PETRONA

Alphabet in crime fiction: Howell

2009-11-23T15:43:00+00:00

My contribution this week of H is a review of The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell, her second novel, which tells two connected, interweaving stories with a cracking pace and confidence. I enjoyed it tremendously, despite not being sure about it at first.
The book opens with Lauren Yates, a Sydney paramedic, almost running over an injured young man running across the road late at night. Jumping out of her ambulance to help, the young man and his friend hastily drive away. Lauren investigates the alley where the men had run from, and encounters a horrific crime in progress. What’s more, she knows the perpetrator, who is able to threaten her sufficiently to make her stay silent about what she’s seen.
Six months later, Lauren and her partner Joe are called to the scene of another crime, this time a street where a man, James Kennedy, has been stabbed. While the ambulance is racing to the hospital, Kennedy is able to say the name of the man who attacked him: the same man who previously threatened Lauren. Lauren therefore has a dilemma – she has previously lied in court at the inquest of the man murdered in the alley in denying that she saw the attack, yet she can’t withhold the name of Kennedy’s assailant from the police because Joe, her colleague, also heard it.
Lauren is one of the two main protagonists in this novel; the other is Ella Marconi, a police detective who is being investigated after events in the previous book by this author (Frantic). Ella is determined to prove herself so that she gets to stay in homicide, hence when she pulls the James Kennedy investigation she is determined to solve it. She’s stymied, however, when Lauren withdraws her evidence about the perpetrator.
I was in two minds about this book up to this point. I wasn’t impressed by the coincidence of Lauren being involved in two cases involving the same perpetrator, or with her dilemma of silence. Lauren is a competent and committed paramedic who has evidently shown plenty of resilience at earlier stages of her life. I didn’t find her vacillation very interesting to read about.
But luckily it doesn’t last long, as Lauren realises that she and her family can’t live with a threat hanging over them. After she comes clean with Ella and the police force, the book shifts a gear into overdrive, and continues at a breathtaking pace until the end. Katherine Howell has a great way of keeping up the action and tension, while also providing plenty of authentic details about the police investigation and the paramedics’ life of constant call-outs, tension and bravery as they repeatedly help the victims of accidents, attacks, and self-destruction.
The police investigation is compelling, with several different divisions coordinating various lines of enquiry as it becomes clearer that certain events must be connected. The question is, how? I really enjoyed the way in which witnesses were interviewed, phone records checked, and evidence gradually put together to build up a complete picture. The author is particularly good at interspersing chapters from the point of view of some of the less savoury characters without giving away to the reader how everything is related. And she presents really authentic characters in Lauren and Ella by showing the reader glimpses of their home lives, their families and how they deal with everyday and not-so-everyday domestic tensions.
Although this is the second novel by Katherine Howell, you don’t have to have read the first to enjoy it (I haven’t). It seems that the character of Lauren is new to The Darkest Hour, and one learns enough of Ella’s back-story not to feel one is missing out by not knowing all the events described in Frantic.
Above all, The Darkest Hour is written with confident and authoritative prose. The author is clearly very talented and I’m eagerly awaiting her next novel, Cold Justice.

I thank Crimefiction reader of It's a Crime! blog, and the publisher PanMacmillan, for my copy of this book.

Read a review of Frantic at It's a Crime!

Read another review of The Darkest Hour at The Guardian (review by Joanna Hines, but it is brief.)

The author interviewed at It's a Crime! after winning the Davitt award.

Author website.

Mysteries in Paradise, the home of the crime-fiction alphabet.

The crime-fiction alphabet series at Petrona.

Observer interview with Maj Sjowall

2009-11-22T13:30:00+00:00

The couple of recent magazine articles about Stieg Larsson and his Millennium trilogy, one in Prospect magazine and the other in Vanity Fair, were rather disappointing: a mix of rehash of the already well known and not very well-informed opinion on the part of the writers. These articles, I felt, were more to do with their writers showing off their intellectual credentials (not, as it happens!) to their readers, than with conveying anything constructive about the appeal of these books and their author's story.

Completely different from these two pieces in almost every way is a superb piece in today's Observer (22 Nov), by Louise France, about Maj Sjowall. Although I know the 10-book Martin Beck series, written by Sjowall and her partner Per Wahloo during the 1960s and 70s, and have read several articles about the authors and their novels, I learnt a lot while reading it, and found it very moving.

Sjowall did not become rich by writing these masterful books; she lives in a small flat and cannot afford a car, but she's happy and "free" as she defines it. The article tells the story of Sjowall's early life, how she met Per Wahloo, and how they came to write the Martin Beck books. Louise France, a fan of the novels, is right to point out how they still hold up today as exciting, involving detective stories even without the internet, email, faxes, DNA profiling and mobile phones, because they rely on tight plots, characterisation and have a strong authorial voice. Or, as she puts it: "what makes the books so compelling? There's something inherently honourable about them, something to do with the meticulous research that went into each one before it was written, and the frail humanity of the characters. They display, say critics, a relevance and timelessness that is the mark of all good fiction. The deceptively simple style is both sparse and dramatic – an accomplishment all the more remarkable when you think that the books were written by two people. "We worked a lot with the style," explains Sjöwall. "We wanted to find a style which was not personally his, or not personally mine, but a style that was good for the books. We wanted the books to be read by everyone, whether you were educated or not." People tell her that the Martin Beck series marked the beginning of a lifetime of reading. "They picked them up off their parents' shelves when they were teenagers and discovered a love of books." "

When they first met, Sjowall and Wahloo enjoyed reading the same type of detective fiction, those that had taken the genre out of the drawing room and onto the streets - Hammett and Simenon, for example. For their own novels, "Their aim was something more subversive than what had gone before. "We wanted to describe society from our left point of view [says Sjowall]. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality. We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer." They planned 10 books and 10 books only. The subtitle would be "The story of a crime" – the crime being society's abandonment of the working classes. The first plot came to them on a canal trip from Stockholm to Gothenburg. "There was an American woman on the boat, beautiful, with dark hair, always standing alone. I caught Per looking at her. 'Why don't we start the book by killing this woman?' I said." " That idea, of course, became Roseanna, the first book in the Martin Beck series.

Did the society that Sjowall and Wahloo feared come to pass? "Yes, all of it," she replies. "Everything we feared happened, faster. People think of themselves not as human beings but consumers. The market rules and it was not that obvious in the 1960s, but you could see it coming."

There's lots more in this excellent article, so I do recommend reading it. Perhaps, if you haven't read any of these novels, it might encourage you to try one. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Reviews of the Martin Beck novels at Euro Crime, including several by me.

Book review: The Southern Seas by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

2009-11-20T20:23:36+00:00

Translated by Patrick Camiller.
If the Swedish authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, writing in the 1960s and 70s, are often held to be the parents of the modern police-procedural crime novel, then the Spanish Manuel Vazquez Montalban, writing a decade or more later, is held to be as significant for detective fiction. So much so that the author Andrea Camilleri named his Italian police chief Salvo Montalbano after the Spanish writer, sadly now deceased.
In THE SOUTHERN SEAS, written in 1979 but not translated into English until about 20 years later and published by Serpent's Tail, private detective Pepe Carvalho is commissioned by the wife of a missing millionaire businessman, Stuart Pedrell, to find her husband after his disappearance a year ago – assumed to have departed for a new life in Polynesia. That is, until his body is discovered in a run-down tenement block in a run-down area of Barcelona.
The bulk of the book concerns Carvalho’s interrogation of everyone connected with the life of the dead man, in an attempt to discover where he has spent the missing year. Carvalho has to don many personae in this process, involving him as it does in highbrow literary and metaphysical debate as well as dealing with the advances of the dead man’s nubile daughter. Unfortunately, I somewhat parted company with the book at this point, as books in which older men “take advantage” of vulnerable young women (however “inappropriate” their behaviour) make me cringe. In this case, I found it hard to sympathise with Carvalho’s (or any of the male characters’) self-indulgent and selfish attitude to women, which is Neanderthal.
There is charm in Carvalho’s refusal to toe the line to the health police, and his almost self-enforced, mechanical enjoyment of as much food and drink as he can ingest or imbibe. I also liked the images of post-Franco Spain, a country struggling to find a future in the fantasies of Communist ideology. And the investigation, during which the dogged Carvalho refuses to tell anyone, even his employer, what he has found out until he eventually gets to the truth, is admirable and, in the end, poignant.
There is something cold about this book, particularly its attitude to women—not only Pedrell’s daughter but the dead man’s young activist girlfriend and Carvalho’s longstanding female “companion” (a prostitute) seem to my eyes to come in for undeserved sneering. Even Carvalho’s manic and vast consumption of food and drink conveys none of the sublime appreciation felt by Camilleri’s Montalbano. I admire the plotting and the intellectual depth of the book, but I couldn’t warm to it.

Read about this author and his books at Serpent's Tail, the publisher's website.

Review of Tattoo, another novel by Montalban, by Mike Ripley at Euro Crime.
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New UK paperbacks in February 2010

2009-11-19T18:12:00+00:00

Finally, just in time for this week's issue, I have caught up with my archive of Booksellers. From the 23 October issue comes news of the paperbacks that will be published in the UK in February 2010.
Among the predicted "top sellers" are Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (Bantam, £7.99), which opens with Jack Reacher suspecting a woman on the New York subway of being a terrorist. For me, these books have become somewhat mechanical, but the Bookseller calls this "one of his best" and says that the next one (the 14th) is even better. Other predicted top sellers are Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid (Sphere, £6.99), a fast paperback publication for this novel about an internet stalker of teenagers; John Connelly's The Lovers (Hodder, £7.99), about Charlie Parker's childhood; and Alexander McCall Smith's Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (Abacus, £7.99), a series that I've enjoyed but am about three behind.
Moving to the "major sellers" category, we have The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith (Pocket, £7.99), his follow-up to the amazingly successful Child 44; and The Given Day by Dennis Lehane (Black Swan, £7.99), not strictly a crime title, being "an epic American novel of Boston in 1918/19, of strikes, poverty, racism.....action-packed and violent...", etc. Its release has been delayed from 2009 to coinicide with the film of Shutter Island.
Perhaps more interesting than any of these are some titles from the "more normal" categories, including The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Orion, £7.99), apparently "a pastiche of an Agatha Christie-style English country murder mystery, only our detective is a precocious 11-year-old girl". This book has received tremendously positive reviews in many places.
Titles I can highly recommend on the basis of having read them myself (links go to my reviews) are: After the Fire by Karen Campbell (Hodder & Stoughton, £7.99); Red Bones by Ann Cleeves (Pan, £7.99); Skin and Bones by Tom Bale (Preface, £7.99), Close-Up by Esther Verhoef (Quercus, £7.99); Shadow by Karin Alvtegen (Canongate, £7.99); and The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas (Vintage, £7.99) - winner of the International CWA Dagger for 2009.
Titles I haven't read but have heard good things about include Dead in the Water by Aline Templeton (Hodder, £7.99); Death Watch by Jim Kelly (Penguin, £7.99), War Damage by Elizabeth Wilson (Serpent's Tail, £7.99); A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio (Faber, £6.99); Angel with Two Faces by Nicola Upson (Faber, £7.99) and The Hidden Man by David Ellis (Quercus, £7.99). These are just a few selected titles, there are plenty more! (Including TV or film "tie-in" editions of three more of Henning Mankell's books, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, and Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane - which must be a leading candidate for my prize for the novel with the worst "cheat twist" I've ever read.)

