JOST A MON

So he crosses out the Kavanagh, the old offices of the Diario Crítica, the Obras Sanitarias building on Avenida Córdoba, the Banco Nación and the Olivetti, facing Plaza San Martín...

You're still suffering from Marisa's death. Pain has the virtue of making people deeper beings. Suffering makes the good guys more compassionate, more noble; it makes the bad guys worse, more perverse, more wicked. So what can I do about it? Just stay calm. Trying to resist will only make it worse. In time it will pass. Right now I've got a lovely bottle of red waiting to be drunk and a pork loin stuffed with pineapple cooking in the oven, which it would be plain stupid to eat on my own. You fancy tackling it with me? Did you wash your hands after work? Are you crazy? That's where the extra flavour comes from.

Camomile Street Library has come up trumps, I must say, and delivered four out of six books I had requested. If the remaining two do not appear, I am allowed to request - at no extra charge - two other books. There are another five in the pipeline. This inter-library loan business is a good business. Foreign crime, here I come.

I'll start this month's round-up, however, with an old favourite: Boris Akunin's latest in the Erast Fandorin series. The Coronation (Erast Fandorin 7) is Akunin's attempt at the high-society detective (recall that he writes each novel according to some stereotype of the genre), and in this novel, Erast Fandorin is as high-society as high-society can be - beloved of a Russian princess and investigating the kidnapping of a cousin of the newly crowned Czar. Nicholas II is a weak man and needs his coronation to complete without a hitch, but the kidnappers promise to deliver pieces of the little boy if their demands are not acceded to, and the Czar finds himself torn between regal duty (the Imperial diamonds absolutely should be present during the ceremony) and love for family. The story is related by a family retainer, a butler, and the story is deeply reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, wherein loyalty to the family is the man's creed, and he is willing to sacrifice everything at the altar of duty, including his happiness and the happiness of the princes and princesses he has taken care of since their childhood. This is a reflective novel, elegiac in tone - Nicholas II is, after all, the last of the Czars, although nobody knew this at the time he acceded to the throne. It is quite different from the humorous and over-the-top and bombastic tone of the earlier episodes in Fandorin's career; it is clear that a coldness has entered Russia's heart, and Fandorin feels it, and even if he saves the Romanovs, it is at terrible cost and ends in tragedy for everyone concerned.

From the philosophy of loyalty to the philosophy of detection, it is no great leap in the hands of the Argentinian author Pablo de Santis. His account of the development of the twelve Master Detectives followed by a brutal series of murders in the run-up to the inauguration of Paris's World Fair, you know, the one that unveiled the Eiffel Tower, is ponderous and pondering. The Paris Enigma describes a secret club comprising the top detectives of the world and their faithful assistants, and reports their petty machinations for power and influence, and discusses the classification and analysis of crime. The structure of the detectives' club ostensibly mirrors society at large: the detectives are supposedly men of high social status, while the assistants are commoners; women are excluded; but it also analyses the possibility of upward mobility and reveals that a detective is only as good as his assistant. The novel reads somewhat jerkily as it attempts to intersperse a criminal investigation with a larger rumination on the art of detection; the two halves of this narrative would be fairly trite individually, but together form a sort of clumsy completeness. I was somewhat bemused at the end, having neither liked it much nor disliked it.

Didier Daeninckx wrote Murder In Memoriam (Five Star Paperback) in 1984 and caused a sensation in France. The French have a long history of self-analysis, even if little concrete comes out of it. The collaboration with the Nazis is something that was hidden in bureaucratic archives soon after the Liberation; the brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement is another blot on their history. The French like to claim that once someone is French, their origins are irrelevant - a fine theory but much remiss in practice. So when crowds of Algerians decided to demonstrate in 1961 against French policy in North Africa, the police clubbed them to death in their hundreds; the ensuing news embargo ensured that the population at large remained ignorant of the truth, and continued to believe that the protestors had been violent (what else to expect from those uncivilised Beurs?). A French teacher on his way home is shot during the demonstrations; twenty years later, his son meets a similar death. Inspector Cadin, an iconoclast if ever there was one, pursues the investigation with single-mindedness, and uncovers dirt on monumental scale suppressed by the powers-that-be. Because it is France, justice can often be denied in favour of power. But Daeninckx is as left-wing an author as they come, and makes no apologies for his revulsion for this kind of national anomie; small wonder that his revelation of the terrible truths of 1961 and earlier created so much angst and outrage among his countrymen. This is a book well worth a read.

