Book Review: Citizen Vince

Jess Walter
2005
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

This book started out with promise but ended up being a disappointment.

Part of my disappointment was in the ridiculously unrealistic naiveté of the gangsters. The other part was that I let myself get cool ideas about what might happen to the main character but the reality was not nearly as exciting as what I had imagined.

The main character, Marty Hagen, is a small-time hood from New York City. He had a successful racket going in credit-card theft until he got himself in debt to some bigger-time hoods. He then turned state’s evidence, was put into the witness protection program, took a new name (Vince Camden), and moved to Spokane, Washington, where he became a baker in a donut shop.

The story opens in Spokane when, unfortunately, Vince’s old life has caught up to him in the form of a hit man sent by his New York creditors to kill him after they discovered where he was living.

It’s a typical formula for a gangster book – an essentially well-meaning, nonviolent hood, in love with a golden-hearted hooker, trying to work towards a better, less felonious life.

What I liked about it was that it takes place in 1980, during the last few months leading up to the Carter/Reagan election. Vince, who had never cared for politics in the past, and who certainly has enough to deal with already with the hit man after him, gets more and more distracted by the race until it’s almost all he can think about. He gets his voter registration card, goes to hear politicians speak, and even befriends a guy running for local office. It gives him a new focus and new reasons for pursuing his dreams.

The politics give a colorful background and atmosphere to the otherwise run-of-the-mill plot. Vince hears Reagan’s now-legendary one-liners and reads headlines about the hostage negotiations with Iran and has to react and interpret them in real time, as we had to, without the benefit of hindsight. There are even a couple short entertaining sections written from Carter’s and Reagan’s points of view (judiciously informed by the twenty-five years that passed between then and when the book was written).

The problem is that the political background is just that – background. At first, I thought for sure that Vince was going to get more deeply involved in it and maybe even run for office himself. He shows a natural ability for it and makes contacts very quickly. I thought it would end up being a story about redemption through public service, or at the very least an ironic statement about the type of person it takes to succeed in politics. But it doesn’t. Vince never does anything besides vote, and even that, by the time he does it, seems a bit pointless and hollow. (Even for me, a rabid voter.)

The other problem with this book that I mentioned earlier is that the gangsters really do not act like gangsters. Get this: When Vince realizes that his creditors in New York have sent a hit man to kill him, he flies to New York, finagles his way into a poker game with them, reveals who he is, and tells them that he is in witness protection. He then tells them so convincingly that he bears them no ill will, that he will pay them back everything that he owes them, and that he has had an epiphany and that all he wants to do is to go back to Spokane and become a full-time donut baker, that they believe him, and they let him go back to Spokane, with only a relatively minor favor to do in return.

Come on. I watched The Sopranos. I know they had to kill Adriana once she got caught by the Feds, no matter what she promised or how much Christopher loved her. No way would these guys let a snitch leave New York alive.

Oh, yeah, one more thing: the book is written in present tense. I’m open to the idea that a book can be written in present tense and still be good, but I'm hard pressed to think of one.

Book Review: A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Lawrence Block
1991
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I am a huge, huge Lawrence Block fan. My love affair with his books started about twenty years ago when my dear great aunt lent me her copy of Eight Million Ways to Die. Since then I’ve read everything Block has written that I could get my hands on.

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse is the ninth installment of the Matt Scudder series, which is Block’s best series by far. The Scudder books are not only extremely gritty murder mysteries but also a complex and realistic record of the main character coming to grips with his alcoholism.

Matt Scudder was a brilliant, if sometimes ethically questionable, detective in the NYPD who resigned from the force after a bullet he fired (while drunk and on duty) ricocheted and killed a little girl. Since then, he has been working as an unlicensed private detective and struggling to stay sober.

By the time of Slaughterhouse, Scudder is has been in AA for several years. He has a stable relationship with his girlfriend Elaine, resists drinking through the whole book, and pursues two cases at the same time: tracking down the producers of a snuff film and figuring out whether a wealthy lawyer did or did not kill his wife.

It’s a shame that this is the only Edgar that Block has won. Slaughterhouse is a perfectly good book, but my favorite Scudder stories are the ones earlier in the timeline (like Eight Million Ways to Die and When the Sacred Ginmill Closes), when he is in the initial fits and starts of his recovery. They make you suffer right along with him as he goes through agonizing backslides which only make it that much harder for him to climb back up onto the wagon.

No matter how long he has been sober, Scudder is (and you are) always, always conscious of alcohol around him. He’s confronted with it all the time, like when he goes out to dinner and the dinner menu says, playfully, “A day without wine is like a day without sunshine!” When his cases aren’t going well, or he’s under stress, it’s doubly hard; the first thing he always fantasizes about is a glass of bourbon. Or a bottle of bourbon.

At one point in Slaughterhouse, Scudder meets a contact, a young cop, in a bar. The cop is drunk, argumentative, and clearly on the same path Scudder himself was on. After making one attempt to get their meeting to happen somewhere else, Scudder eventually chooses to leave the cop there in the bar. He feels guilty about leaving without making more of an effort, but his sponsor reminds him that, as an alcoholic, your first responsibility is not to drink. You cannot always save others because it may take all you have just to do that.

Blurb writers are always comparing Block to Elmore Leonard. I don’t know why they think this is a compliment, given how great Block is and how annoying Leonard is. I wish that Hollywood would stop making movies out of Leonard’s books and make a good movie out of one of Block’s. Eight Million Ways to Die was made into a movie, and it does star Jeff Bridges, who of course is fantastic, but the adaptation is disappointing. Instead of New York, it takes place in Los Angeles, where Matt Scudder definitely doesn’t belong, and Scudder has resigned from the police force because he killed a drug dealer, rather than a little girl; not quite the same thing.