UK crime week in June next year

2009-11-18T13:27:05+00:00

The Crime Writers Association (CWA) is to hold a National Crime Week in the UK in 2010 to celebrate crime writing. During the week, which runs from 14 June, members of the CWA will take part in readings, discussions, readers' group events and workshops all over the country. (via The Bookseller.)

Free Agent or Lost Symbol?

2009-11-18T12:20:32+00:00

In last week's (13 November) Bookseller, Robert Chilver, a buyer at Waterstone's in Colchester, took his turn to reveal his current reading likes and dislikes.

He's loving Free Agent by Jeremy Duns (Simon & Schuster £12.99). "After a jaw-dropping first chapter, I was quickly drawn into Jeremy Duns' excellent thriller......It reveals insights into a relatively unknown era without ever infringing on the twisting plot. With a protagonist you can never quite trust, this is a real page-turner."

Free Agent was reviewed recently at Euro Crime by Michelle Peckham, who writes: "on the cover of the copy I was sent to review it says 'Top Secret, Uncorrected proof'. On the fly leaf, the official looking stamp urges me not to leave the book on a train, plane, in a car or on the bus." She finds the book well plotted and enjoyable 'boy's own' stuff.

Returning to Robert Chilver, he is not loving The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown: ..."the hype was far more entertaining than the book.....Thrillers essentially need to be thrilling and whereas Duns creates a fast-paced, exciting ride, Brown's idea of creating tension is a page break."

Brief Guardian review of Free Agent. "Be warned: Duns loves shocking reversals".

Permission to Kill: interview with Jeremy Duns who, echoing Michelle's words, says: "I want people who don’t usually read thrillers to read my work, and hope that pretty much anyone over the age of fourteen or so could enjoy Free Agent."

Four articles and an email concerning Stieg Larsson

2009-11-17T18:52:00+00:00

I picked up a copy of the latest Books Quarterly, the Waterstones magazine, at the weekend (issue 34, 2009) and discovered that it contains an article by Val McDermid on Stieg Larsson. I thought I'd mention the article here, especially as Books Quarterly is now available online, but before I could do so, the author burst into the news again in three articles.

The most significant of these is at Crime Scraps, where blogger Norman Price (a.k.a. Uriah Robinson) has finished the third in the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and reviews the novel in particular, the Stieg Larsson phenomenon in general, and provides a useful set of links to previous reviews and discussion of these books. Significantly, one conclusion of Norman's about the trilogy is that "when any state regards some citizens as less important than others, we are on that slippery slope to totalitarianism".

In the second article, last Thursday, The Times jumped onto the "Stieg Larsson legacy" bandwagon, concerning the dispute between his putative legatees, and which I won't rehash here. ("Losing the plot over the cash" was the insensitive headline.)

And in a third article, Vanity Fair published a two-page article by Christopher Hitchens, a typically acerbic article laced with innuendo and speculation, which combines the themes of the previous two pieces: a review/retrospective of the books and a rehash of the family dispute. Hitchens is quite critical of everyone concerned including the books themselves and the characters therein, concluding that the books' success are down to "emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author’s demise."

What I actually set out to write in this post was a short piece about the Books Quarterly article by Val McDermid, which like the previous three articles is partly a review of the Hornet's Nest (publisher: MacLehose Press) and partly an analysis of the Stieg Larsson phenomenon. In response to a question about the characters' reading habits by Martin Edwards, Val McDermid has paid more attention than I did, revealing that Blomkvist (the hero) reads Sue Grafton through Sara Paretsky to "my own work" as Val McDermid puts it, in her view books that become more threatening in keeping with the increasing darkness of the novels. Salander herself, of course, reads Nature. (Val McDermid picks up one or two more of Larsson's word games with names.) It is a very good piece, and I recommend it as a sincere tribute to this author who died so tragically young -- or "The Man Who Died Too Soon" as the article's title would have it.

But what is even better than this is an extract from an email by Larsson, written to his publisher Eva Gedin, on 30 April 2004. (Larsson died on 9 November of that year.) He writes:

I’ve tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn’t have ulcers, or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn’t listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model aeroplanes. He doesn’t have any real problems, and his main characteristic is that he acts like a stereotype ‘slut’, as he admits himself. I’ve also changed the sex roles on purpose: in many ways Blomkvist acts like a typical “bimbo”, while Lisbeth Salander has stereotype ‘male’ characteristics and values.....
....I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people don’t do without those actions having social consequences. If Mikael Blomkvist shoots somebody with a pistol, even in self-defence, he will end up in dock.
Lisbeth Salander is the exception to this quite simply because she is a sociopath with psychopathic traits, and doesn’t function like ordinary people. She doesn’t have the same concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as normal people, but she also has to face up to the consequences of that.

The email contains more of Stieg Larsson's thoughts on his characters of Salander and Blomqvist, and his opinions on crime fiction as a genre. It is very sad experience to read possibly the last words ever by this very talented author, at a time when he was so full of hope and involvement in his wonderful creations.

Alphabet in crime fiction: Glauser

2009-11-16T19:56:04+00:00

Thumbprint is the first novel in a series written in the 1930s by Friedrich Glauser; a series so influential that Germany’s main crime-fiction award is the Glauser prize. The novel is a highly readable affair, opening with the imprisonment of Erwin Schlumph, a young man arrested for shooting Wendelin Witschi, a travelling salesman and father of Schlumph’s sweetheart, Sonja, in the woods late at night. Schlumph is visited in prison by the man who arrested him, Sergeant Studer, who discovers that the young man has attempted suicide. After rescuing him, Studer decides to look into the case in more detail, as he’s fairly convinced that Schlumph didn’t commit the crime.

First, Studer has to convince the investigating magistrate to authorize him to take this course, which Studer realises isn’t going to be easy as the man is a stickler for procedure and wants the case tidied away with no fuss.

“Sergeant Studer, I would like to ask you, in all politeness, what you think you are doing? Could you explain how you cam to involve yourself without authorization – I repeat, without authorization -- in a case which…”

The examining magistrate broke off, though he couldn’t have said why himself. The man on the chair before him was a detective, a simple policeman. He was middle-aged and there was nothing special about him: a shirt with a soft collar, a grey suit that had gone slightly baggy in places because the body inside it was fat. He had a thin, pale face with a moustache covering his mouth so that you didn’t know whether he was smiling or not. And this simple policeman was sitting there in the chair, legs apart, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped…

The Magistrate himself couldn’t have said why he suddenly adopted a slightly warmer tone.

Sure enough, Studer is allowed to investigate the case, and so travels to Gerzenstein, a microcosm of Swiss village life, where everyone listens to the radio all day and sounds like the announcer, and where every other building is a shop or small business. Studer is somewhat stifled by the atmosphere:

God, people were the same everywhere. People in Switzerland tended to keep their little indiscretions very much to themselves, but as long as they didn’t impinge upon other people’s lives, nothing was said…….Unless something unexpected happened. Such as a murder. And a murder needed a murderer, like bread needed butter. Otherwise people would complain. And if the presumed guilty party tries to hang himself, and a detective comes along who is stubborn as a mule, then it can happen that al the little irregularities there are in everyone’s life suddenly become important. You work with them, like a bricklayer with bricks, to erect a building. A building? Let’s say a wall just for the moment.

And later:

“Perhaps you remember the case of that dental technician in Austria? Put his leg on a chopping block and hacked away at it until it was left hanging by a scrap of flesh, just to pocket a huge sum from the insurance. There was a big trial.”

“Well yes,” the examining magistrate said, “in Austria. But we’re in Switzerland here.”

“People are the same everywhere”, Studer sighed.

For the rest of the novel, Studer, helped by the local police chief, works on the shooting, with a mixture of forensics, witness interviews, psychological insight and dogged persistence. Dreams and hallucinations begin to come into play – Studer’s wife and Sonja both have a tendency to stay up all night reading novels – which renders them into a dream-like state by day. Studer himself drinks too much and later becomes ill with an infection, causing him to vividly imagine various scenarios that may have led to the murder, and providing some flashes of inspiration.

At its heart, though, the book is a classic story of a murder, some suspects, some social observations, and a neat solution. What makes it special, and fresh more than 70 years later, is its straightforward truthfulness, lack of pretension and yet, despite these pragmatic aspects, its hints of other worlds through which Studer’s perceptions are filtered.

What had people done with their own voices? Had they been infected by the radio? Had the wireless sets in Gerzenstein triggered off a new epidemic: voice-swapping?

My final words of the review part of this post are in praise of the translator, Mike Martin, through whose interpretation the novel reads as if it were written yesterday. I also put in a note of thanks to the publisher, Bitter Lemon Press, which since 2004 have published all five of Glauser’s Studer novels in English translations (all, I believe, by Mike Martin).

Friedrich Glauser was born in Vienna in 1896, and died aged 42, a few days before he was due to be married. He was a schizophrenic, addicted to morphine and opium, and spent much of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and in prison for forging prescriptions. He spent two years in the Foreign Legion in North Africa, and worked as a coal miner, gardener, labourer and hospital orderly.

Der Bund: Glauser has elevated his material to an exquisite artistic level, a master of psychological analysis, a warm, sensitive and wonderfully observant writer.

Nationalzeitung Basel: Perfect characterization, brilliant portrayal of humour and irony against the dark, brooding background of small-town life.
Bayerische Rundfunk: Friedrich Glauser is a remarkable discovery. An ability to translate an erratic, obsessive life into language that seduces by its intimacy. A reflection of his suffering and compassion.

Glauser at the Bitter Lemon website.

Glauser's books reviewed at Euro Crimeand Reviewing the Evidence.

Glauser at Wikipedia.

Mysteries in Paradise, the home of the crime-fiction alphabet.

The crime-fiction alphabet series at Petrona.

