PETRONA

The Preacher by Camilla Lackberg, translated by Steven T. Murray

2009-07-17T19:36:54+01:00

The story of Erica, her partner Patrick (the local deputy police chief) and her troubled sister Anna, begun in The Ice Princess, continues in this excellent second novel. Erica is a much more domestic character in The Preacher than she was in the previous novel, as she’s about to have a child and is enjoying a last couple of weeks at home, on sick leave from her job, before the baby is born. She’s blissfully happy with Patrick, who is warm and sensitive, and relieved that Anna has escaped her abusive husband Lucas and seems to be starting a new life with her two young children.
Events in the small town of Fjallbacka are less tranquil, though, with the discovery of a body of a murdered young woman in a cave on a local farm. This crime is compounded by the fact that the body is lying on top of two skeletons. With Erica’s help, Patrick soon identifies the skeletons as belonging to two young women who went missing 24 years ago. The new victim, however, is much less easy to identify; Patrick and his colleagues have a frustrating time trying to find out who she is – but eventually old-fashioned police work provides the breakthrough that ties together the new crime to the old.
What’s all this got to do with a preacher, you may be asking? Patrick is convinced that an extended local family is involved in the crime or crimes. When the two girls vanished all those years ago, Gabriel Hult contacted the police to tell them that he’d seen his brother, Johannes, in his car with one of the victims on the night she disappeared. Johannes was the prime suspect until he was found hanged in his barn, presumably having committed suicide in remorse. Gabriel and Johannes are the sons of the titular preacher, Ephraim Hult, who as a young man had made money by travelling round and using the two boys to “heal” gullible people of various ailments. At about the time the lads reached puberty, Ephraim announced that the gift had deserted the boys and retired from his circuit – marrying a rich woman and, when he eventually died, leaving a fortune to taciturn Gabriel, and nothing to the family of the handsome, free-spirited Johannes. Resentments have simmered, and sometimes boiled over, between the two families ever since.
Most of The Preacher tells the story of the tortured relationships of the Hults across the generations – wives, sons, daughters and grandchildren. Patrick is convinced that the answer to the mystery lies within the family’s secrets, but he can’t make much headway before another young woman goes missing after hitching a lift into town from the local campsite. Conscious that time is ticking away, Patrick is desperate to find the missing young woman while at the same time torn by his responsibilities to Erica and the imminent birth of his own child.
The Preacher is a great read, and has many things to recommend it. Above all it is a good story, packed with incident and paced revelations. One of its strengths is that most of the events are seen with the humanity of Patrick and Erica – Erica’s increasing concern for her sister and her inability to stand up to various freeloading visitors who want a free summer holiday, as well as her anxieties about motherhood provide a warm background to the very cold, unsentimentally told events of the novel. Patrick is a much more rounded character than he was in The Ice Princess – he’s hard-working, talented as a policeman, has empathy with his victims and has a charming introspection and good nature. Another plus is the depiction of the police colleagues – each character has his or her own foibles and the reader becomes absorbed in the routine and interactions of the cops.
The Preacher is a good mystery story, very well translated. Although there are too few characters to make the ending a complete surprise, Camilla Lackberg (pictured) keeps all the balls juggling in the air to keep the reader guessing as to the details almost right to the finish. Although the ending of the book is exciting, it is also very bleak, and I found the details of the motivation of the criminal not all that convincing. These are minor disappointments, though. In the main, the book is a great read: as well as tight plotting, the author is particularly strong on her depictions of small-town dynamics, the interactions among the police, and the domestic story of Patrick and Erica, which is left nicely balanced for the next novel in the series. (There are six so far, all of which have been bestsellers in Sweden.)

I thank Crime Fiction Reader of It’s a Crime blog, and HarperCollins, for my copy of this book.

Other reviews of The Preacher:

Sunnie Gill at Euro Crime
Kimbofo at Reading Matters
Peter at Nordic Bookblog
CrimeFiction Reader at It's a Crime...or a mystery

Steven T. Murray, the excellent translator, writes about the book.

Vargas wins International Dagger 2009

2009-07-16T21:41:44+01:00

I am the last person in the world to have heard about the CWA International Dagger award for 2009, announced last night. Fred Vargas and her translator Sian Reynolds won for The Chalk Circle Man,the most Harry Potter-esque of the shortlist. Because I go to bed at about 9 pm and wake at 6 am, and the internet (social aspect) is not part of my routine until I get home at night, everyone else had reacted to this news long before I received it via an industry email sent to my work account this afternoon. Predictably there is much comment that the winning book is (1) by an author who has already won twice; (2) the only non-Nordic book on the shortlist; and (3) is French. OK I made that last one up - but taking into account last year's winner, Dominique Manotti with Lorraine Connection, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, with Vargas and Reynolds again for 2007 and 2006 (Wash This Blood Clean from my Hands and The Three Evangelists, respectively), Gallic honours are very high.
Incidentally, in the context of this award, "international" means "translated into English from their original language, for UK publication". Books originally written in English whatever the nationality of the author qualify for the main annual award, for example Peter Temple deservedly won in 2007.
Returning to 2009, I believe that points (1), (2) and (3) are irrelevant in deciding the winner, and although the judge's choice wasn't the book I would have selected, I think it is a fine example of contemporary crime fiction (actually it was written quite a few years ago, but never mind - most foreign-language books seem to take a while to have English translations published). Another point to bear in mind is that all the books on the shortlist have flaws - of course, all books have flaws of some kind, but crime fiction does tend to suffer from cliche, formula and incredulity somewhat more than most, and these downsides can be applied at times to all the titles on the shortlist, I think.
Looking forward, I can already imagine a few strong candidates for next year's shortlist: The Preacher by Camilla Lackberg, translated by Steven T. Murray (reviews here at Euro Crime, Reading Matters and Nordic Bookblog); The Water's Edge by Karin Fossum, translated by Charlotte Barslund; and Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard, translated by Tiina Nunally. (Strangely, these are all Scandinavian!)

Some posts about the 2009 International Dagger awards:

Lying for a Living by Meg Gardiner, MC for the awards evening (lovely pictures).
Euro Crime blog
Crime Scraps: Fred Vargas wins again!
Discussion at Friend Feed.
Mysteries in Paradise: I am not always right.
Scandinavian crime fiction: c'est dommage.
It's a Crime...or a mystery.
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.
Mystery Fanfare.

Digital photography and Italian lessons

2009-07-15T14:16:06+01:00

My ex-colleague Oliver Morton recently invited me to join the question-and-answer service Aardvark. It seems like a good idea - Oliver told Aardvark that he trusted my knowledge of detective fiction and science (thanks, Oliver!) and I've signed up via Facebook, but Aardvark seems to be an independent application. I have also invited a few friends to join. (I think you can join my network directly by going here.) I can now ask people questions using keywords, and if anyone asks Aardvark a question using whatever keywords I told it I knew about, people can ask me questions - all via Aardvark-mediated DM (integrated with whatever DM system you currently use, or via email if you don't use DM, or via Twitter). You can limit your Q/A interactions to people in your Aardvark network or widen them to all Aardvark users.

So, I've asked the two questions most pressing on my mind just now, but it occurs to me that I could also ask the same questions here, on my blog, and I might also get some answers! So, here goes:

(1) Does anyone know of a London-based digital photography course for teens over the summer holidays, specifically during the last two weeks of August?

(2) Does anyone know of a nice tutor of Italian, who would teach a teenage beginner interested in studying for a GCSE - say for the next couple of years?

Book review: Genesis by Karin Slaughter

2009-07-13T19:34:57+01:00

Karin Slaughter’s Skin Privilege (Beyond Reach in the US), sixth in the Grant county series featuring Sarah Linton, ended with a shock. The author followed the book with Fractured, set in the same state but about different characters – mainly Special Agent Will Trent and police detective Faith Mitchell. Slaughter’s latest novel, Genesis (Publisher: Century; US title, Undone) combines these series by introducing these characters to each other.
   Since we last encountered her, Sarah has left her previous job as Grant county coroner, sold her paediatrics practice, and is now working crazy hours in Grady hospital ER. An elderly couple driving home hit what they first think is a deer leaping out into the road, but soon realise that they have, in fact, collided with a young woman. Other motorists stop to help and the traumatised victim is taken to hospital, to be treated by Sarah. It is immediately apparent that the patient has been brutally tortured, including being blinded, and has been starved for many days. As investigators of the crime, Will and Faith meet Sarah - who rapidly finds herself with another, unexpected patient – Faith.
   The main plot of the book concerns Will and Faith’s attempts to discover who was responsible for the appalling ordeal that “Anna”, as they think the woman is called, has suffered – Will discovers the cave in the woods where she and another woman were held, and realises the adversary is a very sick and dangerous person. At the same time, he and Faith have to cope with interdepartmental rivalries which compromise their ability to do their job.
   Anna herself is drifting in and out of consciousness, but after a couple of days is able to ask Sarah what has become of her baby son. Will and Faith rush to Anna’s apartment, which turns out to be the scene of another crime – one which Angie, Will’s estranged wife, and her low-life contacts have previously tipped him off about but which he has ignored in his attempts to escape Angie’s influence.
   In the meantime, a woman disappears from a supermarket car park, leaving her six-year-old son terrified in the back of her car. The detectives realise that their only chance of finding the woman is to uncover what happened to Anna, but Anna is not interested in helping. Another woman disappears, and all the victims seem to be connected by their membership of an online anorexia group.
   Despite these and other events, the book is told at an extremely slow pace, focusing on the thoughts and insecurities of the three main characters as they wrestle with their various inadequacies (not revealed here because of spoilers). One has a strange sense reading the novel that events are going on somewhere else while Will, Faith and Sarah ruminate and agonise over their various personal dilemmas. Another annoying aspect of this writing style is that nothing much happens in the characters' personal lives between the start and the end of each book – Sarah for example spends the whole book wondering whether or not to read a letter; Will's dyslexia is (constantly) overdramatically presented; a look between two characters is picked over rather than going anywhere; and we know far too much about Faith’s angst-ridden reactions to her own domestic/personal situation with no resolution or direction to move things along. The most dynamic, and sharply individual, character is Amanda, Faith and Will’s boss, who always drives the plot forward whenever she appears– introspection is not her style and all the scenes in which she appears are fresh, crisp and provide direction.
   The book picks up towards the end as Will finally interviews a missing witness and begins to put all the pieces together. The climax is exciting, but there are quite a few holes in the plot, and of course in the interests of tension Will and Faith separately break several “detective 101” rules that any seasoned reader of crime fiction will realise way in advance mean big trouble, and so are merely irritating rather than adding to the suspense.
   My main problem with this book is its obsession with its sick subject matter. I don’t mind reading strong stuff, but to my mind there isn’t enough detection, pace or plot to compensate for too many gratuitously disgusting details, sometimes going as far as “torture porn” and pointless sensationalism. Karin Slaughter is a talented author – Triptych is right up there with the best thrillers currently being written, being a cracking and involving story. She needs to drop the clunky Patricia Cornwell/Thomas Harris-like direction she seems to be moving into (agonising and gruesome), and stick to what she does best, which is to write about a group of professionals, police and medical, coping with some of the stresses and adventures of modern low life.

