8 posts tagged “pi”
Translated by Don Bartlett.
Varg Veum is a private detective based in Bergen. Although he's featured in almost 20 novels, only two of them are readily available in English, both published by Arcadia: THE WRITING ON THE WALL (first published in 1995, 11th in the series) and THE CONSORTS OF DEATH (2006, 14th). I was lucky enough to obtain a second-hand copy of the second in the series, YOURS UNTO DEATH, first published in 1977, so I have some idea of the background of Varg Veum, who was ironically named "Varg", meaning "wolf", by his father - "Varg Veum" taken together meaning "outlaw", to his chagrin but to the mirth of many people he encounters.
Veum is a private eye of the classic mould, having been for many years a social worker specialising in child care. His experiences in this profession led him to become hopeless about the ability or even will of the state to help the many sad cases of abandoned and abused children he and his colleagues encounter. His constant brushes with authority led to a parting of the ways in the 1970s, and a new career as a private detective. The three books I have been able to read in this superb series all feature children and teenagers, and how Veum tries to protect them, often not very successfully - not so much for a lack of his own detective skills, which are pretty sharp, but because of the general hopelessness of their life-circumstances.
THE CONSORTS OF DEATH is a perfect introduction to Varg Veum because almost all of the book takes place in flashback, the first chunk of it back to the time before Veum became a detective and hence before the first book in the series. The reader learns Veum's back story as a social worker as well as being introduced to his newest "case", that of Johnny Boy, an ex-criminal newly released from prison, who has Veum on a "death list" of people he blames for his situation. When Veum learns this information, via an old colleague, he remembers the first time he met Johnny Boy, as a young baby. Later, the two meet again, again in awful circumstances when it appears as if the boy has killed his foster father. In the wake of that incident, Veum and two colleagues look after Johnny for six months before he is again taken into care.
Veum then leaves the social services department, sets up as a private detective and loses touch with the boy, until yet another crime takes place ten years later in a remote farmhouse. Again, Veum becomes involved, and not only becomes aware of a century-old crime in the same area that was never properly solved, but also uncovers many puzzling links and coincidences between all of these cases. The final part of the book returns to the present-day and the resolution of the story of Johnny and all the convoluted motives and relationships that are resolved in a cleverly constructed climax.
I enjoyed this book, and previous novels by this author, for many reasons. First, as Maxim Jakubowski writes on the cover, Varg Veum is a Philip Marlowe figure. The classic PI story is, for me as well as many others, a very large source of appeal of the crime-fiction genre. Gunnar Staalesen really is a worthy inheritor of the mantle of Chandler and Macdonald, both in his multi-level plotting and in his world-weary yet straight talking, semi-tough protagonist. Second, the writing is superb - it is always worth looking out for books translated by Don Bartlett, one of my favourite translators, and THE CONSORTS OF DEATH is no exception. Norwegian society and scenery are described with laconic beauty and meaning, an atmospheric background for the events of the story. Here is an example:
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 can't recommend this book too highly. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it, and am only a bit frustrated that because as most of the series is not (yet?) translated, there are gaps in the past 20 years of Veum's career which are hinted at but I can't fill in. In my opinion, this series stands alongside Connelly, Crais, Temple, Camilleri and others, who are among the very best modern exponents of the poetic yet tough detective story with strong, classic plots; a social conscience; and perfect pitch in terms of a sense of place.
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.
Harlan Coben’s latest novel returns to his original character, Myron Bolitar the sports agent, and his associates Win, Esperanza (a.k.a. Little Pochahontas) and Big Cyndi. However, in Long Lost any association with sports, a standard feature of the earlier novels, is dropped, and instead the story is a trendy thriller covering international, post-9/11 terrorism, stem cells, lost loves and water-boarding torture, with a quick tour of Paris and London from a decidedly American perspective.
The reviews to date of Long Lost have not been kind, and I can understand why. One has to admit it is a bit of a lazy book. However, Harlan Coben is nothing if not a great story-teller, and anyone who wants an undemanding but exciting aeroplane or beach read will not be disappointed by spending an afternoon reading this novel. The author is bang up to the minute with his BlackBerries, Google maps and blogs, even if his knowledge of science is a bit sketchy - John Wyndham could certainly give him a run for his money in that regard.
