Yet another busy month with a strong variety of sub-genres on display in our criminal shop window: gritty American regionalist noir, historical gothic thrillers, a Japanese homage to Raymond Chandler, a couple of British debuts from well-known authors with a political background, domestic and courtroom dramas, the return of a classic Scottish character, the hustle and bustle of petty crimes in New York’s Harlem, a compelling tale of psychological paranoia stretched to the limit and another outing for Anthony Horowitz as a character in his own book. Mostly good stuff with some reservations though…
BOOK OF THE MONTH David Heska Wanbli Weiden/WINTER COUNTS (Simon & Schuster)
David Weiden’s debut novel has already been garlanded by a multitude of awards Stateside and quite deservedly so as he breathes new life into the hardboiled tale in a mood often reminiscent of James Crumley in all its sardonic humour but also grittiness. He is not the first author to locate his thriller on an Indian Reservation, but his background as a Sicangu Lakota First Nation citizen certainly adds authenticity and evokes a strong sense of compassion for the downtrodden denizens of American society. Virgil Wounded Horse functions as a sometimes reluctant enforcer for ills the tribal council or local police are unconcerned by on the neglected territories of South Dakota that surround the Rosebud Reservation. Disillusioned Virgil is bringing up his orphaned nephew Nathan, and when the teenager gets badly implicated in drugs running, he makes it his job to investigate who are the parties responsible for bringing dangerous substances onto the Reservation. Assisted by Marie Short Bear, an ex-girlfriend who, unlike him, still has faith in Indigenous traditions, the trail will lead him to Denver and back, turning his life upside down in the process, while casting a harsh light on the conditions history and the white world have imposed on his brethren. The pace never falters and Virgil emerges as a full-blown character littered with contradictions, whose determination and innate sense of confrontation brings both rewards and a mass of problems, and one who will surely become the subject of a great series, but Weiden’s greatest gift is how he opens our eyes to the plight of America’s disinherited and combines a powerful message with a rip-roaring read.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Colson Whitehead/HARLEM SHUFFLE (Fleet)
Whitehead has twice in a row won the Pulitzer Prize, most notably for his subversive retelling of black slaves and the creation of the Underground Railroad in his eponymous novel. This time around he dives deep into a picaresque thriller territory best pictured hitherto by the likes of Chester Himes and brings a teeming Harlem in the 1960s to colourful life in a tale of grifters, petty crooks, heists and shakedowns bursting with colour and social aspiration. Ray Carney is on the surface a respectable furniture salesman whose shop by125th St in New York caters to the growing crowds of the would-be Black bourgeoisie. But, to make ends meet, he has also become a fence. When his roustabout cousin Freddie implicates him in a jewellery robbery at the infamous Hotel Theresa, he soon finds out he has taken on more than he can handle, as the bodies of some of his low life accomplices in the heist begin popping up out of the blue. Ray strives for a better life, as does his wife Elizabeth who is pregnant with their second child, and his attempts to balance crime and respectability are soon in peril of being badly torpedoed as both police and local gangs are on his case and the tightrope he is walking becomes ever more perilous. Over three close periods in time, the book follows Ray’s rise and the increasingly dishonest part of his working life, although the reader will in passing learn more than they ever thought they could know about furniture retail and its subtleties! Ray doesn’t seem himself as crook, just as slightly bent and makes for an endearing character to root for in this morality play with a difference.
Alan Johnson/THE LATE TRAIN TO GIPSY HILL (Wildfire)
This debut novel by the British Labour politician and ex-Home Secretary proves amiable but disposable, proof if need be that a decent memoirist is not always necessarily a born novelist. Gary Nelson has a dull job in the City of London and commutes daily from south of the river; his life is as uneventful as his job and when his attention is drawn to a regular, beautiful-looking female fellow passenger on his train commute his life quickly turns topsy-turvy well beyond his becoming a rather mild stalker. Her name turns out to be Arina and she appears to be Russian; when on one journey she beckons him, to his utter surprise, to sit beside her, and asks for his help, the scene is set for a series of chases, misunderstandings and often perilous escapes from a group of shadowy characters who have an interest in her. He ends up giving her shelter, thus causing one of his housemates to be kidnapped and the couple, whose relationship does however feel all too improbable, are on the run from a sinister Russians, whether mafia or KGB or a combination of both. The plot moves along fast but, paradoxically for an author who in his ministerial job was once responsible for oversight of the police force, never feels at all realistic with gangs of foreign thugs running around the streets of London at will, and authorities almost as much at sea as the hapless Gary. There are connections to the case of the Salisbury poisonings and Johnson wraps the whole caper up with drippy Gary even less of a hero, when it turns out he has been led by the nose and used throughout the adventure, which turns out (not too much of a plot spoiler as she clearly appears to be the leading character throughout) with the clever if two-faced Arina pulling all the strings. A pleasant read but the writing is decidedly flat-footed, like its ostensible main protagonist.
