Review of Go To Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore, Point Blank (2006)

Helena Handbasket is a private investigator. Owen Banks is her first customer. Someone has sent him the severed hands of his brother, Robin Banks, and he wants his killer found. Robin has been missing for five years, ever since 30 million pounds worth of jewels were stolen from his boss, Evan Stubezzi. Handbasket, and her psychotic sidekick, Fifi Fofum, take the case aided by their computer whizz friend, Heidi Salami. Soon other bodies, start to turn-up, missing their hands, a scarlet fish inserted in a stomach wound, and a quote from the bible placed in their mouth. Told to keep her nose out of police business by Inspector Frank Lee, a loner, maverick cop, and FBI agent, Art Ifarti, Handbasket ignores all the warnings and stumbles from clue to clue, cocktail to cocktail, and one prospective man to another.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom inside, I noticed that every head in the place had turned (some of them virtually 360 degrees) to look at me. The bar's denizens froze, and a silence descended. The snooker players stood away from the table and stared at me as their balls clicked together (it's strange how often I have that effect on men); the conversations about football, women and shootin' stuff broke off abruptly, and the small, strange-looking boy in the corner stopped playing the banjo and wiped his nose on his dungarees. The place was a Twlight Home for the terminally befuddled. The smartest thing in the place was probably the cockroach fleeing for the exit.

I’m a great fan of clever, funny books – Jasper Fforde, Tom Sharpe, Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Douglas Adams, etc. Go to Helena Handbasket is both very clever and very funny, so it was no surprise I enjoyed it immensely. Donna Moore ruthlessly parodies the crime genre, sending up every cliché, stereotypical character and corny plot device to great effect through a noirish lens. As I read, I had a permanent grin plastered across my face and laughed out loud many times. The puns, gags, sarcasm, cringing similes, and comic set pieces come thick and fast. The characterization is first rate and the plot unfolds as a smart, witty puzzle. Handbasket is a great creation – a kind of private investigator version of Clouseau, who believes she’s the bees knees but is actually rather hopeless and yet despite her ineptitude she somehow stumbles towards solving the case. It’s difficult to think of a direct comparison, but the writing and style reminded me of the Spike Milligan. And like Milligan’s writing, I would love to see Go To Helena Handbasket converted to radio or television; in the hands of right people it would become a cult classic.

I'll leave the final words to Fifi Fofum, a character described as Joan Crawford on crack cocaine:

"Grab a cloud ya torpedoes or I'll squirt metal and fill ya so full of holes yous could double up as a tea bag. I've got plenty of swift so don't be bunnies and sit on your keisters and hold your yaps. One crack out of any of you and I'll pat you with a spade."

Well, I wasn’t imagining it …

This summer it’s felt like I’ve been living inside of a washing machine – it seems to have been raining every day accompanied by blustery winds. Ireland has always had its fair share of rainy days (that’s why there are forty shades of green) but the last three summers have been a washout – literally. The year seems to have blurred into a single season. Met Eireann have just confirmed my suspicions. To quote, “Rainfall totals were above normal everywhere for the third successive summer, with around twice the average rainfall at some stations.” For some parts of the country, including where I live, it has been the wettest summer since records began – rainfall was 199% higher than the season average between 1960 and 1990. It rained more than 1mm for over 50 days during the three months of June, July and August.

I thought climate change was meant to bring us warmer, sunnier weather. Instead, I’m starting to forget what the sun looks like (especially since we took a staycation this year, wandering around in the pouring rain out West). Can we please go back to how it was a few years ago? I know we used to moan about the fact that it rained all the time back then, but we were wrong. It only rained most of the time. I’ll take most to all every time.