The plot of Long Lost is a bit of a see-saw. In a classic Coben hook, Myron is contacted at the start of the book by his ex-lover Terese Collins, whom he has not seen for some years since running away with her to a tropical island and then splitting, begging him to come to Paris to meet her. Myron has found happiness in a previous novel with “9/11 widow” (as she is called) Ali, but that relationship is now on the rocks so Myron obligingly takes a flight to France and meets Terese. Before she can tell him much more than the bare fact that her ex-husband Rick, an investigative journalist, has been murdered, Myron is on the run from an assortment of French police, Mossad agents and Arab terrorists.
I won’t summarise more of the plot here. Suffice to say that it’s a full inventory of contemporary themes and anxieties, but even if one is being generous, an illogical mish-mash. (The scene in a London (Camberwell) pub is particularly risible.) This is one of those books where the reader just has to decide whether to go along for the ride, or whether to close the covers in disgust and move on to something more believable. I opted to read the whole thing, and enjoyed it, particularly the ending – which I found quite surprising, as in most Harlan Coben novels the ending is weaker than the lead-up.
If you’ve read all the Coben novels up to now, you’ll know what to expect and you’ll probably enjoy this one, though it certainly isn’t one of his best. If you haven’t read him, I suggest either reading one of his classic standalones (Tell No One, for example, which has been made into an excellent French film) or the first Myron Bolitar book, in which the author takes a bit more care with his characters and works a bit harder to keep the reader on board.
Thanks to the ever-generous Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of Long Lost, which whiled away a very happy couple of hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon. It certainly beats doing the ironing and weeding the garden.
Although Peter Temple’s Shooting Star has only this year been published in the UK (by Quercus), it was first published in Australia in 1999. Since then, this wonderful author has written most of his Jack Irish series, the award-winning The Broken Shore, and other excellent novels. So although I found Shooting Star an absorbing and satisfying read, it has a slightly raw (but addictive) air, containing several themes and characters that emerge in more confident, developed form in later books.
The story of Shooting Star is at its heart simple, although many twists and complications are wrapped around it which require reader concentration. A teenager, Anne Carson, has been kidnapped from a music store after school. The girl’s family is extremely rich, and eager to comply with the ransom demand in the light of a similar experience 10 years ago, when another woman from the same family, Alice, was also kidnapped. On that occasion, the family turned to the police despite being told not to by the villains, and had regretted it. This time, determined not to mess about, they call upon Frank Calder, an ex-cop and ex-soldier, who is now a private “mediator”.
The story is told from Frank’s perspective, hence he spends some time working out who’s who in the complicated Carson dynasty, what actually happened to Alice (nobody wants to talk about it), and where everyone is now. Along the way, the reader picks up hints about the mosaic of Frank's own life. As time goes on, several family members are either missing or seem to justify suspicion, or both; I think my favourite moment in the book is Frank’s hot pursuit of one of them to an abandoned warehouse – with embarrassing results.
I love all Peter Temple’s books, and this one is no exception. The author is particularly strong at describing the nuances of social interactions and the emotion under the surface; some of his characterisations (Alice, for example) are beautifully subtle. Frank’s an interesting character in development; perhaps we might find out some more about him in future. Shooting Star isn’t Peter Temple’s best book, but it is still heaps better than most in the genre. Although the ending has a slightly “rabbit out of a hat” air, it packs a powerful punch. It is a very (surprisingly) bleak, ultimately unsentimental story, told well, with pace and emotional sensitivity.
With Executive Privilege, Philip Margolin has come up with a topical, multi-faceted and racy thriller – yet again. I loved it.
There has been talk recently about the thriller genre being in the doldrums, once two or three hugely selling authors are excluded. Yet Margolin has delivered a consistently high baker’s dozen of thrilling novels – like another superbly professional thriller-writer, Mary Higgins Clark, Margolin’s characters are usually decent, ordinary, capable people (often women) who have to live on their wits to survive, work out the conspiracy plot and thus (usually) best the villains. Most if not all of Margolin’s novels are set in his native Oregon, and most (but not all) are standalones, as is Executive Privilege.
As one might infer from the title, the US President is involved. What’s the hook that makes it different from all the other president-related thrillers? This president may be not only be an adulterer, but may be a murderer – or even a serial killer -- and he’s losing no opportunity in closing down any witnesses.
One of the main characters in this tightly plotted narrative is Dana Cutler, an ex-cop-turned-private investigator. She’s suffered a terrible ordeal when in the police force, the details of which become evident later in the book. She’s a resourceful woman, who knows how to watch her back and has a couple of loyal friends. When she’s hired by a rich lawyer to follow a young volunteer for a politician’s election campaign, it doesn’t take Dana long to realise she’s involved with some powerful people. Just how deep it goes, however, takes even her by surprise. Soon she’s running for her life.