For those who like mysteries but for whom the Matt Scudder series is a little too dark and/or explicit, Block’s Burglar series is tamer but just as well-written. The central character, Bernie Rhodenbarr, is a used bookstore owner by day and a burglar by night. He always manages to stumble across corpses while on his night job and has to solve the murders himself to prevent them from convicting him of the murder.

Book Review: The Eye of the Needle

Ken Follett
1978
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book is a blockbuster page-turner with all the ingredients - war, sex, human drama, and international intrigue with the fate of the free world at stake. It also has several elements that I am a particular sucker for: spies, WWII-era Britain, remote Scottish islands, and violent storms at sea.

The main character is Henry Faber, a careful, ruthless, handsome German spy. Faber is known as Die Nadel (The Needle) because of the trademark stiletto he carries and with which he kills a fair number of people over the course of the book.

Traveling around the southeast coast of England in early 1944, Faber discovers that the forces the Germans have been observing building up in East Anglia, which they believe will be used to invade France at Calais, are a hoax. He even is able to take a roll of pictures of dummy cardboard planes to prove it. This leads him to the natural (and correct) conclusion that the Allies are planning to invade at Normandy instead. If he is able to let his bosses in Germany know this, it could change the entire course of the war.

Faber then tries to make his way up from London to his contact, a U-boat stationed off the coast of Scotland, before he is caught by the pesky MI5 agents on his tail. He runs into a number of frustrating delays and setbacks. Desperate, he eventually steals a fishing boat and sets out for sea in the middle of a huge storm, only to get shipwrecked on a barren, windswept island populated by only four people: an old shepherd, a young farmer who lost his legs in a car accident, the farmer’s sexy estranged wife, and their baby son.

The shepherd and farmer are immediately hostile and suspicious, but the wife, Lucy, is quite receptive to Faber... to say the least. The challenge for Die Nadel then is to elude the two men, find a way to contact the U-boat by radio or boat, and to avoid getting distracted by falling in love with Lucy.

Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan are pensive in the
1981 screen adaptation of this blockbuster.

Like The Day of the Jackal, the story is told primarily from the point of view of the bad guy. This can get emotionally confusing. On the one hand, Faber is the enemy and you want him to get caught, and you don’t like that he kills Home Guards and innocent rooming house landladies. But, on the other hand, almost up to the very end, you root for him to win his hand-to-hand fights and to get it on with Lucy.

The details of spycraft are not as gritty and realistic as in, say, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - but then again, Follett doesn’t have the advantage of a background in British intelligence like LeCarré does.

Topkapi

When I read The Light of Day, by Eric Ambler, I had no idea that it had been made into a movie called Topkapi.

I saw the movie recently on TCM and I have to say that I liked it a lot more than I did the book. It played up the comic aspects of the caper, moved more quickly, and was changed from a first-person tale to a more omniscient point of view.

I guess Hollywood screenwriters know what they are doing.

This movie has several tricky stunts in it that are said to have inspired other filmmakers, including the makers of Mission: Impossible (see this clip). It was also filmed on location in Istanbul, which was gorgeous. The best part of the movie, by far, though, was Peter Ustinov, who plays the hapless, bumbling Arthur Simpson to the absolute hilt. (He won his second Oscar for this role.)

It also stars an enigmatic Melina Mercouri and a handsome but callous Maximilian Schell as the masterminds of the heist.

Book Review: Black Cherry Blues

James Lee Burke
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book was well-paced and suspenseful. The core plot was good. It wasn’t cheap or sloppy or half-heartedly put together. Otherwise, however, it was pretty much a disappointment.

The descriptions of Louisiana and Montana landscapes, cuisine, and people seemed self-conscious and smug. So did the main character’s running and weightlifting. Conversations were full of phrases that I think were supposed to be clever but just came out as strange. The treatment of race was weird. And the hero had a streak of violence in him that seriously undercut his indignation about the behavior of others.

The story is about a former cop, Dave Robicheaux, who lives on the Louisiana coast making a modest living running a bait shop and fishing-boat rental business. His inner circle consists of two people who help him out around the shop and his house, and an adopted daughter, Alafair, from El Salvador. He is haunted by dreams of both Vietnam and his dead wife, who was killed by gangsters getting revenge on him for some past escapade.

Aside from the dreams, all is basically well with Robicheaux’s life until he bumps into an old friend: a drug-addicted, down-on-his-luck former rock-and-roll star now working as a leaseman for an oil company. His friend asks him to investigate a conversation that he overheard between two co-workers talking about how they killed a couple guys up in Montana. Before he knows it, Robicheaux is sucked up into a web of danger and intrigue involving mobsters, hired hit men, hot-blooded Salish Indian women, and, of course, winsome elementary school principals who have such incredible generosity they don’t mind that he keeps dumping his kid on them when he needs to go beat up a guy or confront a mobster or otherwise put himself in a life-threatening situation.

In the course of his investigation, Robicheaux has to travel from Louisiana to Montana, giving the author plenty of opportunity to show his intimate knowledge of both (Burke lives in Louisiana and spends a lot of vacation time in Montana). Sometimes an author will bring you into a country with them, sharing it with you, making you feel like you understand it too (as in The Healer’s War, Dance Hall of the Dead, or The Lingala Code). But Burke’s descriptions came off as braggadocio – or as inside jokes I wasn’t privy to. Also, although his writing about scenery is quite detailed, I found it strangely hard to picture.

I had a bit of a hard time with how Burke portrays black people in the book. Robicheaux is white. About the black man and woman who work for him (whose poor grammar he is constantly making fun of), he says: “I was always amazed by the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.” I think this is supposed to come across as a compliment, or perhaps wryly funny, but, since he shows no real understanding of what his employees are like as people, it comes across as a tad patronizing. When push comes to shove, who’s really in charge of that bait shop? This is also the only time in the book he calls them anything but “Negro.” I might be a prude, but I’m not sure that “Negro” is the absolutely best term for 1989.

Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic, but I found his recovery very glossy. It felt more like a gimmick than an integral part of his character. He goes through a dry drunk complete with fever and tremors one day and then the next day goes to get an ice cream cone with his daughter like nothing ever happened. He is also very smug about abstinence with his rock-and-roller friend, who still struggles with self-control every day. It is a pale shadow of Lawrence Block’s excellent Matt Scudder novels, another detective series with an alcoholic lead, which, fortunately, I’ll get a chance to rave about another time.

And, finally, Robicheaux is self-righteous and judgmental about the violence of the mobsters he’s investigating, but he himself has horrifyingly violent episodes. At one point, for example, he ambushes two goons who threatened the life of his daughter and spends probably fifteen minutes beating them within an inch of their lives with a five-foot length of chain. This doesn’t fit. If you’re going to be an anti-hero, you can’t go around on the one hand talking like you’re a saint and then on the other hand be eagerly and gratuitously bloody in your revenge. You need to take care of your problems with reluctant but necessary dispatch.

Book Review: Dance Hall of the Dead

Tony Hillerman
1973
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

About fifteen years ago, I read three Tony Hillerman books in a row. I really liked the first, the second a little less, and, by the third, I have to admit I found them getting kind of repetitive.

I’m glad it’s been fifteen years, because reading Dance Hall of the Dead was like reading Hillerman again for the first time. Refreshed.

Hillerman’s novels are set in the Four Corners area of the U.S. where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah all meet. It’s a dusty, desert-y region home to several Indian reservations – Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and Acoma, among others. It’s also home to archaeological digs and (in the book, at least) a hippie commune.

Dance Hall was one of Hillerman’s earliest novels, and the second to use his really appealing protagonist Joe Leaphorn, a detective with the Navajo police.

Leaphorn is called in to help when a Zuni boy is found murdered and the boy’s best friend, a Navajo, goes missing. Zuni (which Hillerman spells Zuñi) and Navajo people are by no means friendly, usually, but in this case Leaphorn has to cooperate with the Zuni police and work with both Zuni and Navajo witnesses. He learns more about Zuni religion and tradition than he ever wanted to when it really starts to look like the Zuni boy was killed by a kachina – a Zuni ancestor spirit.

This book makes you very conscious of tempo. Joe Leaphorn moves at his own speed. He takes his time watching a location from far away through binoculars before going in to investigate close up. He works his way very slowly around to asking the questions at the core of his investigation. He’s very happy to let many seconds or even minutes pass in silence when he’s talking to someone.

It sometimes seems to be inefficient and slow, but he’s actually getting quite a lot figured out with this technique. So the investigation and the story progress deceptively quickly. And, towards the end, when Leaphorn gets closer and closer to solving the case, the story picks up speed quite smoothly and expertly, so where you originally felt like you were reading a kind of peaceful, slow-moving story, suddenly you find yourself rapidly turning pages and in the midst of quite a lot of suspense and Leaphorn in the midst of real physical danger.

It is really interesting to learn about Zunis through the eyes of a Navajo; partly because it means you end up learning about Navajos too. And Hillerman’s writing is calm and clear, just like his main character’s thinking. It never is self-conscious or gets in the way of the story.

Book Review: The Light of Day

Eric Ambler
1962
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

On the surface of it, this book had all the ingredients of a great mystery story. It is set in exotic locations in Greece and Turkey. The main character is a dumpy small-time crook who gets caught up to his neck in international intrigue. The British author, Ambler, who was described on the book’s 1962 cover as “the greatest living writer of the novel of suspense,” had been, among other things, a songwriter, a vaudeville comedian, an ad executive, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. So I was raring to read it.

The story is about Arthur Abdel Simpson, son of a British father and an Egyptian mother, who lives in Athens and makes a living as a petty thief and distributor of pornography. One day he picks the wrong tourist to scam; his mark turns out to be a member of a ring of spies (or maybe thieves or drug smugglers) who catches Arthur red-handed trying to steal his travelers checks and blackmails him into helping with a major caper.

At first, Arthur’s task is just to drive a car from Athens to Istanbul. It is supposed to be an easy job but he forgets that his Egyptian passport has expired, so he gets stopped at the Turkish border. The car is searched and the customs officials find guns and grenades hidden in the door panels. The Turkish equivalent of the CIA then makes Arthur a deal: they won’t arrest him for possession of the weaponry if he agrees to stay with the gang and provide information about what they’re up to. So Arthur wangles his way into becoming the gang’s full-time driver, lodges with them in their villa outside Istanbul, and generally gets involved way over his head in their scheme.

It’s hard to say sometimes why a book doesn’t quite catch your imagination the way it seems it should. What happened was that I’d often reach the end of a paragraph and realize that I’d spaced out and missed what had happened and had to go back and read it again. I didn’t look forward to picking this book up again after I’d taken a break and would find myself reading other things instead.

It had a heck of a lot of what seemed like unnecessary detail. All distances were exactly estimated: there was an island sixty kilometers from Pendik; a wall was twenty feet high; they had one-hundred fifty yards to go; there was a sheer drop of thirty feet; the roof was thirty-five feet wide. The gang’s preparations seemed needlessly convoluted: they went to garages, resorts, restaurants, museums, and back and forth to Istanbul about fifty times, without anything major happening most of the time. And every move Arthur made was described in excruciating detail even though he seemed to spend most of the time dusting the car and filling it with gas.

The best parts of the book were actually Arthur’s rare flashbacks to his British public school childhood, when he was a loner and a troublemaker and had colorful run-ins with teachers and administrators.

Book Review: The Lingala Code

Warren Kiefer
1972
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Lingala Code is a bit like a simplified, jazzed-up version of a John Le Carré spy novel, but set in Africa and with an action hero as the main character.