Review of The Reapers by John Connolly, Hodder and Stoughton (2008)

Louis used to be a Reaper – an elite assassin – until he started to question who he was killing and why. His father-like handler, Gabriel, had let him walk away to start a new life with his partner, Angel. Now someone seems intent on seeking revenge for a life Louis cut short, Gabriel is back on the scene, and another former Reaper – Louie’s arch-nemesis, Bliss – has seemingly resurfaced. One of Louis’s businesses is attacked, then his apartment. A reclusive, wealthy business seems to know who the perpetrator is, a long time rival that he would also like neutralised. He points the path to a remote farmstead in upstate New York and when Gabriel is shot, Louis decides to follow the path to bring the situation to a resolution thus heading into the trap.

It had been some years since Louis and the man named Gabriel had met, but two men whose lives had once been so closely linked could never truly sever the bond between them. In a sense, it was Gabriel who had brought Louis into being, who had taken a boy with undeniable talents and forged him into a man who could be wielded as a weapon. It was to Gabriel that those who needed to avail themselves of Louis’s services had once come. He was the point of contact, the filter. His precise status was nebulous. He was a fixer, a facilitator. There was no blood on his hands, or none that one could see. Louis trusted him, to a degree. There was too much about Gabriel that was unknown, and unknowable. Still, Louis was conscious of something that resembled affection for his old master.

John Connolly’s writing flows along like a lyrical river; his narrative structure is excellent, tugging the reader from one sentence to the next. That said, whilst I like Connolly’s books - and this was no exception - The Reapers wasn’t in the same league as some of the other books in the series. The problem for me is that book is effectively the back story to Louis and Angel, the friends of his regular main character Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker – the former police detective who mourns the savage death of his wife and daughter and is inexorably drawn to trouble. The result is an in-depth explanation of Louis’s past in particular, to the extent that precious little happens for large chunks of the book. The description above is the entire plot – practically nothing happens. In the first 170 odd pages the only action is the attack on Louis’s garage business and his apartment and they only take up a few pages. Back story and in-depth characterization is fine, but as a reader I wanted story. When the action did arrive at the remote farmstead it was fairly predictable and lacked the kind of twists and turns that I normally associate with Connolly’s work. What saved this book was the quality of Connolly’s writing and the story within the story of Louis’s recruitment as a reaper, which was superb.

The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I've enjoyed this week
The First Line - Do Some Damage
Namaskar to Joan D'Silva - Crime Scraps
Bookseller pens mystery about book hound - Publisher's Weekly
Tips from Kurt Vonnegut - Adventures in Writing
Tales from the No 62 bus - Big Beat from Badsville
How timely it was, how timely - Crime Always Pays
Big Books - Do Some Damage
Murder he wrote - Irish Times

My posts this week
Review of The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri
The largest geopolitical project in living memory
August Reviews
Review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees
The Neutral Isle
Logjects: Objects the record their own use
Review of Zoo Station by David Downing
Saturday Snippet: He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

My present book wish is ...
For Donna at Big Beat from Badsville to take the Number 62 bus stories and make them into a similar book to 'He Died with a Felafel in His Hand' which I wrote about yesterday. If the book is as funny as the blog entries (and Go to Helena Handbasket, which I've now nearly finished) it would be a classic. (I love the fact that the Bus No 62, top right, is for all stops to Barking!)

Saturday Snippet: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

In the early 1990s John Birmingham lived with 89 people in a dozen different shared houses in Melbourne and Brisbane and kept notes on all of them. He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (Yellow Press, 1994) reveals snippets about the flotslam of housemates that drifted through his various abodes and details some hilarious anecdotes of the goings-on and the weird twilight world of shared multi-unit, rental accommodation. It's one of my favourite books with a guaranteed smirk or belly laugh on every page. What the book reveals is that everybody has strange little quirks, and some have very large ones, that drives other people nuts; and that friendships grow, twist and mutate, alliances form and fracture, and people bond and then fall out spectacularly. It starts thus,

He died with a felafel in his hand. We found him on a bean bag with his chin sitting on the top button of a favourite flannelette shirt. He'd worn the shirt when we'd interviewed him for the empty room a week or so before. We were having one of those bad runs, where you seem to interview about thirty people every day and they are all total zipper heads. We really took this guy in desperation. He wasn't A-list, didn't have a microwave or anything like that, and now both he and his felafel were cold. Our first dead housemate. At least we got some bond off him.

