JOST A MON

Keen-eyed readers may have observed that the ninth month of roundups of translated crime fiction never appeared in these pages. The same readers may have then shrugged and moved on with their lives. A recent holiday interfered with the sequence of posts, so I'm combining two months' worth here. Camomile Street library has come up trumps with several of my books on order, and we have a bit of variety this time around.

I may be going out on a limb when I say that the development of popular literature generally follows the same pattern around the world. As a society becomes literate, readers will prefer light material - novellas and pulp, generally involving thrills or spills and sex and romance. Penny dreadfuls take off, often competing for attention by means of lurid covers and suggestive blurbs - not just because it doesn't require intense concentration to appreciate, but also because it is invariably cheaper than middle-class literature. The occasional pulp author will then transcend the genre and establish himself or herself with critical acclaim and gradually move up-market. The readership often will follow this author and introduce itself to other, more literary works. Meanwhile newly literate people continue to fill the voids left behind by this upward mobility and eagerly embrace the canon of pulp.

How's that for a thesis? I mentioned penny dreadfuls, but I should probably also include other gems of the canon, such as those anthologised in the The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (selected and translated by Pritham Chakravarthy), and those lovingly referred to in Patricia Melo's In Praise of Lies. Both Brazil and India are roughly at the same level of economic development as far as the vast majority of people are concerned, and both countries have an enormous thirst for light reading and sensationalism. (One can see this in the wide reach of daytime soap operas on television in both countries.) The English translation of the original Tamil stories serves to include a more middle-class audience for what is essentially vernacular fiction; likewise Patricia Melo discusses the popularity of Brazilian noir among the socially downtrodden, and the cut-throat competition to serve it.

Now Melo does not address the consumers of the cheap literature; rather, she prefers to poke fun at the industry that supplies it. So we have Jose Gruber, a hack who copies the plots from greats of world literature and passes on the texts to a publisher who is unaware of Dickens and Dostoevsky; the readership doesn't know or care either. Jose falls in with a herpetologist, Melissa, who, unaware of his inspiration, believes that his is a fertile imagination. She then involves him in concocting clever plots of kill her husband, who she claims abuses her, and Jose is such a moral and physical coward that he ends up helping her. The stress results in his literary career stalling, with the publisher rejecting proposal after proposal (which lengthen in proportion to his desperation) as unworkable and uninteresting. The noirish aspects of the novel might have served to keep the plot ticking, but Melo is dissatisfied with satirising only the pulp industry and she switches her target to the self-help books that also attract a wide readership in Brazil. Between the crime committed and the unravelling of Melissa's and Jose's relationship, and his sudden success as a hack self-help author, there are suddenly too many threads in the novel, and it all gets increasingly inchoate. While the book started funny and clever, it appears as if Melo loses the plot herself as she goes along, and it ends up trying my patience.

The Blaft book is an uneven collection as well. There are two or three absolute sparklers, but the rest are somewhat pedestrian and obvious. I loved the brilliant wit and repartee of Pattukotai Prabakaran’s ‘Sweetheart, Please Die’ and the innuendo and bonhomie of Subha’s ‘Hurricane Vaij’, which were possibly the best stories in the book. Some of the stories are overtly preachy – offering a defence of a woman’s sexual rights, say, or urging honesty in a politician – and some involve mad scientists and that old favourite of Indian films, reincarnation and revenge. I guess this is not surprising: they must appeal to the lowest denominator, and so become obvious and forced. Still, it’s heartening to see that the remarkably prodigious authors of the stories (some of whom have written thousands of tales and novellas) are often capable of superb and sophisticated imagination, refusing to pander to the base, and, fortunately for us, Pritham Chakravarthy has located several gems of the genre, and published them here.

Being obvious is possibly the worst comment a reader can make on a crime novel, but what  is obvious to one person may be opaque to another. In Tefcros Michaelides's Pythagorean Crimes, the twist at the end depends for its surprise entirely on whether the reader knows the history of mathematics or not. The plot is rather straightforward - a Greek mathematician is found murdered and his best friend (the narrator) looks back on his career, hoping to find clues to his death in his past. The description of this past is possibly the weakest part of the book: Michaelides evidently believes that describing the excitement and fervour of early 20th century mathematics is insufficient to drive the book forward, so he throws in a long section on the development of modern art in the back alleys of Paris, introducing Picasso and his coterie, and claiming that Picasso's art was much informed by his own fascination for the foundations of logic. The plot hinges on an important question on the underlying consistency of mathematics, but surely it defies logic that the resolution to this question should verily be a life-and-death matter?