It packs a pretty good punch of excitement, with riots and shootings and spear-throwing Kasai warriors and even a car chase.

The book is set in 1961 in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The Congo at that time had just gained independence from Belgium and was a mass of turmoil, with lots of violence, corruption, poverty, and competing warlords jockeying for power.

The main character is Mike Vernon, a former Air Force pilot and current CIA agent (unofficially) working for the US embassy (officially) in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa).

At the beginning of the book, Vernon’s best friend and CIA/embassy colleague gets shot to death in a supposed home burglary. But Vernon is suspicious of the shooting and sets out to find out what really happened, opening up a whole huge can of dangerous worms. His investigation pulls in some of the warlords and a local terrorist and eventually reveals a Soviet mole in the embassy.

All of which is indeed very exciting, even if I did sometimes get confused which of the corrupt politicians was which and who worked for whom.

Vernon’s activities take him all over the country. I am not sure if Kiefer had actually been to the Congo when he wrote this, but the details of what Vernon sees in all these places sure made it seem real and I very much enjoyed being immersed in the sweaty world of central Africa for a time.

At one point, for example, Vernon has to fly a tiny prop plane several hundred miles over thick, dirty green jungle to meet a contact at a plantation just downriver from Stanleyville (now Kisangani). He describes his flight in detail - how he uses the lake near Inongo and the town of Boende as checkpoints and how the crocodiles look like logs floating in the mustard-yellow river below him.

I also liked Vernon’s description of his ride on the car ferry from Kinshasa to Brazzaville:

“Out on deck there was no breeze, but it was better than inside the car. The view across Stanley Pool to Brazzaville was not exactly inspiring: green and yellow clots of jungle hyacinth floated by like small islands, while the ferryboat engines pounded and shook beneath our feet...

The Pool is swift in places and the boat was old and underpowered - probably the same one Joseph Conrad sailed upriver seventy years ago. To maintain course to the opposite bank it sometimes crabbed at a forty-five-degree angle upstream.”

I said earlier that this book was a little like a simplified Le Carré novel with more action. The problem is that more action is not necessarily to a spy novel’s benefit. Le Carré's best novels are gray, bleak, and filled with the unromantic, unglamorous, often tedious work that is real-life spycraft. That’s what makes them so real and, strangely, so tense and nerve-wracking. The dramatic Lingala Code requires, on the one hand, more suspension of disbelief and, on the other hand, less sympathy for the main character.

So perhaps Mike Vernon is actually more like James Bond than George Smiley. The bad guys in The Lingala Code were pretty much bad and the good guys were pretty much good; there weren’t many subtle characters or surprising twists. (Although when there were twists, to Kiefer’s credit, he didn’t try to dangle the suspense along way past when you’d figured something out.)

As happens all too often in murder mysteries, the love interest falls flat. Vernon’s girlfriend Françoise was hard to take as the totally stereotypical gorgeous and understanding Frenchwoman from Aix-en-Provence. I found her completely unbelievable as a motivating factor.

Book Review: The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
1970
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book was an enjoyable combination of decent plot, good characters, and great style.

It is a murder mystery set in Stockholm. It sucks you in right away, starting with a pretty gripping description of the shooting of nine people on a double-decker bus late at night in a remote part of the city. Two less-than-enthusiastic patrolmen from the bordering suburb of Solna stumble across the bus first and trample all over the scene, eliminating many of the clues.

To make matters worse, one of the murdered passengers turns out to be an off-duty member of the homicide squad who had no discernable reason for being on that bus.

The case, naturally, becomes a red ball for the Stockholm P.D. and you spend the rest of the book watching the stressed-out detectives solve the crime.

It was neat to read a mystery set in Stockholm. I got to see not only the Swedish police but also a bit of Swedish culture from the inside. Stockholm becomes not a glamorous European destination but a big gritty city. Northern and southern Swedish accents set peers apart, make them feel inferior. Americans even start to look a little bit different.

The team of Stockholm detectives is made up of distinctive, believable characters. You see the story from almost every detective’s point of view and you see how confused and frustrated they all are.

The book was originally written in Swedish but I don’t think it’s the translation to the English that makes the writing style so entertaining. The authors (a husband and wife team) use matter-of-fact, uncomplicated sentences that are just a little bit quirky. This is the description of the patrol route the uninspired Solna patrolmen chose before they ran across the bus – a route designed to avoid running into anything that might actually require policing:

“It was a brilliantly thought-out course, leading through areas which were almost guaranteed empty of people. They met not a single car the whole way and saw only two living creatures, first a cat and then another cat.”

Often what the authors will do is start out with a really short sentence that has only basic information in it. Then they’ll repeat the sentence, making it a little bit longer by elaborating just a little bit. And then they’ll do that again… and again. Until after about five sentences, you have this really long sentence with all kinds of crazy detail in it that is a hundred times more informative than the original sentence. It’s like they’re reluctant to tell the story but can’t help letting it dribble out in spite of themselves.

There were a couple things about the book that were annoying. For one thing, sometimes key pieces of information would be withheld from me and then would be revealed by the policeman I’d been following without me even knowing that he’d been doing any extra investigation. I don’t mind surprises but I like at least knowing that there’s something I don’t know. This felt like my characters were sneaking around behind my back.

And, frankly, the motives of the culprit, some of the victims, and the dead policeman’s girlfriend, all of which were key to the plot, seemed a bit dicey and unrealistic.

But I got over that.

Book Review: The Eighth Circle

Stanley Ellin
1958
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The cover of the 1959 paperback edition of this book makes it look like a trashy piece of pulp fiction. It has a drawing of the main character, handsome private detective Murray Kirk, being leaned on by a lovely young lady who is half out of her satin dinner dress and matching heels. A block of text next to the pair describes the book as “a story about the special world of a private detective.”

But it’s actually a perfectly decent detective story.