Book review: Wicked Prey by John Sandford

2009-11-15T14:31:47+00:00

Wicked Prey is nineteenth in the Lucas Davenport series (there is a twentieth, Storm Prey, due out early next year). I haven’t read all of the previous books, but have read enough of them (about six) not to be lost at this late stage.
Davenport is a tough but dandyish ex-cop who has previously had to leave the force because of killing someone (I surmise), and is now an agent of some kind for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Minnesota. He’s married to a surgeon called Weather, who barely features in Wicked Prey as she’s always at work, but she’s been significant in earlier books. The couple have a little boy called Sam, and have recently fostered a 14-year-old girl called Letty, who has had plenty of violently traumatic experiences in her past (doubtless told in a previous book).
Don’t let this preamble put you off – the author is very skilful at slipping in sufficient back story to orient the new or forgetful reader without affecting the pace of his plot. And it is some plot! A small gang plan a series of robberies at the Republican convention in St Paul, which is to endorse John McCain as official candidate for the US presidency. Davenport is called in to investigate, partly because all the cops are busy defending against a possible terrorist threat, but also because discretion is needed about the tarnished set-up in the political machine.
At the same time, Letty is working as an intern for a local TV station (for a woman who, it turns out, is the mother of another of Davenport’s children, but this relationship does not feature in this particular book). Letty becomes aware that she’s being watched by a strange trio – a man in a wheelchair, a teenage girl who appears to be a hooker, and a dope-addled hanger-on. It turns out that the disabled man, Randy Whitcomb, blames Davenport for his condition, and is plotting revenge in some way that involves Letty.
Both these plots are handled with wit, flair and pace. When I first realised I was going to be reading a book about a heist and a teenage girl being stalked and kidnapped, my heart sank. But it soon turned out that I was totally unfair to prejudge this double-whammy – the book is clever, fast, subtle and very witty indeed. It’s particularly strong on the interplay between Davenport and colleagues; and between the putative robbers.
I was engrossed in the strategy taken by the strong-willed Letty, and in the war of minds between the four members of the thieves’ gang and the various local and national law-enforcement agencies. An additional plus is that Davenport and co use plenty of traditional detective skills to work out who they are chasing and, more difficult, what the villains are planning to do and when. The scenes at the Republican hospitality centre are particularly good.
I found the resolution of both main plot themes a bit of a let-down, rather hastily treated. Letty is a cold piece of work, and will no doubt have this side of her character dissected in future instalments. The ending of the heist story was disappointing after all the situational and character build-up, so I’d rate this novel a high beta rather than an alpha. Very well worth reading, though – and one can forgive a lot when a book is so full of laconic humour and cynically mature observations of modern mores.

Wicked Prey by John Sandford. Simon and Schuster, 2009. £12.99.

Author website, including bibliography.

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

Reading suggestions for January

2009-11-14T17:42:30+00:00

If you are in the UK and are anticipating the need to decide on some books to buy in January (perhaps after receiving book vouchers for Christmas?) to see you through the last of the holiday season, here are a few of the paperbacks that will be published that month, via the Bookseller (25 September issue).

Long Lost by Harlan Coben (Orion, £7.99). A return to the author's original character, sports agent Myron Bolitar. The least-good book I've read by Coben, but still better than many thrillers out there.

Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark (Pocket, £6.99). If you read this author you will know exactly what to expect and won't be disappointed.

From among the predicted "major sellers", some I haven't read myself: Don't Tell by Karen Rose (Headline, £6.99); The Shakespeare Curse by J L Carell (Sphere, £6.99); The Price of Love (short stories) by Peter Robinson (Hodder, £7.99); Daemon by Daniel Surarez (Quercus, £7.99); Blind Eye by Stuart MacBride (Harper, £6.99) and one I'm looking forward to - Far Cry by John Harvey (Arrow, £6.99).

And from the "crime and thriller" category: Occupied City by David Peace (Faber, £7.99); No Lovelier Death by Graham Hurley (Orion, £6.99); Whispers of the Dead by Simon Beckett (Bantam, £6.99); Awakening by S. J. Bolton (Corgi, £6.99); Gutted by Tony Black (Preface, £7.99); Runner by Thomas Perry (Quercus, £7.99); Sure and Certain Death by Barbara Nadel (Headline, £7.99); Dark Waters by Jack Ross (Arrow, £7.99); Unknown by Mari Jungstedt (Corgi, £7.99); and one that is definitely on my "must read" list, The Reunion by Simone van der Vlugt (HarperPress, £7.99). One that sounds quite intriguing is "the fourth in the Mobile Library series", The Bad Book Affair by Ian Samson (4th Estate, £7.99).

There are a couple that sound a bit gruesome: Cut Out by Patrick Lennon (Hodder, £6.99) and Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker (Allison & Busby, £7.99) in which "a chain email might save a kidnapped girl's life in a tale that explores internet celebrity and obsession". And finally, a couple of old names: The Goliath Bone by Mickey Spillane with Allan Collins (Quercus, £7.99), and Salt River by James Sallis (No Exit Press, £7.99).

Links go to reviews of the books at Petrona, Euro Crime, It's a Crime! and Reviewing the Evidence.

The future of real-world bookselling

2009-11-10T18:13:55+00:00

"How Waterstones killed bookselling" and "How Waterstones crushed the publishing industry" are two articles in today's Guardian (website and G2 - the second possibly not available online) that have been aired and rehashed all over the Internet, unsurprisingly. The Bookseller.com has a good, measured analysis of the Guardian pieces, including pertinent examples of dissenting comments made by readers at the Guardian website.

The Guardian article, by Stuart Jeffries, attacks Waterstones for centralisation of its stock (little autonomy of staff in branches), complex pricing, and lack of specialist choice of books for readers. About half way through, he gets around to the reasoning behind these moves: the first of two huge changes for the UK book publishing and selling industry was the court-induced abolition of the national net book agreement (NNBA, already under pressure in any event) which opened the floodgates for book megastores. These massive shops did pretty well for readers as well as booksellers and publishers, until the second huge change - the Internet, and specifically Amazon, an unstoppable force from which "conventional" booksellers are still reeling, possibly never to recover, even as they create their own bookselling websites (not a patch on Amazon for pricing or stock).

To me, it seems ludicrous to "blame" Waterstones for this state of affairs. True, Waterstones has expanded, centralised, and sells a lot of bland fare that does not differ much from what you can get in a supermarket. But it does also offer a huge range of books for the interested browser or specialist enthusiast, and I know at least two people who like the Costa coffee shop in the basement of the Piccadilly store (as well as the lovely restaurant at the top of the shop). For his article, Stuart Jeffries interviews a few standard book industry people (for example, Tim Coates, ex-MD of Waterstones now well-known for his library campaigns; and Nicholas Clee of Bookbrunch, ex-editor of the Bookseller), but they come up with no realistic alternative for Waterstones - probably because there isn't one.

Factors to consider are that many people who like reading and who buy a lot of books will continue to use real bookstores as well as online retailers in combination. These people like browsing in bookshops but will often go online for either price or stock reasons, or both. I think Waterstones' stock in my own local branch is not bad, but I have to buy almost all the crime fiction I like to read online, because translated or backlist fiction is not cost-effective to store on the shelves - this was true even before the Internet was thought of and while the NNBA was in full force, when I worked in vacations in a bookshop and learnt some basic economics of the cost of keeping unsold, low-priced stock (an individual book) for considerable time. A lot of other people either don't buy many books over a year, and/or use the library.

A much better article than the Guardian's blaming broadside, in my opinion, is this one at the Idea Logical blog (8 November): "Can the chains provide us with better small bookstores?" In this piece, Mike Shatzkin analyses the rise and fall of the huge bookstore in the USA, concluding that, in the post-Internet retreat of the giant megabookseller, a great stock is no longer the answer for profitability. He suggests that a solution that might work for the future is a mini-B&N or Borders sited within another large retailer. "This will require a different kind of inventory management than the chains exercise now; more of a rack-jobbing approach. But their capabilities: to source books, select books, organize books for presentation, and to deliver books all over the United States, will have more consumer demand than they’ll be able to satisfy with only their own very large stores." Waterstones might take note of this idea - instead of the Costa or Starbucks within the bookshop, the bookshop becomes within the Costa or Starbucks!

Already the bookselling industry in the real (not online) world has separated out into the "top 1000" books, sold at heavily discounted rates often in supermarkets (which only stock "top" titles); and "the rest". The question is, will it be profitable enough for booksellers to continue to sell "the rest"? And will it be profitable enough for publishers to continue to publish "the rest" of authors? People who love reading and buy a lot of books will read a higher proportion of "the rest" than of the "top 1000". But whether collectively we read and buy enough to support these industries is a question to which I don't know the answer. I do know, though, that the suggestions in the Guardian article (comfy chairs, etc) aren't going to stimulate or sustain the traditional bookselling business to the extent necessary for survival - especially with technologies such as e-readers and print-on-demand machines on the scene.

Thanks to Bernadette for sharing the link to the Guardian article at Friend Feed.

See also: The Third Player, an excellent post at The Digitalist blog, looking at the future of the e-reader and e-book market, and the possibility of Google's dominance of the whole supply chain.

Alphabet in crime fiction: Fossum

2009-11-09T18:27:00+00:00

Karin Fossum is one of my favourite authors. I read her first translated novel, Don't Look Back (winner of the Glass Key award), when it was first translated into English about seven years ago, and have enjoyed all her novels since then. I've reviewed Calling out for You (also called The Indian Bride, and shortlisted for the Gold Dagger in 2005), Black Seconds, The Water's Edge (all 'Inspector Sejer' novels) and Broken for Euro Crime. The first two or three of Fossum's novels were translated by Felicity David (Tiina Nunnally) and the rest by Charlotte Barslund, in both cases very sympathetically, I am sure preserving that delicate yet cold sense from the original Norwegian.

The Times made Karin Fossum number 27 in their list of 50 "greatest" crime writers, saying: "The Sejer novels typically feature dark secrets in small, often isolated, communities with the detective's own melancholy personality augmenting Fossum's sound grip on criminal psychology and willingness to question perceptions of normality."

Earlier this year, The Independent ran a very good interview of Karin Fossum by Christian House, from which I quote: "Bizarrely for one of Europe's most celebrated crime writers, Fossum doesn't consider herself a great purveyor of her genre. "I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else." Her alternative is to concentrate on the yearnings of life's also-rans, and how fragile minds fracture when seclusion or routine is disturbed. This is when anomalies occur. Fossum describes it as a fascination with "the tragedy, the drama, the sadness" of such events. She is interested in "the good guy who does something evil" rather than the bogeyman. The former, she believes, is "much more frightening". There remains an underlying optimism to Fossum's stories, I suggest. "I hope so," she says, "but I suppose I'm a melancholic person." "

Those of us lucky enough to be at CrimeFest in 2008 were able to attend a fascinating interview of this author by Ann Cleeves, which was a highlight of the festival for me, particularly Fossum's chilling story of a roadside death which she told an entranced audience.

In her last-but-one book, Broken, Karin Fossum moved away from her pragmatic, spare Sejer series and wrote an existential, magical novel, in which one of an author's future characters jumps the queue and forces his way into a novel. The interactions between this character and the shadowy author form an unearthly context for the more down-to-earth events of the novel. This move into the inexplicable is what made me find some similarities in mood and message between Fossum and Ninni Holmqvist, author of The Unit, a novel which I highly recommend. Another author who shares some similarities with Fossum is Fred Vargas, not in terms of passion or impulse or plot, but in terms of the novel-as-fable.

Previous posts in the crime-fiction alphabet series.

Mysteries in Paradise: home of the crime-fiction alphabet.

Exclusive insider secrets of a baguette

2009-11-06T18:39:29+00:00

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) earlier this week, as reported in The Register. If the LHC had been operational, the machine would have automatically shut down for a couple of days. However, the LHC is still being worked on after the electrical failure and subsequent leak of liquid helium that caused such damage in September, so was not active when the baguette (as it turned out to be) fell into it.

Even so, intrepid Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel obtained an exclusive interview, under strict conditions of anonymity, with a member of staff at CERN about the errant baguette. From the Q/A:

Can we say anything about the contents of the baguette? Did it contain any tasty filling? If so what type?
Looks to have been a plain baguette - no filling observed. It was very soggy when found.

