up
Classic crime fiction, the first results
The final spot on the classic crime curriculum

The final spot on the classic crime curriculum

Yesterday I posted the nine of the books that would form the Classic Crime Fiction Curriculum - a list of must read, pre-1970 crime novels. There is one space left on the list. The following books all came joint tenth, but I can only pick one. The question is which one? Which of these fifteen books is an ideal complement to the nine already selected? Let me know your choice and the reason why and, based on the responses, I'll select the tenth book for the curriculum.

John Buchan. The Thirty Nine Steps
James Cain, Double Indemnity
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs
Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage
Ngaio Marsh, A Surfeit of Lampreys
Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target
Edgar Allen Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Roseanna
Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
Cornell Woolrich, The Bride Wore Black

Classic Crime Fiction, the first results

I've been through the first results of the Classic Crime Fiction Curriculum Challenge. I received 15 lists, and thanks to all those who took part. The full list included 114 books, all but 24 of which received only one vote. Only 9 books received 3 or more votes (see below) and the clear winner on 6 was The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley
James Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Dorothy Sayers, Nine Tailors
Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance
Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

I'll post up the 15 books that all scored 2 votes each tomorrow and hopefully you'll be able to tell me which one most deserves the last berth on the curriculum list. There were a number of authors who had several different books nominated resulting in their votes being split across different titles. I'll also do a most popular author list in the next few days.

A map day

I've spent today writing a short piece for an Italian journal on post-representational cartography - which sounds more pretentious than it is - so I thought I'd give a plug to FloatingSheep.org, a blog that produces some interesting and quirky maps. The one to the right is the distribution of bookstores to baptist churches. I'll let you work out what you think about the lack of overlap between the two sets of dots ...

January reviews

A slow month of reading, especially in the latter half of the month. It's been a while since I read only one book in a week. Last week I read none but my own whilst I tried to deal with other things. I'm slowly making my way through Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura at the minute, so that'll be the next review up. My book of the month. Hmmm. I'll go with Via Delle Oche.

Dead Set by Kel Robertson ****
Up in Honey's Room by Elmore Leonard **
The Fugitive Pigeon by Donald Westlake ***
Via Delle Oche by Carlo Lucarelli ****
Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa **
Isle of Joy by Don Winslow ****
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley ****

Blind spots

I've been working away on The White Gallows for the past week, trying to tighten and clean the text. Every time I read through it I spot more small typos and quirky phrasing. My particular blind spot are small words - a, as, in, to, etc - which when I read the text are there, but in reality aren't, and hononyms. One reviewer picked up I'd used 'rye' instead of 'wry' in The Rule Book and I discovered yesterday that I'd managed to do the same in this one as well. It's very frustrating trying to spot a hole in the text when you're convinced that it's not there! I'm sure everyone must have some kind of blind spot ... I just wish I could cure mine. Where is an independent proof reader when you need one?