If you've never lived in shared housing and want to know what it can be like or you want to re-live the twilight moments, then this is the book for you. I've just googled the book and see it was made into a stage-play and also a movie - I'll have to check that out sometime.

Review of Zoo Station by David Downing, Old Street Publishing (2007)

New Year’s eve 1939, the Nazis are ratcheting up the political pressure on their Polish and Czechoslovakia neighbours, and John Russell a freelance English journalist living in Berlin, is in a Danzig bar. When he returns to his hotel a Russian, who’d he’d last seen in 1924, is waiting for him with a proposition – to write pro-Nazi articles for Russian newspapers whilst simultaneously spying for them. Tired and frustrated with the Nazi regime he agrees, heading back to Berlin to his actress girlfriend and his son from his first marriage to a former German communist. Whilst researching and writing his stories he starts to teach English to the daughters of a Jewish couple who still hope to gain visas to travel to Britain, and is drawn into the story of his American journalist neighbour who has heard about a new, secret law to exterminate disabled people and then mysteriously commits suicide. Soon the Gestapo and British intelligence are also asking him for favours. All Russell wants to do is keep his head down and stay in Germany so he can remain with his loved ones; but he also wants to avenge the American’s death, save the Weisner family and undermine the Nazi regime in whatever way he can. Soon he’s criss-crossing Europe, sourcing and couriering dangerous information, hoping that everything works out as he hopes.

‘So what are you here for?’
‘Ah.’ Shchepkin hitched his trouser leg again. ‘I am here to offer you work.’
Russell raised an eyebrow. ‘You? Who exactly do you represent?’
The Russian shrugged. ‘My country. The Writer’s Union. It doesn’t matter. You will be working for us. You know who we are.’
‘No,’ Russell said. ‘I mean, no I’m not interested. I …’
‘Don’t be so hasty,’ Shchepkin said. ‘Hear me out. We aren’t asking you to do anything which your German hosts could object to.’ The Russian allowed himself a smile. ‘Let me tell you exactly what we have in mind. We want a series of articles about the positive aspects of the Nazi regime.’

I enjoyed Zoo Station without being bowled over by it. It’s an interesting story, competently told, with care and attention given to the historical context but lacking in high drama (despite all the potential, I was never 'on the edge of my seat'). The characterization is okay; the people populating the story are in the main ordinary folk trying to get by and the result is that they’re generally not very memorable. John Russell is a reluctant hero; he’s got no quirks or odd traits and he’s polite and sensible in dress and action. The pacing was fairly even until the end where it sped up. It would have been better I think to keep it even to the conclusion, using the plot to try and crank up the tension rather than the pace. Instead the ending feels hurried and a little ragged. The American journalist part of the story simply dropped from the plot after a while, pulled back in at the end but not very effectively and without revealing its resolution (in terms of the newspaper story or the source of the information). Overall, an interesting first novel and I’ll probably pick up the next book in the series to see how Russell gets on as an English man in Germany as war breaks out.

Logjects: objects that record their own use

When Mack posted about his Kindle last week, one of the questions I asked him was whether it was a logject – that is, it recorded its own use with the possibility that the information gathered about his reading habits was transmitted back to Amazon. Amazon already gathers data concerning the purchases we make and if Kindles are networked logjects then they can marry that data up with what we actually do with those purchases (including our reading habits and what information we add to them, such as making notes). I’ve no idea if Kindle is a logject, and if it is what kind of logject it is, but I said I’d write a post explaining that neologism (a term that Martin Dodge and myself coined through a refinement and expansion of Bleeker’s notion of a blogject). I'm sorry if what follows is a bit academic, but it's culled from a paper we had published in Environment and Planning A earlier in the year (working paper here) but hopefully it might prove interesting because it concerns how our everyday objects are being remade to do different kinds of work in the world, including recording and communicating their use (and I'm sure they will increasingly turn up as plot devices in novels in the coming years).

