It’s a Mystery: Three to Keep Me Guessing

Hmm, three detective novels in a row is something of a record for me: it’s a mystery in and of itself that I pulled the books off the shelves that way. Here’s a post with all three, to get caught up…

I’ve had a soft spot for detective Hank Palace, the narrator of Ben H. Winters’s World of Trouble, ever since I read The Last Policeman (previous post), the first novel in a trilogy that ends with World of Trouble. Palace is a down-to-earth, loyal guy who continues investigating crimes despite the fact that an asteroid is hurtling toward earth and about to destroy everything. In World of Trouble, Palace and his ailing dog, Houdini, have come to Ohio to find Palace’s sister, who’s disappeared. Disappearances aren’t unusual in these fictional end days: people have been going “bucket list” for ages but Palace knows something bigger is amiss. There are lots of plot threads to pull in World of Trouble: an attempted murder, a search for a concrete worker, and, of course, Palace’s relationship with his family, ethics, and impending demise. Winters finds a near-perfect balance of humor, grieving, and realism, and he finishes the book in what I think must be the best possible way. Yes, I laughed and I cried, and [mild spoiler] I love the fact that Palace remains true to himself and the social compact ‘til the end. He doesn’t even yell “Police!” near the end of the book, “because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now.”

Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch, the investigator in Jean-François Parot’s The Man with the Lead Stomach, the second book in a series, isn’t quite as endearing or imperiled as Palace but this historical detective novel set in 1761 France made for worthy entertainment. I admit I was more interested in atmosphere than the mystery itself, which involves the rather grisly murder of a courtier’s son. That murder leads to another. Of course. But about that atmosphere: it’s a nice change of pace when there are no fingerprints taken, the investigator travels by horse-drawn carriage, and the detective drinks chocolate for breakfast and lots of wine with his meals, some of which are described in detail, this being a translation from the French. (I opened the book randomly to a page where a cook describes how to cut a rabbit for making pâté…) There are also smells in this early passage describing theatergoers: “There was a disconcerting contrast between their luxurious clothes, and the foul-smelling remnants of wax, earth and horse droppings with which they were soiled.” Michael Glencross’s translation from the French was particularly fun to read because it had some obscure words and terms in common with the book I was working on—this was a perfect way to see them in action in another setting and translated from another language.

Finally, a second book that originated in French: Joël Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, which I read in Sam Taylor’s translation of La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert. The truth about The Truth is that it’s an unholy mess, a blend of a writer coming of age (well, in a sense, two writers coming of age), a satire of the publishing industry, and a murder mystery, with whiffs of Peyton Place and Lolita tossed in. In any case, Marcus (“The Magnificent”) Goldman, a blocked writer who was the toast of New York a year or so ago, comes to the aid of his former writing teacher, Harry Quebert, after Quebert, author of a much-praised novel, is accused of killing a teenage girl, Nola Kellergan, back in 1975; the accusation comes after Kellergan’s body is unearthed in Quebert’s seaside yard nearly twenty years after her disappearance. Quebert lives in Somerset, New Hampshire, so Goldman is dealing with all sorts of small-town relationships, oddballs, and secrets as he interviews townspeople in his quest to free Quebert. Dicker throws in everything from the 1998 ice storm that “paralyzed” lots of New England to the first Obama presidential campaign to lots of seagulls in what feel like attempts to create verisimilitude and capture a time but The Truth is just too filled with extraneous pages, clichéd dialogue, and bits and pieces of disparate genres to come together as a full-fledged novel. Even so, damn it, the book is moderately entertaining and I did read every page. Part of the reason was probably inordinate curiosity after hearing Dicker and his editor from Penguin, John Siciliano, speak at BookExpo America in late May… but I think I’m even more curious to see how writers—not just Dicker but also Winters and Parot—adapt and adjust the detective genre’s typical casts, aesthetics, and plot turns to fit their interests and readers. For a very detailed account of The Truth, check out The Complete Review, here.

Disclaimers: I received review copies of all three books, thank you to the publishers and/or publicists: Eric Smith of Quirk Books for World of Trouble, which will be officially released on July 15; Meryl Zegarek Public Relations for The Man with the Lead Stomach, which was published by Gallic Books; and the nice man at the Penguin booth at BEA, who pointed me to a finished copy of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair masquerading as a galley. Thank you to all!

Up Next: Xu Zechen’s Running through Beijing.