Yet another North African connection is revealed in Amara Lakhous's sparkling little book about a murder in a multicultural building in Rome, Clash of Civilisations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. Lakhous is of Algerian origin but writes in Italian, and this book was quite a success in that sunny country. It comprises interview accounts by the residents of that building on the Piazza Vittorio; each interviewee reveals further information about the motivations and passions of their predecessor. And what a motley bunch of characters! The vicious thug Gladiator is the murder victim, but not before he has terrorised women in the building; there is a Milanese professor filled with revulsion at the uselessness of the southern Italian (mirroring, in fact, a desire among many northern Italians to secede from the unemployable social leeches of the south) and disdain for the immigrant; the Bangladeshi and the Iranian, each of whom has fled some terror in his past and finds some measure of acceptance in Rome; the Neapolitan concierge who resents the foreigners and hates the Milanese; and there is the elevator itself, which crystallises the residents' loathing for each other. But Amedeo, the man suspected by the police of the murder, is uniformly respected and liked by the residents; his identity comes as a surprise and eye-opener to the bigots and the welcoming alike. Lakhous is not polemical at all in this novella; rather, he likes send up stereotypes; above all, he recognises that in Rome, a foreigner is as welcome as any Italian, despite the hostility and the boorishness shown both by the native and the immigrant.

Next up, Emilio Calderon's The Creator's Map, which is set in the emigre Spanish community in 1930s Italy. Although Spain is riven with sectarian strife, the snooty expatriates are all Nationalists, and would like nothing better to ally themselves both with Mussolini's Fascists, and the nascent Nazis who are going from strength to strength. This is a somewhat laboured spy novel with all the simplifications and generalisations attendant upon a conspiracy to take over the world. Calderon, however, seems to be pitching it as a sort of Indiana Jones caper, with frequent references to the Nazi desire to snatch antiques of power, such as the chalice of Jesus and the Ark of the Covenant and sundry other relics from the Christian past. The main narration follows an architect who rises in the Fascist and Nazi hierarchies under the aegis of an influential and immensely wealthy prince; both these men are in love with a (obviously) beautiful and vivacious girl. There is a motley collection of men named Smith who recruit the architect and his girl to spy upon the prince and the Church; meanwhile, the spies are being spied upon by the counter-intelligence of the Nazis and the Vatican; the plot is somewhat tenuous and the book is ultimately quite plodding. At the end comes the rather facile conclusion that nothing is as it seems, and people fighting on the opposing side may just as likely be on yours. The blurb calls it 'part love story, part espionage novel and part mystery'. It fails at all three.

Rolo Diez, though, is a wonderful find. In his Tequila Blue, we see his sympatico character, Carlito Hernandez, a cop who is honest by his lights, but sees nothing wrong in dealing in arms, running a protection racket, or maintaining two households (a wife and kids in one, a mistress and kids in another). He is that non-pareil, the Mexican macho man, capable of deep love (his kids adore him) and incredible selfishness (he'll sleep with any woman who gives him an erection - and he is quite catholic in this department). This is as thorough a social criticism as you can find of the deep corruption in Mexico: the police barely get paid and so have to fund their pursuit of serious crime by tolerating and abetting lesser crime. The entire structure of justice is rotten, of course, with everyone on the take; women recognise their relative powerlessness in this male-dominated hierarchy, and promote their own agendas with sexual cunning. On top of it all is the overbearing presence of the mighty neighbour to the North from where arrive protected individuals seeking release for their tawdriest and most brutal passions among the impoverished and desperate Mexicans. Carlito seeks his own version of justice for the indigent and the brutalised, and braves gang wars and politicos and large quantities of alcohol in his quest. This is a darkly humorous and deeply satirical novella. Don't miss it.

