Review of Black Wattle Creek by Geoffrey McGeachin (Penguin, 2012)

Ten years after starting a relationship with Rebecca in the Diggers Rest Hotel, Charlie Berlin is living in suburban Melbourne with his wife and two children, Peter and Sarah.  He’s still working as a cop, but his career is in a dead-end, he’s struggling to make ends meet, and he is still living with the demons of his time as bomber pilot and POW in a Polish camp.  When a recently bereaved widow becomes suspicious about the activities of a funeral home, Berlin agrees to investigate.  It’s immediately obvious that the director of the company has something to hide and his interest piqued, Charlie starts to poke around.  It soon becomes clear though that he’s stumbled onto something much bigger than he anticipated and he’s inadvertently put himself and his family at risk.  Rather than turning a blind eye, however, he stubbornly continues to investigate the strange goings-on at Black Wattle Creek.

Black Wattle Creek has two strong elements: the character of Charlie Berlin and his family, and the reason behind his investigation.  Berlin is interesting company, a caring family man who’s haunted by his past, and is tenacious in his pursuit of a solving a case.  When he looks into the suspicions of one of his wife’s friends about a local funeral home he has no idea what he getting himself into.  It soon becomes obvious that maybe he’d be better off keeping his nose out of other peoples’ business.  Where the story seems to become a little unstuck, however, is in its unfolding.  There were two aspects that I had a hard time buying which worked to undermine the fidelity of the tale somewhat.  The first was the strategy of those he’s investigating, who inflict savage violence on those Berlin consults rather than the man himself.  The second was Berlin being enlightened by the same people when there was really no need and then let wander free.  Nevertheless, the tale is enjoyable, mainly because Berlin is a compelling, wounded character and the pacing and prose are nicely done.  The third book in the series is due out next year and I’m looking forward to reading it in due course.

Many thanks to Geoffrey McGeachin for sending me a copy of the book, which has recently won the 2013 Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel in Australia.

Review of A Private Business by Barbara Nadel (Quercus, 2012)

Recently bereaved, former foul-mouthed comedienne Maria Peters has found God, is trying to make a comeback, and is convinced that someone is stalking her.  She turns to a former cop turned private investigator, Lee Arnold, who has just hired Mumtaz Hakim as his assistant.  Lee and Mumtaz have problems of their own.  Lee’s business is struggling and his brother is an alcoholic who’s making his mother’s life difficult.  Mumtaz’s husband was recently murdered and she’s been left with a sixteen year old step-daughter and enormous debts that threaten their home.  Lee and Mumtaz take on the case, but despite close surveillance can spot no interference in Maria’s life except her own paranoia.  As that grows she is drawn closer to a born again church and becomes ever more withdrawn and skittish.  The question is whether her concerns are real or delusions?  

The real strengths of A Private Business is the characterisation, contextualisation and social interplay between characters.  Nadel has created four strong lead characters in former cop, Lee, Muslim widow, Mumtaz, divorced and world weary cop, Vi, and former alternative comedienne, Maria Peters.  The plot focuses as much on their own lives and troubles, and the various forces shaping them, as it does the investigation, and this is a definite plus rather than a distraction.  They are genuinely interesting characters with fleshed out back stories and social networks.  The story itself is relatively straightforward and its clear from very early on what is happening; it’s more a case of how it unfolds and resolves than a puzzle.  My impression on finishing the story was that it would be perfect for a television adaptation.  I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the series.

Lazy Sunday Service

I arrived in New York on Friday morning.  My luggage seemed to get lost in the airport and popped out on the baggage carousel 20 minutes after all the others, just as I was finishing off the forms and heading into the city to buy some clothes.  Other than that, it's going well.  I managed to get to The Mysterious Bookshop on Friday afternoon.  I set a purchase limit of five books.  In the end I succumbed to seven:

The Thicket by Joe Lansdale
The Visitation by Ivy Pochoda
Rough Riders by Charlie Stella
Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton
Tapestry by J. Robert Janes
Jade Lady Burning by Martin Limon
Severance Package by Duane Swiercznski

I'm happy with this haul, though its added a couple of kilo to my suitcase.  It's a wonder I only managed to stick to seven.  It would have been a lot more if I'd browsed in earnest - these were all within a few feet of the front entrance!  I'm looking forward to reading them sometime between now and Christmas. 