And, as far as I could tell, Kirk never actually sleeps with any of the ladies he runs across. Not one. Oh, sure, one falls asleep on the rug in front of his fireplace and stays the night there, and he has to help another off with rain-soaked clothes and warm her up in his shower to prevent her from passing out from the cold, and there is certainly a lot of racy talk and innuendo, but no major hanky-panky.

And not only that, but the case doesn’t revolve around a murder; it’s just a book-keeping scandal. And I think only one or two of the bad guys even has a gun.

What happens is that Kirk, who runs a successful detective agency in New York, gets personally involved in a minor case, the arrest of a policeman accused of taking payoffs, because he’s madly in love with the cop’s fiancée. He’s hired by the cop’s lawyer to dig up information that will prove his client’s innocence, but he actually hopes that his client is guilty so the fiancée will call it off and go out with him instead. Of course the case gets extremely complicated and pulls in plenty of characters from both high society and the unsavory underworld.

While it wasn’t fantastic, it was generally a well put-together, mostly page-turning mystery. It definitely stayed true to its genre and vintage; I wouldn’t read this book expecting anything unusual or stereotype-flouting.

For the most part, I liked Kirk. He doesn’t always guess right about clues and certainly has bad days. He’s no-nonsense and savvy but not quite as hard-boiled and gruff as, say, Philip Marlowe. He’s a little slicker than that. He’s also relatively kind to the women in his life (for a 1950s P.I.).

The men, both good and bad, are pretty well developed characters. The women, on the other hand, are completely one-dimensional. Each one is absolutely beautiful and in dire need of his help except for his (naturally) super-efficient, loyal, middle-aged secretary (who used to be absolutely beautiful).

Book Review: Peter’s Pence

Jon Cleary
1974
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book is sort of the Da Vinci Code of 1974. It’s a heist story set in the Vatican, so it has the same sort of caper-in-the-inner-circle-of-the-Catholic-church thing going on. There is a disillusioned, lapsed-believer lead male character and a gorgeous Romance-language-speaking (Italian, in this case) lead female character who end up running from the law through (almost) no fault of their own. And they are pursued the whole time by a creepy crazy man devoted to a fanatical cause.

As a piece of writing, it’s a bit better than the Da Vinci Code. A little bit.

The book starts with a group of IRA members plotting to steal some of the Vatican’s treasures so they can use the ransom money to bribe corrupt Ulster politicians and finally bring about peace in Northern Ireland. They get Fergus McBride, the Vatican’s press relations man and the American son of an IRA martyr, to help them get inside. But the heist goes terribly wrong and they end up kidnapping the Pope instead. They spend the rest of the book trying to figure out how to get out of the situation with the ransom but without having to kill the Pope.

In the meantime, the son of a German SS officer is running around Rome trying to assassinate the Pope because the Pope, who is also German, was imprisoned in Dachau during the war and gave evidence against his father which led to his execution.

Problem #1 is that the characters are all unbelievable and annoying.

The IRA gang is made up of an Irishman, an Australian, a tortured, self-divided Irish/English man, and the aforementioned McBride. The Pope is a kindly German and the SS officer’s son is an evil German. The Roman chief of police is a mustachioed, macho Italian. Each man is a complete ethnic stereotype and acts according to type. I found the Irishman particularly over the top.

And don’t even get me started on the women. There are four women with substantial speaking roles in the book. One is the “man-hating” (yes, that is a quote) nun who is the secretary to the Pope. Two and three are the classic jaded prostitutes with hearts of gold who work the street outside McBride’s apartment building. And the fourth is McBride’s girlfriend Luciana, a member of the Italian aristocracy. She is ravishing, passionate, prone to fits of panic and fiery anger, and, of course, has a steel backbone when it comes to protecting her man. Luciana is explicitly described as having elements of both the Madonna and the whore. I had thought that was always just an unspoken cliché.

Problem #2 is that the writing and the plot both just plain drag. There was just barely enough of a wisp of tension to keep me reading the whole way through.

Book Review: Room to Swing

Ed Lacy
1957
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This novel just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its ridiculous cover – or its teensy size.

It proves that just because a book is short (a tidy 128 pages) and just because it went out of print and had to be resurrected by a tiny publisher who obviously scanned in the original text and then didn’t edit it afterwards so that there are typos, skipped sentences, and "& pound; s" scattered throughout the text, and whose extensive cover design consisted of reprinting a tiny picture of the original 1957 cover artwork (shown here) surrounded by an enormous plain black border, and who jammed the text so close to the tops of the pages that the headers and page numbers are practically cut off, doesn’t mean it can’t be action-packed and establish great characters.

The plot is tried-and-true mystery fare: the main character, Toussaint Moore, is a New York detective hired to track a man who quickly winds up being murdered. Moore is the first to find the body and is of course mistakenly accused of the crime; he then has to solve the murder in order to prove his own innocence.

I loved Moore’s style. He doesn’t take any guff and doesn’t go out of his way to make people feel comfortable. He is abrupt, snappy, and slangy, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe at his best. But Moore is also human and you see his fears.

Lacy’s writing is fast-paced, clear-headed, and straightforward – which is the only way the book can be this complex and this short and still work. I liked that he starts by dropping you right smack in the middle of the story, so you have to put the background together for yourself as he gives it to you. And what I liked even more was that you got the clues and solved the mystery at the same time Moore does. You might think that would lead to less suspense, but it actually was more exciting.

What makes this novel unique for 1957 is that Moore is black. (He is, in fact, described on the back of my copy of the book and in several reviews as “the first credible black detective” in popular mystery fiction.)

For a black detective in the ‘50s, racism is never far away. Especially when most of the people he has to deal with in the story are white, including the people who hired him, the police who are chasing him, and the man he was trailing and is accused of murdering. This is a constant additional tension, to say the least, that a white detective would not have had to cope with.