To round it all off, I will mention Nii Ayikwei Parkes's Tail of the Blue Bird. This is not translated fiction, although really it could be, as it has lengths of conversation in the pidgin of Ghana with little more than context to help the reader to decipher it. But it is a lovely tale of the clash between modernity and traditional values, and somewhat mystical in its acceptance that science and technology do not always have the answer when the age-old magics are at play in the world. So what happens in the book? Well, the girlfriend of a high-level politician finds a misshapen body in a hut in a little village she is visiting, and is so horrified by it that the politician demands a thorough investigation. Nobody can tell if the body is human or animal, much less if there is even a crime to investigate, but the policemen sent in are baffled by the villagers' lack of cooperation. A newly-minted forensic investigator, a genteel and polite Ghanaian man educated in England, is forcibly coopted by the chief of police (who, obviously, has his own agenda in pursuing the case). Once in the village, his innate courtesy admits him into the village's confidence: both the great hunter and the medicine-man take him under his wing. He soon recognises that there is hidden evil in the minds of men even in this bucolic setting, and the consequences of that evil are not readily explained by his rationality and science. An endearing book.

For the princely sum of £5, I requested several books via inter-library transfer, and I am somewhat taken aback to note that one of those requests has already failed. 'The book is not available in a format suitable for library use' said the helpful response from Camomile Street Library. Somewhat puzzled, I quizzed the librarian about it. It turns out that she could only get the book in electronic (hence unsuitable) format. 'The British Library, I would have thought, would stock a print copy,' she said, in a perplexed tone.

Well, whatever. As I await the rest of the crime novels, I am able to boast of this month's reading. It has been rather good. We can begin with Koji Suzuki's short stories, titled Dark Water. Widely considered to be Japan's equivalent of Stephen King, Suzuki is better known as the author of the Ring - cult-book-turned-cult-movie. In this book, he bases his tales of horror around the Tokyo-Yokohama bay. I should hasten to add that I wasn't horrified by any of the stories, although one or two had a couple of moments of causing me anxiety. The stories are supposedly recounted by a grandmother to a young girl, but little other than the omnipresence of water links them. And of course all the protagonists are somehow flawed, troubled people - if not abusive, then paranoid, or passive-aggressive. The story I liked the best is called 'Dream Cruise', in which an aggressive salesman and his irritating wife take his classmate, a somewhat laid-back and self-satisfied fellow, on a cruise, with a view to recruiting him to their pyramidal sales scheme. Those of you who read my experiences with Amway will note that I have little patience with these evangelists. So the horrors that await the salesman and his wife when they encounter a child's shoe in the sea and their boat snags on something are music to my ears... Suzuki's interested in the people's back-stories, and he expends pages elucidating this or that aspect of their characters. The plots then begin to thin a bit, and it appears as if - story after story - he loses patience, and attempts to wrap it all up. His attempts at a twist at the end are not entirely fortuitous. I can't tell if the prose is leaden because of the translation, or if it is a particular trait of the Japanese short story. At any rate, this is not a book to savour; on the other hand, reading the stories in rapid succession results in a melded confusion. If you have better luck with it, please do tell.

Arturo Perez-Reverte is back with the latest of his Captain Alatriste swashbucklers to be translated into English, The Man In The Yellow Doublet. This is superb stuff, twirling moustaches, withering scorn, flashing swords, love across social classes, all set in the declining Spain of the 17^th century. This is not literature of nuance, but it is exciting, punctuated by sparkling line and verse by the greats of the time: Quevedo, de Vega, Cervantes. The young narrator of the series, Iñigo Balboa, is growing up, as besotted as ever with the beautiful and treacherous Angelica de Alquezar, who has no qualms about loving him at the same time as plotting his and his foster-father Alatriste's demise. Alatriste is the lover of the famed actress Maria de Castro, but the King has his eye on her as well. When the monarch is felled during one tryst with the beauty, Alatriste is fingered as the jealous killer; it later turns out that it was actually the King's double who was murdered. Alatriste then has to investigate the conspiracy that has led him so close to the gallows, and this escapade involves swords and daggers, whispers in the night, and the deaths of old friends. The Spain of Philip IV is a cauldron of competing interests, and mercenaries like Alatriste are mere pawns in a greater game, but true to the genre, the pawns end up saving the day.