My posts this week:
Pushing one's luck
Review of Pale Horses by Nate Southard
September reviews
Review of The Riot by Laura Wilson

Pushing one’s luck

‘You really are a sour fecker, Charlie.  You take pleasure when some poor bugger fails and you begrudge anyone who has even the slightest bit of success.’

‘At least I don’t discriminate in my sourness.’

‘No, you stick the knife in and jiggle it about with equal relish, no matter who or what the circumstances.’

‘Maybe you’ve had enough to drink, Joe.’

‘Don’t try and tell me when I’ve had too much to drink, you sanctimonious bastard!’

‘Then stop spitting out insults.’

‘You deserve them, you cold hearted fecker.’

‘Careful now, Joe, don’t forget I’m vindictive and violent as well.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Pale Horses by Nate Southard (Snubnose Press, 2013)

Sheriff Hal Kendrick has a secret he’s hiding from his work colleagues – he’s been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s.  Increasingly forgetful, everyday he struggles to get by, relying on bluff and prompts to perform his duties and a GPS to travel around.  Worse still, he can barely remember the name of his wife or his life history.  His wife wants him to retire before his illness is discovered.  Hal, however, is determined to try and leave the county in a better state than when he became sheriff, or at the least solve the murder of a young woman found in a field.  Colleen Lothridge has been beaten to death with a hammer.  Part-time deputy Danny Cole went to school with Colleen and is friends with her husband, Bobby.  He’s convinced he knows the identity of the killer, a former marine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  Since returning to Indiana, Korey Hunt has been drinking, blacking out, fighting his demons and anybody who rubs him up the wrong way, and attending therapy.  All he wants is to return to a normal life, not face a life in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit.  Hal might be able to finish his career with a conviction, but it could be at the expense of rough justice.

Pale Horses is a country noir of the blackest kind, offset with strong bittersweet undertones.  The story charts the intersections of three principal characters over the course of a murder investigation: an aging sheriff with Alzheimer’s, an unbalanced deputy with a drug habit and a Christina Ricci obsession, and a former marine haunted by his time in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All three characters are very well drawn and developed as the story progresses.  In particular, Hal Kendrick is a wonderfully observed character, with Southard sympathetically charting his slow decline and increasing confusion.  There is a good sense of place and contextualisation concerning small town, rural America, and the plot is compelling, building to a violent but nicely done denouement.  In my view, it is ready made for a movie adaptation in the vein of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (it needs an indie treatment, not a Hollywood one).  Unsettling, uncompromising, dark and bittersweet, Pale Horses is a gripping read.

I've been lucky enough to read an ARC of Pale Horses and it should be published shortly.

September reviews

A bumper month of reading, aided by a holiday break at the beginning of the month.  My read of September was Ostland by David Thomas, which proved a thought-provoking tale.

The Riot by Laura Wilson ***.5
Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indridason ***
Dresden by Frederick Taylor ****
Ostland by David Thomas *****
All the Lonely People by Martin Edwards ***.5
Tretjak by Max Landorff ***.5
The Darkling Spy by Edward Wilson ****.5
The Good German by Joseph Kanon ****
Stettin Station by David Downing  ***.5
Echoland by Joe Joyce ***
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave by Colin Cotterill *****

Review of The Riot by Laura Wilson (Quercus, 2013)

August 1958 and DI Stratton has moved from the West End to Notting Hill, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in London.  Over the previous decade many Caribbean migrants have made the locale their new home and racial tension is high, often tipping over into violence.  For Danny Perlmann, a Polish refugee and holocaust survivor, the area represents a business opportunity.  He’s been building up a property folio, buying and subdividing houses and renting them to anyone who wants them regardless of colour or occupation, including prostitutes.  When Perlmann’s civil minded rent collector is murdered, Stratton is assigned the case.  Not long after one of Perlmann’s renters, a black man that the locals think is dating a white woman, is stabbed to death on the street.  Whilst upper class do-gooders try to keep the lid on the simmering cauldron, Stratton tries to solve both murders before the place erupts into riots and running battles.