Simultaneously, a young lawyer, Brad Miller, is told to take on a pro-bono case, that of a serial killer on death row. The prisoner, Clarence Little, insists that he did not kill one of his alleged victims. Brad goes to see him in jail and discovers Little’s creepy alibi, and why he hadn’t revealed it previously.
The link between the cases is FBI agent Keith Evans, who has spent years unsuccessfully tracking the killer of a series of young women. The latest victim not only provides a key to the case, but also provides some startling inconsistencies that blow several people’s worlds wide open.
Philip Margolin is a highly experienced author who juggles these disparate themes with extreme discipline and searing pace. The characters are attractive and capable, the tension and suspense are ratcheted high, and the plotting is satisfying. At the end of the day, this book is an unpretentious thriller that isn’t going to survive the highest possible scrutiny that could be applied to it. But it’s great entertainment, it respects the reader, it’s exciting, topical, and – yes, thrilling. Anyone who thinks the thriller genre is dead in the water need only look this far.
I've enjoyed Catherine Sampson's three previous novels very much, but with THE SLAUGHTER PAVILION she truly comes into her own. The main character from the first three books, Robin Ballantyne, appears only briefly. Here, the setting is China and the main emphasis is on the private detective Song, and to a lesser extent his colleague Wolf and his new employee Blue, three characters who all appeared in the previous book, THE POOL OF UNEASE.
Song, Wolf and Blue are all struggling with their individuality. They aren't conformists, yet are living in a highly repressive society in which information is censored, anyone could be a party spy, every mobile phone call could be traced, and the slightest deviation from the norm could result in years in a re-education facility or worse. At the same time, most of China's population is impoverished and people's human rights are non-existent. An example used here is that much of Beijing is being razed in order to build offices and tower blocks. None of the inhabitants and local business people have any redress, but simply have to clear out of their rooms when they hear the bulldozers approach, taking with them what possessions they can. One course that is open to people who suffer an injustice is that they are allowed to write petitions. If enough people sign, the petition is seen by the police and some investigation is supposed to follow.
THE SLAUGHTER PAVILION opens with Song refusing to take on the case of a peasant who tries to hire him to investigate why his petition, about the death of his young daughter, has been ignored by the authorities. Terrified at having his business closed down, Song refuses to help - and tragedy rapidly ensues. In an attempt to avoid being interrogated by the police as a witness, Song finds himself investigating the case further, as his ex-father-in-law, the awful Chief Chen Delai, seems inescapably to be involved. Soon Song is sought out, and then accompanied on his quest, by an attractive human-rights lawyer, Jin Dao, a development that increases Song's terror at being discovered by the authorities as well as causing him massive internal conflict because of his attraction to Jin.
This book is confident and fast-paced: as well as Song's investigation there are several parallel stories being told. One of these is the tale of two young peasant sisters, a tender, yet menacing, narrative. Blue and Wolf also feature: Wolf takes a back seat in this book but it is his apparently callous attitude to Blue that causes her to discover a crucial piece of evidence on the Internet that eventually allows Song to see where a solution must lie. In addition, Blue visits England as she has been invited to Robin's wedding, and while there sets the final steps in motion that provide us, and later Song, with the full picture.
One of the many pleasures of this excellent novel is the confidence with which China is presented, both from the point of view of the relatively sophisticated urban Song and Blue, and also from the view of the peasants, who have little access to the technology and knowledge of the modern age. The book is infused with local detail that can come only from someone who truly knows a country: the author has been Beijing correspondent for the Times and now lives in China; she makes good use of her knowledge of the country itself and of how its deprived people find and share information under the radar of officialdom.
The book is neither a travelogue nor a political tract. It is a very good page-turner of a novel, with a great plot, convincing locales and superb characters. One could want nothing more - except the next in the series.
First posted on Euro Crime, Sept 2008.
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Dead Point is the third Jack Irish novel by Peter Temple. It is brilliant. Although I've very much enjoyed every book I've so far read by this author, in this one he joins the pantheon, in my opinion. Crime fiction does not come any better than this.
As the book opens, Jack and his racing "syndicate" suffer a double loss: their horse is injured so can't finish the race; and Cynthia, one of the team, has been mugged while collecting on the winnings from the previous outing. Jack and Cam swear to find the culprit.