The easiest way to introduce the notion of a logject is to consider the ways in which the embedding of software is changing the nature of everyday objects. Many objects now have software physically embedded into their material form. On the one hand software is used to enhance the functional capacity of what were previously ‘dumb’ objects enabling them to sense something of their environments and to perform different tasks, or the same tasks more efficiently, or to be plugged into new distributed networks that afford some value-added dimension such as data exchange on how they are used. On the other hand, software is used to underpin the design and deployment of new classes of objects, particularly mobile devices (such as PDAs, MP3 players, Satnav), that in some cases replace analogue equivalents (diaries and filofaxes, personal tape and CD stereos, paper maps and gazetteers) or undertake entirely new tasks. In some cases, software is not essential to an object’s use (such as digital clock in a cooker), but in others software has become vital to the performance of the object. The latter Martin and myself call codejects, of which there are three types differing with respect to their programmability, interactivity, capacity for remembering, their ability for anticipatory action in the future based on previous use, and their relational capacities. In summary these classes are:

Hard codejects that rely on firmware to function but are not programmable and therefore have low levels of interactivity (e.g. a USB memory stick).

Unitary codejects are programmable, exhibit some level of interactivity, although this is typically limited and highly scripted, and they do not record their work in the world. They can be subdivided into two groups:
(a) closed codejects that work independently of the world around them (e.g., alarm clock, CD player)
(b) sensory objects that sense and react to the world around them (e.g., a heating control unit using a digital thermostat).

Logjects are objects that have an ‘awareness’ of themselves and their relations with the world and which, by default, automatically record aspects of those relations in logs that are stored and re-used in the future. More specifically, a logject is (1) uniquely identifiable, (2) has awareness of its environment and is able to respond to changes in that environment that are meaningful within its functional context, (3) traces and tracks its own usage in time and/or space, (4) records that history, (5) can communicate that history across a network for analysis and use by other agents (objects and people), (6) can use the data it produces to make automated, automatic and autonomous decisions and actions in the world without human oversight, (7) is programmable and thus mutable to some degree (that is, it is possible to adjust settings, update parameters and to download new firmware). They can be subdivided into two groups based on their capacity to work independently of wider networks:

(a) permeable logjects - relatively self-contained units such as a MP3 player, a PDA, and a satnav (all of which have the potential to be connected to wider networks). Such devices trace and track their usage by default, recording this data as an embedded history; are programmable in terms of configurable settings and creating lists (e.g. play lists of songs, diary entries and route itineraries); perform operations in automated, automatic and autonomous ways; and engender socially meaningful acts such as entertaining, remember an important meeting and helping an individual to travel between locations.

(b) networked logjects - these logjects do not function without continuous access to other technologies and networks. Such logjects track, trace and record their usage locally but their full histories are also recorded externally to its immediate material form. Some networked logjects are relatively fixed in the environment (e.g. satellite/cable television control boxes, home security monitoring systems) and others are inherently mobile (e.g., mobile telephones, telematically monitored vehicles) that use a range of communication technologies such as GSM, Wifi, Bluetooth to maintain a network connection.

The other way objects are changing is that they are becoming uniquely identifiable through new tagging, so it becomes possible to know the logistics and purchase history of every item, but that's for another post.

I suspect that a Kindle is at the very least permeable logject, recording its own usage. The key question with respect to surveillance and privacy is whether it’s a network logject communicating back to Amazon details of our reading patterns and our notes? If anyone has the answer I’d be interested to know.

The Neutral Isle

It’s 70 years to the day that Ireland declared its neutrality in the Second World War. After Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept 1st, the Irish Government led by Eamon de Valera declared a state of emergency and neutrality on Sept 2nd and ratified the The Emergency Powers Act on Sept 3rd. The Act, which led to the war rather euphemistically being termed The Emergency in Ireland, effectively gave the Irish government license to run the country as it saw fit for the duration of European hostilities including powers of censorship of media and mail and internment.