Is there any indication whether this is a French or a Swiss baguette?
It was a French site – But a frontier crossing bird is not ruled out.

Has anyone considered the possibility that the baguette came from the future to sabotage the LHC? Is there any indication that this is a futuristic baguette?
The possibility has been examined by theoretical physicists - considered unlikely as they feel baguettes will not play a part in future cultures.

Read on at The Great Beyond (the Nature news blog).

Book review: Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo

2009-11-05T18:23:00+00:00

I very much enjoyed this book. I shouldn’t have done if I am logical, as it is not only about a serial killer, but it concerns the murders of young women and girls in very gruesome, slow ways – topics on which I have more than once gone on record as saying “enough, already!”. So why did I like the novel?

Kate Burkholder is chief of police in the small town of Painters Mill, Ohio. She’s ex-Amish, under the bann from her teenage days, when she left her family and the local community (which makes up roughly half the town) for the ‘English’ (the other half). Kate is a professional, competent police officer in her 30s who has built a good strong team and “back office”. As the book opens, she’s called out one freezing night because of some cows that have broken through a fence onto the road. Kate’s irritation quickly turns to shock when she discovers the mutilated body of….yes, you guessed it, a young woman.

What follows are the details of Kate’s investigation of the murder: a very readable and engaging account of the procedures and events that follow a crime, showing the effects on the individuals concerned and on this small community as a whole. Plot-wise, reader interest is maintained by the unusual twist that everyone on the team jumps to the conclusion that, because of a particular “signature” on the victims that was never made public, the murder was committed by a serial killer who struck several times around 16 years ago, but has never been heard of since. Why has he (presumed ‘he’) been silent for so long?

Kate, however, knows that the killer cannot be that person – and she has a certain, secret reason for this knowledge. Hence, she does not call in outside help to follow up that lead, but instead focuses her small team on other avenues of investigation. This is all very well until (inevitably) the killer strikes again – and then again, this time in the Amish community, and Kate is blamed for running an inadequate show. She becomes the victim of inter-jurisdictional and small-town politics as she struggles to keep her investigation on track, while having to follow up in secret her own dark past and that of her estranged family. The only good thing that seems to happen to her is the arrival of a profiler from Cincinnati (the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation) – but even he soon seems suspicious of Kate after the council receives an anonymous note via an Amish churchman.

This book is a great read, written in an assured style and with a fast pace, striking that difficult balance between providing enough details of the investigation and people involved in it, as well as a sense of place, without over-doing things. The story is a very good one, with several interesting angles to do with family, belief, loyalty, morality and so on. The suspense is high, especially when Kate is sidelined so tries to carry on her own investigation even after a (wrongly accused, in her view) suspect has been identified. Although the reader never doubts Kate’s integrity, there is enough of a question over what she did all those years ago to provide more impetus to the story and uncertainty about her current motives.

On the down side, the detailed descriptions of the murders are pointless. The novel would have been just as tense and exciting without the gory information about how these women and girls were tortured and killed. I feel it is simply unnecessary to provide these details – they aren’t necessary to make the villain seem even more bad. I hope they weren’t included for commercial purposes. Whatever the reason, I hope that the next book by Linda Castillo will cut down on these ghastly, explicit aspects. (There are other murders in the book which are just as or even more horrific than those in the main investigation, yet these are sketched rather than dwelled upon – and have just as much emotional impact.)

The closing part of the novel is slightly weak. There aren’t that many potential suspects and the identity of the killer is clear once one of the two obvious suspects suffers a tragedy and is therefore out of the running. And the traditional “woman in peril” climax went on for too long, though at least its initial circumstances were believable.

My main take on this novel is that it’s jolly good, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I don’t mean to moan on too much about the torture but to me this book is a perfect example of one in which some judicious cutting of a few paragraphs here and there would have made it really stunning and of much more broad appeal.

I thank Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this book, a proof from the publisher, Macmillan.

Other (overwhelmingly positive) reviews of this book can be read at:

Lesa's Book Critiques.

Random Jottings (with a review of The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg).

Bibliophile by the Sea.

Book Addiction.

The Bookbag.

Madhouse Family Reviews.
------
Author website.

Bookgroup.info news for November

2009-11-04T20:28:05+00:00

On the cover of my edition of GO WITH ME is a quote from a review in the Wall Street Journal: ‘A novel with echoes of DELIVERANCE and Cormac McCarthy.’ For me, that promised scary hillbillies, a gothic plot, powerful spare writing and wilderness, and, to some extent, that’s what Castle Freeman’s short novel delivers. But hang on, this is not the badlands of the deep south: this is Vermont, heart of New England, land of chocolate box villages, kissing bridges and ‘leaf-peepers’ who swarm the state in their thousands to drink in the glorious spectacle of the Fall. Isn’t it?

Go With Me is the book of the month at Bookgroup.info, which is also running an interview with the author, Castle Freeman. If the book sounds your kind of thing, you can enter a competition to win a copy. (There are also other competitions on the site, for example you can enter a draw to win a copy of the very well-received Sweeping Up Glass by Carolyn Wall, published by Quercus.)

I highly recommend the bookgroup.info website. Even if you aren't in or looking for a book group, the site is a great collection of reviews, interviews and other reading resources. More about Irene Haynes and Clare Chandler and their site can be found here.

Alphabet in crime fiction: Eriksson, Edwardson and Edwards

2009-11-02T20:19:53+00:00

One of the most enduringly popular genres of crime fiction is the police procedural, and the three E authors I've chosen today are all highly readable exponents. Police procedurals are both challenging puzzles to be solved by logic, and are a comforting reminder that law and order prevails in the end.

Or are they? The two Swedish authors in my selection, Ake Edwardson and Kjell Eriksson, are not in the business of providing an over-cosy experience for their readers. Kjell Eriksson's three novels that have so far been translated into English are centred on Ann Lindell and her team of Uppsala detectives. Not only are these policemen fallible, missing leads and failing to make connections, but the people they encounter - immigrants, drug smugglers, high-rise dwellers, daughters of strange professors - provide a disturbing tapestry. Ake Edwardson's Erik Winter series, set in Gothenburg, is conceived as a ten-part series of which three have so far been translated into English (a fourth is on the way). Erik's team of detectives, too, have their fallibilities - and the stories tend to feature wayward teenagers or abducted children, reflecting the author's own professional experience in this area.

Martin Edwards has already featured in this alphabet series, so I shan't say too much more here about his books except to highlight his Lake District series featuring a senior police detective, Hannah Scarlett. There are three books in this series so far (at least one more is planned); as well as the police investigations, the novels provide an imaginative, mysterious, historical aspect (arsenic labyrinths, cipher gardens and the like) and a literary theme - whether academics or booksellers.

All three authors provide likeable protagonists. Hannah and Ann have trouble with their personal lives - Hannah has an obnoxious partner and Ann is a single parent. Erik is now more happily settled: in one of the earlier novels he was in the throes of domestic uncertainty, but of late he's settled down to being a partner and father as well as a successful detective. None of these three protagonists has any of the classic problems with which the crime-fiction genre is often unfairly characterised - not an alcoholic, melancholic loner among them. Yet they're all rounded, flawed individuals, and all the more interesting to the reader for it. Another common aspect of these books is that they are all gripping without being sensationalistic for the sake of it. They all cover dark themes, usually unflinchingly, but don't rely on gratuitous gore to convey tension and excitement.

And while on that theme, I can't understand why books by award-winning authors like Edwardson and Eriksson don't get more of a push in the UK. (Asa Larsson is another excellent yet under-sold author in this country.) Quercus/MacLehose did a great job on promoting Stieg Larsson, and Jo Nesbo gets lots of marketing exposure from Vintage, as London train and tube passengers can attest. Eriksson's books don't even have UK translations (the three that are in English can be obtained in their US editions), and Edwardson's next English-language translation looks like being the last. Asa Larsson may also face a similar fate. This is really bad news: these novels do so well on mainland Europe, sales- and awards-wise, it is such a pity that the UK can't do better by these authors. I would far rather read my "E" authors than the latest slash-fest!

The links in this post go to the authors' Euro Crime entries, where I and others have reviewed them. (Some of my reviews are in the press at Euro Crime.)

Dorte at DJs krimiblog has written about Martin Edwards in this alphabet meme, and links to her reviews of his books in this post.

Mysteries in Paradise review of The Arsenic Labyrinth by Martin Edwards.

Scandinavian Books on Kjell Eriksson and Ake Edwardson.

My previous posts in the crime-fiction alphabet series.

Mysteries in Paradise: the origin of the crime-fiction alphabet.

My Euro Crime reviews for October

2009-11-01T15:32:04+00:00

The start of a new month prompts me to look at the books I reviewed at Euro Crime during October. (See here for September's batch.)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson and translated by Reg Keeland, was of course the big title of the month. I wrote: "The Millennium Trilogy is a fantastically exciting and original set of books, admittedly with flaws, but with a great breadth and intelligence - of the characters as well as of the story - and with an ability to draw the reader in to an exciting narrative so that one is lost in the book, not knowing whether to turn the pages rapidly to find out what happens next, or to turn them slowly to prolong the totally mesmerising read". More here.

The Lie, by Petra Hammesfahr and translated by Mike Mitchell. From my review: "Somewhere in all this there is a good little psychological thriller struggling to get out, but unfortunately, for me it never does .... Suzanne is the only character with life or depth, and the aspects of the plot concerning her non-Nadia life are the most interesting." This author wrote the superb The Sinner (translator, John Brownjohn), which I'd recommend much more highly, though it is very dark.

Good Night, My Darling, by Inger Frimansson and translated by Laura A. Wideburg. A haunting novel whose author "has a wonderful ability to draw the reader right in to her subjects' lives and preoccupations." I very much enjoyed reading this book that digs under the surface of small-town life and the veneer of people's public images.

Hypothermia, by Arnaldur Indridason and translated by Victoria Cribb. I wrote: "among the very best of the books I've read this year. It's the sixth of the author's Erlendur series to be translated into English; it is truly a mature, masterful and utterly fantastic book." I described it as "brilliantly depressive" on Twitter, where every word has to count. It could certainly be read and enjoyed without having read the author's earlier books, but you'd be missing out on a real treat if you miss those!

I have an archive of all my reviews over at Vox, a blog platform that seems to be having a few technical troubles at the moment. I hope these are resolved soon, and that Six Apart (owners of Typepad) don't give up on it, as I'd hate to have to shift all those book reviews!

Another bit of housekeeping news: you can access lists of links to my reviews by year by going to the top of this blog. Finally, I've also sorted my reviews by country: if you scroll down the right-hand side of the blog, you'll see a list of countries. Clicking on any one should take you to all my reviews of books by authors from those countries.

