Review of City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance (Snubnose Press, 2012)

Nearing his fiftieth birthday, Crowe has been released from prison and has headed back to Memphis.  Whilst inside the ‘Old Man’ has died, a more brutal leader has succeeded him, and the criminal landscape has changed.  The new leader might have ordered a hit on Crowe when he was in prison, but after the death of his wife to a religiously inspired serial killer he wants him to use his talents as an enforcer to exact revenge.  Crowe is prepared to oblige, but also has revenge in mind.  His plan, however, is violently derailed and he finds himself up against a radical Christian sect who have ‘rescued’ a set of serial killers to do ‘God’s work’.

The strengths of City of Heretics are the principle character of Crowe, the sense of context and place, and the general story arc and hardboiled nature.  Crowe is getting on in age, but is unwilling to hand in the towel, and despite not quite being as robust as he once was he has the wits and experience to hold his own.  And he’s not about to let pain and poor odds get in his way, despite being put up against his own past and a gaggle of serial killers loosely controlled by a religious group.  The narrative has a nice pace as it builds to bloody climax and I loved the closing couple of pages.  That said, it took a little while before the book clicked into place and I was firmly hooked in; I had a hard time buying the character of Rad; and I found the prose a little uneven at times, sparkling in some places and a little flat in others.  Admittedly, all minor stuff in the grand scheme of things.  Overall, an entertaining hardboiled tale that turns into a real page turner with an ending that makes me want to read the sequel, assuming one is in the pipeline.

Social media etc

On Monday it was year since I started using Twitter and Facebook.  I’m a sporadic user of Facebook, which I find tends to be more personally focused.  It’s a different story with Twitter.  Despite my deep scepticism as to the utility of 140 character posts before starting, I’ve found Twitter to be useful on a host of fronts - discovery, dissemination, conversation, identification.  Through following journalists, academics and book bloggers (I’m pretty choosy who I follow - people who have interesting things to share; I’m not interested in personal info and what people are wearing or eating, or where they are; or in following back for the sake of it), I’ve a constant stream of news and links to stories, articles and new books, letting me keep on top of developments in fields I’m interested in and to find new, interesting scholars and authors.  I can also share my own work, whether that be blog posts, papers or books, and that of others, and I have little doubt that people have discovered interesting stuff through my tweets.  I’ve also had a series of interesting conversations with folk, and identified potential contributors for events and projects.  Put short, it’s become a core part of my academic life.  I would have scoffed at that suggestion a little over a year ago.  My handle is @robkitchin

Review of The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin (Viking/Penguin, 2010)

1947 in Melbourne, Australia, and Charlie Berlin is back working as a detective after serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force, flying night missions over Germany.  He’s returned to find himself at the bottom of the pile, his colleagues having advanced whilst he was away, and with a head full of demons after being shot down and housed in a prisoner of war camp in Poland.  When the railway payroll is yet again robbed, he’s packed off to the small rural twin-town of Albury-Wodonga to investigate.  By sending him alone to solve a case that has already confounded others it seems that his bosses have set him up to fail, and the local cops are hardly welcoming of the arrival of a city detective.  From his base at The Diggers Rest Hotel, Berlin sets about tracking down the armed gang of robbers with the help of a rookie constable and a beautiful, feisty local reporter, who both see Berlin and the case as a way to better things and places.  Berlin though is not just taking on the gang, but also the memories that haunt him, especially the horror of the anti-aircraft fire, the death march back towards Germany from his Polish camp, and the execution of a young Jewess.

The Diggers Rest Hotel won the Ned Kelly Award for best crime fiction novel in Australia in 2011.  McGeachin drops the reader into rural Australia in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with its small town politics, social unease about change, and folk traumatised through what they’d experienced or lost.  He is especially strong at characterisation, populating Albury-Wodonga with an interesting set of people, all struggling in some way to make do, or get on, or come to terms with the past and the present.  In particular, Charlie Berlin and Rebecca Green make for an enjoyable, feisty pairing.  Add in a compelling storyline of Berlin investigating a set of payroll robberies by an armed gang and you have a very nice mix - a strong sense of place and historical and social contextualisation, wonderful characterisation, and interesting plot, told through engaging prose.  Although the resolution was credible, the only slightly jarring element was the ending, which seemed to come about ten pages too soon and left a couple of threads dangling that are hopefully dealt with in the next book in the series.  Overall, a very enjoyable read on several levels.

