Crime fiction: zillionaire's story, serial mystery and more

Crime fiction |

Seattle-area writer Gary Alexander's "Zillionaire" (Gale/Five Star Press, 256 pp., $25.95) is a riot, despite (or because of) its star, Buster Hightower, a not-very-funny stand-up comedian who returns after his lead role in Alexander's 2010 book "Disappeared."

This time out, Buster's girlfriend's distant relative shows up on their doorstep. He's got a line on something strange: a mysterious series of numbers that might lead to a fabulous legacy left by a Japanese — wait for it — zillion-aire.

Throw in a sleazy dentist with money problems and a brain-freezingly complex code needed to crack the secret. Then add a crisis with Buster's classic Cadillac: It's been kidnapped and held for ransom. (Bits and pieces are being mailed back until Buster does the right thing.) Needless to say, high jinks ensue.

Gary Alexander will sign "Zillionaire" at noon Oct. 8 at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, 117 Cherry St. (206-587-5737 or www.seattlemystery.com).

Run out right now and buy "No Rest for the Dead" (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $24.99), not just because it's a terrific book but because it's for a good cause: Brother-and-sister editors Andrew and Lamia Gulli are donating all profits to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The book is a group effort: Starting with a simple premise (a nasty art curator's murdered body turns up in a Berlin museum), 26 writers contribute a chapter each. And there are some heavy hitters here, including David Baldacci, Jeffery Deaver, Lisa Scottoline, Kathy Reichs, Alexander McCall Smith and our own J.A. Jance. Big fun and good deeds at the same time. What more do you need?

Stella Rimington — that's Dame Stella Rimington to us — was the first woman director general of the British Security Service (MI5), so she knows what she's talking about when it comes to espionage fiction. In retirement, she's published a string of books about agent Liz Carlyle, the latest and most accomplished being "Rip Tide" (Bloomsbury, 384 pp., $25).

Told in unadorned and unfussy prose, "Rip Tide" mixes piracy on the high seas with hot-button political and religious issues. It appears that someone is giving pirate groups off the coast of Somalia inside knowledge about which containerships are loaded with valuable medical supplies. And what's with the British-born Muslim man discovered with some pirates when British troops intercept them in the Indian Ocean?

One cautionary note: The book makes frequent and possibly confusing use of the term "Asian," which in England means people of Pakistani or Indian descent.

Medieval Japan, with its strict moral codes, threats of sudden violence and highly structured feudal loyalties, is rich ground for mystery fiction. Laura Joh Rowland's excellent series about an imperial spy, Sano Ichiro, makes full use of this setting.

Rowland skillfully avoids the slightly patronizing tone of other novelists who have written about that time and place (I'm looking at you, James Clavell). Rowland also makes sure that her extensive research blends unobtrusively into her stories.

"The Ronin's Mistress" (Minotaur, 336 pp., $24.99) takes as its inspiration a true-life revenge tale that has become an icon of Japanese literature: the carefully plotted murder by 47 ronin (masterless samurai) of the aristocrat who caused their master's death. Sano, beset by rivals and court intrigue, is assigned to see if the defiant samurai should be forced to commit ritual suicide.

Finally: Best of luck to Seattleite Michael Gruber, whose espionage novel "The Good Son" has been shortlisted for the prestigious Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers' Association. The winner will be announced Oct. 11.

Adam Woog's column on crime and mystery fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Seattle Times.

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Crime - Mystery Novels by P. L. Gaus, Linda Castillo, Harry Dolan, Colin Cotterill and Lars Kepler

Once women got tired of being cast as helpless victims in crime novels and began running their own investigative agencies, authors had to scramble for other marginalized groups requiring the services of a detective hero. For more than a decade, P. L. Gaus has been writing quietly spellbinding mysteries about one such group, the conservative Old Order Amish of Holmes County, Ohio. Returning to the region in the seventh installment of his series, HARMLESS AS DOVES (Ohio University, $24.95), Gaus offers a sensitive account of the impact on this community when outsiders (that is, the cops) descend to deal with an Amish youth who has confessed to the murder of his fiancée’s older, richer and very persistent admirer.

Gaus takes an evenhanded approach to the conflicting values of the otherworldly Plain People, who travel by horse and buggy and shun electricity on their farms, as well as intruders from “the modern world of gadgets.” But he also writes with feeling about the dissension within the Amish community whenever unruly human passions threaten its members’ pacifist principles.

Holmes County is also the setting for Linda Castillo’s more conventional procedural mysteries featuring Kate Burkholder, an Amish-born (but excommunicated) chief of police who feels torn between two cultures whenever her job takes her back to the old community. Kate’s divided loyalties make her a sympathetic narrator in BREAKING SILENCE (Minotaur, $24.99) when three members of an Amish family are found dead in the manure pit of their pig farm, a tragedy she fears may be related to a recent rash of hate crimes. Kate seems a competent if sentimental cop, and for some reason her banal, clichéd interrogations don’t incite the plain-spoken Amish to drive her off with pitchforks.