I'm reading The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, translated by Marlaine Delargy

2009-10-30T18:10:48+00:00

I am totally absorbed in The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, which has very kindly been sent to me by the translator, Marlaine Delargy. I've read good things about this book on various blogs, and on Amazon, so I was quite keen to try it, even though I was not sure if it was going to be science fiction or crime fiction. It is an appealing mix of both, written with an effortless style (I am sure, due in no small part to the faultless translation) that just keeps you reading.
Assuming the book could be classified as crime fiction, I'll write a review and submit it to Euro Crime, so will not say more about the book here. I will, however, reproduce a short passage from the opening page:

Even the bathroom was monitored. There were no fewer than three cameras within that small space, two on the ceiling and one underneath the washbasin. This meticulous surveillance applied not only to the private apartments, but also to the communal areas. And of course nothing less was to be expected. It was not the intention that those who lived here should be able to take their own lives or harm themselves in some other way. Not once you were here. You should have sorted that out beforehand, if you were thinking along those lines.
I was, for a while. I thought about hanging myself or jumping in front of a speeding train or doing a U-turn on the highway and driving toward the oncoming traffic at full speed. Or simply driving off the road. But I didn't have the courage. Instead I just obediently allowed myself to be picked up at the agreed time outside my house.

The book is published by the Other Press, New York, and the translation was supported by a grant from the Swedish Arts Council.

Review of The Unit at Kittling: Books.

Review of The Unit at The Complete Review.

Q&A with the author and other reviews at Amazon (US site).

More about violence in crime fiction

2009-10-29T20:47:38+00:00

I wasn't intending to write a blog post about the endless rehashing over the past week of an article written by Jessica Mann in Standpoint magazine at the beginning of September. In that article, Jessica wrote that she was no longer going to review books that contained "outpourings of sadistic misogyny". I wrote a post here about it, to which several people kindly responded. Martin Edwards also wrote about this article and topic, a few days previously, and an interesting discussion ensued.
All calmed down until last weekend, when The Observer and The Telegraph ran belated articles, picked up by many other newspapers, magazines and blogs, stating that Jessica Mann is giving up reviewing crime fiction - untrue, as summarised in this excellent post by CrimeFictionReader of It's a Crime! blog, and this equally interesting post (with long comment discussion) by Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog.
Enough written on the subject, I thought, until today, when author Val McDermid weighs in at The Guardian, in a blog post with the title Complaints about women writing misogynist crime fiction are a red herring. Val McDermid is an internationally best-selling crime-fiction author who has written books that are pretty close to being sadistic enough for me to consider quitting reading her - though her last few novels have been far less explicit, and all the better for it. Val McDermid's thesis in her Guardian piece is that women are no "worse" than men in writing sadistic serial-killer novels, and that it has all been going on for a very long time anyway. She points out, quite correctly, that there are excellent novels being written that address very dark topics, and very poor novels being written that are about cosy, "safe" mysteries.
All fair enough, but I can't agree with her concluding paragraph: "I wish we could get over this pointless gender squabbling and address the really interesting question of why we are so fascinated by the threat, the fact and the consequences of violence." I think Jessica Mann was right to draw attention to the unacceptability of some current commercial fiction - and to point out that in some cases women are writing it. Of course, such judgements have a large element of subjectivity, but I'd personally like to see more marketing budgets devoted to novels that aren't quite so sick - I'm sure they could do just as well, even better. (Stieg Larsson is one example.)
I also take issue with this alleged "fascination with the threat, fact and consequences of violence". What Jessica Mann was speaking out against, I believe, was not "violence" but "sadistic misogyny", which is different - excessive dwelling on torture, in effect. Although I am not "fascinated" with any aspect of violence, I have no objection to it if it isn't done to unnecessary excess. I do like reading a dramatic story - by which I mean a story with drama in it. There probably is some aspect of violence in any drama, almost by definition. But one does not have to be "fascinated" by it or even interested in it. A good author can engage the attention and sympathy of the reader in very many ways, without dwelling on this aspect - think Arnaldur Indridason for example, or Karin Fossum, Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben or Diane Setterfield. Some novels I read are more upfront about violence than others, and I don't mind that at all. I just don't go out of my way to read about it. In other cases (eg Jo Nesbo) I'm quite happy to read the book and skip over the odd page here or there when it all gets a bit much.
I think there are some lazy novels being written (by men as well as by women) that are wholly poorly constructed and feature repeated set pieces of violence in what seems to be the main reason for their existence. Quite a few of them are "best sellers". Although books like this have always been written, it's nice that one has so much choice that one can decide not to read them, and instead turn to books that are less formulaic, reflecting the individualistic imagination of their authors.

A few random things I found out yesterday

2009-10-28T08:56:53+00:00

Both my daughters, one at high school and the other at university, have to run their essays and other written work through the institution's anti-plagiarism software procedure before submitting them for assessment and marking.

Iceland's three Mcdonalds' restaurants will close on Sunday because nobody can afford to eat there. According to Lyst, McDonald's Icelandic partner, costs have doubled since the krona dropped almost 80 per cent against the euro.

I was told that nobody on the infamous "Nick Griffin BBC question time" panel presented immigration in a positive light, but only as a greater or lesser "problem". Why am I not surprised by that? Disappointed, yes, but not surprised, even though I also learned yesterday that a survey by the Legatum Institute (of which I had previously never heard) ranks Britain as the 12th most prosperous country in the world, ranked by "wealth and happiness" and second in the world (top in Europe) for "entrepreneurship and innovation". Make the connection.

Alphabet in crime fiction: Lief Davidsen

2009-10-26T18:38:00+00:00

The Serbian Dane by Lief Davidsen, one of Karen of Euro Crime's top reads of 2007, is a very tense thriller about a visit to Denmark by an Iranian author under threat of a fatwa. The story concerns the local journalist who is covering the story, the policeman in charge of the security arrangements, and the putative assassin. Chapters switch between the viewpoints of these three characters: we learn about their domestic lives, pasts, and emotions, all of which cause sympathies to alternate and lead to an almost-unbearable level of excitement. It is really very good indeed: a book that threatens to make you to miss your stop if reading it on the bus or train.
Here's what Karen wrote in her Euro Crime review: "First published in Danish in 1996, THE SERBIAN DANE feels incredibly fresh and contemporary. Davidsen brings to life Copenhagen the place, the people who live there and the political scene. Vuk is a cold-blooded killer but has moments of vulnerability at night when he's unable to sleep. You don't want him to succeed but it's fascinating to watch how he plans his job and the lengths he goes to. THE SERBIAN DANE is a cracking thriller, which I was hooked by. The excellent translator, Barbara J Haveland, has also translated the Jonas Wergeland trilogy by Jan Kjaerstad for Arcadia."
The Serbian Dane is one of six novels by Lief Davidsen, three of which have been translated into English, according to Wikipedia. One of these is his first novel, The Sardine Deception (1986), which must be one of my favourite titles ever. The book, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Steve Murray, was reviewed earlier this year by Norman (Uriah) at Crime Scraps, who wrote: "This fast paced political thriller is a very easy read, which is a tribute to the translation, and as well as a complex plot has interesting character studies. It has stood up amazingly well to the passage of time and is worth reading if you can find a copy."

This post is part of a weekly series on the crime-fiction alphabet. Previous Petrona posts are collected here.

The crime-fiction alphabet project is the brainchild of Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise.

The Consorts of Death by Gunnar Staalesen, translated by Don Bartlett

2009-10-25T10:45:26+00:00

I've now read the only three books in the Varg Veum series by Gunnar Staalesen that I'm able to read, and I'm convinced on this basis that this series is a worthy addition to the very top of the stellar PI series that are out there. Maxim Jakubowski calls the series "an upmarket Scandinavian Philip Marlowe", and I agree (not so sure about the upmarket, though) that if you like Chandler, Macdonald, and those who have followed in their footsteps, you surely have to love these books.

I've just finished The Consorts of Death, which I enjoyed the most of the three novels in the series I've read. Although it is the 14th (or 13th?), you can start with this one as most of the book consists of back-story and flashback (not in the least boring, it is an exciting case that can only be solved in the present because of three separate cases in the past, all involving the same person at the centre). Consorts of Death has the added advantage of being translated by the superb Don Bartlett, who also translates (among other authors) Jo Nesbo and K. O. Dahl.

As with the best of PI and other crime fiction, the appeal of the Varg Veum books is not only their plots and the gradual development through the protagonist's life and times, but their sadness at the human condition, a strong sense of social justice, and their wonderful sense of place. All the best novels have this poetic element that can speak to the readers' emotion at another level from the events in the plot. Here is an excerpt:

It was beginning to get dark as I drove into Osen where the Gaular waterway plunged like a faded bridal veil towards the fjord. High up above the mountains the moon had appeared, the earth’s pale consort, distant and alone in its eternal orbit around the chaos and turmoil below. It struck me that the moon wasn’t alone after all. There were many of us adrift and circling around the same chaos, the same turmoil, without being able to intervene or do anything about it. We were all consorts of death.

I shall say no more here as I must now write my review of the book and submit it to Euro Crime. Until then, however, if you are short of a book to read, perhaps sad that Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is over, or tired of waiting for the next Temple or Connelly or Crais, give The Consorts of Death a try. I don't think you'll regret it.

Some related articles:

The Consorts of Death reviewed in the Independent. (Positive review of the book which gives due credit to the translator.)

Simon Clarke's Amazon review of The Consorts of Death. (Another positive review.)

The Consorts of Death at the Arcadia website.

Gunnar Staalesen at Euro Crime.

Varg Veum films discussed at International Noir Fiction in July, August and September.

Reviews of The Writing on the Wall at Scandinavian Books and at Euro Crime.

Doing myself out of book deals

2009-10-24T21:47:32+01:00

One aspect of Thursday night's Kingston Killers evening at Waterstones was that books by the nine authors present were being sold on a three-for-two offer for that event only. I wanted to buy the paperback edition of Echoes of the Dead by Johan Theorin because the translator, Marlaine Delargy, had told me that it contains a little photo essay about Oland by the author not present in the proof I had previously read. However, after poking about among the piles of other books, I could not see two others that I wanted to buy (I already have review copies, or own, or have read, quite a few of them), so conscious of my vast quantity of unread tomes at home, I only purchased that one book.

Next day, I was describing Ariana Franklin's talk and novels to Prof Petrona, who expressed an interest in reading one of them. So I have bought Mistress of the Art of Death, the first in the series. By buying it a couple of days after the Waterstones event - and by buying at at a different bookshop - I missed out on my "3 for 2" offer. But, never mind - because I also bought York Notes: William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and a rather colourful notebook, I qualified for W H Smith's offer of the day - "spend £15 and buy any top 30 hardback for £5.99". Excitedly I went to the display - and again, could not see any book I wanted to buy, even at that price. (I have already read Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid, and have previously purchased the Guiness book of Records and The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown - for other family members, not me!). To be honest, "rather sad" was my mental reaction to the "top 30" display of celebrity bios and cookery books, etc. Then I remembered I had in fact only paid £4.99 for The Lost Symbol and not much more for the Guiness Book of Records, so cheered up a bit.

The last book deal I missed out on was the one I thought the best. In yet another bookshop, which just happened to be on my route home so only required the tiniest of detours, I noticed next to the till an offering of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson and a large bar of Galaxy chocolate, all tied up with a gold ribbon, price £20. Now that is what I call a special offer worthy of take-up! I asked the woman at the till if she'd read them and she hadn't, though she said she "kept hearing good things about them" - so I recommended that she snap them up as great reads at a bargain price (even without the chocolate).

How many plots are there?