Lazy Sunday Service

We watched a thoughtful and moving Japanese movie last night called Departures (which won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2009, and loads of other awards). A young man loses his job as a cello player in a Tokyo orchestra and moves back home to his small town with his wife.  Seeking work he answers an advert to work in 'departures', thinking it might be a travel agency.  Instead, it is to undertake the ritual of preparing the dead for their coffin.  Given the taboos concerning death in Japanese culture, it is a job that few people want, including the young man.  But it is work and it is cathartic and allows him to see the world afresh, even as those around him shun him. The film was beautifully shot, well acted, and had a very good script.  One of those films that makes you think about life - and in this case, also death.  I'd recommend to anyone who enjoy reflective, thoughtful movies.


My posts this week:

Review of Icelight by Aly Monroe
Some tasty US imports
Some media pieces from today
Review of Liar Moon by Ben Pastor
Killing time
Still living in a haunted landscape

Killing Time

‘Tom.’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Are you in or out?’

‘I just told you, I’m thinking.’

‘What’s there to think about?’ the dealer asked.

‘The ten bucks in the middle of the table.’

‘It’s like playing with a sloth!’

‘Let him think,’ the fourth player said. ‘It ain’t gonna make a difference to who wins the pot.’

‘Except we’ll all be a few minutes nearer to the ever after with nothing to show for them.’

‘Like that matters.  Since retirement what have any of us have done except kill time?’

‘Tom?’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Jesus.’

'Get another beer and stop rushing the man.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Liar Moon by Ben Pastor (Bitter Lemon Press, 2012)

September 1943 and Wehrmacht Major Martin Bora wakes in an Italian hospital minus a hand, with the doctors fighting to save his leg, a victim of an attack by partisans.  The Italian government have recently switched sides, dividing the country into two, with the North still controlled by the Fascists.  As he starts to make his recovery he is asked to help the local police investigate two cases: the murder of a local Fascist hero, and an escaped mad man who has taken to killing people indiscriminately.  Reluctantly he agrees, forming an uneasy alliance with Inspector Sandro Guidi, aware that the case is politically charged and that he still has to perform his usual duties.  The murder seems a relatively open-and-shut case, the main suspect being the victim’s young widow, but neither Bora or Guidi are convinced of her guilt, though for different reasons.     

The real strength of Liar Moon is the character of Martin Bora and the moral ambiguities around his persona and actions.  He’s reserved yet direct, determined, ruthless, and principled, driven by a deep sense of conviction and his aristocratic family tradition.  He’s a soldier in an army of a corrupt and corrupting regime, trying to hold the line between murder and killing, on the one hand relentlessly hunting down partisans and on the other subverting the hunt for Jews.  And losing his hand and nearly losing his leg is not going to slow him down.  Moreover, he remains loyal and dutiful to his wife, despite their failed marriage.  My sense is that regardless of the storyline, he’d be an interesting character to spend some time with.  In Liar Moon, Pastor places him in an interesting historical terrain - Northern Italy just as Italy changes sides - and pairs him with an Italian police inspector to investigate the death of a local Fascist.  She creates a nice sense of place and history, and captures the awkward relations between Axis allies.  For the most part the plot worked well, but faltered at the resolution, which was contrived and came too much from left-field.  This was a shame as the story was coasting along very nicely up to that point.  Nevertheless, this was a thoughtful and enjoyable tale and if the other books in the Bora series are translated I’ll be reading them in due course.

Some media pieces from today

The formal announcement of my ERC Advanced Investigator award has received a whole bunch of media attention today.  Here is the TV piece from the six and nine o'clock evening news on RTE1.   Earlier, I did radio pieces on Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1) and KFM.  The Irish Times covered it twice (here and here), and there were pieces in the Irish Daily Star, Journal.ie, Silicon Republic, Tech Central, and Business and Leadership. 

Some tasty US imports

A nice parcel turned up in the post today.  Five crime novels from the US, all of which I picked on the basis of recommendations and best of 2012 lists.  Now I have to work out where to slot them into the to-be-read pile, though I'm saving Devil in a Blue Dress for my trip to LA in April.