It's not often one hears of crime fiction from Africa that is written in a non-native language, although now that Afrikaans has been spoken in South Africa for close to 300 years, perhaps it is as native a tongue as any other. Deon Meyer is a successful author of thrillers set in that country, and he uses the medium to explore several unsavoury aspects of South African history. The nexus between the apartheid regime and the vastly influential military-industrial complex is reasonably well-known; what is perhaps less known is its constant interference in the affairs of neighbouring countries, either on the pretext of containing Communism, or to co-opt corrupt Black leaders of those countries. The story in Blood Safari is, as far as thrillers go, fairly faithful to the genre: a rich young woman thinks she has seen her long-dead brother on TV, her house is firebombed, she buys the services of a top-notch bodyguard (named Lemmer) who helps her in her search for her brother. Of course, the enemies are many and vicious, and when both get injured in an attack, Lemmer decides to go on the offensive himself. He is a man with a short fuse and can be indescribably vicious himself, so when the villains meet their comeuppance, they don't go gently into the unknown. Meyer throws in social commentary on present-day South Africa as well. There is corruption at higher levels that thwarts honest policemen, there are social schisms between the Afrikaners and the English-speakers; there is suspicion at every level between the blacks and whites; and there are tensions between the various nations of blacks, too, as they scramble for economic advancement and funding from an impoverished state. Underlying this all is a passionate cry to save Africa's wildlife as well, not just the popular creatures of tourist imagination, but also birds such as vultures that are held in such distaste by everyone.

Véronique Ovaldé's Kick the Animal Out is a narrative from the viewpoint of a mentally-unbalanced girl desperate to locate her mother. This is an exploration of the lush mindscape of the fifteen year-old Rose who adores her mother and is baffled and upset by her father's seeming lack of anxiety when her mother vanishes. She seeks answers in her mother's past, uncovering details of old loves and past crimes. This is a slim book set in a sunny coast of France completely at odds with Rose's anguish, and it drags the reader into her world of 'immeasurable loss' more surely and heartbreakingly than weightier tomes by less assured writers. Well worth a read.

One of the great canards of medieval life that have been promoted to outraged titillation in the world of entertainment is the putative droit du seigneur, the right of a feudal lord to bed the wives of his serfs on their wedding night. There is almost no evidence that such a right ever existed in law, though it is undeniable that serfs were abused and their wives very likely forced into granting sexual favours. Still, this is a favourite trope among writers of historical fiction (equally, directors of films set in the Middle Ages), and Ildefonso Falcones in his Cathedral of the Sea proves no different. Perhaps, though, we should believe Falcones - he is, after all, a lawyer himself, and he quotes Catalan legal documents (the Usatges) that purport to grant such rights. The novel, a sweeping history of the construction of the magnificent Cathedral of Santa María del Mar by indigent labourers as an act of love and devotion, starts with the violation of a woman on the night of her wedding. The story then follows the fortunes of the woman's husband, and then their son, against the background of the rise of Barcelona's maritime power. It is a gripping tale, incorporating miracles, internecine feuds, pogroms against Jews, naval battles, detailed explanations of construction techniques, sex and strife between diabolically devious women and inhumanly good men, envy between brothers, religious schisms, class struggles, and, if all this were not enough, the Inquisition. I'm well pleased with this, especially because there was nary a mention of the Templars.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge is a tale of the fall of a brilliant Swiss detective. The denouement is somewhat pat, but the analysis of the detective's psyche is very good. A little girl is savagely murdered and the detective makes a promise to her mother that he will find the killer. When a suspect is arrested and he subsequently commits suicide, everybody is satisfied that the case is closed, even the victim's parents. But the detective is not convinced, and against all evidence and in the face of his superiors' disapproval, he lays an intricate trap to catch the killer. He is so obsessed with this plan that he doesn't mind sacrificing everything he has - his reputation, his relationships, even his 'adopted' family - to fulfil his pledge. The plan fails and he loses his mind, and when the explanation arrives (a bit contrived and convenient), it is far too late to save the detective. This is a small book, a quick but agonising read, and well worth for its insight into the extremes of human nature.