The strengths of The Riot are the characterisation, sense of place and time, and social contextualisation.  DI Stratton is a strong and interesting lead and the book is full of a diverse set of well defined and vividly penned characters.  There is a strong sense of London in the late 1950s as the social mix of some neighbourhoods start to change, and Wilson does a good job at conveying the social realities of working class life and the tensions around change.  Indeed, the story works well to weave issues of race (both Black and Jewish) and gender through class and capital.  And the plot is intriguing and quite complex.  That all said, the story is let down a little by its pacing and balance.  Prior to ‘the riot’ the storytelling is quite slow and there is a lot of unneeded detail.  For example, on his initial visit to the house in which a murder occurred Stratton laboriously meets everyone in the building and others nearby, most of whom never reappear in the book and who tell him little of importance.  After ‘the riot’ things speed up somewhat, but there’s sometimes not enough fleshing out or reveal as to what is going on, especially with respect to the Perlmann’s empire.  Overall, an interesting and entertaining story that’s nicely contextualised.

Lazy Sunday Service

On Friday I travel to New York and then on to Boston to give a couple of talks and to hook-up with some folk relating to work projects.  I've two books lined up for the trip so far, Lyndsay Faye's The Gods of Gotham and Andrew Cotto's Outerborough Blues.  Whilst I'm in New York I'm hoping to spend some time in one or both of Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers and The Mysterious Bookstore to browse titles and fill-up part of a suitcase.  Any recommendations for a Boston novel to pick-up for the second half of the trip?

My posts this week
No comment
Review of Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indridason
Review of Dresden by Frederick Taylor
Irish crime fiction festival, Nov 22-23

No comment

Stiles pushed back the chair, paced to the wall and back. 

‘Karen’s dead, Michael.  You killed her.’

The man continued to stare at the off-white table top.

‘You beat her to death with a kettle. ... Pummelled her with it.  She put up with you for twelve years and that was her reward?’

Stiles bent down to the table, leaning on his long arms. 

‘So how was it, Michael?  You had an argument? ... It got heated and you lost your temper? ... For god’s sake, man, you killed her!’

Michael slowly raised his head, his expression blank.  ‘No comment.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2013)

Drawn to Eastern Iceland in search of the brother he lost in a snow storm decades previously, Detective Erlendur has taken to sleeping in the ruins of his childhood home and wandering the mountains.  One morning he meets Boas, an elderly farmer, and they chat about a young woman, Matthildur, and some British soldiers who had died on the same night in a blizzard on the moor.  Unlike the soldiers, Matthildur’s body was never found.  Intrigued, Erlendur begins to investigate her tale, tracking down those still alive who knew her.  The more he teases apart her story, the more he’s convinced that there is more to her disappearance than at first meets the eye.

Strange Shores is the final instalment of the ‘Murder in Reykjavik’ series featuring Detective Erlendur.  Erlendur has always been haunted by the disappearance of his brother in a snow storm and the fact that his body was never found.  He blames himself for the death and searches the moors for his final resting place.  He is drawn to the story of Matthildur, a young woman who similar vanished whilst walking in the hills.  Indridason weaves these two threads together in Strange Shores.  As with previous books, the pace is often slow, ponderous and reflexive.  That in itself is fine, however, the story suffered from two issues.  First, after a decent start, it began to feel like a novella extended into a novel, with too much of the tale not moving the story forward.  Second, some of the dialogue felt clunky, which might have been a translation effect, but disrupted the narrative.  Further, the conclusion of the story seemed to be oddly out of key.  My overall impression then was that Strange Shores has the usual trademark melancholy, atmosphere and sense of place of the other tales in the series, but the plot and telling was weaker and thinner than some of the other books.

