Review of Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice by Gerald Steinacher (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Nazis on the Run details through detailed archival research the escape routes and hiding places of Nazis and their collaborators, many of whom were wanted war criminals, in the aftermath of World War Two. In particular it concentrates on documenting the ‘ratlines’ through Austria, South Tyrol and Italy on to South America and the Middle East. South Tyrol proved to be an ideal place in which to lay low before being shepherded onwards because it had a large number of ethnic Germans who were technically living in Italy and were effectively stateless at the war’s end; it was on the north/south route for people who had been scattered by the war and thus used to the mass movement of out-of-place or stateless people; and it was in easy orbit of church organisations, notably the Vatican. Steinacher details five main groups that aided Nazis and collaborators along the ratlines – Nazis themselves and the South Tyrol Ethnic German community; The Red Cross and other aid organisations; religious orders including the Vatican; the US intelligence Services; and South American consuls and representatives, notably Argentina. Often working in tandem, these groups ensured those fleeing had shelter, work, finance, and suitable paperwork to evade justice. Over time the ratlines evolved into quite sophisticated networks and were fairly robust.

Steinacher creates a convincing weight of evidence from documentary sources to back-up his story, however, the story itself leaves a lot to be desired. The book is marketed as a popular history tome, but it is academic in its presentation and writing style. The result is rather dry and stogy. Even then, the analysis is rather descriptive in nature, detailing lots of information and anecdotal stories, but really fails to shift to explanation or a wider discussion of what the analysis means for how we interpret what happened. The conclusion starts to do this, but is relatively short and underdeveloped. More problematically, the book could have done with a really good edit to sort out issues of repetition and poor structuring. Given the high standards of OUP, I was quite surprised that this basic editorial work had not been undertaken. The level of repetition in particular is very noticeable. With a decent edit, about a twenty percent reduction in length, and the addition of some explanation, this would have been a first class book. As it is, whilst the research work seems sound, it just about passes muster.

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm back to buying books faster than I can read them. I bought two books this week and ordered two more (right). The plan is to read them all, but having worked the pile down a bit in the last few weeks there's still at least fifteen week's worth of reading backed up and that seems set to grow. What I need is a buying moratorium. I'm still working my way through new to me authors. At the minute I'm half way through Denise Mina's Garnethill.

My posts this week
Review of The Holy Thief by William Ryan
The bloody meadow
Call for crime fiction short stories
Unfinished housing estates 2011 update
Review of Open Season by CJ Box
Can't live without shoes

Can't live without shoes

‘What are they?’ He points at the bags.

‘Shoes.’

‘Shoes?’

‘They were on special offer. Thirty percent off.’

‘But you bought three pairs.’

‘They were a bargain.’ She turns away.

‘You have a closet full of feckin’ shoes, Gemma,’ he says, trailing after her. ‘You don’t need any more shoes!’

‘I like shoes!’

‘You’ll have to return them. Have you any idea how much trouble we’re in? The three credit cards are maxed out and you’re buying shoes!’

‘They were a bargain!’

‘They’re just more debt!’

‘I like shoes.’

He leaves. It’s that or he’ll stab her with a stiletto.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Open Season by CJ Box (2001, Corvus)

Joe Pickett is a relatively green game warden in Saddlestring in the Twelve Sleep Range, Wyoming. With two young girls and another baby on the way he’s struggling to make ends meet given his meager salary. After he’s disarmed by an outfitter and he lets the incident ride, his unpopular status is added to as a figure of fun. That is only the start of his problems. When his seven year old daughter, Sheridan, claims to have seen a monster in the back yard, Pickett is skeptical. The monster however is the same outfitter that disarmed him. Only he’s now dead. At the camp he’s just ridden from, Pickett, another warden and a deputy find two other hunters shot dead, seemingly killed by another hunter. The case is quickly closed, but Pickett is not satisfied. When he continues to investigate, his life starts to get a whole lot worse.

It took me a little while to get into Open Season. Box writes in short, often flat sentences, and the beginning is spent largely developing the characters and family relations. Gradually the story opens up and the prose becomes a bit more expressive. The strength of Open Season is the sense of place, contextualisation and the plotting. Box does a good job of placing the reader in the mountain and small town landscape of Wyoming, and in framing the work of game wardens and the social politics concerning their work. The plot develops nicely, the tension slowly ratcheting up. It’s clear from quite a long way out that what is going on and who the bad guys are, and that Pickett will ultimately win out, but it matters little; the reader is still kept on the edge of their seat. The characterization is well done, especially with regards to Pickett’s family. Overall, Open Season puts in place a very solid foundation for the rest of the series.

Call for crime fiction short stories

Trestle Press are seeking submissions for a new anthology series of hardboiled/noir stories. Here's the framing:

"Murder around the world. Is a body lying on the floor with a knife jutting rudely out of the victim's chest the same kind of murder in Calcutta, India as it would be, say . . . . in Oslo, Norway? Are the motives of a villain in Yokohama, Japan the same as might be found in Stuttgart, Germany? The art of the mystery/detective story found around the world; a treasure chest of delicious whodunits."