Gianluca Morozzi has written a neat claustrophobic thriller set in the elevator of a residential building. In Blackout, three individuals, strangers to each other, enter the lift. Shortly thereafter, the power goes out and the trio is trapped between floors. Their back-stories are filled in between chapters that describe the continuously rising paranoia and terror within the cramped quarters of the lift. I’m not giving anything away when I say that one of the three is vicious serial killer, and his is the only background that is really relevant to the story. The other two could have been pilots or scuba-divers for all their lives had any consequence up to the point they are trapped. So far, so good. True to the genre, the innocents have to escape. How though? And is that all to the story? This is where Morozzi cranks up the unlikeliness factor, and the story – to my mind – degenerates to droll fantasy. It is written in that arch, self-consciously-talking-to-the-reader fashion that might grate on some; the staccato sentences might alienate others, but it is a thin book, trying a bit to be too clever, and will serve as a decent page-turner on a short trip to work.

Arch and knowing books are, thankfully, not a dime a dozen, but Jef Geeraerts’s Public Prosecutor, The is another such. Geeraerts doesn’t have much time for organised religion, I gather from this fable, or for money-grubbing men or women, most of whom end up perishing in some gruesome fashion or the other. The protagonist of this parody of the paranoid thriller genre is the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp, a man who owes his position to his wife’s noble family. He leads the usual life of an alpha male – he has a beautiful young mistress; his wealth does not stop him from seeking more; and, of course, he detests his wife, and hardly has any time for his sons. The wife is a deeply religious Catholic who wants one of her sons to enter Opus Dei, the usual villain in books involving religious skullduggery, and to that end is willing to sacrifice everything, including her husband. There are other unsavoury Opus Dei operatives with connections at the highest reaches of power – both financial and administrative – and there are sundry criminals out for revenge. None of the characters has any redeeming qualities but the Prosecutor, harried and hassled, ends up being strangely sympathetic. This is so earnest a book I cannot imagine Geeraerts wasn’t grinning ironically all the while he was writing it; good fun.

And the humour continues in the latest caper from Latin America that I’ve read: the Uruguayan-Cuban author Daniel Chavarría’s Adios Muchachos is a rollicking dissection of Cuban life, where years of Communism have only served to drive the capitalist fervour of the masses to feverish pitch and materialism rules above all. Unlike the corruption and drug-addled misery limned in Leonardo Padura’s Havana series, Chavarría’s book is far too good-humoured. It is also a sexy romp with the pneumatic bottom of the wondrously bright and beautiful Alicia running riot, trying to ensnare rich foreigners who might then take her away to their own rich lands where she could lead a life of luxury. Her modus operandi is to ride her bike, wiggling her alluring bottom to attract a rich man in a fancy car, and then falling spectacularly before the sucker, prompting him to come to her rescue. Her mother aids and abets her schemes, providing fancy food and culture to the man, causing him to get more and more besotted by Alicia. Unfortunately, Alicia then falls in with a Canadian ex-con whom she mistakes for her latest wealthy conquest. He is leading a double-life himself, trying to persuade a multinational corporation to fund marine archaeology (to make money out of selling salvaged treasure) while also hiding his less than salubrious past from his employers. An accidental death sparks panic in Alicia and Victor, but also hands them possibility to make large amounts of money, and at this point, Chavarría’s grip over the plot begins to loosen, and confusion takes over. In the classic manoeuvre of the author who’s lost interest in the proceedings, there’s a final roundup of what happens in the subsequent lives of the various characters. I’ve often wondered what purpose such a roundup serves: it’s as though the story somehow were unable to close by itself, and so an artificial conclusion is forced on the reader. Dissatisfying, surely?