Neutrality was broadly welcomed by all political parties in Ireland. The country had been an independent state for less than 20 years and was still working its way through the legacy of its civil war and division from Northern Ireland. It was also a poor nation that was ill-equipped to fight any kind of war or defend itself from the kind of Blitzkrieg attack as unleashed on Poland (there were only a handful of anti-aircraft guns, a couple of obsolete planes, and a tiny professional army).

Officially favouring no side, neutrality was strictly adhered to throughout the war with British, French, German, Japanese, the United States and other states representatives based in Dublin. The government nor the press endeavoured to show any partiality to either side (the media were particularly hamstrung as they could not print or play newsreels or films that explicitly favoured one side or could be considered propaganda) and sought to repress all foreign intelligence activity regardless of source (which it actually did effectively despite the rumour-mongering of the British that Ireland was awash with German spies).

Neutrality was designed to both to stave off an attack from either side (and contingency plans were made to deal with invasion by both Britain and Germany) and to maintain harmonious relations within the Irish population many of whom were anti-British (though not necessarily pro-Nazi) after independence and the on-going debate over Northern Irish sovereignty. This neutral position clearly annoyed Churchill who repeatedly tried to bully de Valera into passing the treaty ports back into British hands and cast quite scurrilous accusations about Ireland’s role in the war, which were largely unfounded.

In practice, Ireland lent towards the Allies. Allied airmen and sailors were passed back across the border, intelligence gathered by Irish agencies was secretly shared with the British, over 50,000 Irish men served in the British armed forces (there are only a handful of documented cases of Irish men serving in German forces), hundreds of thousands of men and women worked in British factories, and German Legation activities were heavily monitored and policed. In addition, de Valera interned scores of IRA men – those most likely to be sympathetic to Germany - in the Curragh camp where 3 died on hunger strike seeking political status. The wish to remain neutral to the very end of the war though did backfire to a certain degree in the final days of the European conflict when de Valera presented condolences on the death of Hitler to the German Legation in Dublin (the only official head of state to do so). At this time it was clear the war was over and the atrocities of the death camps were well known and the gesture almost certainly did great damage to Ireland’s political reputation at the time especially with respect to the United States.

Review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees, Mariner Books (2007)

Omar Yussef works as a teacher at a United Nations school in the Palestinian district of Bethlehem. With his detailed knowledge of political, religious and cultural history he tries to educate his students as to the reasons for the complex social and geographical nature of their lives and to instil a philosophy of understanding, respect and negotiation rather than hate and violence. Given the daily tit-for-tat firing of weapons across the valley between the local Martyrs Brigade and Israeli Army and regular violent deaths amongst the communities they live in, along with the vocal, hostile ideology of their parents and kin, his teachings do not always find a receptive audience. One of his success stories is his former pupil, George Saba, a Palestinian Christian. When a local Martyrs Brigade leader is killed by an Israeli sniper, Saba is accused by the Muslim martyrs of being a collaborator and is arrested by the local Palestinian police force. Both Yussef and the authorities know that Saba is innocent, but the leader’s death demands justice to be seen to be done to sate the community’s outrage, even if that means convicting and executing an innocent man. Unwilling to accept such an injustice, Omar Yussef sets out to find the real collaborator and free his friend, putting his own life at risk as he tangles with the Martyrs Brigade and the Palestinian authorities.

“When you’re a stimulating teacher, you had better be careful. You never know what you might inspire people to do.” George laughed and put his hand on Omar Yussef’s. “Don’t worry, Abu Ramiz. It’s not your fault. I thought about it for days, every time they came to the neighbourhood to shoot across the valley. Finally I knew I had to act. You see, I thought I understood the gunmen better than you, better than my dad. In South America, I saw thugs like them. They were cowards when they were confronted. Remember, I lived in Chile when the military dictatorship was forced to give up power. But unfortunately there is no-one here to back people up, no law. The criminals have made themselves the law. They shoot at some soldiers, and it transforms them into representatives of the national struggle. That makes them unassailable and they can abuse anyone they want, particularly Christians who are weak already. That was my mistake. I didn’t see that clearly enough. But I don’t regret it.”