2009-10-23T17:35:53+01:00

I spent a most enjoyable evening at Waterstones in Kingston last night with Karen of Euro Crime website and blog, at Killer Reads, an event devised by Chris Simmons of CrimeSquad. Yaba Badoe, Chris Carter, N J (a.k.a. Natasha) Cooper, R J Ellory, Ariana Franklin, Johan Theorin (fresh from his CWA dagger John Creasey/New Blood award the night before for Echoes from the Dead), Cathi Unsworth, Nicola Upson and Laura Wilson all read from their novels and talked about their writing as well as the usual topics about the appeal of the genre. One inevitable result is that I now have even more books for my reading list.

Among the interesting perspectives provided was one by R J Ellory, in jetlagged yet energetic mode, who emphatically opined that there are only three kinds of British crime fiction (cosy village murder, gritty urban police procedural, and I forget the third!), which is why he writes novels based in different times and places in the United States, where there are (in his view) far more regional and temporal differences. I find this point of view exceedingly unconvincing. Probably so did everyone else, but they were too polite to say so. He also went on to say that there are only three kinds of author, but I have even less memory of those generalizations - other than it is good to aspire to write a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or In Cold Blood.

It was amusing in this context to read Sharon Wheeler's post about Nick Hay's selection procedure for books to read for review for Reviewing the Evidence. "Oh look, here's a mad monk running around mittel Europe in search of a religious icon. And there's another, with added Freemasons at no extra cost. Yes, and there's yet another, with a beautiful woman to help our intrepid hero track down said mad monk. If the writer's feeling particularly radical, there'll be a mysterious library in there somewhere." Many other books fall into a couple of other categories: Mr Average in small-town America avenging himself on threat to family; and thrillers involving former military heroes charging round the United States.

Alphabet in crime fiction: Robert Crais

2009-10-20T17:54:44+01:00

I decided to follow the lead of some others and find an old post to recycle this week. Already, a lot of good Cs have been taken(the perils of leaving a weekly task to Tuesday!) - Connelly, Christie, Cotterill, etc. So who is left? I decided to look through my old posts, betting with myself that the first C would be Coben or Crais. So - was I right? (Clue is in the title of this post.) Here is a post from 18 February 2006 (one of six posts that day! How my blogging frequency has decreased over the years):

Last night I finished reading Robert Crais' latest book, The Forgotten Man, just out in paperback in the UK (though I got it in hardback a couple of weeks before the paperback release from Amazon UK, where it was heavily discounted to below the p/b price to clear out stocks in anticipation, presumably).

Crais is, if nothing else, an object-lesson in writing series. About 3 chapters in, after drawing you in to the current plot, he writes a short (paragraph) recap of where we were at in the last book. Thanks!

The latest of the Elvis Cole novels is focused mainly on Cole (not much of Pike in this one) and his will-they-won't-they relationships with Lucy and (nascently) with Starkey. I much prefer the character of Starkey to that of Lucy, so I know which way I hope it comes out.

As usual with Crais, the plot is pacy, prose spare and the whole an absorbing read. The author has a talent for conveying the emotions hidden by the laconic exterior of Cole's character. The search for his unknown father is poignant, both in the flashbacks to Cole's life as a boy and in the present-day. This area of emotion, which Cole thought he had long-since packaged away ("forgotten"), is gradually shown to be unrepressed -- and the resultant clouding of his judgement in the case he's involved in is brought into focus by the solution to the mystery.

I look forward to the next in the series.

Mysteries in Paradise crime fiction alphabet meme.

Previous letters at Petrona.

About Double Exposure, by Michael Lister

2009-10-19T18:14:00+01:00

In her Boucheron wrap-up post at Hey, There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room, Alison Janssen writes that "Tyrus author Michael Lister became an instantly buzzed-about author when his latest novel, Double Exposure, was cited by Michael Connelly as one of the best books he's read recently. I KNOW, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!"

So I went over to the Tyrus website to take a look at this book, and sure enough:

“Double Exposureis absolutely riveting! I sat down, plugged in and didn't get up until the last page. With elegiac prose, insightful characterization and a wonderfully ingenious plot, Michael Lister has squeezed every ounce of terror and thrills out of a dark night in the woods.”
—Michael Connelly

Here is the blurb about the book:

DOUBLE EXPOSURE
September 2009 (according to Amazon UK, available in "1-3 weeks")
216 pages
Paperback | ISBN 978-0982520925 | $14.95
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0982520932 | $24.95

"Following his dad’s death, Remington James returns to the small North Florida town where he grew up to assume his father’s life—taking care of his dying mother and running the local gun and pawn shop.One fateful fall evening, as the sun sinks and the darkness expands, Remington ventures deep into the river swamp to try out some new equipment and check his camera traps. Encountering the kind of wildlife that made him want to be a photographer in the first place, Remington gets some of the best shots of his life, but he’s about to happen upon the most dangerous animal of all—a feral, patient, sociopath who wants Remington dead."

Hmm, well, on the face of it, not a book I would usually pick up and read, but with a recommendation like this, I probably should give it a try.

Author information, including bibliography.

Read an excerpt from Double Exposure.

About Tyrus books, where Alison Janssen is Senior Editor.

Book review: Publish or Perish by Margot Kinberg

2009-10-18T18:16:56+01:00

Academic intrigue is deeply entrenched at Tilton University. Graduate student Nick Merrill has devised Learn It!, a computer program to help students learn English, which seems from initial trials to be very effective. Nick asks Connor Hadley, his academic mentor, to go through his write-up of his results before submitting them for publication, without realizing that Hadley himself is due for tenure and desperate to impress the committee that is about to decide his fate. Nick is also carrying on affairs with two women, a juggling act that can’t go on for ever, and attracts envy from other students by his application for a prestigious scholarship.
Publish or Perish is a brisk, engaging account of the hectic lives of the students and faculty of Tilton. Teaching, committees, observations, research and writing fill up the time of the academics, all desperate to stay on the ladder of success, or, in the case of the students, steady employment for a year or two.
Before too long, there is a death – could it be murder? Professor Joel Williams thinks so. Williams is a retired cop who has retrained as a teacher, and is now on the faculty of the criminal justice department at Tilton. He was a colleague of the victim, and uses his contacts with the police to investigate the crime – if there was a crime.
Publish or Perish is a literate, light yet engaging read. The account of life at Tilton University rings authentically true, as one might expect from the author’s credentials as an associate professor at a prestigious US university. The pace never flags as the investigation narrows down to a small group of suspects, and previous associations become clearer.
I thoroughly enjoyed Publish or Perish, and can recommend it to anyone who wants to be taken out of themselves for a couple of hours, and who is curious about the backstabbing and doublespeak that can go on in the groves of academe.

Publish or Perish by Margot Kinberg (Eloquent books, New York).

Publish or Perish reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise.

Confessions of a Mystery Novelist is Margot Kinberg's blog. Such a good blog, with consistently well-written, thoughtful, constructive and engaging posts daily - that it made me want to read her book.

Nine Dragons (Connelly) and Doors Open (Rankin)

2009-10-17T17:55:40+01:00

Many of us go through reading highs or lows, in which every book seems to be spot-on or the opposite. I've been going through a low recently - starting and putting down three books after struggling to maintain interest in the one before that. To break the spell I went out and paid for the new Michael Connelly, Nine Dragons, in hardback. I read it this week, followed by Ian Rankin's Doors Open (kindly sent to me by Pat of Mysterious Yarns, who reviewed it for Euro Crime). Although I did read both these books from beginning to end, I can't summon up enough enthusiasm to write a proper review of them, so will just make a few remarks here.

Nine Dragons is a typical Michael Connelly - he is a superb author at the top of his game, deeply embedded in his main character (Harry Bosch), his mission (to stand up for the dead) and his world (LA, with whom Connelly and Bosch are tightly integrated). If you like Connelly's novels, you'll like this one, it is well up to standard. As well as a tight plot with a twist, Bosch is taken out of LA for 39 hours in the middle of the book, when most of the (very fast and furious) action happens. It's interesting to read about Harry when he's a fish out of water; we see him much more objectively, as rather an objectionable character in this part of the book, as his driven, obsessive and blinkered personality dominate everything and everyone, sometimes to destructive effect. One very much has the sense in Nine Dragons, as in The Scarecrow before it, that the author is setting the scene for what will happen after Bosch's imminent mandatory retirement from the LAPD. By the end of Nine Dragons, a couple of characters have been removed from the scene so that Bosch, McEvoy (an ex-journalist), Rachel Walling (FBI agent) and Mickey Haller (the "Lincoln lawyer" who has more than one connection to Bosch's personal life) can form some kind of partnership....well, that's my theory.

Doors Open by Ian Rankin is a heist story about an art theft. It's mildly diverting, particularly in the second half after the heist actually takes place (I usually find the planning stages of these crime "capers" rather tedious). For me, the motivation of the "criminals" is always unconvincing, as is the portrait of the gang boss (cloned from Big Ger of the Rebus series). Rebus himself is alluded to, not by name, as an aside in the middle of the book. There's lots of neat little touches in this novel, particularly many nods to the author's knowledge of art and music, but it doesn't add up to much of a whole. It passes the time in a pleasant enough fashion but I can't say that I was gripped by it. The behaviour of the characters became less and less likely, a few "cheats" are thrown in (the reader not being told about certain events), and the wrap-up plus outcome for the "gang" was somewhat flat, silly even.

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer in the Bookseller

2009-10-14T18:33:00+01:00

One advantage of the various local postal strikes in London is that the Bookseller is arriving late, so I am reading it in a less rushed fashion and focusing on bits of it I might usually skim over in my weekday haste. (OK, this is a stretch of a good reason for a postal strike or two, but I am trying to be positive.)

One such article in last week's (9 October, p. 23) issue is a profile of an author of a book that looks intriguing. Belinda Bauer, author of Blacklands (hmm, lots of Bs there - why didn't I think of that for my last crime-fiction alphabet post?), was highly commended by the CWA in the debut dagger category this year. Ms Bauer says that she did not set out to write a crime novel: "to me a crime novel is Val McDermid or Sue Grafton or Michael Connelly, where there is a crime. And in my book the crime had taken place many years before, and it was the aftermath of the crime that I was dealing with....."

The book, published in the UK by Transworld (Bantam Press) in January of this year according to the Bookseller, 2010 according to everyone else, is the story of a 12-year-old boy who lives with his mother and nan. His uncle had disappeared when aged 11 - believed to have been murdered and buried on Exmoor. The boy is searching for his uncle's body to "heal his fractured family"......It's the first of a trilogy, apparently.

Ms Bauer trained as a journalist and worked as a reporter for a news agency - good training for novel writing. She wrote a screenplay in the evenings, and fortuitously entered, and won, the Carl Foreman Award. The prize was to study screenwriting at California State University, where she found it empowering to be "in a town where when you said you wanted to be a screenwriter nobody laughed in your face". (What a sad comment on English life.) Returning to Cardiff having written a screenplay "Happy Now", made into a film starring Ioan Gruffudd but never released, she eventually wrote Blacklands in just 4 months.