Two Quick Words: Police and Theft

It’s rare that I write about a book the week it hits the New York Times bestseller list but here goes… Jo Nesbø’s Police, which I read in Don Bartlett’s translation of the original Norwegian Politi, is described on the title page as “A Harry Hole Novel.” Meaning Police continues a series of novels about Harry Hole, a gruff, hard-boiled Oslo police detective. I’d be hard-boiled, too, if so many of my co-workers were murdered: they get killed off at such a rate in Police it’s a wonder anyone’s left by the end of the book.

Police is my first Nesbø book and it left me pretty indifferent. I enjoy a good detective novel but Police felt a little too twitchy and manic, shifting from plotline to plotline, character to character. I realize the furtiveness felt magnified because I haven’t read any of Nesbø’s previous novels about Harry Hole and his colleagues—always a danger with series novels—but, sorry, I think books ought to stand alone a little better than this if they’re sold alone. When Police finally settled down and began exploring character as the characters continued to explore a series of killings, I enjoyed it more, though the series of plot twists is such that mentioning relevant specifics would pretty much spoil the book for anyone intending to read it… not that those spoilers would really come as much of a surprise. Even at its best, Police still didn’t feel like much more than a typical hard-edged detective novel that could take place just about anywhere in the world. There was even a reference to Breaking Bad. Shrug.

If I were using food metaphors—and why not?—then Police is the Starbucks coffee and institutional-tasting chocolate cupcake I ate a couple weeks ago while traveling, you know, that standard junky snack you can buy anywhere to satisfy a certain craving even if you know you won’t love it. By contrast, Peter Carey’s Theft is a tasty soufflé with a glass of wine and a fun friend: light, laugh-inducing, and atmospherically memorable. Theft is narrated by two Australian brothers, both troubled in their own ways: Michael Boone is an artist who’s done time and Hugh Boone is younger, larger (at 220 pounds), and living in Michael’s care because he’s not, as they say, all there.

The (new) troubles start when Michael (a.k.a. Butcher) meets Marlene Leibovitz, who turns up at his (borrowed) house… it turns out Marlene’s the daughter-in-law of one of Michael’s favorite painters. And then we start in on forgery, thefts (art and even one of Hugh’s folding chairs he uses to sit on the street), other forms of deception, trips to Tokyo and New York, murder, and so on. What makes Theft so much fun is Carey’s combination of undependable narrative voices: Michael, mostly serious and mostly in love with the sneaky Marlene, and Hugh, quirky, perceptive about his brother’s relationship, and often using ALL CAPS to emphasize his points. All this fits together in a way that addresses questions of truth(iness) and its versions, the nature of art, and, of course, all sorts of relationships, many of them triangular. And who gets the last laugh.

Disclaimers and disclosures: I received a copy of Police from publisher Alfred A. Knopf, thank you!

Up next: Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond and MacDonald Harris’s The Carp Castle. And Pitigrilli’s Cocaine.

Detectives Times Two: Ishiguro’s Orphans and Mishani’s File

Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, the third Ishiguro novel I’ve read, has led me to start thinking of Ishiguro as the Meryl Streep of novelists: Ishiguro and Streep both seem capable of taking on any voice from any era. When We Were Orphans is, like Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, a first-person narrative: private detective Christopher Banks tells the story of how his parents went missing when he was an expat child living in Shanghai in the 1910s, leaving him an orphan. He returns to find his parents in 1937, during the Battle of Shanghai.

What intrigued me most about When We Were Orphans was a fuzziness that begins with language: Christopher’s voice feels a bit formal, wordy, and distant, even in suspenseful allegorical action scenes during the Battle of Shanghai, when he’s trying to reach a house where he believes his mother is being held. He’s already missed his chance to leave the country with a woman who’s invited him to run away with her… she’s an orphan, too, and their attraction is a strange one that seems more predicated on aloneness than anything else. As Christopher sums up in the book’s last paragraphs:

But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

Most of the book describes Christopher’s chases after various shadows: from playing games in Shanghai with his neighbor Akira, a boy from Japan, to research in London about the Shanghai from which his parents disappeared, to the on-the-ground search for his mother when he’s an adult. With those chases comes the creation of personal myths. Those begin in childhood, too, with Akira touchingly reinventing the kidnappers as people who “took great care to ensure my father’s comfort and dignity in all our dramas” during the boys’ role play rescues of Christopher’s father. Christopher describes many aspects of his friendship with Akira in tremendous detail, including an episode where they take something from a servant’s room and dialogues in which Akira calls Christopher “old chap.”

Of course it turns out that not all Christopher’s memories are quite right—though some are surprisingly helpful—and being sentimental gets a bad rap toward the end of the book. But memories are transformative for Christopher, who took on his profession because he felt he had a responsibility to find justice: he sometimes sounds a little like he thinks of himself as a loner superhero. He even carries a magnifying glass. And he says detectives have “little inclination to mingle with one another, let alone with ‘society’ at large.”

