Whoosh, away from Italy, north to Sweden and another detective, Kurt Wallander.
The crime story here is more ambitious and international in scope, involving an assassination plot of famous real-life South African political figures, fictional contract killers and the landcapes of two radically different countries.
Another Italian detective, but this one’s home grown. Salvo Montalbano is a Sicilian police inspector and this is his first appearance in print.
The story concerns a man found dead in a car in a wasteground well known as a trading place for prostitutes and drug dealers. He’s Silvio Luparello, an engineer and uncorrupted politician. He’s wealthy and aristocratic, so the well-worn crime trope – this case must be finished quickly to avoid publicity for the powerful friends of those in charge of the police – comes into play and Montalbano feels under pressure.
Modern crime fiction doesn’t go in for humanity all that much. There are faults, for sure, but fondness and family bonds that aren’t late ripped apart from a threat from an avenging psychopath are rare.
Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti is the most human detective I’ve come across, a sort of Venetian Maigret with a lower clear-up rate.
“Hey Foss,” the prosecutor said, taking Clark by the arm, “of course it changes. Don’t take it so hard. Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes everyday.”
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is another classic of the hardboiled crime genre but while The Hunter is the equivalent of the Hollywood action thriller, this is the precursor to something more realistic, such as The Wire. The characters here, whether crooks, cops or lawyers, are just doing their jobs as best they can.
This is considered a classic of hardboiled crime fiction. It’s also the only book that I’ve continued to search for after I bought a copy. That’s because it took me a long time to realise that The Hunter and Point Blank, two much-recommended crime novels, were in fact the same book. There are also three film versions: Point Blank, Full Contact and Payback.
Published in 1962, the book is the first in a series of more than 20 novels about Parker, a professional crook. Its author, Donald Westlake wrote more than 100 novels under many pseudonyms. The Parker novels were all written as Richard Stark. In summary, both the novel and its author go by many different names.
Lost in the Funhouse marked the beginning of a small exploration of experimental and post-modern fiction. I followed it with The Lime Twig, the sixth novel by John Hawkes, which seems not to be very well known, from what I can tell. It’s obscurity is undeserved.
Hawkes’ was clear about his approach to fiction: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”
“It was around nine-thirty, there was a chill in the air, the wind was gentle now, and he was moving inside it like the light of love, ringing without sound, giving himself up to every vibration, totally alive inside of a crime.”
Angels, Denis Johnson’s first novel, is a dark and affecting story, populated with characters that are easy to dislike but difficult to avoid empathising with.
Though the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is generally considered to have ended with the Second World War, this novel, published in 1948, is very much in the golden age tradition. It’s a mystery that centres on a country house, features a host of upper and upper-middle class characters and, despite some devious criminality, order is restored at the end.
I find golden age crime novels comforting in a funny sort of way. They are more like puzzles than novels and, as with any genre fiction, the adherence to a template offers a reassuring familiarity. The Franchise Affair is considered one of the classics of its kind so everything should have been in place for an enjoyable read.
Tokyo Vice first skulked across my radar last summer when Jake Adelstein spoke at the Frontline Club. I had tickets to the event but at the last minute, circumstances intervened and I missed out. It was a crying shame: this is the kind of memoir that, lively and engaging in book format, would verily crackle in the hands – and words – of the author himself.
Adelstein’s account of his twelve-year career as a journalist on the police beat in Tokyo is an accessible, pleasing read. That’s no back-handed way of saying the storytelling in Tokyo Vice is simplistic (it is clearly told but not dumbed down) or set out in a primitive parade of monosyllabic grunt-words (Adelstein is a skilled writer with a perfectly ample vocabulary – and in two languages at that). Rather, it’s a memoir that just unfolds itself from the outset, and for this reader, as for the half-dozen people I have recommended it to, it was difficult not to get carried along in the momentum of Adelstein’s crazy life.
This is one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”, the term he used to describe those novels that he did not consider to be literary. It is, of course, entertaining but it has more literary value than Green believed.
Set on the Orient Express, which was the title the book was given for its US publication, this is an atmospheric pre-war thriller that also feels surprisingly modern.