Detectives in novels and on screen

2009-10-13T18:10:00+01:00

I am sure many other people will have read the article in today's (13 October) Times, in which P. D. James and Ruth Rendell (who also writes under the name of Barbara Vine) discuss their lack of regard for the TV adaptations of their novels. They weren't too keen on their respective leading detectives - Baroness James says that Dalgliesh does not have a moustache (you never see a senior detective with one, according to her), and Barnoness Rendell that Wexford was ugly (she thinks George Baker too handsome). I did see a few of these adaptations years ago, and I suppose I must agree. I invariably prefer books to TV or film adaptations, so have just learnt to see them as completely different entities.

If I were an author of a series, I'd find it hard to continue once actors were firmly established as my characters. As a reader, it is bad enough - can one read a Henning Mankell now without visualising Ken Branagh as Wallander? Whatever one may think of Ken Branagh in that part, he is not the books' Wallander. Everyone liked John Thaw as Morse - I was already a fan of Colin Dexter's books long before the TV series was dreamed up - but even though I did not see all that many of them, it is impossible to detach Morse from John Thaw in my mind.

The best part of the Times article, for me, is this: "Baroness James said that she had given up trying to make sense of changes made to her stories when they were adapted for television. “I don’t read a script of adaptations because I know I’m not going to like it. They do things sometimes that are nonsensical.”
Dame Ruth said that her stories were always augmented with irrelevant action sequences. “They put a car chase in all of mine. There’s no reason for a car chase but everyone likes one. In the end you don’t care.” "

Absolutely. Fewer car chases and more plot, please (ideally, a plot that actually makes sense). I doubt this will ever happen. But it is why I tend not to watch detective programmes (or anything else) on TV - because it is always obvious what is going to happen after the first few minutes. One exception to this rule was Cracker, which started out being about a truly unpleasant person (Cracker, played by Robbie Coltraine) and some gritty police procedural, headed up by Christopher Ecclestone. He (Ecclestone) soon jumped ship, and before you knew it, Cracker had morphed into a "loveable old rogue" and I switched off. David Jason as Frost was (is?) similar: the character on TV had very little connection with the scurrilous, politically incorrect man in the books - superficially wisecracking with very off-colour humour, bursting with obsessive energy, but a very sad, lonely person at some level. Again, I switched off after a few episodes. Not because I'm a purist about differences between page and screen, but because the screen versions were boring in their predictability and sameness to each other (both within and across series).

Last words to the Baronesses: "Dame Ruth, who has written 21 Wexford books, said that she had no creative control over television adaptations but that they were not important to her. “I think that people expect us to be far more concerned with our television productions than we are. You can say that television makes you famous and sells your books but you don’t care very much about it.” "

Alphabet in crime fiction: Desmond Bagley

2009-10-12T20:19:26+01:00

This is my second entry in Kerrie's alphabet meme.
During the 1970s, I was an avid reader of authors like Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley. I liked Desmond Bagley’s thrillers so much that I actually kept a couple of my favourites from all those years ago – Fontana paperbacks priced at 85 p each.
It’s quite amusing looking at these titles now. One is called Running Blind, and the blurb reads:
The tip of the iceberg…. “It’ll be simple”, they said at the Department. “You’ll just be a messenger boy.” But to Alan Stewart, on a deserted road in Iceland with a murdered man at his feet, it looks anything but simple.
The cover of my edition is a dark photograph of a handsome looking actor with a flash stating “now a BBC TV serial”. I am not sure whether I ever watched it, we did not have a TV in those days and I don’t remember it, but according to the back cover, the hero is played by Stuart Wilson, and the serial was produced by Bob McIntosh for BBC Scotland.

My other favourite, I think the favourite, The Enemy, I recall because it was a scientific thriller about genetics, and the plot depended on knowing the DNA code. I don’t remember any other details about it (apart from liking it so much I read it about three times). The blurb reads:
The enemy strikes and strikes again, as George Ashton flees for his life after an acid attack on his daughter. Who is his enemy? Only Malcolm Jaggard, his future son-in-law, can guess – when, as a government agent, he sees Ashton’s secret file.
In a desperate manhunt Jaggard outwits the KGB and stalks Ashton to the silent and wintry forests of Sweden….

Iceland? Sweden? I detect a bit of a foreshadowing of my later reading habits here!

Will you be buying the international Kindle?

2009-10-11T10:08:14+01:00

With the announcement by Jeff Bezos of Amazon that the Kindle is now available to order from many countries outside the US, the UK included, for delivery from 19 October, I thought I'd attempt to weigh up the pros and cons.

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, you can't actually buy the Kindle in other countries, you have to order it via the US site (though you won't be charged for shipping) and therefore there are some questions about the wireless access - in effect, this seems to be via US wireless networks (via the deals Amazon has with service providers there) not UK networks. What I'm not sure about is the effect this will have on costs to the UK user long-term, after Amazon does introduce a UK-centric Kindle (later this year apparently).

As the big advantage, or rather selling-point, of the Kindle compared with currently available e-readers eg the Sony is the wireless access, I think this point is worth anyone looking into, before purchasing. The Sony and other e-readers need to be plugged into a PC before e-books can be bought and downloaded.

I advise checking into pricing - I think that Amazon will be charging more for an e-download on its international Kindle than the amount charged by existing readers available in the UK (certainly Amazon will charge more to international users than it charges to US Kindle users - eg $11.99-13.99 for a typical bestseller to international users compared with $9.99 to US users). Also, of course, an e-reader like the Sony is cheaper to buy than a Kindle, which is $279 for the international version.

Another factor to bear in mind is availability of books. Sony uses the e-pub format which is the nearest there is to a universal standard among British publishers. Amazon, on the other hand, has not completed its negotiations with publishers on rights and formats before announcing the Kindle's wider availability, so although many have signed up, others have not - notably Random House, OUP and PanMacmillan. Therefore, Kindle users may have a while to wait before being able to download any book they want, even if it is available in e-format. Nevertheless, apparently 200,000 titles are available via Kindle so the owner is not exactly stuck for choice.

In sum - e-readers have not taken off hugely in the UK, not least because of the lack of wireless access. It seems to me that this first-generation Kindle (for non-US users) is perhaps a premature investment. If you are in the UK, it might be better to buy a reader like the Sony or similar, which apparently offers a nice reading experience, even though it doesn't have the wireless access; or wait for the UK-centric Kindle which will be available fairly soon; or hang on for the Nirvana of the single device (phone, internet, e-reader, email and music). From what I read, the most likely winner in that game will be Apple, not Amazon or Sony, who may find themselves having produced expensive "interim" devices that nobody will want in a year or so.

The urge to criticise

2009-10-09T20:41:39+01:00

Watching the news of this year's Nobel prize winners appearing on Twitter and elsewhere over the past week has been a learning experience for me. The first couple (physiology or medicine and physics) were fine - the reactions were largely excited and congratulatory. But then came chemistry. Even before the announcement that Yonath, Steitz and Ramakrishnan had won for their studies on the structure of the ribosome, the twittosphere was replete with sarcastic wit about the fact that a biological discovery would probably win. And sure enough - the fact that the ribosome is a biological structure seemed more important to many twitterers and bloggers than the achievements of the prizewinners. As Nature put it:
"It is the third time in seven years that the chemistry Nobel has been awarded to crystallographers who have determined the structure and function of a complex biological molecule. "It does seem to be a recurring theme," says Thomas Lane, president of the American Chemical Society. But at its heart, this structural biology is "fundamentally chemistry", adds Jeremy Sanders, head of physical sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK, "even if many chemists had never heard of any of the winners"." A commenter at the Sceptical Chymist blog wrote: "To me, chemistry is the study of atomic and molecular structure and understanding how these structures affect the properties of molecules and molecular assemblies. In this respect, the work of Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath falls right into the heart of what chemists do." Quite.

This was nothing, of course, to the reaction to the announcement that Herta Muller was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Many in the UK and America, myself included, had never heard of this writer. Rather than by reacting with curiosity and interest in her work, the main intent of twitterers seemed to be to sneer either at her or at the Nobel committee, implying that the award was not deserved in some way. I was glad to read a piece in the Guardian today correctly pointing out that "By awarding the 2009 Nobel prize for literature to Herta Müller, the Swedish Academy is not only honouring a beautiful writer, but also expanding our concept of Europe". (I'll refrain from commenting here about the non-winning, introspective, self-regarding US literature about the collapse of the American Dream, etc;-). ) I was also glad to read that the publishers Serpents Tail and Granta are to reissue two of Muller's books in translation. No doubt, as a result of the Nobel, more will continue.

And even this was a storm in a teacup compared with today's announcement that Obama is to be awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Frankly I'm nauseated by the constant carping nastiness and "jokes" on twitter today, and have "unfollowed" several people as a result - not because of any views one way or the other about the recipient, but because I wish that rather than impulsively and emptily criticising, people might bother to think or find out why the award is given, before jumping in to share their knee-jerk petulance with the world. I was impressed, both by a video interview between a very highly groomed American TV lady and the chair of the Nobel committee in which he explained their rationale for the award (unanimous, across the political spectrum of the committee members from left to right), and with another one of Obama's reaction speech (video embedded at link). There's lots of good in all of this if people care to listen, not least in the mood of consensus building, which is essential if the world is to make anything of the political, economic, social and environmental mess it is currently in.

Hobbyist and professional bloggers

2009-10-08T18:59:00+01:00

I keep reading interesting posts on blogs and online newspapers, but can't get enough into any one of them to do more than to post a link/comment at Twitter. However, a few highlights from them:

The Huffington Post says that very few individuals in the book publishing industry are blogging, because companies don't like it. Apparently crime-fiction author Jason Pinter (The Mark, etc) was an editor at Random House and lost his job because of his blog - or so states the Huffington Post. Yet the same day, I read a PW interview with Rebecca Ford, who runs the (US) Oxford University Press blog and Evan Schnittman, the company’s vice president of global business development, who maintains his own publishing-centric blog, “Black Plastic Glasses.” A well-run blog benefits a publisher by promoting authors, the brand and encouraging debate, they say. Quite. It doesn't seem to me that there is much of a shortage of publishing blogs.

The Guardian technology blog weighs in on the just-announced US FTC plans to regulate bloggers. It is still unclear to me what exactly is planned - and enforceable, across international boundaries. According to the Guardian, it is their relationship with advertisers that bloggers must disclose. But this isn't how many book bloggers are interpreting it, according to various discussions about what do do about declaring receipt of free review (advance-reading) copies of books and bound proofs that publishers send (often unsolicited) to bloggers. Other bloggers are, rightly, questioning how to declare a relationship with a Google ad box with automatically generated content. Frank Wilson collects some unsurprisingly negative coverage of the plans over at Books, Inq. Ed Champion puts it well in a comment to that post: "If the FTC wants to rake in some cash and keep media clean, they're better off going after the big boys, not the legions of hobbyists who clearly aren't blogging for lucre."

'Life sentences' are people who everyone knows one thing about. Dan Quayle, for example, cannot spell potato (that's my contribution). Some nice examples here. And on the same blog (Nicci French) - Murphy's law or Mruphy's Lore: bad grammar or misunderstood irony?

I barely watch any TV, let alone daytime TV, so my heart fell a bit when I saw in my RSS reader that the Guardian is running a series in which they ask readers who are at home during the day to submit reviews of TV programmes that they watch. I should not be so quick to form an opinion: this review of a programme called Pointless is rather good, even though it is a game show and (therefore, of course) I have never seen it. Chalk up another win to the "hobbyist" bloggers!