Though I enjoyed When We Were Orphans for the almost ridiculously consistent voice Ishiguro creates for Christopher, insights into memory (fuzzy or otherwise), and Christopher’s lifelong existential wanderings, those good technical qualities occasionally made the book feel a little too surgically correct, too hermetically sealed within Christopher’s mind to be as interesting as it might have been.

If you’re looking for a straight-ahead international detective novel, you might want to try D.A. Mishani’s The Missing File, translated from the original Hebrew by Steven Cohen. Mishani’s police procedural novel tracks Avraham Avraham’s work on the case of a missing teenage boy: Avraham is (yet another) heavy-smoking bachelor detective with a territorial streak, and Mishani also gives him a penchant for watching Law and Order and a passion for analyzing detective novels. The Missing File moves along at a decent pace though a detour to Belgium feels a little like it was pasted in for a very specific reason and I thought a strange schoolteacher, one of the most developed characters in the book, caught a bit too much of Mishani’s attention. The novel is absorbing enough though, with some surprises at the end, and the narrative voice is spare in Cohen’s translation, which generally reads smoothly. The back cover of my book, by the way, calls Mishani “a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature,” which probably helps explain some of Avraham’s ideas on solving real-life and fictional crimes.

Up Next: Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza, a book I think I’d describe as a combination of “stupendous” and “stupefying.” In a good way. Then Thorvald Steen’s Lionheart.

Disclaimers: I received a copy of The Missing File from publisher HarperCollins, thank you!

Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh

Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh, which I read in Ruth Whitehouse’s translation of the Turkish novel known as Kelepir Ev (“bargain home” according to Google Translate), is the second in Aykol’s Kati Hirschel “Istanbul mystery” series; it follows Hotel Bosphorus, which Whitehouse also translated. I guess I’d call Baksheesh a moderately cozy detective novel that draws on multiple genres: Kati Hirschel, a German woman who speaks Turkish almost like a native, owns a mystery book store and, you guessed it, solves a murder herself.

It’s Kati’s search for what I think is the bargain home in the original Turkish title that leads her to pay the baksheesh in the English title… and to find her way to trouble. Kati meets the dead man when he is still very much alive, and she’s even considered a suspect in his death because she threw a ceramic ashtray (apparently a supremely heavy ceramic ashtray) at him, making his head bleed. The other Big Problem in Kati’s life at the time of Baksheesh is that she and her lawyer boyfriend aren’t getting along.

Alas, my biggest impression of Baksheesh is that Aykol wrote it for a very specific target audience: cosmopolitan woman (or perhaps aging Cosmo girls?) experiencing midlife angst due to relationship “issues,” the onset of wrinkles, and, yes, even impending menopause. Though Kati certainly needs to take herself out of contention for a murder charge, it felt that her conversations with a police investigator were as important for her to win compliments and propositions as for her to pump him for information about the case.

Aykol also includes, often rather awkwardly, a fair bit of cultural information in Baksheesh. Her details on how people dress, though, feel more like magazine writing than fiction: “Nowadays, all middle-class Turkish women wear shorts, miniskirts and tops with cleavage bursting out, even from high necklines.” There’s also a mention of the male habit of kissing female hands, plus details on clothes for mourning. The cultural background that comes through characters’ life situations—a family business that includes parking facilities or a pop singer’s quick career—tends to feel far more organic to the story than Kati’s commentaries.

Though I’m sure Baksheesh will find readers content with a light book about a plucky German woman living in Turkey, I wish Aykol had dug deeper when she created Kati’s character. I would have been more interested if she’d found something darker and more intriguing than superficial treatment of topics like aging, smoking, or a petty-sounding tiff with the boyfriend. Or, alas again, even the mechanical-feeling sleuthing.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Baksheesh from Meryl Zegarek PR; the book was published by Bitter Lemon Press. Thank you to both!

Up Next: Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, then Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza.

Cold Blood: Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark

I’ve never hidden that I’m a moody reader, so I’m more than happy to explain my choice of Håkan Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark, which I read in Laurie Thompson’s translation from the original Swedish: On the morning of January 16, I posted to both my blogs then found that a technical problem prevented comments from appearing on Lizok’s Bookshelf. By the time I solved the problem, two hours later, I was cranky and hungry but ready for a stroll on the treadmill. And starting a new book. It was also very cold, which drew my eye to the Swedish detective novel corner of my bookcase. The first line of Woman with Birthmark—“She felt cold.”—felt right.