David Loogan, the personable amateur sleuth in Harry Dolan’s first crime novel, “Bad Things Happen,” finds himself entangled in another literary murder case in VERY BAD MEN (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $25.95). As the editor of a mystery magazine called Gray Streets, Loogan is used to dealing with peculiar authors. But when a killer drops off a manuscript in which he confesses to one murder and thoughtfully provides the next name on his hit list, Loogan feels compelled to horn in on the investigation headed by his girlfriend, a detective on the police force in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Although the dynamic of this relationship is fairly bland, the characterization of the killer is more inspired. Anthony Lark suffers from synesthesia, a rare condition that causes him to perceive written words as having color and movement. He can read most crime stories without difficulty because of their simple language, but ornate writing styles leave him queasy, and adverbs, which “swarmed like marching ants,” make his skin crawl.

If Lark could actually read this convoluted account of his mad mission to rectify the unjust outcome of a 17-year-old robbery, the killer might indeed be seeing red. That reaction would have less to do with Dolan’s language, which is clean and crisp, than with his excessive use of plot twists, character reversals and irrelevant clues — devices that, like adverbs, should be used sparingly by writers who don’t want to find themselves on some crazy reader’s hit list.

It’s a fact of crime fiction that social misfits make the best amateur detectives. That’s certainly true of the endearing sleuth of Colin Cotterill’s first mystery series, Dr. Siri Paiboun, an aged pathologist who is amused and appalled to find himself one of the last surviving free-­thinking intellectuals in 1970s Communist Laos. In KILLED AT THE WHIM OF A HAT (Minotaur, $24.99), Cotterill expands on his outsider theme with a beguiling new series set in contemporary Thailand. His scrappy young heroine, Jimm Juree, feels the sting of social alienation when her mother’s impulsive decision to buy a shabby resort on the Gulf of Thailand forces a move south from Chiang Mai, dashing Jimm’s dreams of becoming the local paper’s first-string crime reporter.

Stuck in this rural backwater, where southerners dislike northerners and northerners scorn southerners and everyone hates the Chinese, Jimm can identify with the lonely stand of evergreen trees she spies growing here in the tropics: “I wondered if they had dreams of snow.” Luckily for her, two drifters from a bygone era suddenly surface when a workman digs up a 1972 Volkswagen camper with their skeletons inside. Now that’s something you don’t often see up north, a hint that Jimm’s life in the south is going to be much more interesting than she thought.

Don’t believe the hype about THE HYPNOTIST (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27), a calculating thriller by two Swedish authors writing as Lars Kepler. This lengthy story of a spree killer who wipes out three members of a family in a murderous rage and the discredited hypnotist who comes out of professional exile to help catch him does contain strokes of good writing (“Josef had a particular smell about him, a smell of rage, of burning chemicals,” in Ann Long’s blunt translation). And the maniac of the piece is certainly an eye-­catching villain. But the dislocations in time, glib psychology and repetitious depiction of guts and gore create more discomfort than tension. For genuinely stylish sadism, stick to Stieg Larsson; for cruelty executed with true cunning, read Jo Nesbo; and if ponderous philosophizing is called for, no one can beat Henning Mankell.

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What have we got here then? The mystery of Irish crime writing

The Irish Times - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 JOHN CONNOLLY

DESPITE THE prevalence of a certain type of Golden Age-indebted crime fiction, largely British in origin, that uses rural landscapes as its backdrop, crime fiction functions best in urban settings. It was GK Chesterton who commented that crime fiction was unique in expressing “some sense of the poetry of modern (which is to say urban) life”.

For Chesterton, the city functioned as a text that required interpretation, a mystery in itself: “There is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as it were a telegram or postcard. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in the grave.” ( A Defence of Detective Stories , published in The Defendant , 1901).

For Chesterton, crime fiction is inextricable from, and actively concerned with, city life. It requires not only its architectural complexity and historical layering, but the energy that derives from the random collisions of people, the endless social interactions between both strangers and acquaintances.

Even the village settings of Agatha Christie’s novels (the “Mayhem Parva school” of writing, as Colin Watson termed it in Snobbery With Violence (1971), his critical history of the genre) require an enormous degree of interconnectedness between individuals for the plots to function. Christie’s villages are less microcosms and more enclosed spaces into which too many traumatised people have been crammed, like survivors of some dreadful natural disaster.

Irish society, which was primarily rural by nature, was unlikely to accommodate the conventions of contemporary crime fiction without a struggle, despite its fascination with the secrets and foibles of others, itself the subject of the Brinsley MacNamara book, The Valley of the Squinting Windows , the hostile reaction to which led its author to leave his home county of Westmeath and not return.

