Lazy Sunday Service

I'm reading Missing in Rangoon by Christopher G Moore at present.  The setting, weather and culture is certainly different to cold, rural Ireland.  The story is peppered with some nice observational touches.  I liked this one as it captures how I think the relationship between my academic work and creative writing:

"As with many reinventions, the original platform remained functional underneath.  The Colonel was still a cop who played the saxophone and not a saxophonist who played at being a cop."

My posts this week:

Review of Norwegian by Night by Derek B Miller
Review of Beautiful, Naked and Dead by Josh Stallings
A Murder in Venice

A Murder in Venice

The three visiting academics stared at the body floating in the canal.

‘You know him?’ the inspector asked.

‘He’s a professor at the university,’ Göran replied. 

‘We were waiting for him,’ Sigrun added.  ‘He said he kept Italian time, not Swiss.’

‘The dead are always late,’ the inspector said. ‘And often in life also.’

‘Water is life,’ Rafaela, the hydrologist, muttered. 

‘Not if you’re drowned, Signora,’ the inspector replied.  ‘You’re going to have to stay in Venice for now.’

‘For how long?’ Göran asked.

‘As long as necessary.  There are worse places to be.  Unless you’re the murderer, that is.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Beautiful, Naked and Dead by Josh Stallings (Heist Publishing, 2011 )

Moses McGuire is not sure what he hates most -- himself or the rotten world he finds himself living in.  Having been drummed out of the marines and served time, he’s approaching forty, his wife has left him, and he’s working as a bouncer at a run-down strip club in LA.  He’s surrounded by losers and hardened and criminal souls, and his closest friends are Kelly, a waitress at the club who declines to strip, and bottles of whiskey.  Contemplating whether to end it all with a bullet through the back of his mouth, he receives a phone call from Kelly asking him to come and rescue her from two thugs from her past.  By the time he catches up with her she’s been tortured and murdered and McGuire gains a new purpose in life: revenge and justice.  And he doesn’t really care who he pisses off in the process of exacting them -- the cops, FBI, the mob, or those working in the strip and prostitution industry -- or if he’ll end up dead.  All that matters is making those responsible pay, and he has the attitude, wheels and firearms to make sure that happens.

Beautiful, Naked and Dead is a hardboiled caper novel that starts at a fair clip and keeps motoring along until its bloody climax.  Everything about the book is hard-edged with soft undertones: the characters, the plot, the prose.  Moses McGuire at one level is a cookie-cut hard man, but Stallings makes him a little vulnerable and complex with a firm moral compass despite his own shady past.  The other characters are a little one-dimensional and cliched, but they perfectly fit the plotline and the fast-paced action.  The strength of the plotting is the relentless pace, nicely realised action scenes and interchanges between characters, strong contextualisation within the stripping industry, and sense of place.  Adding to the whole effect is Stalling’s tough writing voice that is nicely expressive and engaging.  Overall, an entertaining read that has possible movie-script written all over it.

Review of Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller (Faber, 2013)

Following the death of his wife, eighty two year old Sheldon Horowitz has recently moved to Oslo to live with his grand-daughter and her husband.  After a stint as a marine in Korea, he's spent most of his life running a watch and clock repair shop, grieving over the death of his son in Vietnam, for which he blames himself, and looking over his shoulder for North Korean spies bent on exacting revenge for the soldiers he killed during the war.  Unable to speak the language and unsettled by the move and regrets in life, he seems increasingly disconnected from the world and his grand-daughter believes he might be starting to suffer from dementia.  When the upstairs neighbour appears on his apartment doorstep with her young son after a violent argument he takes them in.  But the respite is short lived.  Her attacker breaks down the door and kills the mother as Sheldon and the son hide in the closet.  Afraid the police might hand the boy over to the killer, the two fugitives slip away, intent on making their way to a summer cottage and sanctuary.  Not sharing a language, the old man and young boy sneak through the Norwegian landscape, drawing on Sheldon’s in-grained marine training, as the cops, family, and the mother’s killer search for them.  He might have failed his son, but Sheldon isn’t going to fail the small boy he’s christened ‘Paul’.