Read the first chapter of Genesis free online.

I thank Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this book.

Sunday Salon: Reinventing plots

2009-07-12T16:07:53+01:00

As well as featuring 12 crime fiction novels, the current issue of Waterstones Quarterly contains an interview with Sarah Waters about her life and work, especially her latest book The Little Stranger. I found a paragraph about influences on this novel extraordinary for two reasons:

"That's right" [says Waters]. "I'd been thinking a lot about Brideshead and other country-house novels. One in particular actually: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. It's about a working class girl who's abducted by a mother and daughter living in an isolated house. It's brilliant in lots of ways, but repellent: the narrator's sympathies are completely with the middle-class people and the girl is made a repository for all this class loathing. At first I wanted to do a rewrite of it, but I worried that Tey's estate might not be happy. So I decided to find another way to explore that landscape."

First, has Waters actually read the book? Of course she must have done, but anyone who has read it will surely agree that her encapsulation of the plot is bizarre.

Second, the idea of Tey's novel as a ruthless salvo in the class war had not occurred to me before. It is an interesting way to look at it. Not a perspective with which I agree, but Sarah Waters has certainly provided a stimulating, if jarring, interpretation.

I thought I might try the Sarah Waters treatment on a couple of classics.

Hamlet: a middle-aged couple is driven to distraction by a hooligan they selflessly adopted despite his ASBO. The authorities' caring attempts to save the wayward boy from his worst excesses via secret surveillance and monitoring by a female social worker are viciously repelled.

Lord of the Flies: in an over-the-top show of force, the military callously destroy the innocent game of a group of unarmed boys; the reader is encouraged to root for the oppressors, endorsing the terrible repression so prevalent in British society at that time and providing a vote for juntas worldwide.

Please feel free to try this approach yourself on your own favourites.

The return of Harry

2009-07-11T22:02:12+01:00

From Random Jottings: "as I stood in the check out queue there was at least one copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in each trolley. In front of me stood a gentleman with four copies and I could not resist asking him, Why Four? "Well, there is one each for the kids and one each for the wife and me and we are going to have a really great weekend as peace will reign in our house while we all read" ".

---------

Four poems written by 19-year-old Daniel Radcliffe have appeared in an underground fashion magazine under the pen-name of Jacob Gershon. The collection was published in November 2007 in Rubbish magazine, an annual publication with a circulation of 3,000 which describes itself as "a playful platform for fashionable people". This, and many other fascinating details, are revealed in The Guardian.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: Warner Brothers official site.

Freemium as a bird

2009-07-10T18:16:14+01:00

I like this comment by Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine and author of books The Long Tail and the two-day-old, controversial Free, in response to some of the recent attacks on him and his latest project:

"I may have a somewhat rosy-tinted view of journalists as being largely drawn by intellectual curiosity, but they are also people, and they are people in the midst of a once- in-a-lifetime industry collapse. How the media industry has to reform is not yet clear. I don’t have answers for them."

Chris was interviewed by PW for an article about the stormy reception the book has received - mainly by people who haven't read it or who can't be bothered to work out his argument before reacting against it. (The unfortunate accidental lack of attribution of some Wikipedia passages didn't exactly add to the book's popularity.) Me, I'm well-disposed towards anything Chris writes anyway as he's always intelligent and original (he's an ex-colleague of mine from long ago when he was a News reporter at Nature, and has also done a distinguished stint at The Economist), but the fact that Malcolm Gladwell slated the book in a prominent review makes me think it probably is rather good.

PW interview with Chris Anderson on the meaning of Free.

The Long Tail blog, which has lots of posts about the book and how it is "free" (and why).

@chr1sa on Twitter.

Useful and useless promotions

2009-07-09T19:55:44+01:00

Among my emails today was one from my gas supplier, about the London postal strike. The email informed me that this strike was expected to cause major disruption, and would I therefore like to rest more assured and manage my account with them online? (Which I already do, and have done for years.) One person's sorrow is another's opportunity - or in this case, one organisation's sorrow is another organisation's opportunity to show both its rapaciousness and its incompetence. Maybe next time there is a burst main in my area, the Royal Mail will send a person on a bike to my house with a "Post Office Brand Gas Cylinder", compete with compatible (or possibly incompatible) attachments to my supply pipes.

Returning to reality, I was quite impressed by Waterstone's latest crime-fiction promotion, Fresh Blood. In their print magazine and online, they present short biographies and minireviews of books (at "up to 40 per cent off") by 12 authors - they call them "best" and "new" which is not always true, but they are not obvious, lazy choices - they are (of the ones I have read) rather classy selections. They include novels by Brian McGilloway, Yrsa Sigurdadottir, S. J. Bolton, Johan Theorin, Karen Campbell, Nicola Upson and Camilla Lackberg. I've enjoyed novels by all these authors, so I will certainly aim to read books by the remaining five - Mark Pearson, Caro Ramsey, David Levien, Shona McLean and R. N. Morris. There, good marketing works! (Gas company, please note.)

By the way, Waterstones is also offering a few lucky readers the chance of a free advance copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Triology (published by Quercus), out in the UK in October. Pre-order the book at Waterstones before 6 August, fill out a form including your card number, sign a confidentiality agreement ;-), and you could be one of five lucky winners of a free pre-publication copy of the book. Further details here.

Possibly my last word on the topic before the International Dagger winner is announced

2009-07-07T22:06:10+01:00

Now that I have read all the books on the shortlist for the International Dagger award 2009, the question on everyone's mind is "am I sticking to my earlier choice of winner?" That earlier choice was made exactly one month ago today, on the basis of having read four of the six novels.

The books, with links to my reviews, are:

Karin Alvtegen - Shadow (translated by McKinley Burnett)
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played With Fire (translated by Reg Keeland)
Johan Theorin - Echoes From The Dead (translated by Marlaine Delargy)
Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man (translated by Sian Reynolds)
Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill (translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb)
Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer (translated by Don Bartlett)

Two of the novels are exciting thrillers - Redeemer and The Girl Who Played with Fire. Only one of them, Shadow, is not a police procedural, in whole or part. They are all very sad -each of them facing up to the cruelties of human nature. Two of them, Shadow and Echoes from the Dead, are explicitly about the lasting effects of the Second World War on the present, and one, The Redeemer, has its roots in the horrors of more recent conflicts in the Balkans. Arctic Chill is an indictment of racism and, in common with The Redeemer, condemns the attitudes of comfortable cultures on those less fortunate. The Chalk Circle Man is an oddity - not necessarily because it is French whereas the other books here are Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic- but because it is a fable. Even so, what gives it its heart is the same as the core appeal of the other books - its identity with the weak, the old, the abandoned child, the immigrant, those whom society would ignore.

All the books share one feature in common - they are all superbly translated by people who have real empathy with the text and seem to genuinely interpret the intention of the author, as well as the actual words. Perhaps it goes without saying that they all have a committment to showing the truth - either via a detective or via one or more of the characters who aren't formally investigators, but who also are the conscience of the events that are described. The books all also share the accolade of being impossible to stop once you start. You live with these books while you are reading them, and for long afterwards.

All, then, are worthy winners. None of these books is noticeably "better" than the others. All these books have a heart, and speak for those who don't usually have a voice: children, women, the poor, the bereaved, the old, the forgotten. For me, the emotion evoked by the sadness of Shadow and Julia's enduring grief in Echoes from the Dead possibly lift these two books onto a higher plane. But these are personal reactions from one who recognises the suffering. Arctic Chill is an utterly sympathetic portrait of depression and of the awareness of life's pragmatic disappointments. The Girl Who Played with Fire is a sprawling, occasionally flawed novel of immense heart and passion, burning with revenge in a cold, fierce heat. The Chalk Circle Man is a magical, glassy, brittle affair, told with baroque detail and with a splinter of ice in its heart. Echoes from the Dead identifies not only with the impossible grief of a mother who has lost her child and has no subsequent engagement with life, but is also an elegy of old age - the enforced patience, the slow death of faculties physical and mental. Shadow is Chekhovian in its unblinking portrayal of lives, old and young, destroyed by ambition - and Shakesperian in the playing out of the roles of the characters.

All of the books except Shadow are series. The Chalk Circle Man and Echoes from the Dead are the first in their respective series (Echoes from the Dead is a debut with the second yet to be translated; The Chalk Circle Man has been translated long after several later installments). The Redeemer and Arctic Chill are relatively late entries, and probably suffer slightly if you haven't read the earlier volumes. The Girl Who Played with Fire is second in a posthumous triology and definitely requires a previous reading of the first volume.

My main advice is to read all six books. All of them transcend the mere labelling of genre. All of them present characters who live outside the page, and provide an involving, exciting plot. All of them will involve you, will make you laugh at times and make you feel sadness, anger and despair. None of them should be consigned to a genre. It's a very worthy list indeed: I commend them all.

The winners will be announced next week, on 15 July.

A selection of posts and polls about the International Dagger 2009 award.

Sunday Salon: The Chalk Circle Man, by Fred Vargas, translated by Sian Reynolds

2009-07-05T11:27:27+01:00

The Chalk Circle Man
By Fred Vargas, translated by Sian Reynolds.

So I come to the last book I have to read that is on the shortlist for the 2009 International Dagger award. It’s French, and the first in the Adamsberg series that has already won Fred Vargas this award for two years in succession (2006 and 2007).
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has been, until the start of this novel, a provincial police inspector of great unconventionality but with an unusually high success rate in solving cases. Therefore, as the novel opens, he’s recently promoted to commissioner in the Parisian force, and we see his eccentricities through the eyes of his close colleague, Inspector Danglard – himself a single parent of two sets of twins and additionally looking after a fifth child belonging to but abandoned by his ex-wife and her lover. Adamsberg has an instinctive, bordering on supernatural, style, as is shown by an initial vignette in which he correctly identifies the criminal in a case long before any evidence is found to force a confession from the suspect.
Despite the internal and external strangenesses of the sensual Adamsberg and the lugubrious Danglard, the story told in The Chalk Circle Man is at its heart a straightforward police procedural. Someone is drawing chalk circles on the Parisian streets at night, leaving strange objects in their centres. Adamsberg’s forebodings about the person behind this activity are soon borne out when a murdered body is found inside one of the circles. Despite intensive police activity, other murders follow, at different parts of the city.
An eccentric range of suspects is assembled even before the first body is found. An academic whose research speciality is deep-sea fish, Mathilde, has a hobby of following people round the city. One of these characters, a beautiful blind man called Paul Reyer, has disappeared and Mathilde, professing to be worried, reports him as missing to the police. She is ignored by all but Adamsberg, who rapidly finds the “missing” man (not missing at all). Soon, Reyer and another wanderer on the streets, an elderly woman called Clemence, are lodging with Mathilde in her fish-obsessed house. Clemence is addicted to answering lonely-hearts adverts, but is perpetually disappointed because each time she arranges to meet someone, he immediately abandons the old woman on sight.
How these three oddballs are going to become involved in the chalk circle story is not clear – but involved they are, not only with the mystery but also, in Mathilde’s case, with Adamsberg in a much more personal sense. As events reach their climax, the author plays fair with her readers and provides a satisfying, if sad, solution to the bizarre conundrum. At the same time, the author has piqued the reader's interest in the affectionate relationship (mainly unspoken) between Adamserg and Danglard, two men of very different outlook, to be explored further in future novels.
Much has been written about Vargas's alternative universe. I see her characters as acting like children in adult’s bodies. This novel is a fable, in which people live out their impulses, creative or destructive, without thought of consequence. Nobody plans for the future, living in the existential present. Yet the motivation of the murderer is cold and logically carried out – and would pass muster in a novel firmly rooted in pedestrian reality.
The book is peppered with acute social observations; cynical yet funny barbs at the media and modern society (the excerpts from the newspaper reports of the chalk circles are hilarious); and myriad tiny delights – Mathilde’s plan to spend a day following a man who is interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, Clemence’s pointed teeth for which Mathilde likes to provide zoological comparisons, or little exchanges between Adamsberg and Danglard about Byzantium and the emperor Justinian (actually highly relevant to the mystery). If the reader is prepared to take this world as it is, then the book is very satisfying. Its eccentricities are charming (though the author is ruthless within her creation, which is no fairy tale) – they are bound up in the pace and focus of the novel, rather than distracting the reader from these essentials.