In the course of solving the crime, Moore ends up traveling from New York to Bingston, Ohio, a small town just north of the Kentucky border. The contrast is educational for him. Bingston is plainly, overtly racist; Moore can only make phone calls from certain gas stations, can't eat at the cafeteria or stay at the hotel, and is constantly called “boy” and treated with hostility. New York is certainly better than Bingston; black people have a wider choice of professions, have at least the legal right to eat and lodge anywhere they want, and night clubs often have both black and white patrons. (It even has out-of-the-closet Lesbians (capitalized), whom Moore is totally okay with.)

But even with the most “liberal-minded” white New Yorkers, Moore constantly walks a tightrope of behavior, judging when to put up with insensitive remarks or outright insults and when to defend himself. And he still has to fight the pressure, even from his girlfriend and his own pesky conscience, to give up his risky detective agency venture and run to a safe civil service job.

Book Review: Death and the Joyful Woman

Ellis Peters
1961
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is yet another well-put-together British mystery.

It starts with the violent murder of a businessman hated by many people for a variety of reasons. Someone is arrested for the crime but the detectives (and the reader) are convinced the accused person is innocent. The book follows the entire business of investigating the crime and finding the true killer.

There are negatives to this book, indeed, but they are outweighed by the positives.

The Positives

The two sleuths are likeable – both the official professional (the police detective, George Felse) and the unofficial amateur (George’s inquisitive teenage son Dominic).

The story is very well constructed. Peters does a nice job of ramping up the tension toward the end so that the climactic scene really is very exciting.

Peters exhibits hardly any of that annoying habit some mystery writers have where they too obviously keep things from the reader that would let the reader put together the clues themselves. Or the habit of trying to string the reader along and make the book more suspenseful by hinting clumsily at what the reader has already figured out, to the point where the reader wants to scream, "I know it was the butler already!" In this book, as you figure things out, the story is right there with you, acknowledging what you've figured out and then taking you to the next step.

There are some great quirky phrases in this book. I don’t know whether they’re more a result of Peters’ creativity, nationality, or era but they’re excellent:

"A sprat to catch a mackerel was fair enough"

"he was laughing like a drain"

"speak of the devil and his bat wings rustle behind you"

"working as packer and porter and general dog's body at Malden's"

"I never said anything to the fellows, naturally, but it leaked in around dawn, with the milk"

The Negatives

Some of the non-detective characters are ridiculous.

Particularly Kitty, a young woman with a complex relationship to the murdered man. Kitty is beautiful, innocent, and dippy. She does a lot of gasping and looking astonished and pleading with her big violet eyes. Naturally, guys feel rewarded just helping her out. She is like many young females in 1950s-1960s novels who are supposedly wild and rebellious, but never actually so rebellious as to be socially unacceptable.

Also, the police detective's wife, Bunty. She is completely understanding and helps her husband talk things out when he needs to even though he has a major crush on Kitty and she knows it.

Book Review: Whip Hand

Dick Francis
1979
Awards: Edgar, Gold Dagger
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Yeah! This is exactly what a fast-action, summer-reading kind of mystery novel should be.

As usual with Dick Francis, the story revolves around horse racing. The detective in this book, Sid Halley, is a former jockey who had to quit riding because he lost his left hand (his whip hand) in a racing accident. Sid’s missing hand is a perfect device for making him unique and giving him both physical and mental challenges to overcome.

Sid ends up solving three tricky and somewhat interrelated cases over the course of the book in spite of being threatened and severely beaten and - what turns out to be most difficult of all - having a severe crisis of confidence. I have to admit I don't remember the twists and turns of all of the cases because I was so wrapped up in the plot I just wanted to keep turning the pages to see what would happen next, but the most interesting of the three story lines was a bookmaking scandal in which promising young horses kept developing unexplained heart conditions.

I loved looking into Francis’s hoity-toity and yet also seedy world of English horse racing. I also loved how Francis gave me enough information as the book went along to make me feel like I was solving the case along with Sid; what surprised me surprised him too.

But, at the same time, Francis also held just enough information back to do a very effective call-all-the-characters-into-the-room grand reveal at the end. (Actually, in this book, you get a bonus mini-reveal in addition to the grand reveal, and it comes at just at the right time to make you feel like things just might turn out okay after all the struggle Sid has been through.)

Book Review: Resurrection Men

Ian Rankin
2003
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ – – – –

This might have been one consecutive British mystery too many. Or maybe I’m just missing my sci-fi. But I was extremely, extremely impatient with this book.

I have identified five primary irritants.

First: the plot. It didn’t hold my attention. In the semi-complex story, the main detective/hero, D.I. John Rebus, is sent to remedial detective school undercover, on a thin pretext of insubordination, to investigate other detectives also attending the school who are suspected of corruption. While there, Rebus manages to solve three cases simultaneously – he ferrets out the truth about the officers’ corruption; he and the corrupt cops solve a real-life cold case as part of their class work; and, through phone calls and quick off-campus visits back to his station, Rebus helps a protégé investigator solve the murder of a local art dealer. I didn’t care about any of these three cases enough to really want to keep reading.

Second: the main character. A blurb on the back of the hardcover first edition of this book describes detective Rebus as one of the most "rounded, warts-and-all characters in modern crime fiction." Maybe by “rounded” they meant “ill-defined.” I never got a consistent sense of his personality. Sometimes he was taciturn, gruff, and rebellious against authority, like Mike Hammer. Sometimes he was pained and wrestling with inner demons, like Matt Scudder. And other times he was light-hearted and sarcastic, readily volunteering advice, like Adela Bradley.