Of course I didn’t identify with that “she” for very long—we learn early on that “she” is up to something rotten—but I was happy to commiserate, mentally, about nasty wintry weather along with police inspector Van Veeteren, for a few hundred pages. Here’s what Van Veeteren thinks upon waking up at 7.55 on a Saturday morning:

If there was a month he hated, it was January—it went on forever with rain or snow all day long, and a grand total of half an hour’s sunshine. 

There was only one sane way of occupying oneself at this lugubrious time of year: sleeping. Period.

A serial killer brings Van Veeteren and his colleagues out of hibernation in Woman with Birthmark: someone is killing men who went to school together, shooting them in a distinctive way. The whodunit aspect of the book is clear from nearly the start because we know the cold woman has revenge on her mind but Nesser links her motive with a social message tied to her past. I figured that out before the end of the book, too, but was still more than happy to see how the police would solve the murders.

That’s my favorite kind of detective novel, particularly when northern temperaments and bleak weather patterns are involved. (I love bleak northern weather as long as I don’t have to leave the house.) I also enjoyed Nesser’s quiet humor, which gives us moments like these: the first victim’s wife is out of the house when her husband is shot because she is at the theater seeing A Doll’s House (their marriage doesn’t sound especially happy), a detective named Jung, and the bath-taking habits of police inspectors. An example: “It could be a coincidence, of course, Van Veeteren thought as he settled down in the bath with a burning candle on the lavatory seat and a beer within easy reach.”

Woman with Birthmark was a nice distraction during a mid-winter cold snap, particularly because I enjoyed reading Laurie Thompson’s clean and clear translation.

Up next: Joseph Roth’s Job. I think.

Below Norway’s Surface: Two of Karin Fossum’s Sejer Books

I enjoy detective novels and love Scandinavia so was thrilled to find a neat stack of Norwegian and Swedish detective novels at the library book sale. Among them: four of Karin Fossum’s books featuring criminal investigator Konrad Sejer. Last week I read Don’t Look Back and When the Devil Holds the Candle.

I think I enjoy reading detective novels from other cultures because I like hunting for insights into other countries’ fears. Though these two Fossum books are quite different stylistically, they have a common motif: physical and psychological problems and imperfections that lie below the facades of our skin, clothes, and homes. A blurb from The New York Times Book Review about Don’t Look Back put it this way: “There’s no mistaking this psychologically astute, subtly horrifying crime study for a cozy village mystery.” Indeed! Both these books are set in the clean, orderly Norway I remember from visits, and Don’t Look Back mentions Legoland, cod sprats, Vigeland Sculpture Park, and Sigrid Undset. But Fossum’s books definitely aren’t advertising the beauty of Norwegian fjords...

Don’t Look Back starts off as if it’s a book about a kidnapping: Raymond, a young man with Down syndrome, picks up a small girl and takes her to his house. He brings her home unharmed but she and Raymond saw a teenage girl’s corpse during a walk. Sejer and his colleague Jacob Skarre investigate. Socially, Sejer is a fairly typical criminal inspector: he’s a somewhat lonely widower whose large dog keeps him company. He adores his little grandson.

Fossum excels at showing sinister currents beneath the town’s quiet surface: a strange neighbor who sleeps in a quirky bed, an odd rug salesman, and the sad family histories of the dead girl and her boyfriend. It’s very telling – both for Sejer, in solving the case, and for the reader interested in local mores – that the dead girl learned something unpleasant by looking through a neighbor’s window. There’s peeping though real and metaphorical windows in When the Devil Holds the Candle, too, but it’s a very different type of novel: we know from the book’s early chapters what happened to a missing man named Andreas.

The good-looking Andreas, who sometimes works as a nude model for a local artist, and his friend Zipp (for the zipper on his tight jeans) are petty criminals who’ve barely grown out of the “juvenile” category. Their trouble starts when they need beer money and steal the purse of a woman pushing a baby carriage. That crime goes bad, as does an attempt to rob an older woman in her home; Andreas disappears. The reader knows where Andreas is, thanks to a first-person narrative delivered by a disturbed mind, but many of the characters have no clue.

I write “many of the characters” because Fossum shows us several critical lapses: one belongs to the police and Zipp, of course, is terrified to say much about the evening’s events because he doesn’t want to get into trouble himself. Plus he has strange feelings about something he learned from Andreas. Meanwhile, Sejer has doubts about his girlfriend, Sara, because he keeps thinking he smells hashish in his own apartment.