Review of Icelight by Aly Monroe (John Murray, 2011)

The winter of 1947 and London is in the grip of a big freeze, with limited fuel supplies and food and clothes restricted by rationing.  Peter Cotton has been reassigned from colonial intelligence in the Foreign Office’s Colonial Service to Operation Sea-snake, designed to try and protect valuable assets from American pressure to tighten security and the homophobic and paranoid attentions of MI5, MI6 and a MP who has established his own intelligence network.  One such asset is Alexander Watson, an atomic scientist who is vital to Britain’s attempts to join the nuclear age, who picks up men for fleeting sexual encounters.  Aided by Derek, a rent-boy in South London, and Sergeant Dickie Dawkins of Special Branch, Cotton tries to keep a watching brief on Watson and others, but then the scientist is arrested and he is pulled into the murky world of inter-agency rivalries and their hired help in the form of a pair of Glasgow razor boys.  The issue is no longer simply protecting Watson, but how to also protect himself.

Icelight plunges the reader into the frosty world of London in the Winter of 1947 and the emerging cold war.  Monroe creates a vivid sense of place and of social history, with the shortages of just about everything, the black market, and the feeling that Britain is teetering on the edge of a new age, shorn of its empire and beholden to its ‘special relationship’ with America.  And as relations with the Soviet Union sour and a new political war starts, Monroe focuses on the tensions, rivalries and paranoia that flower within and between British intelligence agencies.  She does so through a captivating but, at times, complex and convoluted plot that involves a fairly large cast of characters.  I don’t mind admitting that occasionally I felt I was wandering in icelight, and at a couple of points I stopped and backtracked to reposition my bearings.  What holds the book together is the premise, some lovely passages of writing (I thought the scene with Cherkesov in a restaurant was wonderful), a general sense of social and historical realism, and some nice characterisation.  Cotton is an interesting lead character, who is worldly, shrewd and standoffish, and is complemented by the more earthy Dawkins, and the other characters are well penned.  Overall and intriguing and entertaining read, that whilst complex is thought provoking and nicely resolved.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've just finished reading Liar Moon by Ben Pastor, set in 1943 in Northern Italy and featuring Wehrmacht Major Martin Bora (review to follow this week sometime).  The first book was Lumen set in Poland in 1939.  Both books are interesting because they explore notions of honour and morality in a time of war; Bora, for example, is prepared to kill but not murder; to hunt partisans but not send Jews to their deaths (or at least give them the opportunity to escape).  According to Goodreads there are eight books in the series, and if the rest are translated from Italian, I'll probably work my way through the set.  As yet, I can't see any plans on the Bitter Lemon Press site for the third book to be released, but I'm hoping that it's in the pipeline.

My posts this week

Review of The Devil I know by Claire Kilroy
The TBR grows ...
Fair dinkum
Contemporary, historical crime fiction set in the 1930-50s
Review of Go With Me by Castle Freeman
The evidence proves otherwise

The evidence proves otherwise

‘I never touched her.’

‘Mr Stevens, you were observed to hit Ms Fenton by two witnesses.  You punched her in the face and broke her jaw.’

‘I was still in the pub.  They saw somebody else attack her.’

‘You broke two fingers in your right hand.  The hand you used to hit Ms Fenton.’

‘I didn’t lay a finger on her.’

‘Are you a habitual liar, Mr Stevens?’

‘Are you a habitual wan...’

‘I see you have a quite a temper.  It makes you violent, as my client can testify.’

‘I’m not lying!’

‘I think you’ll find the evidence proves otherwise.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Go With Me by Castle Freeman (Duckworth Overlook, 2008)

In a small rural town in the backwoods of Vermont Sheriff Wingate arrives at work to find a young woman sleeping in her car, clutching a paring knife.  Lillian claims she is being stalked by Blackway, a local bad cop who lost his job after she complained of being shaken-down.  There’s no evidence though that it was Blackway that smashed up her car and killed her cat.  Wingate’s advice is to leave town before Blackway escalates the violence, but the woman is not going to run away like her boyfriend; she wants Blackway dealt with.  The sheriff sends her to an old sawmill where some of the town’s men gather to drink and chat to ask for their help.  They send her off with Lester, a wily old-timer, and Nate the Great, a massive young man with more brawn than brains.  Whilst the pair feel they are a match for Blackway, Lillian is having second thoughts, but once they’re on his trail there’s no backing out.