Review of Dresden by Frederick Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2005)

The flattening and firestorm of Dresden on the night of the 13th February and morning of the 14th of February 1945 continues to generate controversy.  For many it has become a symbol of the extent to which the Western Allies overstepped the mark from a morally righteous war campaign to wanton destruction and mass murder.  For others, Dresden was a legitimate target; a key transport node and a centre for armaments production and administration, and the next city that the Russians would face as their front moved forward.  The controversy focuses on Dresden and not other German cities who suffered the same fate in large part because of its cultural cache -- known as ‘The Florence on the Elbe’ -- the fact that it was unprotected (its flak guns moved elsewhere), the lateness of the attack in the war wherein it was clear that the Allies were going to win, that the city was full of refugees fleeing East, that the centre of the city and its key heritage buildings were the target rather than factories, and Russian anti-Western propaganda after the war as the iron curtain closed and the cold war started.  Frederick Taylor’s book seeks to chart what happened on the 13th and 14th of February 1945, when between 25,000 and 40,000 people died, and thousands more were made homeless as thirteen square miles of the city’s historic centre was destroyed, and to contextualise it within the long history of Dresden and of modern aerial warfare and the end game of the war, and to consider the moral philosophy of the bombing.  He does so by drawing extensively on archival sources, interviews with Allied air crew and survivors of the firestorm, and by considering other accounts of the raid and their arguments.  The result is a book that does more than detail a particular harrowing destruction of a city, but tries to make sense of it.  Some of the history of the city was probably not needed and the moral philosophy could have been deepened and extended, but otherwise Taylor succeeds in his aim, providing a very readable, informative and largely non-partisan account and arguments. 

Irish Crime Fiction Festival, Nov 22-23

I picked up this bit of news from the blog of the Oracle of Irish crime fiction, Declan Burke, Crime Always Pays (if you're interested in all things Irish crime fiction then it's a must-read).  On November 22nd/23rd Trinity College Dublin, in association with New York University, are hosting an Irish Crime Fiction Festival.

Confirmed speakers so far are Declan Burke, Jane Casey, Paul Charles, John Connolly, Conor Fitzgerald, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Kevin McCarthy, Brian McGilloway, Eoin McNamee, Niamh O'Connor, Louise Phillips, Peter Quinn, Michael Russell, and Stuart Neville.

The initial programme is:

Friday 22 NovemberLong Room Hub, Trinity College
6.30pm-8.30pm: Panel Discussion and Book Signing

Saturday 23 November
Long Room Hub, Trinity College
10.00am-11.15am: Writers Panel, 'Historical Crime Fiction'
11.30am-12.45am: Writers Panel, 'Irish Crime Fiction Abroad'
12.45pm-1.30pm: lunch
1.30-3.30pm: Surprise Film Screening
3.45pm-5pm: Writers Panel, 'Crime Fiction and Contemporary Ireland'
6pm (doors open 5.30): 'An Evening With Michael Connelly' (interviewed by John Connolly)
Exam Hall, Trinity College

The event is free, except for a €6 charge for the Connelly/Connolly panel.  Details about the event and tickets can be found on the festival website.

I've already booked my tickets.  I suggest if you're interested you do as well before they're all snapped up.

Lazy Sunday Service

At my 'no longer head of department' gig on Friday I was very kindly given some Amazon vouchers.  The first item in the basket was Jack Irish, the TV adaptation of two of Peter Temple's novels - Bad Debts and Black Tide.  I'm really looking forward to watching these as the novels were terrific and Guy Pearce is a brilliant actor, so it should be a winning combination.  It was followed by Peter Quinn's Hour of the Cat and Malcolm Mackay's The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter.  Now I'm pondering and I'm about to work my way through some review sites to see what else should join them.

My posts this week

Review of Ostland by David Thomas
Review of All the Lonely People by Martin Edwards
Book launches
Learning to count in the shelter

Learning to count in the shelter

There were nine of them crammed in the shelter.  Her mother, her aunt, her elder brother and sister and four cousins. 

Somewhere in the distance was a string of dull thuds.  A trickle of loose soil fell from the roof. 

A few moments later the explosions were much louder, the ground vibrating. 

Her aunt started to mutter.  ‘Our Father who art in heaven ...’

Now they could hear the whistle of the bombs, the explosions growing nearer and violent.

How many were in stick?  Ten?

Her brother was counting: ‘six, seven, eight, nine ...’

‘... hallowed be thy name ...’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Book launches

It's dawned on me that tomorrow I'll be launching Stiffed and the Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography.  Work has organised an event to mark my stepping down as director of the institute I've run for the past 11.5 years.  Rather than hold another event, we've folded the book launches in as well.  Which is fine by me as I'm always a reluctant participant in these kinds of events.  Hopefully I can get away skulking at the back with a bottle of wine whilst working my way through the nibbles.