Håkan Nesser is this month's obligatory Scandinavian, and I am pleased to say that in his acerbic and sardonic detective Van Veeteren, we have a wonderful winner. As police procedurals go, The Mind's Eye is representative of the genre; what raises this above the usual is the meta-text provided by the author - knowing asides and darkly humorous commentary that enliven the pages. Often, the chapters start with pronouns, requiring some amount of concentration from the reader to decide exactly who is being talked about; unlike other reviewers who found this confusing, I thought it refreshing, serving to keep the story going as well as keeping me alert. Van Veeteren is the classic noir footpad with a troubled marriage and a jailbird son, and has the usual likes (jazz and classical music) one expects from such a detective. He investigates the case of a husband wakes up one day to find his memory gone and his beautiful wife slaughtered. A sparkling set piece in a court enumerates the facts of the case. The husband is consigned to a mental institution where his memory returns, and for no reason I can discern, he sends a message to the killer. Shortly thereafter he is killed as well. The police procedural then takes over and the investigation proceeds meticulously. It is fairly obvious who the murderer is, even if it's not clear for a while what triggered the murderous spree; it is also disappointing that Nesser needs that old trope of Scandinavian fiction, namely abusive parents, to give credence to the tale. Still, this is one of the better crime novels I've read, and I heartily recommend it.

Talking about Scandinavian fiction, and why a supposedly idyllic and peaceful land has been gutted by bloodthirsty explorations of its underbelly, this article from Salon tries to figure it all out.

A few years ago, I read the mathematics-tinged The Oxford Murders by the Argentinian writer Guillermo Martinez, and found that somewhat irritating in its insistence of mysticism around logic and set theory. The writer now comes up with an even more fantastic tale in The Book of Murder, in which, it appears, characters are killed by a mad author and nobody is able to establish that fact. The narrator is approached by a distraught Luciana, a secretary who had briefly worked with him a decade earlier, who accuses the far more famous novelist Kloster of systematically killing off her family in revenge for her own actions that (in Kloster's mind) resulted in his abandonment by his wife and in the death of his daughter. Luciana used to be a beauty but now she is deformed by her paranoia and anguish, and the narrator - a somewhat less successful author himself - finds it difficult to believe her. Still, some vestiges of loyalty to her lead him to accost Kloster who dismisses him brusquely. Inflamed, the narrator decides to put down Luciana's story in the form a novel and threatens Kloster with its publication unless he agrees to reveal his involvement. At this point, Martinez appears to lose the plot and introduces a peculiar agent who is supposed to have committed gross crimes in the town. Suddenly, the book we are reading and the book the narrator is writing become aspects of a single unifying theme; exactly what that theme is I am unable to determine, and just like so many books with interesting premises, this one also meanders into opaqueness and stultification. Read it if you must.

In the past six months of translated criminal roundups, the dominant writers have been Nordics or Italians or French. There are one or two Spaniards, too, in the mix, and Javier Cercas can be added to the lot. His The Speed of Light is not really a crime novel; instead, it is a rumination on the effects of war and war-crimes on a thoughtful intellectual. Its foundation is a horrific assault on women and children in a Vietnamese village by American special forces during the US campaign in Indo-China. The narrator is a Spaniard visiting as a research fellow at Urbana-Champaign, a young man who still has supreme confidence of his own literary ability, which is simultaneously undermined and energised by his encounter and subsequent friendship with a veteran of that same massacre (as he later finds out). Much of the book deals with literary criticism and the shadow of experience on writing; it also details in tawdry detail the fall from grace that inevitably follows success; the nature of friendship is examined in subtle detail. This is a densely written book with much superfluous detail and cascading clauses, and it careens from philosophy to conspiracy theory and back in staccato bursts. But the denouement once again disappoints - it is stereotyped and weak - involving deaths of loved ones as metaphor, and the ensuing search for redemption.