The call is open to novices as well as established authors. Closing date for the first round of submissions is Nov. 12, 2011. The next round cutoff is Dec 1, 2011. First come first served. Email stories to gelati.giovanni@gmail.com.

Also a reminder: Patti, over at Pattinase, is hosting a flash fiction challenge. The task is to write a short story of less than 1,000 words inspired by the art of Reginald Marsh. Stories to be posted up by October 18th and the link sent to Patti so she can collate them.

The Bloody Meadow

Having thoroughly enjoyed William Ryan's The Holy Thief, I popped into a bookstore today and bought his new novel, The Bloody Meadow. The blurb runs thus:

Following his investigations in The Holy Thief, which implicated those at the very top of authority in Soviet Russia, Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself decorated and hailed as an example to all Soviet workers. But Korolev lives in an uneasy peace – his new-found knowledge is dangerous, and if it is discovered what his real actions were during the case, he will face deportation to the frozen camps of the far north.

But when the knock on the door comes, in the dead of night, it is not Siberia Korolev is destined for. Instead, Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD security service asks the detective to look into the suspected suicide of a young woman: Maria Alexandovna Lenskaya, a model citizen. Korolev is unnerved to learn that Lenskaya had been of interest to Ezhov, the feared Commissar for State Security. Ezhov himself wants to matter looked into.

And when the detective arrives on the set for Bloody Meadow, in the bleak, battle-scarred Ukraine, he soon discovers that there is more to Lenskaya's death than meets the eye.

If the book is of the same quality as the The Holy Thief, then I think Ryan will be onto a winning series. A kind of Bernie Gunther series set in Russia during roughly the same period.

The Holy Thief by William Ryan (Mantle, 2010)

Moscow in 1936 and a young woman is found tortured to death in a former Church. Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia is asked to investigate the case. Korolev, a veteran of both the Eastern Front in the Great War and the revolutionary civil war, is known as being a wily, skillful cop. And he needs to be: Moscow at the start of the great purge is a dangerous place, where a casual joke about the regime is sufficient for a ticket to the camps, and fear propels people to denounce each other in order protect themselves. Very quickly the NKVD become interested in the case and Korolev is compelled to keep them informed of progress. A second victim, a senior criminal figure, is then found similarly tortured. It’s apparent to Korolev that the case involves high level officials and that makes it just as dangerous to him as it is to those he’s pursuing.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Holy Thief, which is a very assured debut novel. It skillfully weaves together a police procedural with the understated elements of a spy thriller a la Le Carre. The characterization is well developed and Korolev is sympathetically portrayed with an interesting back story and enough depth to sustain a series. Where the book excels is in the contextual framing of politics and social relations of Stalin’s Russia – the cliques and factions, the collectivization, the role of the state, the division of power and resources, the social conditions and the everyday drudge of making ends meet – and in the strong sense of place and claustrophobic atmosphere. The plot is carefully constructed and well paced, with sufficient twists and turns and tension points. Once I’ve got hold of the second book in the series, The Bloody Meadow, it’ll move to the top of my reading pile.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've made a start this weekend on Gerald Steinacher's Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice. The book is an interesting analysis of the various ways in which Nazis, along with hundreds of thousands of stateless citizens and refugees, survived in post-war Europe and gained passage to other parts of the world. The book is marketed as a popular history tome, but is much more academic in its presentation and writing style. The big plus is it is full of information, the negative is that it could have done with a good edit to sort out repetition and poor structuring, and it is largely descriptive, failing to shift to explanation. More in the review once I've finished reading it.

My posts this week
In loving memory
September reviews
Review of Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
NAMA and debt forgiveness
Review of Death Toll by Jim Kelly
The Song of the Sea

The Song of the Sea

It had been five days since the yacht had capsized. Five days in an orange bubble being tossed around on boiling waves, tumbling and spinning in a drunken dance. Five days listening to the song of the sea. The pitter-patter of spray and the thwack of waves against nylon and rubber, the crash of mountains of water greeting each other or tumbling in on themselves, the howl of the wind whipping and spinning in the troughs, his own groans and the dry heaves of sea sickness. And every now and then a haunting lullaby calling to him from the deep.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Death Toll by Jim Kelly (Penguin, 2011)

Due to flooding the graves of a King Lynn cemetery are being exhumed and moved. What the diggers did not expect to find was the bones of a black man lying on top of a coffin buried nearly thirty years before. Forensic evidence suggests that he was thrown in the grave the night Nora Tilden was buried, killed by a blow to the back of the head. DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine are assigned to the case, which they know will difficult to solve given the intervening years. What they are hoping is that by asking awkward questions they might dislodge the truth. What they discover is a family with secrets that want to keep them hidden. At the same time they are trying to solve another cold case – one that involves Shaw’s father and Valentine. Thirteen years previously DCI Shaw and Valentine were demoted for supposedly planting evidence. Shaw is determined to clear his father’s name and to put the guilty party behind bars, even if it means potentially jeopardizing his own career.