Third: ridiculous, gratuitous, contrived nicknaming of secondary characters and even some of the darned buildings. A sampling:

James "Jazz" McCullough
Morris Gerald "Big Ger" Cafferty
"Dicky" Diamond, a.k.a. "the Diamond Dog"
Eric "Rico" Lomax
Eric "Brains" Bain
John "Perry" Mason
George "Hi-Ho" Silvers

Fourth: jarringly unnecessary explanations of un-witty banter. For example:

"They got a picture of me? Was it my good side?"
"I wasn't aware that you had a good side."
A low blow, but he let her get away with it.

Thank you for helping us out by telling us that was a low blow.

Fifth: the author constantly trying to impress us with detective Rebus's record collection. While sitting in Rebus’s car or apartment, the secondary characters always manage to find themselves going through his records or CDs. This allows them to make studiedly casual references to long lists of offbeat and/or obscure bands (Cocteau Twins, Massive Attack, R.E.M., Arab Strap, Jackie Leven, Bad Company). Okay, I get it, Rebus has an eclectic, educated, wide-ranging taste in music (and, therefore, so must the author). He’s practically as cool as Quentin Tarantino.

To be fair, there were two things I liked about this book. (1) It takes place in Scotland. (2) There is a preamble at the beginning of the book explaining the British police ranking system (D.S., D.I., D.C.I., etc.) which I'd always been confused by. That explanation has helped me a lot in understanding the relative positions of officers in great British TV mystery series like Foyle’s War and Cracker.

Book Review: Beast in View

Margaret Millar
1955
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This murder mystery takes place in Los Angeles in the 1950s. A wealthy, antisocial woman, Helen Clarvoe, starts getting weird, threatening phone calls from an old acquaintance. The calls scare her, so she hires her family’s financial advisor, Mr. Blackshear, to try to find out who is calling her and why. This leads Mr. Blackshear on a nice investigation in which he uncovers all sorts of interesting secrets about Helen’s past and the other members of her family, and during which one of the people he is investigating commits suicide and another is murdered.

What I liked about this book most of all was the author’s clear, straightforward style. It was a pretty complicated story, and Millar certainly doesn’t use a simple vocabulary, but her writing is easy to read. She is not deliberately obscure or pretentious or too obvious about trying to create suspense.

The book was also small, a tidy 156 pages. I think that Millar knew the story she wanted to tell and didn't feel that she needed to add a lot of unnecessary fluff around it. Which I appreciate.

I also enjoyed reading a mystery about post-war non-Hollywood society in Los Angeles by somebody with a very different take on it than Raymond Chandler.

One notable aspect of this book is that one of the key characters, Helen’s brother Douglas, is gay. I thought that his character was handled amazingly well, considering that this book was written in 1955. Douglas is a full, complex person, not a monster or a silly stereotype. And when his mother finds out and wants to take him to a clinic to get “cured,” he explains to her (and the reader) that this is a part of who he is and it isn’t anything that he can be cured of.

The back cover of the 2000 edition of this book advertises that it pulls the main characters into a world of “extortion, pornography, vengeance, and murder." I don't know if it's really all that exciting, but it was a good read, with a clear style and plot twists that kept me interested through to the end.

Book Review: The Sculptress

Minette Walters
1994
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

This book was great, a real page-turner, up to the halfway point, when it abruptly started losing my belief and my patience and my interest.

The story revolves around Olive, an enormously obese woman who is serving a 25-year prison term for the gruesome murder of her mother and sister. A writer, Roz, is doing research for a book about the murders and ends up discovering evidence that suggests that Olive didn't commit the murders after all.

Olive is a disturbed, creepy person who makes voodoo dolls of clay and candle wax and has to be carefully drawn out to say anything of value. Roz's initial investigation into the murders was lively and kept my interest up, particularly when she was interviewing Olive.

But it all starts to go downhill when Roz gets involved with Hal, one of the policemen who arrested Olive, who is now retired and running a restaurant.

Roz’s ex-policeman/restaurateur boyfriend has problems of his own - a foreclosure-scam lawyer trying to get him to close his restaurant. As it turns out, the lawyer was Olive’s family lawyer and had invested in properties (including Hal’s restaurant) with Olive's inheritance assuming she'd be in jail for 25 years, and now that it appears she might be innocent after all he has to start breaking people's kneecaps to get the money back. All of this seemed like an attempt to be twisty that just got too complicated.

Also the relationship between Roz and the policeman is juvenile and annoying. When they got together, Roz suddenly became the stereotypical sassy but helpless heroine. Hal became her stalwart protector and kept referring to her as "woman", as in, "woman, you drive me crazy."

I also didn't buy Olive's character change over the course of the story. She went from being a tough, recalcitrant prisoner who insists she committed the murders to a soft mush-mouth who cries a lot and is practically falling over herself to explain everything that really happened.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book, though, if I may hearken back to my politically correct college days, is its treatment of the Female Body Image. First there is the obvious contrast between fat, creepy, evil Olive and skinny, sassy, virtuous Roz. There are also a couple times when Roz gets beaten up – once by her ex-husband and once by thugs hired to take back Hal’s restaurant. There is a lot of lingering detail about Roz’s injuries, and her bruises bring out the lover and romantic protector in Hal in a way that I found less than comfortable.

Book Review: The Progress of a Crime

Julian Symons
1960
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is not a stereotypical murder mystery with a lot of drama and gore. As advertised, it follows the progress of a crime very closely and realistically, from the murder to the trial of the chief suspects. You experience the investigation from the point of view of several people trying to figure out what happened – reporters, policemen, and lawyers. Sometimes they get information through good detective work, and sometimes they get it accidentally. You find out what they know as soon as they know it, and you put the story together with them.

The story had twists that I did not expect, precisely because the twists were caused by what would happen in real life – people being confused, people saying things inarticulately, people not knowing quite what they want or what they are doing.