Thanks to Karen Meek of Euro Crime for my proof copy of the book.

Fred Vargas at Euro Crime: a listing of all the books translated into English, in order, with links to reviews.

Crime Scraps discusses The Chalk Circle Man and order of translations of the Vargas books, in a series of posts.

L A Times: Sarah Weinman discusses Fred Vargas's novels and the order in which they have been translated.

Other reviews of The Chalk Circle Man at:

Euro Crime by Fiona Walker

Mysteries in Paradise by Kerrie

The Independent by Jane Jakeman

The Guardian (brief) by Laura Wilson

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett

2009-07-04T19:57:59+01:00

In the cold of winter in Oslo, Harry Hole is investigating the case of a young drug addict who has apparently committed suicide among the containers in a shipyard. He's undecided about his future with the police force: although he has achieved closure concerning the death of his colleague (described in three previous novels: The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star), the reverberations have left him even more outside the mainstream than before. His lover Rakel has rejected him in favour of a careerist doctor. What's more, his sympathetic boss, Bjarne Moller, has retired and been replaced by a stickler for discipline, Gunnar Hagan. It isn't long before Harry and his new boss are rubbing each other up the wrong way, as Hagan reacts against Harry's intuitive and freewheeling approach (no doubt he would be shocked at Harry's failure ever to have had business cards printed).
Harry is nothing if not a good detective, though, and rapidly unearths the facts behind the young man's death which his younger, slicker colleagues have overlooked. His method of solving the case proves critical to the climax of the next investigation, which takes up the bulk of the book.
An assassin from Vukovar is in Oslo, whose target is a member of the Salvation Army. We are told the life story of the assassin, known as the Little Redeemer for his actions in the terrible wars during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. We also learn a great amount about the workings of the Norwegian branch of the Salvation Army, the raging jealousies and relationship traumas of its younger members, and the shady business dealings concerning the lucrative properties that the Army owns in Oslo. I admired the fact that the author managed to keep me interested in the story of the Little Redeemer, because the 'disaffected assassin' theme is one that crops up quite often in thrillers and tends to create a sense of deja vu.(For an example of an excellent book in this subgenre, I highly recommend The Serbian Dane by Leif Davidson.)
I was less interested in the Salvation Army characters, finding most of them (the men, certainly) either unsympathetic or not well-drawn, or both. I would prefer to have read more about Harry, his personal life and his colleagues. As the plot thickens - and it is a very fast-moving, exciting plot - there are a couple of rather gruesome set-pieces, as well as another tragedy that strikes the Oslo police team. Harry himself presses on with the investigation, finding himself drawn to one of the Army members, which of course distracts him from his pursuit of the Redeemer. As I've found previously with this author, the final disentangling of who hired the assassin and why does really stretch credulity - however, the story of the Redeemer and his circumstances are, perhaps because more simple, rather moving, and I was pleased by Harry's choices in the end-game.
Although you don't need to have read the earlier books in the series to enjoy The Redeemer, I think you'll enjoy it a lot more if you have done. There are nuances running throughout the text, for example Harry's relationship with watches and with his retired ex-boss, that won't make much sense in isolation of the previous novels. I think the Harry Hole books comprise one of the top police-procedural series being written today. Although the books have flaws, they are flaws of ambition - the plots are very clever, and if perhaps they are sometimes a bit too clever, that's better than the opposite. These novels are thoughtful, intelligent, exciting and above all, have a great central character.

'You're moving into a difficult area for theologians, Hole. Are you a Christian?'
'No. I'm a detective. I believe in proof.'

I recommend reading all the books - in the right order. (English readers won't have been able to read the first two chronological novels in the series, which have not yet been translated, but the next one, The Snowman, will be out in English fairly soon, and follows directly on from The Redeemer.)

See yesterday's post for other reviews of the book, and links to further discussion about Nesbo's novels.

Jo Nesbo at Euro Crime: lists the books so far translated into English (excellently, all by Don Bartlett), with links to reviews.

Euro Crime news about forthcoming novels by Nesbo .

Crime Scraps: Is Jo Nesbo Europe's top crime writer?

Some books by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett

2009-07-03T18:24:54+01:00

I have been having a bit of a Jo Nesbo fest recently, as part of a possibly doomed attempt to read all the shortlisted novels for the Crime Writers' Association international dagger award before the winner is announced in about a week's time. I had read four of the six books when the shortlist was announced, which admittedly helps a lot.

Although I had not read Jo Nesbo's The Redeemer, I won it at Crime Fest, so had a copy to hand. Life is not that simple, though. Nesbo's Harry Hole series is one of many to be translated into English out of chronological order - and in this particular case, it's an egregious crime because the impact of the "trilogy within the series" (The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star) is ruined if you do what I did and read the third one first, followed by the first one. The Redeemer follows on from this "trilogy".

Nothing for it, then, but to buy Nemesis and read that first. And a gripping read it is, too. The character of the police detective, Harry Hole, previously rather patchy and chaotic, began to gel in my mind. I'm sure he looks exactly like Don Bartlett, the excellent translator of the series (though Don has more hair than Harry). Nemesis turns out to be a very exciting book. Harry is mourning the death of a colleague and has his suspicions (actually, convictions) of who is the perpetrator. However, after six months he has failed to find any evidence so has agreed with his boss to go back to his usual duties. His girlfriend Rakel and her son Oleg are in Russia, where Rakel is petitioning the courts for custody of Oleg. While she's away, Harry bumps into Anna, a woman with whom he had a brief fling some years previously. Anna is now an artist of sorts, and has created a strange triptych of paintings surrounding a lighted statue - Nemesis. Harry is soon investigating two crimes, in an intensely plotted and detailed narrative (you need to read every paragraph carefully to spot all the clues). There are some real implausibilities in the plot when the ending is finally revealed - not least the perpetrator of both the crime and the way in which Harry is manipulated in his attempts to solve it - but I didn't mind because by then I was won over to Harry: he's a flawed, angst-ridden, funny alcoholic - inevitably a maverick but one who in the main uses his brain and wit rather than his fists to demonstrate his independence.

I then had to re-read The Devil's Star, of course, as in the two or three years or so since I read it previously I had forgotten most of the details. Again, I thoroughly enjoyed it - due in no large part to the excellent translation (Don Bartlett again) and the strange coincidence of identity (in my mind) between the translator and the character of Harry. Reading this book after the previous two made an extraordinary difference - it was a far more rounded, and moving, experience this time around, as Harry returns to his pursuit of the person who he believes murdered his colleague, while at the same time investigating a series of ritualised killings that seem to be related. The characters and their relationships are one of the main strengths of the book, and the convolutions of the plot are so intriguing that you have to keep reading on, driven to know how it is all going to work out. The solution to the crime is again somewhat weak, but I think more believable than the outcomes to the cases in The Redbreast and Nemesis (the latter is particularly daft).

Finally, I was ready to read The Redeemer - but given the length of this post, I'll return to that another time. If you can't wait until then, you can read reviews of the book at Crime Scraps, The Independent, Nordic Book Blog, Mysteries in Paradise, International Noir Fiction and Reviewing the Evidence.

Crime Scraps on "Keeping Harry in Order" (a very useful post!)

Michael Walters on the Harry Hole novels.

Crime Scraps: notes from Nesbo.

Don Bartlett's website.

Some reviews, a profile and a bit of mystery twittering

2009-06-29T18:35:00+01:00

Even in the summer heat and at the peak of Wimbledon, there's lots of entertaining, stimulating reading on that ol' Internet. Via In Reference to Murder and dBusiness news, I learn that on June 15th, "the Tweet Mystery of Death became Twitter’s first live murder mystery — letting Twitter users follow nine characters to engage with the story and solve a series of crimes." The mystery is running live on Twitter from 15 June to 27 July: see tweetmystery.com or hashtag #tmod on Twitter.com for more.

There's a highly readable profile of Yrsa Sigurdadottir in PW, by Jonathan Segura, who writes "in addition to international bestselling author, mother of two, grandmother of one and owner of two pugs, Yrsa’s a civil engineer. With the economy in a death spiral, the engineering work has slowed, but, she says, her books are doing better than ever: her most recent Thora novel debuted in December as the #2 hardcover bestseller in Iceland (its initial print run, 10,000, was huge by Icelandic standards), and she’s in the middle of writing the next, on track to deliver this fall and maintain her average of a novel per year. She doesn’t do much press in Iceland—one interview per year, so people “won’t get tired of me”—but is frequently on the road to promote her books abroad. There is much terrain to cover; she’s been translated into nearly 30 languages." See here for my Euro Crime review of Yrsa Sigurdadottir's debut, Last Rituals.

There's a lovely review of Case Histories, Kate Atkinson's first Jackson Brodie novel, by Dorte on DJ's Krimiblog. I must read One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?, both of which have been on my shelves unread for far too long, given how much I enjoyed Case Histories - especially the first two-thirds of the novel.

Very appropriate for the current weather, Norman Price reviews the latest Camilleri to be translated into English, August Heat. Norman's quote says it all:
"How about a few big platters of antipasto di mare with shrimps, prawns, baby octopus, anchovies, sardines, mussels and clams?"
"Sounds good. And for second course?"
"Mullet in onions: served cold a delight."
Served cold, a delight indeed. I'm already looking forward to Montalbano's next outing.

The Brothers Judd have just reviewed The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson, and give the book a C! "Try a Martin Beck instead", they write. I can't argue with trying Martin Beck - but you can do both! Incidentally, if, like me, you are interested in Scandinavian crime fiction and keeping up with the latest news about books, films, translations and so on, Peter at Nordic Bookblog has a very informative and useful post up - with some good news for Jo Nesbo fans.

Kim at Reading Matters writes a spiffing review of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I read and loved all Wyndham's books when I was young (I think I read them all, I may have missed a couple), and it's surprising, though maybe it shouldn't be, how often one comes across posts about his books, and how many people I encounter on the Internet are fellow-enthusiasts for this author's books. Kim writes that The Chrysalids is set in a "post-apocalyptic world a few thousands years in the future. But in this case society has regressed to the point of living a rather primitive frontier-like existence reminiscent of 18th century pastoral America..... But all is not as it seems. This is a society obsessed with fundamental Christianity to the point where anyone not born in the true Image of God is regarded as a blasphemy to be dispatched at birth or condemned to live in the Fringes, a wild untamed area where other rejected "humans" roam." Read the rest of Kim's excellent review here.