Crimefest returns to Bristol, 20 - 23 May 2009

2009-10-06T18:01:00+01:00

Next May may seem like a long way away, but preparations for CRIMEFEST 2010 are well under way. Colin Dexter, Gyles Brandreth, M. C. Beaton and Ariana Franklin have already been announced as "featured authors" but some new names have just signed up: Michael Stanley, author(s) of the Inspector Kubu series; Jonathan Hayes, born in Bristol, and now a veteran forensic pathologist in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan by day and crime writer (amongst many other things) by night; Dan Waddell (Creasey Dagger nominee); and Laura Wilson (Historical Dagger nominee). Lots of other participants have signed up already: a full list is available here, and you can register for the festival here (special registration rates available until 15 October; special hotel rates available until April 2010).
Crimefest have also announced the next online reading group title, "an excellent debut crime novel that has just been nominated for a Gold Dagger: M.R. Hall's The Coroner. The novel is set in Bristol and the Wye Valley, and not only does it catch the atmosphere of CRIMEFEST 's home base, it is a great psychological suspense novel as well. To receive a copy, the first twenty people to email us at read@crimefest.com with 'Coroner' in the subject line and their postal and email address in the body of the message will receive a free copy of the book. The deadline is October 30. Have you already read the book and would like to join the discussion? Then please sign up at ONLINE READING GROUPS." A new book is discussed every month, and several copies of each month's selection are given away free.
You can also enter a competition to win a signed first edition of Fever of the Bone, the latest in Val McDermid's chilling Tony Hill series. To enter the draw for the free signed first edition, send an email with 'Bone' in the subject line, and your name, postal and email addresses in the body of the message to enquiries@goldsborobooks.com. The deadline to enter is October 30.

Lifestyles of the online wanderers

2009-10-05T19:29:25+01:00

I was rather taken by a post by Bill Thompson, Neo-Nomad at Large, which I read on Saturday and has stuck with me. Bill already lives as the aforementioned neo-nomad, "one of the growing number of people who use digital technologies to allow them to work from anywhere, living with 'no office, colleagues who are largely engaged with online and often a number of overlapping projects to be juggled and managed at the same time'." Now, he is taking the concept one stage further by selling his house and embarking on life as a "digital bedouin", seeing how far he can get with a laptop and an internet connection without having to be rooted anywhere: home or office. He's giving it a trial period of a month, to see how he can use the technologies around him to support his existence. If it's the kind of life that interests you, there are some useful pointers in Bill's post as to what devices to use and storage/back-up systems to prevent your very being from vanishing into the 'cloud'.

Or, you could just go to China instead. For that, you'll need a bit more than a laptop and an internet connection, it seems.

Alphabet in crime fiction: Hunt by A. Alvarez

2009-10-03T12:42:40+01:00

I'm going to have a go at Kerrie's Alphabet crime fiction meme, in which participants write a post a week featuring successive letters of the alphabet.

Back in 1978, for the sum of £4.95 for the hardback, I read a book called Hunt, by A. Alvarez (two As for the price of one!), perhaps better known for his work on suicide and poetry than for crime fiction. To my knowledge, it is the only crime-fiction book he wrote, though he did go on to write non-fiction about gambling, the subject of Hunt.

Conrad Hunt leads a tedious suburban life with his wife and sons, painting in the attic while the rest of the family watches TV. But he finds himself caught up in a confusing and bizarre game of gambling in which he has no idea of the rules or the players - and his life spirals out of control.

The publisher's blurb reads: "Hunt is a taut, funny, psychological thriller with brilliantly realised characters: a book/game in which even the reader who would die rather than risk a shilling [sic] on the Derby will turn the next page as inevitably as the gambler reaches for the next card."

Opening paragraph: "Conrad Hunt, foxy moustache, sly melancholy eyes, sat over his beer and brooded: "Loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not." He sipped his beer, puffed his cigarette and stared at his newspaper but did not take it in. Did not even take in the daily horoscope he usually paid so much attention to."

The book's prologue is an excerpt from a piece in the Times from 9 September 1977: "The names and personal details of tens of thousands of people scrutinised by the Special Branch for reasons of national security are to be fed into a new criminal intelligence computer bought by Scotland Yard and shrouded in mystery.
When plans for the computer were drawn up two years ago it is understood that the Special Branch was allocated space on it for up to 600,000 names out of the system's total capacity of 1,300,000 names by 1985. The work would begin with the transfer of a much smaller number of records as a pilot project.
Yesterday a police source said that the Special Branch had yet to decide how many names would be placed on the computer and denied that anything like 600,000 names would eventually be filed."

My Euro Crime book reviews for September

2009-10-02T11:23:13+01:00

It's more than a month since I posted links to my new reviews at Euro Crime, so here are the book reviews that have gone up during September:

Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid. "It's a perfect holiday or weekend piece of light reading (despite the dark central theme) that leaves plenty of issues to ponder after the last page is turned."

Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort, "an excellent little thriller, an easy read that can be raced through in a couple of hours and that leaves a haunting impression."

Close-Up by Esther Verhoef : "if you like your crime fiction suspenseful, erotically romantic, tense and pacy, this is definitely a book for you."

The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin, "a wonderful book, framed as the story of a wooden house, Eel Point, on the coast of the small island of Oland, Sweden - an island where the population is small and the old traditions continue. The house has a long, tragic history associated with the building of the two lighthouses on the nearby rocks, shipwrecks and various residents. The brief stories of these old tragedies are told in short sections interleaving the book's chapters, showing how Eel Point has become regarded today as haunted. The reader is never sure whether the ghosts are real, or to what extent the house's sad, cruel past is influencing current events."

Books to put on your Christmas list

2009-09-29T13:02:05+01:00

I keep reading that 1 October, though a Thursday, will be a "super Tuesday" of the book publishing world, with a huge post-DB splurge of predicted best-sellers due for publication (not least Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - as described in the previous post and others, if you'd like to scroll down for more information about this eagerly awaited novel).

However, life goes on - and as I see from recent Booksellers that December is expected to be a "quiet" month for UK book releases, I thought I'd post a few here so you can plan your holiday reading or even drop a few hints to Santa.

There's massive publicity to support publication of Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by Edgar-winner C. J. Box (Corvus, £12.00 HB), his UK debut. The plot: a couple adopt a baby, only to be told a few months later that the father did not sign away his parental rights, and wants her back - very badly. Not so surprising, perhaps, but a sinister motive emerges.

Other December HB releases include Two Tribes by Charlie Owen (Headline, £12.99); Paying Back Jack by Christopher G. Moore (Atlantic, £12.99); A Murder on London Bridge by Susanna Gregory (Sphere, £19.99); and True Blue by David Baldacci (Macmillan, £17.00) - one of those authors with whom I parted company some time ago despite a few exciting early novels, including his cracking debut Absolute Power (made into a film starring Clint Eastwood, not bad in itself but which ruined the plot and the logic by ducking the shock that happened half-way through the book).

Moving on to paperbacks, more my cup of tea (price- and size-wise), of the December crop I am most looking forward to Death in Oslo by Anne Holt (Sphere, £7.99), one of Norway's best-selling authors. This is the first in a series in which the female US president disappears while on a state visit. I liked the two so-far-translated Johanne Vik novels by this author, and am keen to try this one.

Peter James's Dead Tomorrow is out in PB (Pan, £6.99), a super outing in the Roy Grace series, this one about organ and child-trafficking. "It's a sad tale of desperate needs taken to extremes, really very disturbing", according to The Bookseller. You can see what I thought of it in my review (of the HB).

Other December PBs - well, get the megasellers out of the way first, we have Run for your Life by "James Patterson" & Michael Ledwidge (a strangely dry month for James P, only one out by him in Dec); and Girl Missing by Tess Gerritsen (Bantam, £6.99) - warning, this is her debut crime novel, out in the US in 1994, only now getting a UK publication.

Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo (Pan, £6.99) has received excellent reviews in the professional media and on blogs, so I shall certainly be reading this one. It is about an Amish community disrupted by murder with, according to The Bookseller, "an amazing hook, sense of place and a terrific twist. It's for the P. J. Tracy market and had my reader totally gripped right from the start". [Not that I am that keen on P. J. Tracy but I will nevertheless give Sworn to Silence a go, based on reviews I've read.]

A few more: The Taken by the controversially named, pseudonymous Inger Ash Wolfe (Corgi, £6.99), second in the Hazel Micallef series, the first not much liked by me; The Fury by Jason Pinter (Mira, £6.99), fourth in the Henry Parker series and much praised by The Bookseller (I must read The Mark, still on my shelf from ages ago); Dishonour by Helen Black (Avon, £6.99), one of the childcare lawyer Lily Valentine series (the third, I think); Mud, Muck and Dead Things by Ann Granger (Headline, £7.99), first in a new series set in the Cotswolds; Playing with Bones by Kate Ellis (Piatkus, £6.99), second in the Joe Plantagenet series (Kate Ellis also writes the well-established Wesley Peterson series, an attractive mix of contemporary and historical crime, based on the one I've read, Bone Garden); and Bad Penny Blues (Serpent's Tail, £7.99) by Cathi Unsworth, a "1960s tale of brutality, police corruption, perverted aristocrats and murdered prostitutes, with a bit of mystic stuff thrown in."

Lisbeth Salander's favourite reading material

2009-09-27T12:41:02+01:00

I am even more grateful than I realised in advance to the publisher (MacLehose Press) for sending me the perfect weekend distraction of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland. The book is out in the UK and Australia on 1 October, so if you haven't read the first two in this trilogy, you just about have time to rectify that situation before the final volume is out. You certainly need to have read them both before embarking on Hornet's Nest. Like the previous volumes, the opening 100-or-so pages are not an obvious way to begin a novel of this calibre. But persevere - I am now 200 pages in and at that delicious stage of wanting to race on as fast as possible, yet not read any so that I don't finish the novel. (As, sadly, there will be no more by this author.)

Lisbeth Salander, the scorching protagonist, is in hospital because of her serious, life-threatening injuries incurred at the end of book 2 (The Girl Who Played With Fire). Here's an excerpt from Hornet's Nest (p. 187 of my edition), an exchange between her surgeon and a psychologist at the hospital:

... "I asked her if she wanted something to read, whether I could bring her books of any sort. At first she said no, but later she asked if I had any scientific journals that dealt with genetics and brain research."
"With what?"
"Genetics."
"Genetics?"
"Yes. I told her that there were some popular science books on the subject in our library. She wasn't interested in those. She said she'd read books on the subject before, and she named some standard works that I'd never heard of. She was more interested in pure research in the field."
"Good grief."
"I said that we probably didn't have any more advanced books in the patient library - we have more Philip Marlowe than scientific literature - but that I'd see what I could dig up."
"And did you?"
"I went upstairs and borrowed some copies of Nature magazine and The New England Journal of Medicine. She was pleased and thanked me for taking the trouble."
"But those journals contain mostly scholarly papers and pure research."
"She reads them with obvious interest."

See Euro Crime news for some early reviews of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

More about the Millennium Trilogy, with links to reviews of and articles about the earlier books.