And, to round off this roundup, we have Jean-Christophe Grangé’s The Empire of the Wolves, as harrowingly graphic as any lesbian crime author’s work (as Ian Rankin once pointed out to much controversy). A secret right-wing Turkish sect is busy butchering its way through the textile-worker community in Paris (all trafficked women from Turkey). The wife of a senior bureaucrat is having violent flashbacks that lead her towards paranoia and breakdown. The policeman investigating the serial killings is forced to rope in a retired colleague, a man who has been well-known for his efficiency in keeping crime down in the Turkish quarter in the past (and notorious for his corruption and brutality). The two of them determine that political schisms in Turkey and the spread of transnational criminal gangs led as much by ideology as mere lucre are the cause of the murders in Paris. Naturally, the killers are in search of one particular person, and it’s not difficult to discern early on who this person might be. After all, there are only two supposedly disparate strands in this novel, and so they have to connect at some point. The denouement is, once again, in classic mode: in the end there are two people out to get each other, there’s some grandiose recrimination, and an obvious conclusion. This novel, I thought, was a bit over the top; for a much more satisfying experience, check out Dominique Manotti’s Rough Trade (Eurocrime Series), which is taut, gripping and eminently true to life.

It’s that time of month again, and I am back with the latest roundup of translated crime fiction consumed in April. So what if taxes are being put up and Britain will soon be as unliveable as Zimbabwe – expensive and no quality of life? We can take heart in the adventures of those folks immeasurably better off than us – characters in books, thoughtful detectives, murderous villains, dangerous damsels, none of whom speak English.

This time I’ve been rather fortunate in my random pick-ups from the library. There’s much in common among them, strangely enough. There are tax dodges, social collapse, sometimes both, sometimes neither. Have I missed out any combinations? Yes. Well, we shall begin with Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho, a dark, disturbing, frequently funny diatribe against society by a superb villain, a square-headed individual in a country very like Mabanckou’s native Congo. Gregoire is a mass of neuroses, a liar obsessed with the country’s only serial-killer, Angoualima, whose exploits he lovingly recounts, and whose approval he seeks in his own acts of violence. Gregoire is determined to kill his girlfriend, Germaine, and his preparations – both physical and mental – for this are interspersed with accounts of his troubled childhood, and the two murders he has attempted (both of which fail). Although Angoualima is dead, Greg has frequent meetings with him (at the killer’s grave) where he strives for approval from his mentor. These dialogues are blackly humorous, with the spectre frequently exasperated with Greg’s incompetence. Greg has issues with human foibles, he detests intellectuals but is not above spouting quotations, he wants the company of a compliant woman, but he can scarcely stand Germaine who has moved in with him. In the end, his murderous plans collide with forces out of his control, with spectacular results.

Next, we must have a Swedish writer, Åsa Larsson, whose The Savage Altar (or The Sun Storm) is an example of one aspect of Scandinavian life that seems to be attracting quite a bit of attention lately: the effect of fundamentalist Christianity on society. A well-beloved man, active in an evangelist church, is found brutally murdered, with his eyes gouged out. His sister falls under suspicion, the devout and scatterbrained Sanna, who calls her oldest friend Rebecka Martinsson, the heroine of this book, to help her. Rebecka has her own bitter past linked with that church, and is reluctant to return to her roots. At any rate,  she visits Sanna eventually, and uncovers tax dodges, corruption, charismatic and schismatic men, while facing up to her own demons. It is a fairly standard plot complete with the stereotypical finale of the villains closing upon Rebecka in an isolated cabin in a snowdrift, but not before she has solved the crime (she’s no detective, but lawyers are as good, eh?), saved Sanna, and gained some measure of closure. There are moments of superb psychological characterisation here, and Larsson’s detestation for evangelicals is quite clear (or perhaps it was my own dislike being mirrored in what I read), but this is not an exemplar of the best that Scandinavian crime fiction has to offer.

Benjamin Prado is our next author, a Spaniard whose Snow is Silent is a remarkable piece of work. It describes the descent of one innocuous, vacuous soul into murder. Exactly who the murderer is may be clear right from the beginning to the most obtuse amongst us, and his motivations are possibly apparent to the perspicaceous, but I was a bit thrown by the revelation towards the end. What prompts a pathetic example of clerical humanity to get above himself and pretend to be a rich man in search of suitable properties to purchase for his portfolio? Why does a woman who wouldn’t have given him a second look fall in love with him? Why are his two friends, whom he meets regularly at a cafe and to whom he recounts his daily life and criminal plans, showing so much interest in his activities? This is good stuff, a small book packing a nifty punch.