Death Toll is a solid police procedural. Kelly skillfully weaves the two cases around and through each other as Shaw and Valentine struggle to keep on top of both cases. The plotting is carefully constructed and paced. The characterization is nicely realized, and although I didn’t really take to either Shaw or Valentine that didn’t seem to matter. There is a very strong sense of place, Kelly dropping the reader into the landscape of Kings Lynn and the Norfolk coast. The prose is quite workmanlike, but has flourishes of nice, colourful imagery. My main critique is that sometimes the storytelling is over-elaborated, with passages that added little to the story, and the text would, I feel, have benefitted from some trimming to increase the pace and tension. Overall, a well constructed police procedural.

Review of Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail, 2011)

Sid and Chip have grown up together on the wrong side of the tracks in Baltimore, discovering the world of jazz at a young age. 1939 finds the two black Americans in Berlin, playing illegally in bars and dives, their six piece band including Paul, a Jew, and Hiero, a mischling (a half black German). They know they should leave, but they’re unwilling to abandon their paperless band mates. Then Delilah arrives to entice them to Paris to cut a record with Louie Armstrong. Sid falls head over heels for the seductive singer, but she only seems to have eyes for Hiero, a virtuoso trumpet player that some think is as good as Armstrong. After a fatal scuffle with some 'boots' (the Nazi authorities), they know it’s time to head to the border. Then Paul is snatched from the street by the Gestapo and another band mate quits, setting in train their flight. They arrive in Paris the day after war is declared and settle into the phoney war. What they need is another set of papers to get Hiero out of France ahead of the Germans arriving, but then he is seemingly betrayed, ending up in a concentration camp. Fifty years later, a festival recognizing Hiero’s genius has been organized and Sid and Chip are the special guests.

I was hooked on Half Blood Blues from the first paragraph. The book has all the ingredients I like in a novel - a strong story, well penned characters, a good sense of place and atmosphere, lovely prose, and a sensitive embedding in historical context. This is a book that is very much about Sid and his relationship with his friends; the war setting provides a backdrop and the situation of black people in Berlin and Paris forms an important context, but it frames the story rather than being the story (some reviews of the book do, in my view, unfairly critique the story on these grounds, suggesting that those interested in finding out more about black people in Germany look at other non-fiction books). The characterization and the social relations between the principals - the love, jealousy and tension - is the standout quality of the book. At the heart of the story are the themes of friendship, betrayal, guilt and forgiveness and these are skillfully woven through each other, providing the threads that tie the two time periods together. The prose is rich and colourful, and a real joy to read. One of my books of the year so far.

September reviews

My September book of the month was White Sky, Black Ice, the first in the series featuring Nathan Active. I need to get round to ordering the second in the series. Out of the eight books I read during the month, six were police procedurals. And yet they were all quite different in terms of their style, place and characters, and their social and political framing. Nice to get such a mix.

White Sky, Black Ice by Nathan Jones ****.5
The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths ****
The Quarry by Johan Theorin ***.5
The Cleanup by Sean Doolittle ***.5
Frozen Out by Quentin Bates **.5
Bloodland by Alan Glynn ****
The City, The City by China Mieville ***.5
Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli ***

In loving memory ...

I don't usually post on personal, family stuff, but I'm Birmingham again today at the funeral for my nan. I travelled over last weekend to see her and she died the day after I returned to Ireland. She was 92 (just shy of 93) and married for 72 years. It's going to take a while for it to sink in that she's gone. She requested that Just A Closer Walk With Thee by Patsy Cline be played at the service. Here's a live version of the song.

Lazy Sunday Service

Halfway through Death Toll by Jim Kelly. Enjoying it, although it is a little longwinded in places and could have been tightened up to useful effect. There's no doubt though that he employs some lovely descriptive imagery throughout. Here are two samples from the same page.

'His eyes were green too, bright and youthful, but his skin had all the surface tension of a week-old party balloon.'

'The smile on the barman's face fell like a calving iceberg.'


My posts this week:
White lips / Pale face /Breathing in snow flakes
Review of The City, The City by China Mieville
Reginald Marsh art, flash fiction challenge
Review of Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli
Half blood blues ...
This isn't a game

This isn’t a game

‘Slow down.’

Gavin ignores the request. It’s like he’s playing on his XBox, his gaze fixed twenty metres ahead, the car an extension of himself.

They hurtle round a corner on a perfect line, the g-force tilting them in their seats.

‘Gavin!’ This isn’t a game to Chloe, it’s a rollercoaster ride and she’s scared.

‘Relax. I know this road like the back of my hand.’

They crest a hill, the wheels leaving the slick road.

An over-sized truck fills the windscreen.

Chloe screams, Gavin instinctively turns hard left, hitting the brakes.

The car smacks into a wall and cartwheels.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.