Another of Jack's low-life associates, Cyril Wootton (of whom Jack has suspicions in the Cynthia affair), hires him to find Robbie Colbourne, a local barman who has been missing for some time. Wootton's client is a Judge, Colin Loder, and although Jack doesn't entirely buy Loder's reasons for wanting to find Robbie, he is unexpectedly charmed by Loder calling him a "colleague".
Essentially, the book tells the story of these two cases. Jack is depressed by the Melbourne winter, his love-life is not going well and change is all around him. Even the footy group are wavering in their support of their Fitzroy substitute team. And Charlie Taub, the cabinet maker for whom Jack works, is away visting his extended family for a suspiciously long time, leaving Jack to supervise the installation of a beautiful library that he and Taub have made for Mrs Purbrick, a rich customer with high-society connections.
I read this book slowly for three reasons: one, because of the rich, detailed plot, one's attention cannot wander; every paragraph contains information that might be relevant. Two, the quality of the writing is breathtakingly superb. And third, the evocation of a lost and changing world is completely involving. Jack's internal thoughts and emotions about the city, the people he meets, the world, women: it is all just perfect. The humour, his network of shady but charming rogues, various samidzat policemen, and the people Jack encounters on his search for the missing man, together create a unique and almost mesmerizing whole.
A final strength of this book is that the denouement is less dramatic than in previous novels, and hence more believable. Political machinations are involved as usual, pots of money and contracts (a leisure resort hangs like a miasma over the story), but passions are at the root here, which makes this book seem more rounded than the previous installments, and mean that events don't spiral out of control of believablity.
If you haven't yet read Peter Temple, you have a total delight in store. If you have, you will be like me and not able to bear to wait for the next Jack Irish book, Shooting Star (UK publication September).
I would like to thank Quercus for my copy of this book.
Following on from her excellent first two novels, FALLING OFF AIR and OUT OF MIND, Catherine Sampson provides a change of theme for TV journalist Robin Ballantyne. After the death of her partner and the father of her twins, and starting a relationship with Finney, the detective investigating the case, Robin might have thought life would calm down a bit. She's wrong.
At the start of THE POOL OF UNEASE, Robin is sent to Beijing where Derek Sumner, an executive from a Scottish steel mill, has been murdered. The mill is about to be sold to a Chinese millionaire businessman called Nelson Li, and it was after Sumner made some indiscreet comments about the operation being moved from Scotland that his body was found.
As well as coping with the long flight and the separation from her young children, Robin is immediately thrown into the chaos of this huge Chinese city. She has hired an interpreter called Blue, but they have an edgy relationship: everywhere she goes, Robin encounters mistrust among a population ground-down by government dictates and poverty. She does her best to investigate Sumner's death, but is hampered by her lack of journalist's visa, the unwillingness of any of the other westerners involved to speak to her, and her incomprehension of the language.
Another story is running in parallel, that of Song, an ex-policeman who is struggling to make a living as a private detective. Song has left the police force because he couldn't stand his corrupt boss, Detective Chen, but he's in a mess because Chen is also the father of Song's wife Lina, whom Song has left, together with their son. Chen's persecution makes it virtually impossible for Song to operate, so he is reduced to lurking outside brothels trying to photograph errant husbands. It is while he is engaged in this activity that he hears a terrible scream in the woods. Racing up the hill to see what is happening, he comes across a dead woman in a fire, as well as a terrified young boy. Before he can react, Song hears shouts - and afraid of being accused of the crime, he grabs the boy and runs away, eventually ending up at the office of his partner Wolf, a young and rather eccentric lawyer with silver hair and a tattoo on his forehead.
Robin's and Song's separate investigations take alternate chapters, eventually, as one knows they must, merging into a single thread, before separating again. Although the two strong plot themes are satisfyingly strong, this book's power comes from its atmospheric and sympathetic portrayal of modern China - not just Beijing but the surrounding countryside and even Shanghai. Catherine Sampson now lives in Beijing, and her first-hand experience is woven into this very vivid account of a country in the midst of upheaval. She conveys so well what it must be like to live there if one is not one of the favoured Communist party few; how people struggle to survive in a place where wages are virtually non-existent, families live several to a room and share bathroom facilities with the rest of the street; and where nobody is sure who is watching them. This paranoia infects both Robin's and Song's efforts to uncover the truth of the nightmare situations in which they both find themselves, so that when they finally meet, although they can't communicate in words, they understand each other perfectly.
I loved this book, and hope very much to read more in future about Song, Wolf and Blue - such vivid and strong characters in their far-away world.