In a sense, John B Keane’s play The Field (1965) is an example of the form that an Irish rural crime story might take, a study in which the core question is less “who?” than “why?”, where the central mystery is the connection of a people to a landscape, so that land becomes not merely a convenient stage upon which to play out the drama but a thing inseparable from the nature of the protagonists.

Something of our national inferiority complex may well have played a part here too. Perhaps readers simply did not view Ireland as “interesting” or “kinetic” enough to comfortably accommodate the drama of crime fiction, however sedate the form. (A similar outlook bedevilled the development of our native film industry for many years, and it remains a battle to get Irish filmgoers to support home-grown product.)

In this, we have a certain amount in common with Australia, another country that struggled to establish its own cultural identity in the aftermath of direct British rule, and suffered from a similar crisis of confidence as a consequence. It, too, now boasts a burgeoning homegrown crime tradition, and Australian crime authors, including Peter Temple and Michael Robotham, have begun to attract a readership beyond their own shores.

“HEY JOHNNY, WHAT ARE YOU REBELLING AGAINST? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?” 

The Golden Age of crime fiction, generally taken as the period between the two world wars, produced two very different traditions: the British tradition, often referred to, somewhat unfairly, as “cosy”, and the American, referred to, somewhat less unfairly, as “hard-boiled”. Each springs from a very distinct process of engagement with the concept of law and order and the perceived nature of society. The British tradition is motivated primarily by a trust in the Establishment; a belief that the propensity for criminal behaviour is a part of the human character but also, if acted upon, an aberration; and a desire for order as much as, if not more than, the rule of law, for the two are, of course, not the same. While there is an affection for the amateur eccentric as detective (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey), such figures are only superficially outsiders while remaining essentially Establishment to their core.

They may occasionally show up the police as well-meaning bumblers, but at heart they maintain a faith in those responsible for protecting society and enforcing the law. In the end, the criminal is handed over the tender care of the police in the certainty that justice, having prevailed, will now be seen to be done in a court of law.

The American tradition has no such faith. It’s no coincidence that the spiritual home of the hard-boiled crime novel is California, a state mired in corruption during the period under discussion. With the police regarded, not without justification, as being bought and paid for by the wealthy and the privileged, the poor and the vulnerable had no recourse to the law in the event that they were victimised further.

In that case they required someone standing outside the established forces of law and order to act on their behalf, and so begins the private eye novel. Actually the figure of the private eye is, in turn, indebted to the lone cowboy of the western tradition, facing down oppressors because to do otherwise would make him complicit in their crimes.

The point at which those two traditions finally begin to blend into each other is probably the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), which is essentially a western in nice suits, although Hammett had earlier dabbled in the western with the neo-noir story Corkscrew (1925).

In Red Harvest , two rival gangs are set against each other by a lone, anonymous operative, until eventually they eliminate themselves. Red Harvest subsequently became one of the sources of inspiration for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), along with Hammett’s later novel The Glass Key (1931), which in turn influenced the Coen Brothers’ 1990 gangster movie Miller’s Crossin g, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing (1996), so Red Harvest has variously taken cinematic form as a samurai movie, a western, and a gangster film. While police procedurals have since found purchase in the American tradition, most memorably in the form of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, albeit with something of the tolerance for the maverick that is a part of the private eye tradition, the private eye novel has struggled to make a successful case for itself in the UK.

While that may be due, to some degree, to the sense that gun-toting PIs don’t travel well across the Atlantic, I would suggest that it is also a consequence of a deeply held belief that the pursuit of justice is one best entrusted to the police, and an absence of the frontier spirit of the United States that places such a premium on independence and individual action.

That belief may be shaken by reports of real life police corruption, brutality, and incompetence, but it seems such revelations may simply cause readers to turn to the more idealised police officers of crime fiction with renewed vigour.

After all, crime fiction is less about the world as it is than the world as it should be. As William Gaddis wrote in his novel JR (1976): “Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”

Crime fiction refuses to accept that this should be the case, and in doing so it reflects the desire of its readers for a more just society. Even at its darkest it is, essentially, hopeful by nature.

All of which brings us back to Ireland, and the question of which of these two opposing outlooks might best have suited an Irish crime novel. The answer, I think, is neither: the Irish police had yet to establish themselves in the mind of the populace, and after centuries of British rule our faith in the Establishment and its values was minimal.

If we accept the view that crime fiction is not merely engaged with the society from which it comes but is representative of it, then the nascent Irish Republic – secretive, defensive, intensely parochial, and unforgiving of its critics – gave Irish crime fiction little with which to work.

John Banville’s 21st-century crime novels, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, tackle the bleak Ireland of the 1950s but are informed by revelations that have only recently been formally examined: the cruelty of the Magdalene laundries and the collusion between Church and State that allowed the systematic physical and sexual abuse of children and young women to continue for decades. Such novels would have been difficult to write as contemporary fiction, and impossible to publish.

John Connolly is the author of the Charlie Parker series of mystery novels.

This is an extract from Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, edited by Declan Burke, published by Liberties Press

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