As first novels go, they won’t come much better than this for a reader like me who likes a
mix of a strong plot, good characterization and memorable characters, informative contextual history, good pacing, a balanced blend of action and dialogue which lacks overly thick description, and a story that stimulates my interest in a place and issue and stays with me long after I finish reading it. Most of what I know about the daily lives of Palestinians is gleamed from television news. Beynon Rees opens up their world beyond suicide bombers and the conflict with the Israeli state, providing a rich, multi-textual portrait of family life, culture, politics, and institutional structures as an integral aspect of the story without it ever descending to a sermon or it rising above the story of Omar and his quest to save George. What he makes clear is that, like every society, Palestine is layered and fractured, riven with as many internal differences as exist as between it and the society it supposedly opposes. Benyon Rees’ skill is to transport you into the sights, sounds and tastes of Omar’s world, providing a rich sense of place along with a riddle of a story (although I did have a fairly good idea as to the identity of the real collaborator a long way from the end despite the efforts to keep a few potential suspects in the frame – there were enough other twists though to make this an entertaining read to the last page).

It’s a week since I finished reading The Collaborator of Bethlehem and I’ve already discussed it with half a dozen people (usually in a discussion that also involves Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin – my review here). The second book in the series is A Grave in Gaza and I hope to purchase it shortly to catch up with the humane and slightly chaotic life of Omar Yussef and his family.

The largest geopolitical project in living memory

Over the past year I've read a number of novels set either just before or during the second world war including books by Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Marek Krajewski, Hans Fallada, Carlo Lucarelli and others, along with some straight history books, but I haven't been keeping track of history itself. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and Germany's invasion of Poland (The Polish Officer by Furst does a good job of capturing the first few days as Poland desperately tries to put in place the basis for resistance knowing that it is being over-run).

Of course, I haven't pre-prepared a post, but I have been thinking about doing one based on a conversation I had with Martin Dodge last week, so I'm hastily moving it forward. At his Mapping Manchester exhibition we were talking about whether the John Ryland's library had survived the blitz intact and that led onto a discussion about bomb census maps. Martin kindly sent me on a link to a story that discussed them. I'd be really interested to take a look at them in more detail. I always remember the two old ladies who lived next door when I was growing up who used to describe going up Caldy Hill to watch Liverpool and Birkenhead docks being bombed. They were great story-tellers - you felt like you were there watching the cities burn.

The tracing below is from the Christmas raids of Dec 20-22, 1940 on the Merseyside area when 365 people died. It is designed to be overlain on a base map, hence why there are so few roads, etc. shown (much cheaper to keep a clean map and have lots of tracings). A daily tracing would be taken so that the pattern of bombing could be tracked over time.


The tracing shows the area between Bootle and Walton and plots 26 separate incidents in quite a confined area. Each incident is given a number, followed by the size and type of bomb, and the location of any unexploded ordnance. Collectively the maps reveal that by the end of the war Liverpool was the second most bombed UK city after London.

These other maps are of Brighton and Bristol.

I've been fascinated by the Second World War for a while now given it was the largest and most complex geopolitical event in modern history with many civil wars operating inside transnational wars, and political ideology explicitly reshaping territory and lives through violence. I've been trying to collect books that explains what went on different parts of the world, including some that traditionally get looked over (e.g. Aleutian Islands [the only bit of the USA occupied by the Japanese], Malta, Isle of Man, Ireland, etc) so I can have a go at mentally stitching the whole lot together.

I'll perhaps try to do something on Irish neutrality tomorrow. Ireland declared its neutrality on the 2nd Sept, the day before Britain and France declared war. It was a policy that was rigidly maintained right to the end of the war.

Lest we forget ...

August Reviews

An interesting and varied month of reading. Here's a list of last month's reviews.