Go With Me is a country noir novella, full of atmosphere and sense of place.  The great strength of the book, however, is the characterisation, dialogue and prose.  Freeman’s style is all show and no tell, and with a few deft sentences he paints a vivid picture.  The dialogue is absolutely spot-on, with some very well penned scenes where people are talking over and past each other, or at cross-purposes, or where conversations have nice elliptic loops, and sometimes all of these at once.  The story itself is divided in two main strands.  The first is Lillian’s quest to deal with Blackway aided by Lester and Nate.  The second is four old timers chatting about their chances of success as they drink the day away in the mill.  They are nicely complementary, the second providing a kind of contextual commentary on the first.  The plot moves at a relatively swift pace to a tense conclusion.  Whilst the book worked very well as a novella, and would provide a very good basis for a movie, my sense was the story was a little too linear, with no twists or turns or subplots, and if worked up into a longer piece could have been exceptional.  Nonetheless, Go With Me is an engaging and enjoyable slice of country noir.

Contemporary, historical crime fiction set in the 1930-1950s

Yesterday a colleague asked if I could recommend some crime fiction set in 1930s-1950s.  I jotted down a bunch of suggestions on a sticky note.  Last night I decided it would be better to email her links to various reviews and then decided I might as well share it here.  So, if you're interested in historical crime fiction in this period, then you might like books by these authors (I've only picked one book per author, but there are others reviewed on the blog if you search for them).  If you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment.

Icelight by Ali Monroe (London 1946)
The City of Shadows by Michael Russell (Dublin/Danzig 1934)
Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon (Istanbul, 1946)
The Envoy by Edward Wilson (S.E. England, early 1950s)
The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst (Paris 1939)
Silesian Station by David Downing (Germany/Poland 1939)
A Lily of the Field by John Lawton (Vienna 1934/London 1948)
A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill (Australia 1931)
Lumen by Ben Pastor (Poland, 1930)
The Holy Thief by William Ryan (Moscow 1936)
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Paris/Berlin 1939-40)
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Arizona, 1931)
The Silver Stain by Paul Johnston (Crete 1942/2003)
Stratton's War by Laura Wilson (London 1940)
A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (South Africa 1952)
Field Grey by Philip Kerr (France/Cuba/Germany 1931/1954)
The Information Officer by Mark Mills (Malta, 1941)
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell (Berlin 1931)
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski (Breslau 1933)
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (Berlin 1940)
Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli (Italy 1945)
HHhH by Laurent Binet (Czechoslavakia, 1942)
Restless by William Boyd (Pairs, Belgium, US 1939-41; UK 1976)
The Last Sunrise by Robert Ryan (India, Burma, Singapore, China 1941/1948)
The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman (Berlin, 1932)
The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland (Russia, late 1930s)
The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris (Scotland 1946)
The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman (Dusseldorf, 1929/30)
Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn (New York/Berlin 1938)
Ostland by David Thomas (Berlin/Minsk 1940/1959)
Echoland by Joe Joyce (Dublin, 1940)
Once in Another World Brendan John Sweeney  (Ireland, 1937)
Death of a Nationalist by Rachel Pawel (Madrid 1938)
The Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (Los Angeles, 1948)
Last Rights by Barbara Nadel (London, 1940)
A Death in Bordeaux by Allan Massie (Bordeaux, 1940)
In Search of Klingsor by Jorgi Volpi (US, Germany, post-war)
Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin (Australia, 1947)


Updated as of Dec 2013

Fair dinkum

After a protracted process and quite a bit of frustration, The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin and A Decline in Prophets by Sulari Gentill, arrived via its second courier from Australia yesterday (thanks, Pauline and Cian).  As I've noted before (here and here) it's blumming difficult to be fair dinkum about Australian fiction when it's nigh on impossible to buy!  Now I've managed to get my hands on these, I'm looking forward to tucking into them.

The TBR grows ...

I've been on a bit of book buying binge over the past couple months and my active to-be-read pile has got up to about 50 books between fiction, popular non-fiction and academic books.  Not large in the context of some people I know, but very large for me (I usually only have about 10-15 in the pile) - all told it's about half a year's worth of reading.  In particular, I've been snaffling up fiction books.  Above is my tbr on that front (easier to see if you click on it) and I've 8-10 others ordered and another 7 or 8 on the kindle.  Given I've been quite selective in my choices, I at least know it's going to be a very good few months of reading!  However, I must stop buying books until I've worked my way through them all!  On the other hand, all the fiction on the pile is only about 4 months of reading, which isn't very long at all really ...