The story is set in a small city outside of London. A gang of youths acts rowdy and gets thrown out of a dance by a prominent local citizen. A short time later, amid the confusion of a Guy Fawkes Day fireworks and bonfire celebration, the youths come back and manage to stab the prominent local citizen to death. It so happens that Hugh Bennet, a reporter for the local paper, was covering the Guy Fawkes Day bonfire when the murder happened. He thus simultaneously becomes not only an investigator of the crime but also a witness to it.

Bennet isn’t a typical lead character; he is unsure of himself and gets confused like any normal human being. He is a relatively new reporter and tends to romanticize his editor, his job, and his co-workers. He becomes disillusioned with them when a big-time reporter from a London paper comes out to cover the case and gives him a little more perspective. Then, in turn, he gets disillusioned by the big-time reporter as he learns more about his world.

Bennet’s girlfriend is a real person as well; she gets frustrated and doesn’t always act in the best or most attractive way.

The lead detective on the case, Twicker, mishandled a previous case and Scotland Yard has given this one to him as a sort of a test. I thought the whole time it was going to be a stereotypical Hollywood-type story where he was going to pull it out of his hat and dramatically redeem himself to the Yard but, as with everything else in this book, things don’t always go exactly as Hollywood would have you expect.

The lawyers for the prosecution and the defense are charismatic characters but they're not superhuman or brilliant like the ones on Law & Order. They have moments where they shine and moments of trouble, and none of them care particularly about the boys they are prosecuting or defending; they care primarily about their jobs and reputations.

The case does make many of the characters reevaluate their lives and their careers, especially Bennet. But it doesn't tie up neatly or end terrifically happily for everyone. Things come out better for some, worse for others; some find their resolution depressing and others try to make the best of theirs. Just like real life.

Book Review: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

John LeCarré
1963
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

On the back of my 1977 paperback edition of this book there is a quote from one of my favorite authors, Graham Greene. His quote says, “The best spy story I have ever read.” Below that is a quote from the New York Times that says, “It may be the best spy story anybody has ever read.”

I don’t usually go by what the reviewers say on the back of books, but in this case they’re right. This book is awesome from beginning to end.

The main character, Alec Leamas, is a British intelligence agent. He works in Berlin at the height of the cold war. He’s fed up and tired. All of his best East German agents have been exposed and murdered, one by one. He wants to quit. But his superiors in London give him one more assignment before he can come in from the cold – a chance to kill his nemesis in the East German Abteilung. He agrees to the mission and it turns out to be the hardest one he’s ever had.

The first time I read this book, way back in the ‘90s, it was the first book I had ever read by LeCarré (who was himself a British agent). It started me on a tear of reading everything he ever wrote and then seeing all of the movies based on his books.

I just love the way he writes. Spare, matter-of-fact, with great descriptive details that it seems like only someone who had actually done this job would think of. And the atmosphere is perfect. He shows you that spycraft can be dingy and cold and often requires months of careful research, uninteresting waiting, and tedious attention to detail. It is lonely – you can’t have a real connection to anyone. And it also is incredibly tense – waiting for your opportunity, never knowing if you’ve been found out. You always have to keep up your cover even when you are alone. And then there are rare moments of fast action, times when the spotlight is on you and you’d better play your part right or you’re dead.

I like that the people who Leamas is most impatient with are the people who try to understand why he does what he does. The people who think there must be some kind of religion or political philosophy that makes spies live this kind of a life. LeCarré seems to be saying that the best spies – on both sides – are the ones who are lost; the ones who aren’t sure what they believe in.

The always-disheveled Richard Burton is perfect as Leamas in the 1965 movie version of this book. This book also introduces the character of master spy George Smiley, who reappears in several of LeCarré’s other books including the awesome Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (which was made into a spot-on TV movie starring Alec Guinness).

Book Review: A Cold Red Sunrise

Stuart M. Kaminsky
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I really liked most of the characters and the setting of this book. But the main murder plot just wasn’t very gripping.

The story is set in the tiny town of Tumsk, Siberia. Police detective Rostnikov is sent from Moscow to investigate the murder of another detective who was killed while investigating the death of a little girl – the daughter of a dissident who is about to get deported to the west.

Rostnikov is extremely appealing; gruff and plainspoken. He is honest and works very hard but has run afoul of the KGB a couple times back in Moscow, so this is sort of a test for him. He has a very tall, unemotional, doggedly loyal assistant, Karpo, who is a little like Lurch from the Addams Family. The Party watchdogs are, of course, totally incompetent and full of bluster. I felt like all the townspeople were well-defined, down to the nervous old woman who serves the visiting policemen their food. The conversation was spare and direct.

Siberia itself also plays a great part in the book. Rostnikov is sent to Tumsk during the winter, so it is always ridiculously cold and the sun barely rises at all in the sky in the daytime. Snow is piled everywhere, several feet high. A snowplow (run by the Navy personnel manning the town’s weather station) clears the streets at 6:00 am every morning and serves as the town alarm clock. Most of the town’s residents are dissidents or skeptics or (like the incompetent Party watchdogs) rejects from Moscow of some kind. Everyone seems very much alone.

The problem was that the murder story itself was a little simple and maybe a little tired. Rostnikov keeps all his information close to the vest, including from the reader, which is frustrating because you aren’t really able to make your own guesses (and thereby build up your suspense) from the evidence he uncovers. I do appreciate last-minute surprise revelations but in this book practically all the information you need comes out in the last ten pages.

It turned out that I did correctly guess who the murderer was, but mainly I just guessed that person because he/she seemed like the least likely suspect, and that’s what Agatha Christie teaches you to look out for. I still am not sure I really understand his/her motive.

Because of the plot issues, I was a bit surprised that this book won the Edgar. But the book did come out at the perfect time – the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was in its final crumble. Kaminsky’s detective and his assistant both have integrity and are just trying to do their jobs, and yet – or maybe because of that – they both end up struggling in their own ways against the oppressive system they live in. They are very sympathetic characters for the end of the Cold War.