Our (obligatory?) Latin American is Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, a Brazilian known for his ruminative prose, yet another man so keenly observant of the changes in his society that his detective Inspector Espinoza is more of a philosopher-poet than a policeman. In The Silence of the Rain, Espinoza investigates the suicide of a rich executive in a plodding fashion, confused as he is by a series of murders that appear related to the suicide. Just when he appears to get no further, help arrives from convenient quarters (this, as much as the concentration on the upper classes of Rio, means that the book is far from a regular police procedural that prefers to plumb the underbelly of great cities). There’s some sultry sex, a view into the lives of the super-rich, financial scams, feckless men, beautiful women, almost no mention of food, and a detective who prefers to move books from one part of his living room to another, and ponder about life and the two women he is in love with, than seek out the criminals. Rather arbitrary and slow-moving. Not bad, but not the best this month.

For a change from the norm, we have two Russian books this time. Allow me to say, what incredible books. The first, Headcrusher, is by a duo named Garros-Evdokimov. This is almost technopunk, combining an incredibly violent videogame, and yet another gormless individual who suddenly goes berserk and commits a series of murders. Set in the Russia of the early 1990s when limitless money was available to the amoral and the corrupt, this book combines social criticism with dark humour; the plot is scarcely credible, but the murders follow a logical inevitability as the anti-hero, Vadim, knocks off one person after another, launders money on a vast scale, learns all about single malt whisky, and bonks beautiful women. It’s all described in a very laconic style, almost stream-of-consciousness, hilarious to boot. Rush out and grab it ASAP.

This is not really a translated novel, but I’m throwing it in as it has in it every possible stereotype an Englishman holds of the French: oversexed women, gourmets, intellectual dogs, corrupt civil servants. I daresay it is an Englishman with such a view of the French who will most benefit from reading the other books in today’s litany. Anyway. Michael Bond, famous for the Paddington Bear series, has written a bunch of harmless and humorous accounts of the exploits of Monsieur Pamplemousse, a retired policeman and gourmet (see this, e.g.). In Monsieur Pamplemousse Hits The Headlines, a famous TV chef dies while he films a cooking show where Pamplemousse is in attendance, and obviously our man has to get involved. There are horny vamps out to blackmail every male in power, even Pamplemousse who is not really powerful, and sundry colourful characters who have much to say on food, but it’s Pamplemousse’s dog Pommes Frites who guides the detective to the solution. There are a couple of innocuous misdirections to keep the reader’s interest going. A very light book, this, which offers almost nothing to the intellect. General time-pass.

Akashic Books has been in the business of urban fiction for some years, and recently, has published a series of books of short crime fiction set in various cities of the world. I picked up Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, but this has nothing at all to do with Akashic, heheheh. It is as motley a collection as I can imagine, however. Noir only loosely describes the stories in the book (in what way Elric of Melniboné is involved in crime?) and not all of them are very good. In fact, despite claiming to shed light on little-visited areas of the City of Lights, the tramping grounds of the various characters in the book are Pigalle and environs, known even to one such as I who has scarcely visited the city, as a red-light district. The stories by now have all blended into an amorphous mass in my head, written by American, Canadian, French, and British writers; I can single out a couple that I thought were decent: Jason Starr’s “Bar Fight” with its twist at the end, and Romain Slocombe's “Guy Georges' Final Crime” has a clash between a serial-killer and his last victim that turns unexpectedly.