There’s a lot to like about Norwegian by Night, especially the wonderful lead character of Sheldon Horowitz.  He’s cranky, difficult, complex, indignant, lovable, principled and caring.  Derek Miller gives him great depth by charting a detailed back story and providing him with a difficult quest.  He surrounds him by other well realised characters and there are some very nice interchanges between them.  The plot is relatively straightforward in terms of Sheldon and the young boys journey, but Miller adds depth and layers through the use of remembrance and contextualisation, and it builds to a tense and dramatic climax.  Much of the story is a wonderful read, shifting the reader through a full spectrum of emotions.  However, the story drifts a little in the middle, providing back story material for other characters rather than keeping the focus more centrally on Sheldon and ‘Paul’, and Paul is the most underdeveloped character in the book (we never once get to see the world through his eyes, unlike several other characters).  I was fine with the resolution, but the ending for me was a little too sudden leaving a number of loose ends with regards to the fate of different characters beyond Sheldon.  Overall, this was a very good read and highly recommended to readers who like character-driven crime fiction.

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm off to Venice for a couple of days this week to attend a meeting and present a talk.  I was hoping to read Alibi by Joseph Kanon, which is set in the city in the 1946, when I was there but the order hasn't arrived at the local bookshop.  I have an unread Donna Leon book on the bookshelf, Blood from a Stone, so I'm going to give that a go instead.  I've not been to Italy before, so I'm looking forward to trip, even if it's only a short visit.

My posts this week
Review of The Twelfth Department by William Ryan
Norwegian by Night
Reading tensions
Unfinished estates and the local property tax
Review of The Big Gold Dream by Chester Himes
Detailed maps of every unit on unfinished estates exempt from the local property tax
Stonework

Stonework

George stared at the pile of grey-blue stones, then bent down and selected one, weighing it in his calloused hands, twisting it round, taking in its shape.  He turned to the half-built wall and slotted it into place.  Testing its fit, it toppled to one side.  He pulled it free, turned it ninety degrees and tried again.  Unsatisfied he placed the stone in another slot, then dropped it to one side.  He stared at the wall, then at the hill across the valley, before gazing back down at the pile of stones, content in the cadence and silence of work. 





A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of The Big Gold Dream by Chester Himes (Avon, 1960)

Alberta Wright has found God via Sweet Prophet Brown’s sermon at a street service on 117th Street, Harlem.  At the height of her religious fervour, she seemingly drops dead.  Her partner, Sugar Stonewall, dashes from the scene not wanting to be around when the cops turn up.  He arrives back at their apartment to find that Alberta’s estranged husband has sold all her furniture, having failed to find her secret stash of cash.  But Sugar and her husband are not the only one’s hunting for Alberta’s money and soon the furniture buyer is murdered at his shop.  Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, two black detectives working the Harlem beat, start to investigate, aware that the body count might rise before they manage to administer justice.

The Big Gold Dream is the fourth book in the Coffin Ed and Grave Digger series.  The strongest element of the story is the sense of place and contextualisation as to life and hustles in Harlem in the 1950s.  However, the characterisation is wafer thin, with next to no back story with respect to any of the various characters, and the two lead detectives hardly feature at all.  What keeps the story together is the plot and pace.  Himes keeps the action moving along in a reasonably convoluted tale about finding a supposed small fortune hidden by a somewhat naive woman.  The telling is a little ragged in places, but it’s a reasonably entertaining caper.

Reading tensions

Over the past couple of months I've been wrestling with the balance between reading fiction and work-related material.  The dilemma is that I have a lot of books I need to read to help me write the academic book I'm working on, but not enough time to read them.  The obvious solution is to scale back on the fiction to slot the non-fiction in.  I've been resisting that, but it's fairly obvious that something is going to have to give and it needs to be the fiction reading.  So, expect a lessening of crime fiction reviews on the blog over the coming months, after which normal service should hopefully resume.  My plan is to still post at least one fiction review a week; more if I continue to resist the need to scale back.