Black Delta Night by Jessica Speart ***
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke **
Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty *****
Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir ***
Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken ***
Winter Frost by R.D. Wingfield ****
Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker ***
Black Out by John Lawton ****
Bombs over Dublin by Sean McMahon ***
Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie *****
The Last Llanelli Train by Robert Lewis ***
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski ***
The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri ****

My book of the month was Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand. Taut and lyrical, snappy dialogue, and a smart story.

Review of The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, published by Picador (2003, in Italian in 1994)

Silvio Luparello, a well connected Sicilian politician, is found dead in his car by two garbage collectors at the Pasture, a narrow strip of brush land between an abandoned chemical plant and a beach, a liminal space of prostitution and drugs. It seems as if Luparello has died in flagrante, but Inspector Salvo Montalbano is not so sure. Tantalisingly out of reach, something is not quite right and despite the pressure of his boss, the local judge and a bishop to close the case he keeps returning to the source of his unease – why would Luparello, known for his discretion, risk everything by visiting the Pasture? And who was in the car with him at the time he died? Slowly, but surely, he starts to form water into shapes, but which one is the truth?

I had a little friend, a peasant boy, who was a little younger than me. I was about ten. One day I saw that my friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot and a square milk carton on the edge of a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively.

‘ “What are you doing?” I asked him. And he answered me with a question in turn.

‘ “What shape is water?”

‘ “Water doesn’t have a shape!” I said, laughing. “It takes the shape you give it.”’

Camilleri’s writing seems breezy and effortless, sucking the reader into the seedy underbelly of Sicilian high society and the easy going and urbane world of Inspector Montalbano, and I zipped through The Shape of Water in a few hours. Camilleri keeps the pace fairly brisk by minimising the description of scenes and characters to their essences. His characterization and sense of place suffers little however. Often quite humorous, the story is well plotted and from the mid-point on it starts to twist and loop, cleverly tying up different strands and proving Montalbano was right to have doubts. I found The Shape of Water to be a more satisfying read than August Heat (my review here) although the latter book had a more rounded list of supporting police characters.

Other reviews:
Eurocrime
(Another) 52 Books

The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I've enjoyed this week
A fictional interlude - Big Beat from Badsville
Roses are red, dahlias are blue - Crime Always Pays
Dial S for Suspense - Criminal Brief
Jef Geeraets - The Public Prosecutor - International Noir
The Build-Up, Philip Gwynne - Mysteries in Paradise

My posts
Review of Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie
Pet Peeves
Mapping Manchester
Scene of the Crime
Review of The Last Llanelli Train by Robert Lewis
And may god bless all that sail in her
Review of Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski
Saturday Snippet: Black Out

The conference I attended last week was okay; all it really reminded me was 1) I have a number of obligations to people (I'm under contract to deliver three books, two book series, and two journals); 2) they are very dangerous places in terms of picking up new obligations (I've agreed to do two other books). My ambition when attending these events is that I'll meet at least one new person who might be interesting to work with and I pick up at least one new, useful idea. I met a couple of new people, but the conference was a washout on the ideas front. Some of the papers I went to were shockingly poor, but there seems to be a long tail in academia (0r, as in the cartoon above, a short tail and a pile of bodies).

Saturday Snippet: Black Out

John Lawton has a fine eye for capturing war torn London. In Black Out the year is 1944 and the blitz is still lingering on. I reviewed the book ten days or so ago and I thought I'd share a passage from the book that might wet your appetite.

At the foot of Eros's pedestal two young women sat in shirtsleeves, daring all for spring sun, and shared a single cigarette.

He walked into Piccadilly, watching his shadow dance before him. In the brightness of such light the city contrasted sharply with the weather. London thawed. London budded. London ached. Like a muscle stretched and strained for too long it yearned to relax. The sense of action, the sense of an ending being almost tangible. Troy found himself wondering if the city would not expire with the forst breath of spring like some old man who had spent his energy enduring the depth of winter and had none left for the simple pleasures of living. What the sun revealed was a city of peeling, blistered paint, of broken, boarded-up windows, of shattered walls and open roofs, of four long years of make do and mend. It was a city scorched and scarred, patched and tattered in the light of spring.