Val McDermid's summer reading selections

2009-06-28T16:17:29+01:00

As part of yesterday's (Saturday) Times books "supplement"* on holiday reading, Val McDermid recommends her choice of crime and thrillers. Crime fiction may at first glance seem an odd choice for relaxing reading, she writes, but it lifts the spirits to "pick up on our favourite characters' latest travails. It can be like catching up with old friends - the ones you always go on holiday with." She also opines that murder mysteries divert the reader from committing domestic violence when cooped up for two weeks with their families, but I think I part company with her on that.

Here's what Val McDermid, a generous blurb writer with a great turn of phrase, recommends. Links are to reviews of the books at Euro Crime, Richard T. Kelly's blog, Picador blog, International Noir Fiction and It's a Crime.

Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill - "a complex story packed into 24 hours. It's a witty, wise and warm read, with rich characterisation and emotional depth".

The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri- "a cold, twisted tale of love and exploitation at its heart, but Montalbano and his team are the perfect counterweight to its darkness."

When Will There be Good News? by Kate Atkinson- thick and fast plotlines, and the coinicidences "explanations waiting to happen".

The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler- "devishly clever and mordantly funny".

The Other Half Lives by Sophie Hannah - "a corkscrew plot that performs a danse macabre around the passions and rivalries of artists".

Woman With Birthmark by Hakan Nesser- an intriguing series in which "Nesser displays more optimism in his social commentary than do most of his fellow Nordic writers."

All the Dead Voices by Declan Hughes - Irish crime that is "energetic, pacy and vivid."

Singing to the Dead by Caro Ramsay - "Well-drawn characters and a great sense of place set this head and shoulders above most of the competition."

Shatter by Michael Robotham - "a haunting read that niggles in the mind for a long time."

All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney - "Tough and uncompromising, beautifully written", it's a debut about a Glasgow journalist, due out in the UK in August.

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey - a reissue of this "bewildering devious tale of how lies devour lives" - which in part inspired Sarah Waters' "brilliant and unsettling" new novel, The Little Stranger.

A final addition from me: you could do a great deal worse than to take Val McDermid's A Darker Domain with you, if you have room in your suitcase.

*No longer a supplement but a few pages clinging on to the end of a "Review" section.

Sunday Salon: inappropriate titles

2009-06-28T12:42:06+01:00

Interesting weather last night: raining steadily but mildly in Kingston, completely dry and sunny in Wimbledon 3 miles down the road, and torrential rain in north London, causing closure of the North Circular and other roads in many places due to severe flooding, and a several-hours-long power cut over Mill Hill. Today, all is calm and I turn to the topic of books.

Horace Bent of the Bookseller 26 June p. 42 (not online) notes the Sun-generated outrage that The Crimes of Josef Fritzl was selected for a prominent a father's day promotion in W H Smith and Tesco. The book was quickly removed from the shelves despite, writes Horace Bent, "Tesco's initial bold defence of their decision to stock it".

What, he asks, would rank among the most inappropriate book promotions? "The God Delusion on an Easter table? Living with Sexually Transmitted Diseases in a Valentine's promo?" He also suggests Wittgenstein as a 'Summer Read', but that doesn't seem so bad to me - especially on reading some of the holiday recommendations in yesterday's papers. Winter's Bane or Snow Falling on Cedars, now....

What would be your suggestions? Far From the Madding Crowd in a "Glastonbury special"? The Black Path to promote countryside walks? Skin and Bones in a health campaign?

[For more bookselling amusement, follow HoraceBent on Twitter]

A welcome perspective

2009-06-27T17:50:25+01:00

Thank you, Dave Knadler, for providing some much-needed perspective on MJ. Here's an excerpt from his post, but do read it all - it is one of those posts which sums up all the craziness in a nutshell.

"When a major celebrity dies, it's bigger than World War II, at least for a day or two. The stars get realigned -- literally, because there's one less of them, and figuratively, because big stories have this way of becoming small when something bigger comes down the line. Who cares about Sanford any more? Who cares about Iran? We are talking Michael Jackson here, who has Touched Us All in ways we will still be discovering years from now. Personally, the coverage I've found most poignant is this piece about the time Michael Jackson inadvertantly dropped his sequined glove in the toilet."

Ann Pettifor on economic crisis and recovery

2009-06-26T20:52:43+01:00

I'm too exhausted to post anything sensible tonight. Last night I went to a fascinating event organised by the UK resource centre for women in science, technology and engineering, on the recession. "The recession is having a major impact on science, engineering, technology and the built environment (SET) in the UK. Applications to study SET subjects are rising, while employment opportunities have diminished. Some sectors are harder-hit than others. Women in SET, alongside men, are facing reductions in working time, redundancy and unemployment."

There were several excellent speakers at the event, which was at the Institute of Physics, but I would like to highlight a speaker who is particularly inspiring: Ann Pettifor. From her Wikipedia entry: "In 2003 she correctly predicted the bursting of the credit bubble ("The Credit Crunch") in a book she edited for the new economics foundation The Real World Economic Outlook (Palgrave, 2003). You can find her blog about the crisis at Debtonation.org. In 2006 Palgrave Macmillan published her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave, 2006). She is a co-author of the Green New Deal, published by the new economics foundation in July 2008 - a set of policies to deal with threats posed by the Credit Crunch, Peak Oil and Climate Change."

Ann is an excellent speaker and inspiring (as well as friendly) person. She explained the economic crisis in terms that I (and the rest of the audience) could understand, suggested practical solutions, and explained how all the economists (each with two PhDs from Harvard) had not only not seen the crisis coming, but who have failed to realise the paradigm shift that has occurred and therefore have no idea what to do now. Whereas she says: "The best way out of the economic crisis is to cut interest rates, create jobs and raise incomes." After hearing Ann speak, I actually felt quite cheerful on the subject of the global economy for the first time in ages.

Brief biography of Ann Pettifor.

Ann Pettifor at the Huffington Post.

End of the line for science journalism?

2009-06-25T11:48:10+01:00

Although I say it myself, there are some really stimulating, readable and fascinating articles in Nature this week (25 June issue) about science, journalism and communication with the lay public. Most of this post is taken from a Nature Network forum post: you're welcome to join in the discussion there.

Many researchers see science journalists as a public-relations service or as an ally in spreading the news about their work, asserts a Nature Editorial this week (459, 1033; 2009 – free to read online). The Editorial points out that there is a deeper value of journalism: to cast a fair but sceptical eye over everything in the public sphere — science included. This kind of scrutiny is easy for researchers to applaud when a news report questions dodgy statistics or dubious claims about uncertainties in evolution. It is not so easy when the story takes a critical look at animal-research practices, overblown claims about climate change or scientists’ conflicts of interest. But such examinations are to the benefit of society, which needs to see science scrutinized as well as regurgitated, and journalists are an essential part of that process.
This week’s Nature special issue, of which the Editorial is a part, shines a spotlight on the profession in changing, troubled times, and is published to mark the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists from 30 June to 2 July 2009 in London.
Scientists can do little to stem the current bloodletting, in which readers and advertisers are deserting publications that are downsizing or folding at fast pace. But, argues the Editorial, they can make worthwhile attempts to ensure that questioning and informed science journalism persists in whatever new forms might emerge from the carnage. If the future of the media truly is a dire landscape of top-100 lists, shouting heads and minimal attention span, then such efforts might at least defer the grim end. A good start would be to have a look at the advice for academics speaking to journalists provided by Brad Delong and Susan Rasky. And from the other side of the coin, the Washington Post‘s national environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin and its executive editor Marcus Brauchli discuss the future of science coverage in their newspaper in a Nature Books&Arts Q&A.
But do newspapers even matter? Blogs and microblogging services like Twitter are opening up conferences to those not actually there – how is this direct to web exposure affecting science journalism, and indeed scientists themselves and their options for peer-review and publication of their research? A range of angles on these questions are covered in a Nature News feature, including the story of a recent ’blogostorm’ about a Cold Spring Harbor meeting in which scientists seemed free to report what journalists could not.
In other articles in this week’s Nature, Toby Murcott in Toppling the priesthood argues that the process of science needs to be opened up to journalists; Boyce Rensberger (Too close for comfort) tracks the progression of scientific correspondent from cheerleader to watchdog; and Nadia El-Awady in The Arab boom suggests much room for improvement in local journalism in Arab countries. The bottom line? To what extent should scientists help — or care?
(All the Nature articles mentioned and linked here are part of the science journalism special in the issue of 25 June 2009. The three Essays and the Books&Arts article are free to read online for 2 weeks from the publication date.)

The Dolphin Man comes to an end

2009-06-24T20:53:36+01:00

Don't read this blog post! It is the ending of The Dolphin Man, a publishing experiment.

If you are intrigued, start here - this is a blog you have to read backwards, starting in November last year and finishing just the other day. How it all began...

"For the few who knew I’d left, I have arrived.
Who am i?
Some people call me the dolphin man. That is all you need to know for now.
Where am I?
That is a secret: a Top Secret.
Why am I here?
I am a researcher (I dislike the word ‘scientist’) and I work with dolphins. I investigate the way dolphins communicate with each other and other pods of dolphins that may be swimming many miles away across the ocean.
Most scientists doubt that this possible that this is possible over the scale – hundreds of miles – that I’m interested in. These are the same scientists that say that dolphins don’t have a true language as such, just some fancy one-way signalling, as opposed to true two-way communication.
I will spend the next three to five years here and I will prove the sceptics wrong.
In the meantime, there’s just me, and this blog. I have a laptop with satellite broadband Internet. It would be a bit of a waste to sit here hiding from the world."
Enjoy!

Individuality in the online age

2009-06-23T18:31:00+01:00

General interest is out, niche is in - according to an article in The Atlantic on why the Economist is thriving while Time and Newsweek fade. "The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009." Michael Hirschorn describes how the Economist (by accident or design) more or less ignored the online revolution and the desperate urge to be "relevant" on the web, and has hence remained a valuable print product - valuable that is to readers and to the owners, an enviable double-whammy for publications these days. The Economist is not innovative or intellectual, according to Hirschorn: "The “leaders,” or main articles, tend to “urge” politicians to solve complex problems, as if the key to, say, reconstituting the global banking system were but a simple act of cogitation away. A typical leader, from January, on the ongoing Gaza violence was an erudite, deeply historical write-around on Arab-Israeli violence that ended up arriving at the same conclusion everyone else arrived at long ago: Israel must give up land for peace. The science-and-technology pages tend toward Gladwell-lite popularizations of academic papers from British universities." However, the magazine cleverly distils the world into a compact survey every week - so you really can keep up with what is going on everywhere. (The other publication that is succeeding for similar reasons is The Week, an addictive digest of everything but without any orginal content.) "Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices."