When the Devil Holds the Candle is oddly suspenseful, thanks to Fossum’s characters’ psychological depth and her gradual presentation of events. The contrast of the book’s parallel lines – Skarre and Sejer’s investigation, plus the inner thoughts of the crimes’ perpetrators – give the reader a feel for both police work and the (fictional) criminal mind. For me, the thoughts of criminals who control life and death are the ultimate mystery in detective novels, so I enjoyed watching how the guilty parties reacted when confronted with their own crimes. Another interesting plus: nobody is infallible here, and Fossum may let characters in both books get away with murder. Fossum’s books left me with the feeling I’d witnessed a silent scream: they leave an impression more similar to dark Edvard Munch paintings than Norwegian tourist brochures with lovely photos of sunny fjords.

Up next: I don’t know!

Satellite image of Norway, from NASA, via Wikipedia.

Carlotto’s Bandit Love & Sofer’s Septembers

Massimo Carlotto’s noirish Bandit Love – L’amore del bandito in the original Italian – is a fast-moving detective novel with sociopolitical themes. Marco Buratti (a.k.a. The Alligator), an ex-con and unlicensed investigator, narrates; Antony Shugaar’s translation gives him a dry sense of humor. The book opens with the kidnapping of a belly dancer, the girlfriend of Buratti’s smuggler friend Beniamino Rossini. Rossini is heartbroken. To oversimplify: Burrati, Rossini, and Max La Memoria, who co-owns a bar with Burrati, look for her. They also look into the theft of 44 kilos of narcotics that had been stored at a lab, apparently for analysis.

Carlotto’s spare prose enables him to work plenty of characters – such as a cocaine-dependent call girl who proves helpful to Burrati in multiple ways – and plot twists into 180 pages. I found Carlotto’s approach to characterization refreshing: his combination of bits of back story and a few habits creates people who seem real but doesn’t stall the story with TMI. Max, for example, loves to cook, and the Alligator loves the blues and Calvados. The book made me thirsty for Calvados and hungry for gnocchi, and I will take Max’s advice and never roll oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes in prosciutto.

These guys may be violent but they’re also softies, and they observe special moral codes in a book containing ample doses of seediness, corruption, and New European organized crime. Carlotto intentionally places his characters in situations that reflect 21^st-century news and reality. He discusses the strategy for his Alligator series (of which Bandit Love is not the first) in an article on the Europa Editions site; it initially appeared in a Greek magazine, then in Mystery Readers Journal. Carlotto concludes:

“People today feel betrayed; they no longer believe the truths handed to them by a State that has proved itself dishonest. And in this literary genre they find a source of truth and information. Naturally, the literary quality of each individual novel is immensely important. It is not enough to plot an important story; one must also know how to write it.”

I’m sure Carlotto’s own experiences contribute to his desire and ability to write crime novels that address social issues: I also read The Fugitive, his memoir of life on the run after being accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Carlotto describes, with surprising humor, his elaborate disguises, life in Mexico, loneliness, and the horrible effects of fugitive life on his health. The Alligator hides out, too, and his loneliness – and description of friendships – felt especially genuine because I knew Carlotto had survived far, far worse. Bandit Love reads quickly, but it left me with a surprisingly strong melancholy feeling… just what I like from noir. I’m looking forward to reading more of Carlotto’s novels.

Also… Dalia Sofer’s The Septembers of Shiraz, a novel about Iran after the overthrow of the Shah, left me less satisfied, though I’d looked forward to it thanks to positive reviews and an interest in Iran. Sofer shifts her book’s action between members of a family: Isaac, a jeweler who has built a considerable business and is arrested at the start of the book; his wife Farnaz, who waits for him to come home; their young daughter Shirin, who begins to understand political danger and does something very brave; and their son Parviz, who lives in Brooklyn and begins working for his Hasidic landlord after rent money from Iran stops coming.

Much of the book felt familiar – I’ve read a lot about political repression in the Soviet Union – but the novel never quite jelled for me. I’m not quite sure why, though it’s easy to say that poor Parviz felt literally and literarily marooned in Brooklyn… but a convenient device for Sofer to convey the family’s relationship (and future?) with its Jewish heritage. Farnaz felt real but she seemed more linked to comforts and possessions than ideas, so her chapters felt a little empty. I thought Shirin, who keeps big secrets and has difficulty adjusting to the new Iranian reality, overshadowed everyone else. I wish Sofer had given her more ink.

For more:

• Bandit Love in Publishers Weekly
• Excerpts of The Septembers of Shiraz, from The New York Times
• Claire Messud’s very favorable review of The September of Shiraz, from The New York Times Book Review

Disclosure: Thank you to Europa Editions for giving me copies of Mossimo Carlotto’s books at Book Expo America, where I enjoyed speaking with Europa about their translations. Bandit Love will be released on September 28, and The Fugitive was published in 2007.

Up next: I don’t know…