Norwegian by Night

I bought Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller from the local bookstore on Saturday afternoon.  I finished it yesterday morning.  It's one of the those books you devour in a couple of sittings and manages to convey just about every kind of emotion.  The lead character - an eighty two year old former Marine now living with grand-daughter in Oslo - is a wonderful creation.  I'm still mentally digesting the story about how he goes on the run with a small child after witnessing the murder of the boy's mother.  I'll post a review in the next week or so, but suffice to say it's worth checking out.  Of the three covers I've seen browsing the internet, this one is my favourite.

Review of The Twelfth Department by William Ryan (Mantle, 2013)

Moscow, 1937, Captain Korolev, a divorced detective with the local militia is looking forward to spending a week with his young son, who is visiting him for the first time in a while.  He’s barely met Yuri off the train when he’s asked to investigate the death of an important scientist, shot in the back of the head in his exclusive apartment near to the Kremlin.  The scientist has managed to rise up the greasy pole to attain his own research institute through a mix of promising results from dubious science and denouncing colleagues.  Korolev knows the case is a poisoned chalice given the interest of a colonel in the Twelfth Department of the NKVD and he’s relieved when it’s taken away from him.  His respite is short-lived, however.  Not only is he directed back to the case, but he becomes a pawn between two sparring NKVD departments and Yuri disappears.  The challenge is to solve the case whilst negotiating a booby-trapped tightrope in a country where failure has dire consequences and to save his son.  No easy task, but at least he’s armed with tact and guile, and has the support of friends and enemies, all of whom may share his fate if he fails.

The Twelfth Department is the third instalment in Korolev series and sees the detective back in his native Moscow after his excursion to the Ukraine in his last outing.  Ryan does an admirable job of recreating the tension and paranoia of pre-war Russia, and the ways in which ordinary people try to survive and get by in the system.  Korolev is canny, street-wise and willing to take a risk, but he isn’t corrupt nor anti-establishment, instead trying to be a good citizen and comrade in a regime that oppresses many.  Given his job, he is tested often, and in The Twelfth Department Ryan provides a nice conumdrum to solve both in terms of the case and in surviving being a pawn in a game between NKVD departments.  Indeed, this is a well-paced, plot-driven story, and whilst the characters are nicely penned, they are caught in the moment of the story and the reader learns little of their back story or wider situation and it would be interesting to learn a little more about Korolev and his colleagues in the next book.  In compensation, there is a strong sense of place, good contextualisation, and vivid atmosphere.  Overall, an enjoyable read and solid addition to what is shaping up to be a very good series. 

I was fortunate enough to be send an advance copy by the publisher and The Twelfth Department is not published until May, so you have plenty of time to get your advanced order in.

St Patrick's Day reading

Happy St Patrick's Day.  Given it's a day to celebrate all things Irish I've gone back through my reviews and picked out all the novels written by Irish authors in the last twelve months.  There are some cracking stories here, so why don't you join in the festivities by tracking down at least one of them and giving it a read. Or if you want something you can read right now, you could try my short story from earlier in the week, The Case of the Strange White Van, set in Leitrim.

Ratlines by Stuart Neville
The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy
I Hear Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty
The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway
Red Ribbons by Louise Phillips
The City of Shadows by Michael Russell
Slaughter's Hound by Declan Burke
Even Flow by Darragh McManus
A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady
Ghost Town by Michael Clifford

My other posts this week:
Property tax evaluation model and what it means for residential property owners

Review of Last Rights by Barbara Nadel
White van stories
Review of Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer
Stick or twist?

Stick or twist?

‘So, how’s life?’

Susie placed her wine glass on the table.  ‘It’s okay.’

‘That good?’

‘I think it might be time to move on.’

‘Again?  You’ve only been with them two months.’

‘From Simon.’

‘Simon?  Are you crazy?’