Along similar lines, here's a video of Christopher R.Weingarten talking about music criticism and the web at the "140 characters" conference in New York a few days ago. It's an entertaining rant, making the point that using Twitter (etc) to find information relevant to you is the problem, not a solution, because all you find is what you already know. He writes music reviews on Twitter, and says he makes an effort to make every one poetic and infomative. His line is: don't just say "I like/hate this" and make it about you, in common with everyone else on Twitter, but be a critic, let people know the "why and the how" - there is enough room in 140 characters to elaborate and have good writing, and that way you might actually discover something new rather than following the bland majority. Those of us who read and review books know this already (the principle, rather than the bit about the 140 characters!), but I think it might be news to a few.

Stieg Larsson in the Library Journal

2009-06-22T19:26:21+01:00

Via Dave Lull, Wilda Williams of the Library Journal hosts a Q&A with Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Knopf and Paul Bogaards, the publisher's executive director of publicity, about Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. From the article:

SM: I have to say that these books just keep getting better. I think Book 2 is better than Book 1, and Book 3 is better than Book 2. It's extraordinary that Larsson was able to outdo himself with each successive work.

Prior to its U.S. publication, there had been a great deal of online buzz about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. So in a way, Knopf had a ready-made audience before the book’s debut. What role did your marketing efforts help in the novel's success? And how did libraries contribute to its commercial success?

PB: It’s true that we worked very hard to seed the book with the online community, and with influentials in the mystery blogger community. We sent out advance reading copies (ARCs) and allowed some early publicity to take place. This is an international community of fans you’re talking about, and so even before the books had been translated to English, the online community was buzzing. Word got out.

There is more in the article about the trilogy's impact and about the author himself. The same issue of Library Journal features a brief review of The Girl Who Played with Fire, which is out in the US in August. Readers in the UK can look forward to reading the final novel in the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, in October.

My review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

My review of The Girl Who Played with Fire

Round-up post on Petrona: Stieg Larsson flies to new heights

Articles about Stieg Larsson and his books on crime-fiction journeys.

What happened this weekend

2009-06-21T19:04:50+01:00

I had no idea that the Fighting Nuns of Harrogate, led by the terrifying Sister Mary Agnes, had not only pursued Meg Gardiner to this year's CrimeFest (thank heavens I was quietly reading in my room and missed being attacked by a flying cocktail), but are planning a raid on London, necessitating Meg to join forces with Jeff Abbott. The gang met this weekend, planning their strategy for squashed-strawberry chucking (yes, it's Wimbeldon next week) and seeing off the Rottweillers by knitting them little pink bootees, causing them to slink away in embarrassment. "Sock" it to them, Meg and Jeff! It is anyone's guess what havoc Sister Mary Agnes will wreak when she discovers that Jo Beckett has been optioned for TV and that The Memory Collector was at number 3 on the teen bestselling charts on Amazon earlier this week. Whatever she does, I am sure it will be scary.

David Montgomery reviews Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow in the Chicago Sun-Times, headline; "Novel rips sad state of US journalism". His review starts: "There's something so comforting about knowing you're in the hands of a master when you pick up a new book. Certain writers are just so good, so dependable that you know when you buy their latest novel, you're in for a treat. George Pelecanos is one of those authors, as are Joseph Finder, Laura Lippman and Robert Ferrigno. But Michael Connelly is perhaps the best example.
Through 21 novels, Connelly has produced one of the most impressive bodies of work in crime fiction, both an in-depth study of the darker side of human nature and an ongoing biography of the city of Los Angeles, told through the guise of sharply plotted, endlessly entertaining mystery novels." I couldn't agree more. [Taking a raincheck on the other examples, as I haven't read many (or in one case, any) books by these authors.]

At Nature we call them research highlights, at DJ's Krimiblog they are called just "highlights" - for a novel in six parts. The first half is here. Can't wait for the second.

There's a superb post here by Kerrie, who has listed 17 crime-fiction awards and the 100-or so books that have been nominated for their current rounds, together with links to the titles she has read and reviewed. I've read 22 of the books on the list - about one-quarter.

More from To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu

2009-06-19T20:28:02+01:00

Bogey man

“What kind of man is Harjunpää?” Kontio asked out of the blue.
“Just…part of the furniture, really.”
“Does he drink?”
“I’ve seen him have one or two in the sauna, but he’s never passed out or anything like that. I did hear that once he was apparently so drunk that Mäki managed to slip a pair of Ulla’s knickers into his pockets, and as he reached for his wallet on the train, they fell out and he was…..”
“I mean – if someone claimed he’d been on night shift and had one or two to drink, would anyone believe it?”
“Absolutely not.”

---

His home was his castle – not one other police officer had even set foot inside it. Perhaps it would have been more correct to call it his warehouse: he had sold off some of his furniture and replaced it with shelves reaching up to the ceiling. He even had three fridges, and each of them was full. He kept a meticulous log of everything he acquired, though even without this he would have been ale to list that he had seventy-nine bottles of whisky, sixty-five bottles of Cognac and exactly forty bottles of gin; then there were the cured sausages and rounds of cheese, stacks of preserves and cans of beer, washing powders and toothpastes. It might have been easier to list the things that were not in his flat – babies’ nappies were missing from the collection.
All this was the result of years of hard work and saving. He felt this same joy almost every day upon coming home. More than anything, it made him feel that life hadn’t been wasted after all, and now he was untouchable. And the feeling became stronger every time he took out his bankbooks and looked up his balance, and no one who knew him would have believed that he was the happy owner of a fortune just shy of six-hundred-thousand marks.
Kontio walked up to the Lada, put the bags in the rear foot space so that Hämäläinen couldn’t see them properly, though Hämäläinen had learned years ago not to snoop, then he sat down in the passenger seat and sighed heavily as though he’d just brought difficult negotiations to an end.
“It’s a good job you don’t smoke either”, said Kontio once they were back on the road. “There’s nothing worse than getting into a car full of smoke. But let’s go via Paloheinä on our way back to the department. I’ve got to stop in at the house for a moment.”
“OK.”
“So what did Harjunpää do when the knickers fell out of his pocket?”
“He was so embarrassed he got off at the next stop.”
“I see”, said Kontio, not in passing, but weightily, as though something had just fallen into place.

From To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu.
Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston.
First published in 1993; first published in English in 2008.

From: To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu

2009-06-18T20:40:38+01:00

Pet Shop

Harjunpää sat on the steps at the back of the house with the night around him and the rabbit in his arms. He gently scratched Viljami’s neck. The rabbit’s jaws munched, stopped every now and then, then started munching again, and each time the rabbit finished eating its dandelion leaf Harjunpää quietly apologised and fetched him a fresh one growing by the wall.
On the horizon he could see that morning was almost upon them; the darkness was fractionally bluer. It was almost four o’clock. He’d woken up around three and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. Instead he sat there breathing in the fragrant night; he would have liked to think about the pet shop, but this time he found he couldn’t.
It was just a thought he’d had, a daydream that would have involved buying a slightly older house somewhere further away. There was a suitable house for sale in Veklahti and it even had a garage big enough; he’d already been to look at it. Then the whole family could start raising rabbits and guinea pigs and mice and everything in between, then could grow their own hay too, then they’d rent a little place in the centre of Kirkkonummi and open a shop that Elisa could run. There wasn’t a single pet shop in Kirkkonummi, but there were plenty of children and teenagers.
And somewhere deeper down another thought began to crystallise: if the business were successful he could do the same as Onerva. But he couldn’t mention it out loud: he knew all about unemployment, bankruptcy and the recession, and those who didn’t understand that all this was just a game knew to their cost far more than he did. It was as though the recession had claimed people’s very idea of happiness, too.

From To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu.
Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston.
First published in 1993; first published in English in 2008.

Twittering the Apollo 11 Moon mission, 40 years on

2009-06-17T16:30:28+01:00

Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened -- 40 years on. Follow them at ApolloPlus40 ; location, the Moon.

Via twitpic.

Two hours ago: #Apollo 11 passes 9-hr flight readiness review: 16 July launch date approved.

Robert left a comment to my "puzzled of Twitter" post the other day recommending a service called Thwirl, which I've duly downloaded. It seems to do for Twitter what the Friend Feed notifier does for Friend Feed and other similar pop-up notifiers do for their services (eg the dreaded email notifier which I have turned off). This pop-up route is apparently "the" way to use Twitter, not RSS (I have probably been told this before by other helpful people but only just got round to focusing on this pressing issue). Once Thwirl was installed (very easy, but requires Adobe AIR, as does the Friend Feed notifier) I immediately found out that the Apollo 11 programme had started (40 years on) so I can tell you about it - and I have also found, via Andreas (whose Twitter name is, I think, @Trabesinger - follow him if you want to know lots of things about physics and probably motor racing - he is very nice), 18 beautiful rainbows from around the world. I would certainly have missed seeing those without this Thwirly thing, so I'm grateful for that.

By the way, Thwirl also lets you include other services, including Friend Feed - I think I might find that level of integration just too confusing, though, because the only people who are allowed to appear on my FF notifier are the crime-fiction room members - so if I see a FF pop-up I know it is crime-fiction related (or OT!). And I imagine that everyone else I know on Friend Feed is also on Twitter so they will all be Thwirled, now.

While I've been writing this post, the Apollo 11 programme staff have been busy, popping up regularly with updates about their preparations for launch. It's so exciting, reminding me vividly of the tension, massive public interest, and sense of awe at the sheer scale of the ambition back in the "olden days". Then, I cut out pictures and articles from the Times's coverage (they ran various special supplements) and stuck them up on my bedroom wall. I had to visit a friend's house to watch the news on the day it happened because we didn't have a TV -- waiting to see the film of the landing on that day was unbearable! How times have changed in terms of instant, constant, pictorial news reporting. (And my bedroom wall isn't the same either, believe it or not - but although this year it features a calendar of scenes of Yosemite national park, next year I just might go for planets and satellites.)

TV series, armed birds, unpresents, writing and not blogging

2009-06-16T17:57:00+01:00

A few items from the web that caught my eye, in case you missed them.

A hit in the US, the psychotherapy drama has quality acting from Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest and a great script. So why are UK networks afraid to commit to the couch? Clare Birchall examines the reasons why The Treatment won't be appearing in UK TV screens on The Guardian TV and Radio blog. Pity, as it sounds a good show. Maybe it will eventually be available on DVD. There's a comment to the post that made me laugh, by someone who could try reading a book or getting out more: "As usual, UK networks underestimate the audience's desire for intelligent, quality drama. We watch stuff like Holby City or Casualty because that's mostly what's on in the evening, but it doesn't mean we love it."

If you like Improbable Research, you'll know what to expect if you check out these armed bird photos (not babes with guns). I'm nost sure if this is more silliness or welcome sanity: Scott Adams's negative Christmas (or birthday): "rather than giving gifts, you can force a family member or friend to discard one item that he or she already owns. The selected item might be a hideous shirt that you consider an abomination, or that pair of bedroom slippers that are an insult to all footwear. The idea is that the unrecipient should be better off without the item you ungift."