I was also taken by this line:

'Of course war's an utter fucking picnic! Millions getting slaughtered for the benefit of the nostalgia of the survivors.'

Given the plethora of novels, TV series, documentaries and Hollywood movies that focus on the second world war, it's difficult to not think of them as a perverse nostalgia industry built on a mountain of dead bodies (even if some of them help us to think through why it happened and shocking waste of life, rather than simply providing entertainment).

I've already ordered the second book in the series, Old Flames, which moves forward to 1956. If its written with the same prose and eye for place I'm sure to enjoy.

Review of Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski, translated by Danusia Stok, Maclehose Press (2008, in Polish 2006)

1933 and the Nazis have recently taken power and are in the process of infiltrating and re-organising the institutions of the Weimer Republic. In Breslau, Criminal Counsellor, Eberhard Mock, Deputy Head of the Criminal Department of Police Praesidium, is not only trying to maintain his authority and power base, but make sure that when the political axe falls on his boss he's promoted into his position. Mock is entirely capable of achieving such an end because he’s an arch-player of the political game, happy to double deal, blackmail and coerce. When 17 year old Marietta von der Malten, the daughter of a Baron, is found murdered in a railway carriage, along with her governess and a railway worker, Mock takes charge. The three victims have been killed by scorpion stings, the daughter’s stomach also slashed open, and strange writing is scrawled on the wall. Mock is well aware of the stakes and sets to work to find the killer knowing that the Gestapo also has an interest in the case. Through some string pulling by Mock’s boss, a young policemen from Berlin, Herbert Anwaldt, is foisted upon him. Mock and Anwaldt form a close 'father-son' partnership during the course of the sweltering summer as they are drawn into a dark world of torture, false confessions, school girl prostitution, and secret sects, as they seek to uncover a dark secret that has serious consequences for both of their futures.

This book should have been right up my street – strong characters, historical pre-World War II setting, interesting plot – but it just never clicked for me. I did enjoy it, but I felt I should have loved it. Somehow it fell a little flat. I’ve been trying to work out why. I think part of the problem is that every character in the book is highly flawed and criminally inclined. All the female characters are prostitutes or madams, all the male characters are police or Gestapo or aristocracy, all highly corrupt. There were no ‘good guys’ only those that weren’t Nazis. I read somewhere that Death in Breslau was Chanderesque. I’ll go along with the idea that Krajewski’s writing is noir, but its doesn’t have the first person narrative of Chandler, nor his craft at creating a way of seeing the world – Chandler always had very rich descriptions of place that didn’t just put you in the landscape but made sure you were seeing it through his lenses (see this post for more on this). And Eberhard Mock is not an anti-hero in the Philip Marlowe mould, he has institutional power and he uses it, even torturing and disposing of people to get the information he needs. I’m starting to think that the book had no heros or anti-heros, just villains. As a reader I was left with little vested interest in any character. As the plot unfolded it became a little fantastic, with the connections to The Crusades and some of the coincidences stretching the story to almost breaking point. Given all that was happening during this period there was really no need for this kind of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' kind of angle.

I wasn’t quite sure where Breslau was, so once I’d finished the book I decided to google it. It’s the German name for Wroclaw in what is now Lower Silesia is South West Poland. Prior to the First World War Breslau was in Prussia and was the sixth largest city in the German Empire. By 1932, just prior to the novel’s setting, the Nazis gained their third highest vote in Breslau, making it one of their strongholds, and from 1933 onwards they started to persecute their political enemies, constructing a series of concentration camps in the region. The novel gave me the impression that Breslau was a small, provincial town. Clearly the book didn’t manage to get this broader contextual history across and the pictures I found show a very ornate medieval city, which never formed in my mind’s eye for some reason.

Death in Breslau passed a few hours, but something just didn’t click for me in the way that I hoped it would. That said, I’d be prepared to give the other books a second chance. Thanks to Uriah at Crime Scraps for the recommendation. Other reviews can be found at:

Eurocrime 1
Eurocrime 2
Reviewing the Evidence
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