Next up is the second Russian novel: Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin, an absolute smasher of a book, about a down-and-out wannabe novelist who is hired by a newspaper to write up obituaries to be kept ready when important people die. Viktor is a loner, an introspective hack, with very little to tie him to his compatriots. His only source of comfort and affection is an Emperor Penguin named Misha that he picks up from Kiev zoo, which is too broke to feed its animals. The penguin spends much of the time standing quietly in the bedroom and staring at the wall; occasionally it studies its reflection in the mirror; often it senses its master’s despair and waddles over to put its head on his lap… Various thugs begin to arrive at Viktor’s doorstep, stern but friendly, who ask him which of his obituaries he liked the best.  The next day, the subject is dead; soon others Viktor has written about are dying as well, and the editor of the newspaper admits that he is part of a clique determined to clean out corruption in Kiev. One minor villain (who soon is killed) leaves his daughter in the writer’s care. Viktor now has to take care of two wards, and while he is kind to the girl, his deepest affection is reserved for Misha. Viktor finds out that his obituary has been written, which serves to crystallise his mind and strengthen his spine. Then the penguin falls badly ill. This is a novel of simply wrought impressions, humorous and moving and surreal, a study of social collapse, and the ties that bind the honest and the helpless. Wonderful stuff.

The German writer Petra Hammesfahr has been likened to Patricia Highsmith, and her award-winning novel The Sinner has all the darkness and psychosis of the latter’s oeuvre. A young mother, Cora Bender, seemingly content with her husband and little son, suddenly stabs out at a man in a beach as he makes out with his wife, and kills him brutally. She then admits her crime to the policemen who show up and requests them not to waste time investigating the murder. But the investigating detective is baffled by her statement that she hasn’t seen the man before; when she refuses to explain her motive, he.begins to dig deeper. And once again we see the awful consequences of religious fundamentalism on a growing child, We learn what an awful upbringing Cora had, with her mother suffused with rigorous piety, her father feckless and incapable of supporting her, her younger sister so badly ill that she is in and out of hospitals. As she grows up, she faces the constant contempt of her mother; her sister then begins to live life vicariously through her, even going so far as to attempt to persuade Cora into prostitution. When a flashy boy comes to town, she falls in love with him, and finds herself among a crowd that seeks sex and drugs, which inevitably leads to tragedy. Perhaps it is this tragedy that has coloured her life, and the demons that were driven deep into her psyche suddenly emerged on that beach that sunny day and caused her to kill? This is a top-notch study of psychological trauma and faith, revealing that just as blind faith can destroy, faith in the fundamental goodness in people can save.

Speaking of psychological studies, the Swiss writer Friedrich Glauser spent much of his life at one or the other mental institution in Switzerland. Amidst his treatments, he wrote four novels that were to become classics in European crime fiction. In Matto’s Realm is one of them, and it is rather good. Matto, in Italian, is the spirit of madness, and it appears to rule in an asylum in Bern, whence a child-murderer escapes and the director is found with a broken neck. When the sympathetic sergeant Studer is brought in to cover up the case (with the approval, strangely enough, of his superiors), he finds that there are castes and hatreds and religious maniacs and sexual rivalries galore within the institution. The blurb says that Studer finds it hard to resist Matto himself, finding himself drawn into the ‘no-man’s land between reason and madness’, but this is an exaggeration. Studer remains warmly analytical throughout, even if some of his efforts at resolving the mysteries go awry and an innocent man ends up dead. He is shaken by the consequences of his actions, but he is too good a man and detective to ignore the truth. This is a slow-burning novel of humour and understanding, written with intimate knowledge of the world of the insane. Glauser has certainly put to good use his own unfortunate experiences.

Finally, we have Czech-born French writer Pavek Hak’s Sniper, a violent and awful description of war and the greatest crimes of all – those sanctioned by governments on their own hapless populations. This is a thin book, describing the points of view of three characters in a Balkan country: the sniper, an amoral stooge of the government who is convinced that he is serving the greater good by annihilating everyone who comes into the scopes of his rifle – children, mothers, old men and women, postmen – he kills them all indiscriminately; a young man who is determined to exhume and bury his parents with honour, fighting with every ounce of sinew the tough ice that covers them, reliving over and over again the brutal slaughter of his father, his mother and his little brothers; and a commandant who embodies the criminal decision of the oppressors to wage brutality in every possible way against the civilians, including degradation and rape and torture and bestiality. The three viewpoints are interlinked, with the horror escalating with every page. As anti-war novels go, this is right up there with the best.

And that’s all for April, folks.