As is well-known, more than 90 per cent of blogs last for less than three months, many of them only ever featuring one post - a bit like the diaries I started on 1 January when a child. The New York Times recently ran a feature on this statistic, which I idly read thinking it might contain some new insight on this old (internet timescale) chestnut. It didn't - people stop blogging because nobody reads their blogs, because they don't make any money at it, because their readers get too intrusive, because they get no comments, or for other predictable reasons. You might like to read one or two of the case-histories, though, which are mildly amusing, particularly the poor mystery author who was surprised to discover that nobody read her rants against the Bush administration.

Finally, a couple of useful posts for writers. Random Jottings reviews A Seriously Useful Author's Guide to Marketing and Publicising books by Mary Cavanaugh, which sounds pretty good, in particular this excerpt provided by Elaine (the reviewer): "A bookblogger is an independent person who takes it upon themselves, for no financial reward whatsoever, to post online articles about books they have currently read, mostly on a daily basis......their reading output is amazing.....as well as being devoted and fanatical readers, they also review books. The biggest breaks of my literary career were made by Book Bloggers and without them I would have got very meagre coverage in any sphere". Hear hear! And Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works provides a very useful round-up of writers' forums, with a great set of comments providing feedback about these sites. Best comment (selected by Jane): "the major benefit in using writers' workshops is in the critiques you write on other people's work, not in the ones you receive.".

Spy master Eric Ambler in The Times archive

2009-06-15T19:56:23+01:00

In The Times's recentish relaunch, their worst decision in the eyes of me was to lose their standalone Saturday Books supplement (book reviews now fight for a few pages in a wider scale Review section), but by far worse in the eyes of the younger generation was the mutation of the magazine "The Knowledge" into an A5 (small notebook size) rag called "The Playlist", into which the week's listings are crammed.
There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times". The Times archive, going back 200 years, is subscription-only, so it is lovely to see a daily photo from days gone by, and the longer piece in the weekly edition. Last Saturday's was an appreciation of Eric Ambler from 1985, by then-Times writer James Fenton. Fenton first got to know Ambler in Saigon, where the "street urchins" sold books. They gave customers a day or two to read their most valuable stock, then wanted it back. "An Ambler was, to them, a unit of currency. There was no question of it gathering dust on a shelf. It was to be sold, read, given back, sold again, read again, given back again. That's what it was for."
James Fenton later met "Mr Ambler" (such politeness was house style in 1985), who told the journalist that at the time he took up thriller-writing he was working in advertising. He was given a promotion - the ExLax (a chocolate laxative) account. He decided instead to revamp the image of the thriller, which at the time (the 1930s) was a despised form compared with the "ingeneous and highbrow authors at work on the detective story". Mr Ambler did not like the villains in thrillers: "Power crazed or coldly sane master-criminals, or old-fashioned professional devils. I no longer believed a word of them. Nor did I believe in their passions for evil and plots against civilisation. As for their world conspiracies, they appeared to me no more substantial than toy balloons, over-inflated and squeaky to the touch."
Eric Ambler's five classic pre-war thrillers, Uncommon Danger, Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear, established his reputation, according to Fenton, still (in 1985) making people sit up when they come across one. And, it seems, in 2009.

Books and writers bibliography of Eric Ambler.

Euro Crime on Penguin reissue of Eric Ambler classics.

Eric Ambler at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

Eric Ambler at Wikipedia.

Sunday Salon: Body Count by P. D. Martin

2009-06-14T15:52:11+01:00

It is all too rare that we in the UK can read some of the great Australian crime fiction currently being published. I write “great” because of all the wonderful reviews I read on the Australian (mainly) blogs devoted to the subject. I've loved Peter Temple (Jack Irish and more) and Adrian Hyland (Diamond Dove), for example, and have enjoyed the first two by Michael Robotham – who although Australian sets his books in the UK. Although some more authors are being published over here and/or are available on Amazon, there are many that aren’t – see the Crime Down Under Australian crime fiction database and this reading group for plenty of examples.
One author who is regularly recommended by crime-fiction bloggers and other reviewers is P. D. Martin, so I was very pleased to see a copy of her debut, Body Count (publisher, Mira), in my last visit to Murder One, and snapped it up.
Review:
Sophie Anderson is an Australian, working for the FBI as a profiler in their famous Quantico offices. As the book opens, she takes part in a joint operation with the Washington, DC, police to capture a serial killer, an exciting few chapters that provide a (seemingly) authentic view of an FBI operation in detail, and allow us to become acquainted with the engaging Sophie and her colleagues.
We also learn, however, that when she was a young child, Sophie’s brother John was abducted. Not only did the infant Sophie have a premonition of this horrifying event, but in a nightmare she experiences the kidnapping and subsequent events from the perpetrator’s perspective, feeling his sense of enjoyment. Determined to dedicate her life to helping victims of criminals, twenty-five years later she is an admired and respected profiler. Of course, she and the reader know that the reason for Sophie’s ability to accurately profile offenders is because of this psychic ability.
Unfortunately, clichés of the genre being what they are, the plot of the book is apparent very early on. Sophie has a best friend among her colleagues, Samantha (aka Sam). The team is overworked because resources have been diverted to combating terrorism in the wake of 9/11, so the case of the “Washington slasher” is passed to Sam and Sophie to profile. Inevitably, via Sophie’s nightmares, the reader has to share her re-enactment of the horrible ways in which this person tortures and kills. Equally inevitably, Sam and Sophie (both attractive, fit young women, of course) become targets of the killer as they are similar in several ways to the earlier victims. For me, this aspect of the book is deeply unpleasant, as the basis for the suspense is not only the fact that women are being tortured and raped, but that it is probable that one of the two friends is going to suffer this fate, and that we are going to have to experience these events through the mind of the other one. I really do not find this entertaining in any sense: to the contrary.
This having been said, the book does not fall into the category of “torture porn” that has made me fail to complete, or not even start, other books on these topics. The tale is told briskly and without dwelling too much on the gory details – but they are horrible.
It is obvious very quickly, and well before anyone in the FBI taskforce cottons on, that the villain is going to be someone working on their team. In another weakness, I knew the identity of the villain on the first appearance of this character – I am not sure why I clicked straight away, but I did - so for me there was no suspense in the eventual revelation of which character this was and how they had evaded suspicion.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to be unduly negative about the book. Its strongest aspects are in the details of the investigation – how the FBI team teases out hard clues from a profile and follows them all up in order to narrow down the options to identify a chief suspect. The story is told at a fast pace in an easy style, and the protagonist is an attractive character, although her mystic intuition is far stronger than her ability to add two and two together in the here-and-now, and she’s a bit too susceptible to a handsome guy. Although at the end of the day the subject-matter was not to my taste, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone looking for an exciting thriller to take on holiday or to pass away a couple of hours, if you don’t mind the subject matter described here. The novel easily stands up there with Karin Slaughter and earlier (i.e. good) books by Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman. And it’s better than many others in this rather crowded subgenre.

P. D. Martin bibliography (official author website).

Body Count reviewed at Shots.

Body Count reviewed by The Age newspaper.

Posts about P. D. Martin at Mysteries in Paradise.

Review of the next in the Sophie Anderson series, The Murderers' Club, at Reactions to Reading.

Nick Hornby on the English 'can't do' spirit

2009-06-13T21:25:27+01:00

Nick Hornby is interviewed in the Bookseller this week (12 June) by Graeme Neill. Hornby’s latest novel, Juliet, Naked, is out soon in the UK. In the novel, a famous US singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe, wrote one of the great break-up albums of the 1980s, Juliet, before disappearing. Duncan is an obsessive fan of the singer, and discovers an acoustic version of the album (hence Juliet, Naked). Although he’s initially delighted, he discovers that his girlfriend, Annie, has already heard the “naked” version, hates it, and has written a negative review of it. Cue strain on the relationship between Duncan and Annie. So far, so predictable, but soon Annie is contacted via email by the reclusive Crowe, who has read her review, and agrees with it, hence starting a friendship. Intriguing.
Hornby makes some astute comments in the interview. His new book, he says, epitomises the English “can’t do” spirit. “It’s a sad book because there’s a sense of people who have not achieved what they wanted to achieve with their lives.” Hornby cites his hero Arsene Wenger, Arsenal manager (the club Hornby is famous for miserably yet obsessively supporting – see Fever Pitch) and “great philosopher”, who apparently said on becoming 50 that he realised he was not going to live the life that he wanted to.
Hornby also comments on E-readers. He doesn’t hold out much hope for them (unlike the iPod, to which he’s devoted), not on emotional grounds but because “people don’t read enough. Their consumption is during summer holidays and they like to take a couple of paperbacks away with them. That’s a three-for-two offer. They read maybe seven or eight books per year. You don’t need one of those machines to do that.”
Too true. On similar, refreshingly pragmatic grounds, he has a go at the “lit snobs”, otherwise known as the “literati”. “I completely understand people’s reluctance to pick up a literary novel that is not going to entertain them in the 30 minutes they have before they go to sleep at night. I think the world of books forgets that because so many of us do our reading during the day. That’s a luxury so many people forget.” Hornby has written about these themes of accessibility on his blog, saying that writers who challenge their readers without entertaining them sometimes forget that readers are people with “jobs and worries and dependents, people who are tired after a hard working day or week.”
Nick Hornby is said to have “crossed genders” in terms of his readership. For me, this is true. His first two books, Fever Pitch (soccer) and High Fidelity (music), were read mainly by men. I didn’t read them but, on a recommendation, Prof Petrona did, and enjoyed them. Then came About a Boy, How to be Good and (skipping 31 Songs, not to the taste either of me or Prof P) Falling Down, all of which are said to appeal more to women: I’ve read and enjoyed them (some more than others). About a Boy prompted me to go back and read the first two, which really are pretty funny in their observations of a certain type and era of British male. Hornby has recently written a couple of books for children, which I haven’t read. I do, however, recommend his (occasional) blog.

Nick Hornby's website (Penguin books). Dig around for all kinds of fascinating articles, for example the time the author took Mr Darcy (a.k.a. Colin Firth, actor in Fever Pitch as well as Pride and Prejudice and, in a perfect nestedly referential bit of casting, Bridget Jones's Diary) to see Arsenal play.

Nick Hornby's books (listing, links to reviews and extracts).

I don't understand Twitter

2009-06-12T20:11:04+01:00

So, a genuine question about Twitter and why I fundamentally don't get it. When something like the below (actually, the below) pops up in your RSS reader, what do you click on? I am "following" @CrimeFiction. I see the below, I click on #FF Pt. 2 and get a load of rubbish - i.e. nothing except a picture of a smiling woman. No message, on any topic. Is this TwitterSpam? If so, what's in it for the spammer? I click on @CrimeFiction in this chain and just see the last thing he/she did (31 May). What has happened that is new or interesting about crime fiction? What has even happened at all? I just don't get it. Unless the answer is that Twitter is just on some kind of global autopilot and therefore irrelevant and/or annoying. I would appreciate anyone's expertise on this question - what's the point, if what I "follow" results in this?