Emil is the much-loved hero of Erich Kästner's series of books for children set in the 1920 and 1930s, and in Emil and the Detectives (Red Fox Classics) we encounter the little fellow going to Berlin to meet his grandmother and cousin. En route, he falls asleep and awakes to find that one of his companions in the train has stolen his money. Naturally, he won't have any of this, but recognising that it was unlikely that any policeman would take his word against that of an adult (and recalling with embarrassment and fear that the police might indeed arrest him for painting a moustache on the statue of a famous man in his village), he decides to follow the thief himself. He then encounters an entire cohort of kids who offer to help him out, and with true Prussian sang-froid, run the thief down. Everything ends well. As far as sophistication goes, I dare say a five-year old might find this entertaining - there's far too much of the smug and upright here to interest any hot-blooded child older than that. Contrasted with the naughtiness and scrapes of William, Emil is a pale imitation. He insists that he will fight anyone who thinks he is a mummy's boy just because he is protective of his mother and far too responsible for his age, but this is too mild a protest to convince anyone. There are a couple of other jaunty boys who are superficially more appealing, and might have made far better heroes. Oh well. When I checked out the book, the librarian sighed 'I loved this one', and frankly I'm baffled why. If this is the sort of book that has been thrust upon generations of British boys by a feminised teaching community, I'm not surprised that they have been permanently turned off reading.

In desperation, I'm forced to return to authors I've read before, and few are better than Fred Vargas, archaeologist-historian-turned-crime-novelist-of-class. Several of her later books featuring the ethereal detective Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg have been translated into English, and recently, the very first one in the series was rendered into English as well. (There was a cri-de-coeur recently about this phenomenon of out-of-order release of translations, and I find it quite irritating that I am unable to follow the development of a character from start to finish just because publishers can't be bothered to publish chronologically. This is especially egregious when the full series is already available in the original language, and still they are translated at random.) The Chalk Circle Man introduces the provincial detective-turned-Parisian-commissioner who can sense evil in people and prefers to doodle instead of following up on clues and interrogating suspects. His evident success (summed up by one of his rivals as ''You sit around daydreaming, staring at the wall, or doodling on a bit of paper as if you had all the time and knowledge in the world, and then one day you swan in, cool as a cucumber, and say "Arrest the priest. He strangled the child to stop him talking."') has attracted various curious individuals, each more peculiar than the other, and all of them in some circumstantial way involved in the latest puzzle that is attracting his attention. All of Paris is agog by a street artist who goes about drawing perfect chalk circles on pavements in various arrondissements, enclosing some object or the other within them - a hat, a mouse, a lighter. Is this the latest break-out art? Adamsberg senses cruelty, however, and keeps alert to any developments, and is proved right when a murdered woman is found one day within one such circle. The investigation then splits into competing hypotheses - is the chalk-circle man responsible for the death? Or is someone following him around to piggy-back off those circles and implicate him? This is a detective novel with a surreal premise: unlike Poirot who uses strict logic, or Van Veeteren, who is a meticulous footpad, Adamsberg arrives at his conclusions mystically, and expects his deputy Danglard to fill in the gaps. Good fun, though.

Finally, if we have one Scandinavian, then we should have another, and Helene Tursten fills the gap with her Glass Devil, The (Inspector Irene Huss Investigation), as poor an example of the genre as we can imagine. This is a very poor effort, I'm saddened to say, especially because in Inspector Irene Huss is an interesting protagonist - a loving wife and mother and workaholic. A teacher is found brutally slain, and when the police go over to his parents' place to break the news, they find that the couple have been murdered as well. There are signs of Satanism (inverted pentagrams and all), and evidence of computer geekery - the hard-drives of the machines have been found completely wiped. It turns out that the surviving member of the family is a daughter (a computer geek) based in London, who has been so stunned by the deaths of her kin that she suffers a mental collapse. Huss is forced to travel to London to interrogate the woman, and there's an entirely pointless addition of a travelogue about the places she has time to visit and H&M shopping she is able to accomplish while she awaits the woman's pleasure. Even more egregious is the several pages describing a gruesome attack on Huss by drug-addled rapists that she is able to repel owing to her Olympic-level jiu-jitsu. What was the point of this? What are the chances that a chance visitor in London will suffer such an attack? Negligible, I'd have thought. The attack does nothing to advance the plot, adds little to Huss's character development, and serves no earthly purpose I could discern. But what really got my goat were the footnotes that dotted the book at various places. The publisher evidently is targeting an American audience, for whenever the text used metric measurements, a footnote would translate into imperial measures. Now consider - how many readers of translated fiction would be unaware of the metric system? It's just a puerile insult to one's intelligence. And, I'm sad to say, the book is no better, falling back on that old standby of Scandinavian child abuse. Evidently there are no other social problems worth addressing in that idyllic land.