‘I ... well, I just ...’

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes.  I ... yes.’

‘And he’s treats you well.’

‘I wouldn’t have lived with him for eight years if he didn’t.’

‘And the bedroom?’

‘Good.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘It just feels ... stale.’

‘Stale can be refreshed.  Finding something better might be more tricky.’

‘But it could be exciting.’

‘Or lonely.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (Hodder, 2010)

Benny Griesel’s home and work life seem to be drifting away from him. He’s been sober for six months, but his wife has still not let him return to the family home. At work he’s been eased to one side, assigned the role of mentor to a new crop of detectives. The day starts badly when he gets an early morning call about the discovery of a body. A short time later he receives a second call; another body has been found. Both are high profile: a young American tourist and the owner of a successful record label. His day is going to be busy and stressful, giving advice to two rookie detectives. Then he discovers that a second American tourist is being chased by a gang of men intent on killing her. Griesel is ordered to take charge of finding and protecting the young woman. But not only is she running scared, she believes that some of the men pursuing her are police officers. The clock is ticking and time is running out for both the woman and Griesel.

Thirteen Hours starts at a brisk pace and hurtles along to its tense conclusion. The journey, however, is not overly linear, with Meyer managing to create a layered, complex and compelling story consisting of two intersected plotlines. The contextualisation is excellent, particularly with respect to the dynamics and politics of the Afrikaans music industry and the South African police force, and the social geography of Cape Town. The characterisation is very nicely realised, especially Griesel and his fellow cops, and Meyer is particularly good at portraying the interplay and dynamics between characters and how these evolve over time and in context. The only slight niggle was the sense that woman being chased should have really been able to find safety in such a large and busy city, especially once she knows the US authorities are also looking for her, yet when she does find refuge she takes a bath rather than calling for help. Other than that, this is a great read - a tense, fast-moving, textured thriller - which definitely whets the appetite for spending more time in Griesel’s company.

White van stories

Yesterday, Patti Abbott posted links to all the entries to her 'white van' challenge - to write a short story involving a white van.  I haven't yet found the time to work my way through all of them, but if you're interested in some short pieces of flash crime fiction head over to Patti's blog pronto.  And here's the link to my story - The Case of the Strange White Van.

Review of Last Rights by Barbara Nadel (Headline, 2005)

1940 in London at the height of the blitz, undertaker and First World War veteran Francis Hancock’s nerves are in shreds.  Unable to descend into the shelters for fear of being buried alive, he wanders the streets in a dazed madness as the bombs fall all around him.  One night he comes across a man who claims to have been stabbed before staggering off.  Two days later, the man turns up in Hancock’s funeral parlour.  The police think he died from shock caused by a bomb blast, but Hancock discovers a small pinprick on his chest which he believes was created by a hat-pin.  Initially, the police are not interested, but after a post-mortem examination they arrest his wife, disbelieving her alibi and aware that she has a chequered history and possible 'bad blood', her mother having murdered her step-father with a hat-pin through the heart.  Hancock is not convinced of the woman’s guilt and having taken in her teenage daughter sets about trying to contact her estranged sisters and to discover who did kill the man.

Last Rights is a kind of a hard-edged cozy: undertaker, Francis Hancock, turns amateur detective, investigating a murder when the police do not at first seem interested, continuing when he feels that they have arrested the wrong person.  The edge is provided by the blitz, working class conditions, prostitution and the black market, and some unsavoury characters.  The story unfolds at a reasonable clip and Nadel’s style is quite engaging.  There is some nice contextualisation with respect to the blitz and the Jewish community in London, the sense of place is quite strong, and the characterisation and familial relations are well realised.  Where the book suffers is with respect to the plot.  The premise is interesting but the execution is weak and contrived at times and the killer is somewhat obvious from a long way out.  There were a number of elements of the story that I just simply did not believe, not least the actions of the police, which made little sense.  Overall, the makings of a good series, but this opening story was undermined by an improbable plot.

3 stars