#FF Pt. 2 @DakotaCassidy @NicolePeeler @preyforhuntress @michelebardsley @ScifiWatch @CrimeFiction

from crimefiction at Twitter by JeannieHolmes (Jeannie Holmes)

#FF Pt. 2 @DakotaCassidy @NicolePeeler @preyforhuntress @michelebardsley @ScifiWatch @CrimeFiction

Google wave, squared and translation tool-kit

2009-06-12T18:35:00+01:00

Today there was one of those articles in The Times 2 (the features bit of the paper) by James Harkin about how Google used to be supreme but might not be any more due to Twitter, Bing and Ask. (How many of these have I read in the past few years?) As well as the usual failure of these articles to make the point that there are right ways and not so good ways to perform searches, it is curiously out of date because it fails to mention Google Wave, the company's next big evolutionary shift, if all the buzz is to be believed. Google Wave will allow you to aggregate all your online activity in real time, which sounds boring but isn't. As David Brown puts it, it is like "a conglomeration of all your favourite web applications, but on steroids". David's post provides Google's demonstration video and a few ways in which the Wave will help authors, editors and publishers. An even better article, I'm told, also including the demonstration video and some screen shots, is the one by Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times. It's well worth reading, as it is by someone who has, apparently, had a play with it and is a longstanding writer and observer of this scene. And, as the author writes: "Sophistication isn’t about a million beeping lights and the audible grinding of thick gears. It’s a system that Simply Works, and which makes you wonder just how the Humanity managed to get along for so many years without it." If Google Wave fulfils a fraction of its promise, it puts the The Times piece somewhat in the shade. Nevertheless, the article does have a funny sidebar by Hugo Rifkind, so that's something.

Google have been busy making announcements in the past week or two. You can't play with Google Wave yet but you can try out Google Squared, which collects facts from the web for you and organises them for you, a bit like a spreadsheet. There is admiration from an independent, expert source, O'Reilly Radar, where you can read how James Turner got on looking at science-fiction conventions and other parameters. He calls it "an exponential improvement in search". When I've got some time, I might try it out on crime fiction.

Finally for this Google round-up, the company (perhaps recognising the many hilarities of its automatic translator) has launched a translator tool-kit, which it calls "a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation." If you want to know more, there's a demonstration video at the link provided. Just don't think of using it for a novel.

Nick Oldham's write crime course

2009-06-11T19:41:22+01:00

A long time ago
a million years BC
the best things in life
were absolutely free.

So goes the song "Pennies from Heaven", though this being the Internet, someone will probably contradict me. It's on my old tape of the original music on which the Dennis Potter TV series was based, anyway, which I played incessantly on my cassette recorder at the time. Well it wasn't a million years BC but it feels like it, when I discovered via my book club (a pre-Internet source of new-to-me authors) Nick Oldham, and an excellent, gripping trilogy Nightmare, One Dead Witness and The Last Big Job. I didn't know anything about genres in those innocent days of yore, but nowadays I'd call them Blackburn noir - tight police-procedurals with a whopping punch at the end of the last one that I read.

I then lost touch with Nick Oldham's books, so was delighted when at the recent Crime Fest meeting in Bristol when his name caught my eye on a flyer on the "swaps" table (where I was a regular visitor, donating a total of about 30 books, some bought with me and some acquired at the meeting. A bit of a digression but despite my best intentions and largely due to Karen of Euro Crime, I carried back almost as many and had to forego my life-long feminist principles and ask for a lift home from the station as my back had given up by the time I had hoisted them from Bristol across London underground to the far reaches of zone 6.)

Returning to the point: Mr Oldham's flyer says that he is an "established crime writer with 12 published crime novels to his credit", with a thirteenth in progress. Interesting, I think, knowing only of the above three titles and realising then that "trilogy" was not the correct noun. Nick Oldham took early retirement from the police force and "dedicated himself to writing about what he knows best - police work". He is running a writing course on 18-20 September 2009 at the Hayes Conference Centre in Derbyshire, UK. It is suitable for all levels, according to the flyer, including sessions on developing your plot, creating characters, realistic descriptions and setting the scene with up-to-date procedures. Writing crime fiction is not my scene, as I prefer to read it, but if you are interested in such a course, I am sure this would be an excellent choice.

Nick Oldham's website, including bibliography, diary and links to further details of the course.

Euro Crime's list of Nick Oldham's novels, in date order.

Nick Oldham at Tangled Web.

The Nothing Job is Nick Oldham's latest book, featuring DCI Henry Christie, published in May 2009.

And as a PS, back to Crime Fest - via Crime Fiction Reader, Zoe Sharp has now posted her photographs of the meeting.

Indridason et al.: books for September in the UK

2009-06-10T19:05:34+01:00

This is a bit of a laundry list post, I'm afraid, but I don't feel creative enough to write anything more brain-engaging tonight. The "big sellers" predicted for September by the Bookseller (5 June issue, p 29) include Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam, £18.99 but half that on Amazon, probably in common with all these "big sellers"), James Patterson's Alex Cross's Trial (Century, £18.99), The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith (Little, Brown, £17.99), an Isabel Dalhousie novel, and Dick and Felix Francis's Even Money (Michael Joseph, £18.99). There are some interesting general fiction books also: Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (Viking, £18.99); A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £18.99); and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, £18.99), which includes some of the same characters from Oryx and Crake although it is not strictly a sequel. I've read a couple of features about Atwood's new novel and I am half-tempted, though I could not honestly say I have enjoyed any of the four or five of her books I've read - including Oryx and Crake, which was well-written but had an utterly predictable plot and a very annoying "who cares about the reader" ending. Non-fiction-wise, you might be intrigued by Andy MacNab's Spoken from the Front (Bantam, £20), a collection of "true tales from the battlefields of Afghanistan...to convey all of the courage and hardship of British servicemen and the unique difficulties posed by the conflict". Watch out for a linked TV series.

Of much more relevance to the main theme of this blog are the regular crime fiction titles due out. Top of my list is Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill, £11.99 trade PB) - can't wait for that one! There's a Val McDermid, Fever of the Bone, her first with her new publisher Little, Brown (£18.99), and a Tony Hill series novel. Quercus has several titles due out: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr, a new Bernie Gunther novel (£17.99), Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass (£12.99), and a reissue of David Pearce's 1974 and 1977 (£12.99 each), in "gorgeous" hardback editions. Peter [son of Elmore] Leonard's second novel, Trust Me, is published by Faber (£12.99, trade PB) and Brian Freeman's thriller The Burying Place (Headline, £12.99) sounds good. A couple of very experienced, prolific authors also have titles due out in September: Lynda La Plante's latest has a publisher, Simon&Schuster, a price, £18.99, but no title (unless it's Untitled ;-) ); and John Sandford (same publisher, £12.99 for a trade PB) offers Rough Country, a Virgil Flowers novel (the character, a homicide detective, is a protege of Sandford's usual hero, Lucas Davenport). I've heard good things about Gerald Seymour's The Collaborator (Hodder, £16.99), and Macmillan is serving up Chelsea Cain's fourth novel, Evil at Heart (£12.99). The featured crime debut for September is Walking in Pimlico by Ann Featherstone (John Murray, £14.99), a murder mystery set in the world of Victorian music hall.

Andrea Camilleri competition at Pan Macmillan

2009-06-09T21:40:10+01:00

To celebrate the release of Andrea Camilleri's new crime novel, August Heat, Pan Macmillan are running a competition to win a set of "terrific Euro crime books" as they enthusiastically call them. The publisher is giving away two sets of books including August Heat, Dante's Numbers by David Hewson, Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser and Bleed a River Deep by Brian McGilloway (UK addresses only, I'm afraid). The competition is open until the end of June, and having had a look at the questions, I can safely say that they are not as fiendish as those of a certain retired health-care professional, who also points out a similarity between Camilleri and another featured author here, Nesser. So do give the competition a try - I can highly recommend the two books on the list I have read, August Heat and Bleed a River Deep, and would be thrilled if I could enter (which I can't as I work for a different part of the same company) so I could have a chance of winning Woman with Birthmark by the admirable Hakan Nesser.

August Heat has just been reviewed by Glenn Harper at one of my very favourite blogs, International Noir Fiction. From Glenn's review: The comedy, much less the surprises in the investigation, would be spoiled if I say much at all about the plot, so I will add only that Camilleri proves once again that he is the deserving heir to Leonardo Sciascia's terse, evocative portrayals of life in Mafia-ridden Sicily, and Camilleri adds to that deep note a light tone and comic touch that are decidedly his own.

Elaine of the lovely blog Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover has also written an appreciation of Camilleri and review of August Heat, which she calls "one of the best Montalbano books yet".

My own review of the book, read in a pleasant couple of hours last Sunday afternoon while others were revising for their history exams, etc, is in draft and will be submitted to Euro Crime in due course. Camilleri is, to put it mildly, a bit of a favourite of the Euro Crime reviewers: a complete list of his books with links to reviews of them can be found here.

Inspector Singh Investigates: A most peculiar Malaysian murder

2009-06-08T20:31:37+01:00

Inspector Singh Investigates: A most peculiar Malaysian murder

By Shamini Flint

Piatkus, PB original, £6.99, May 2009.

Inspector Singh is neither young nor slim. Based in Singapore, he is sent to Kuala Lumpur to look into the case of Chelsea Liew, who is on trial for murdering her husband, Alan Lee. Chelsea is from Singapore, so Inspector Singh is charged with representing her interests in a hostile Malaysian legal system.

At first, Singh is not sympathetic to the ex-model who has lived a life of luxury and indolence while married to the rich Lee. It isn’t long, however, before he is impressed with her evident sincerity despite her “ridiculous” first name, “par for the course with the adoption of Western names by Singaporeans aiming to give themselves a cosmopolitan air…..like Mayfair and Rothmans.”

The man in charge of the case is Inspector Mohammed, who keeps well clear of Singh for the first part of the book, instead providing a sergeant, Shukor, to assist. Soon, Singh and Shukor are convinced of Chelsea’s innocence and although they don’t entirely believe the fortuitous confession to the murder by one of Alan’s brothers, Singh is pleased at the opportunity to release an innocent (he thinks) woman so she can be reunited with her three sons.

Singh and Shukor continue to discover new aspects to the case. The murdered man was head of a logging operation that might have been involved in illegal operations in the protected rainforest. Chelsea may have been having an affair with a wannabe playboy and hence may have had good reason for wanting her husband out of the way. Alan was no saint: not only did he beat his wife but he also had a string of affairs, his most recent conquest being a Moslem, causing Alan to convert in his effort to convince the girl of his genuine intentions of (eventual) marriage. Chelsea is therefore struggling not only to convince the police of her innocence but also with the Syariah court, who if Alan’s conversion was genuine, would have legal jurisdiction over Chelsea’s children and take them into care. Chelsea becomes so focused on this fight that she forgets to pay a private detective who she’s hired (before Alan’s death) to obtain evidence of his infidelity. The detective’s findings are explosive, turning Chelsea’s already upside-down world into chaos and tragedy.

Shamini Flint rings these changes with panache, alternating between themes and suspects so that the reader is never short of clues and red herrings. At the same time, she paints a sweet portrait of Inspector Singh, torn between his duty to his tedious Singaporean colleagues back home and his drive to get to the bottom of the confusing tangle of events in Kuala Lumpur.

The strongest parts of this book, however, concern Chelsea. Initially unsympathetic, we follow her attempts to reconnect with her eldest son in the wake of his father’s death, her realisation of what is important despite all her trappings of fashionable wealth, and see her change from being a spoilt trophy wife into a responsible, even brave, adult.

The plot continues to be brisk, though the solution to the murder mystery is no real surprise once the reader is provided with a motive and a chief suspect, about three-quarters of the way through the book. Nevertheless, this is a story with a conscience, and the topical subjects of biofuels, logging and the fate of indigenous populations who get in the way is told with assurance.

This book will certainly pass a very pleasant couple of hours. The as-yet incomplete character of Inspector Singh will no doubt develop over the planned series, the next episode of which will take place in Bali. I thoroughly enjoyed this light but serious novel, and think that those who enjoy Colin Cotterill and Alexander McCall Smith will find a welcome companion in Shamini Flint.

Thanks to Priya at Little Brown for my copy of this book.

Read a review of this book at the Guardian.

Read a review of the book at Book Bag.

An interview with the author at High Browse Online (2006).

Inspector Singh Investigates at the publisher's website.

My contribution to the many posts about the CWA International Dagger shortlist

2009-06-07T13:54:25+01:00

Trying to calm down a bit after that last post, I see from many blogs including Karen of Euro Crime and Norman/Uriah of Crime Scraps that the CWA International Dagger shortlist has been announced. It is an excellent list, and I think impossible to say which of these books is "better" than the others. I reproduce the list from Euro Crime blog:

Karin Alvtegen - Shadow (translated by McKinley Burnett)
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played With Fire (translated by Reg Keeland)
Johan Theorin - Echoes From The Dead (translated by Marlaine Delargy)
Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man (translated by Sian Reynolds)
Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill (translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb)
Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer (translated by Don Bartlett)

I've read four from the shortlist, and of these, after much thought, I would recommend Shadow to win the prize. (Although I haven't read these particular books by Vargas and Nesbo, I have read others by these authors, and I venture to suggest that my proposed winner would not change had I read these titles.)

Indridason's novel is part of a masterly series of books, but Arctic Chill - though I loved it - is not quite as good as the previous novel, Draining Lake. Some of the power in Arctic Chill rests on the book being part of the series, as it requires the reader to identify with the depressive main character, rather than for the book on its own, so for this reason I would not choose it as the winner, even though I loved its sympathy for the outsiders.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is hard to judge because one does not know how it would have turned out if the author had lived to make corrections and edits to tighten it up a bit and remove one or two obvious plot howlers. Although it's an incredibly exciting read, it has one major flaw - the irrelevant first third. (This section might not be irrelevant in context of the trilogy - the third component of which is not yet published in English - or of the planned but never to happen entire series of ten books, but in terms of The Girl Who Played with Fire as a book that needs to stand alone to win a prize, it has to count against it.) I think that this thrilling, campaigning trilogy will best be judged as a trilogy, and not as separate books.

This leaves me with Echoes from the Dead and Shadow as the two front-runners. Both these books are superb. On balance I would choose Shadow because it goes further down to the line of human emotion, parable and psychology, in its relentless investigation of the price of fame - what a man will do to achieve it, and the consequences of those actions. Also, the historical perspective of the effects of a regime of terror on the most tragic character in the book - the character who never has a voice but whose story is the one that lives on in the heart of the reader - adds a dimension of sorrow that lifts the book out of formula or genre. Another plus of this book is the way that it follows through its premise to the bitter end, without sentimentality or distraction.

Nevertheless, the depiction of a mother's longstanding grief in Echoes from the Dead is truly superb. I found the author's empathy with Julia to be awesome. The character of Julia's father is also delightful and memorable, both in itself and its insight into a way of life. I found the historical aspects of this book (the back-story of the outcast which is told in the middle section) not quite as strong as the rest, though the modern story was brilliantly absorbing. Although the denouement packed a great punch, the resolution of the older story was less satisfying than the brilliantly realised modern one.

In all honesty, I'd be happy whichever of these superb books wins the prize. But if I were the judge, I would award it, by a whisker, to Shadow, Karin Alvtegen's remarkable testament of the iron-cold grip of the past, the allegories of fable, the price of fame and political manouvering, the bitter family saga and the loneliness of age, with its inevitable alienation from the modern world. (Honours shared, of course, by the able and sympathetic translator, McKinley Burnett.)

I don't know where we are going

2009-06-06T18:32:37+01:00

I am disoriented and reeling. Yesterday night I attended a memorial meeting at the Royal Institution for the greatest man I have ever known well - Sir John Maddox, who hired me in August 1984 to work for a superb journal, Nature - a journal for which I am still honoured to work, whose mission is to communicate the results of science to the world. Several people, many of them as distinguished as it gets, spoke last night about aspects of John's life: his Welshness, his transforming roles as scientific correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, his two editorships of Nature, his leadership of the Nuffield foundation, his political offices, his brilliant journalism, incredible writing output, his books, restlessness, tireless travels, his awards (he was the first honorary fellow of the Royal Society), the many and varied risks he took and the fearless independence of his opinions - and his roles as a husband, father and grandfather. It was a delight and an honour to have known and to have worked for John (even though sometimes terrifying); I was deeply moved by the evening and the number of ways in which he inspired the many people present last night, and many others who were not.

Today, on the other hand, I open the paper to read that the Labour party now has won not one single local council in the country, so badly did they perform at the local elections held on Thursday. None of the councils returned a Labour majority, in such bad regard they are held. There has been an overnight cabinet reshuffle as yet more (mainly pathetic, self-serving) ministers have resigned. Lord Mandelson (an unelected person) now heads a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which brings together the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and has also been given the rarely used title of First Secretary of State as well as the post (previously held by Baroness Royall) of Lord President of the Council. Thus, the department for the universities, created a mere two years ago, has been subsumed into a minor appendage of the business department - to summarise its clutter of names. What would John Maddox have made of that?

I am sick to read that a sexist bully TV entertainer, unelected, has been made a Lord and will be advising government. What message is that giving children and young people (the main target audiences of these inane shows)? We have three Lords in cabinet now (Mandelson, Drayson (minister for Innovation and Science in this Mandelsonian department store of a business empire) and Malloch-Brown at the foreign office). Another non-elected person, Glenys Kinnock (wife of a former leader of the Labour party) has been made minister for Europe. Again, what would John Maddox have made of these people: the Brown-Mandelson-Sugar triumverate in particular?

So, where's the vision? Where's the next generation of elected leaders for our country? Where is some simple language reflecting some simple, strong decisions (one-word government departments would be a good start)? At this time of exceptional global circumstances, it isn't exactly difficult to see the direction we need to be going in. What can we look up to and aspire to follow? I am ashamed of this government and parliament. We need a leader who faces up to the awful situation the world is in, both in respect of its natural state (its environment, which we are ruining - climate is one of the few topics, incidentally, on which John Maddox changed his mind), and in respect of the horrendous global economy which is affecting us all in so many ways on the individual level as well as generally. We need a leader who will rise above the pettiness of the grasping, moneygrubbing, sleazy expenses claims - sort out the rot and set up a decent, new system. Obama is facing many of the same problems in terms of endemic congressional corruption and coziness, a wrecked economy, global conflict and terrorism, and more - but he is rising to the challenge. He might not succeed, but he's facing up to the problems and growing in stature all the time in doing so. He isn't making it his top priority to phone up a person who came second in a talent show to commiserate, that's for sure.

Well, I am not writing anything new, or writing it particularly well. But at a time when we are remembering the brave sacrifices made by previous generations, and the serious intellectual contributions made by people like John Maddox, an inspiration to those who followed, I am ashamed by what I read in the papers today. Yet more aimless milling about, with blatant pandering to ignorance and stupidity. And, sadly, I don't see any other of our reprehensible Westminster parties being any better, as they are all far too busy looking after themselves and trying to cling on to their positions by sucking up to the media and conning the electorate. What we need is leadership, a sense of direction, and a vision for our country and the world at large, such as Obama is doing in the United States. Whether or not I voted for him, if I were an American I would be proud of Obama today and to be part of the country he is leading. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case for the United Kingdom, which is being treated with patronising contempt by its so-called leaders and other political parties.

Blue light for Dead Tomorrow

2009-06-05T21:57:41+01:00

Via The Times today (brief, print edition, 5 June) Peter James has donated a patrol car to Sussex police that is "branded" to promote his new book, Dead Tomorrow. The author is said to have donated the car in gratitude for the force's help in ensuring that the police work he describes in his novels is accurate. Chief Superintendent Graham Bartlett said "The car is not used to respond to emergency calls but is solely for use in the local community." I can see that screeching up to an accident with "Dead Tomorrow" all over your vehicle might not seem the height of tact. (Photo from Peter James's blog from last year - I am unsure if the Times is a year out of date or if the donation reported today is new.)

There's lots more publicity for the UK release of the Dead Tomorrow scheduled for next week. There will be interviews with the author on Radio 5 live (Simon Mayo), Radio 4, Radio 2 (Claudia Winkelman's arts show) and the Sunday Express. Dead Tomorrow is being serialised in the Brighton Argus and will be Tesco's book of the week, W. H. Smith's deal of the week, Asda's author of the week and Sainsbury's offer of the week. There will also be a poster campaign on London Underground and elsewhere, including a short code to text in order to receive a call from Superintendent Roy Grace (via the Bookseller, brief, 5 June print edition).

RAC News: Writer donates car to help force.

Euro Crime: Peter James sponsors police car.

My review of the book, which is a jolly good thriller, is submitted to Euro Crime.

Ice Cold, by Andrea Maria Schenkel

2009-06-04T21:44:46+01:00

My review of Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel went up at Euro Crime on Sunday. From my review:

"This grim tale is told amid lives of extreme poverty and ignorance, with the political propaganda applied to the population by the government always in the background. The atmosphere of working class Munich is well-conveyed, reminding me of L'Assommoir and Nana in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, which explored poverty and squalor in Paris 50 years before the events of ICE COLD."

The author previously wrote The Murder Farm, reviewed for Euro Crime by me here, and by Amanda Gilles here.

Both books have won awards, are short, and are very grim reading. Too bleak and cold for my taste, I think, but clearly they are very well respected. Which makes me think I may be missing something in my assessment of them. I think my issue with them is that the stories are told in a very clinical fashion, without embellishment. The style of providing the story as several "witness statements" increases this sense of alienation in the reader, as one cannot get involved in any of the characters (although one can feel pity for the victims). Essentially, these books leave me stumped. I don't "get" them.

Redundant, risible and sublime

2009-06-03T19:04:19+01:00

"Have you ever wondered what celebrities do when they use the web?" asks Google. No, actually, I haven't. Never mind, Google ploughs on, you can now tour the homepages of your favourite celebrities, using iGoogle. Eight celebrities are mentioned; I have heard of four of them, only one of whom I know to have done anything useful (Al Gore). I can't bear to write more, but please do visit the Google blog if you want to know more about it.

As more ministers topple -- Top five political backstabbings. Funny, but is that all they could think of? Or should I write, Et tu, Brute?

Sean French writes that "DVDs are good for movies but utterly fantastic for opera". Bernard Haitink's Glyndebourne version of The Marriage of Figaro will cost you £175 to see live (the only price on offer) or £14 to buy the DVD. Advantages and one disadvantage of the recorded medium are duly noted.