Robert Peston/THE WHISTLEBLOWER (Zaffre)
Unlike Johnson whose style remains steadily pedestrian, the other debut novelist to emerge this month from the political ranks is actually remarkably vivid in his descriptions of London in the 1990s, evoking the time and many of the places within the corridors of power with flinching accuracy – I, for one, recognised every detail of the Groucho Club in its heyday, let alone Central London streets where I used to work daily. This comes as no surprise as star political journalist Robert Peston has lived by the pen all his life, unlike someone like Johnson who was restricted to political speeches and ministerial despatches. But what does come as a surprise in this thriller is the closely autobiographical nature of the principal character, Gil Peck, which sheds light into Peston’s ebullient public persona but also provides gaudy insights into his own private life, with a protagonist whose impulses and many defects are anything but hidden and at times far from appealing, even using PTSD as an excuse. Set against the background of an imminent general election with recognisable political personalities thinly-disguised and wickedly sketched, the novel follows Peck’s personal investigation into the accidental death of his own sister in a traffic incident which might not have been as accidental as it first appeared. The fact that she was a high-flying civil servant and was connected to a variety of mandarins and ambitious politicos soon uncovers a veritable nest of vipers, involving cover-ups, the influence of newspaper barons on the establishment and corruption in the heart of Westminster. Before becoming ITV’s political editor, Peston worked for the Financial Times and succeeds in bringing an abstruse world dangerously alive. Who would have thought you would end up being gripped by a thriller about pension fund credits? Wicked fun.
Virginia Feito/MRS MARCH (Fourth Estate)
The first name of the eponymous title character in this fascinating debut novel by a Spanish born author is only revealed in the book’s final line, crowning a slow-burning psychological thriller with many a subtle and rewarding difference from the customary fare normally on offer. She is a well-to-do New York socialite, married to successful but older novelist George, whose life begins to literally fall apart when she somehow gets the impression following a routine visit to her local patisserie that his latest novel, about a coarse and pitiable French prostitute, is possibly based on her and gradually falls into an accelerating spiral of psychosis after she is also led to suspect that her husband might be involved in the savage murder of a young woman in a small town outside of the city which he occasionally visits for hunting trips with his editor. A spoilt, repressed creature of routine and decorum whose relationship with her own small son is detached to the point of neglect, she is soon wary of all her social acquaintances, shop assistants, passers-by and under the impression they all know more than she does as her paranoid tendencies plunge into sheer overdrive. Once the seed is planted however, almost everything Mrs Marsh sees and hears just serves to confirm her fears, and pronounced lack of self-esteem, digging up well-concealed secrets from her own past and the story graduates into a fascinating form of horror novel of the ordinary, which will inevitably culminate into a murderous and explosive finale. Rather unique and compelling.
Kia Abdullah/NEXT OF KIN (HQ)
The welcome flowering of first class mystery books by British writers of ethnic descent is vigorously confirmed by London-based Kia Abdullah’s third novel, following on from the well-received TAKE IT BACK ad TRUTH BE TOLD. Talented architect Leila Syed, distracted by a work emergency, has left her toddler nephew Max locked inside her car instead of driving him to his nursery, this on a particularly hot day. Tragically, the child dies and Leila is charged with negligent manslaughter. The trial that ensues uncovers a viper’s nest of family tensions and flawed relationships and the courtroom drama that develops grips in its sheer intensity and emotional charge, with Leila being confronted by her younger sister Yasmin and husband Andrew. As a legal thriller, this is one which is more concerned by the human factor than page-turning twists and misdirection and the novel delivers a proper punch to the gut in the way it mercilessly X-rays its parade of increasingly flawed characters and simmering rivalries past and betrayals slowly being peeled away one page at a time. Dramatic, complex and layered, featuring a delicate balance between good and bad ‘guys’ which is drawn with great delicacy. A keeper.
Anthony Horowitz/A LINE TO KILL (Century)
The third instalment in the adventures of the sleuthing duo of Hawthorne and Horowitz proves a gentle, traditional lightweight read but left me hungering for more. The formula, previously mischievously honed in THE WORD IS MURDER and THE SENTENCE IS DEATH pairs the author himself, as a sometimes hapless but self-deprecating Watson-like adjunct to the opaque ex-cop Daniel Hawthorne, and trades on familiar tropes, with mismatched protagonists, misunderstandings and red herrings galore alongside a great affection for the genre. However, this instalment however pleasurable it proves, also mostly misses out on some of the gentle digs about he writing and publishing life the previous volumes featured and which proved so entertaining, The mismatched duo are invited to a small literary festival on the Channel island of Alderney to promote a book Horowitz had written about one of their earlier cases, only to find themselves stranded with assorted author misfits (a celebrity cook, a French punk poet, a blind psychic and a children’s book writer) and unable to leave following the murder of one of the wealthy organisers, with not only each and everyone of the guests but also a fair assortment of the locals under strong suspicion causing the steadfast but taciturn Hawthorne to chip away at alibis and motives as well as false identities. Possibly a rare instance of a locked island mystery, this ambles along in classic style, with misdirections abounding and a satisfactory conclusion, but maybe our uneasy duo have taken on a case too many and now lack the original freshness and verve of their personal dynamic.
Rhiannon Ward/THE SHADOWING (Trapeze)
The second semi-pseudonymous gothic thriller by crime writer Sarah Ward comes in the wake of her genre debut THE QUICKENING and proves equally gripping and atmospheric. Set in Nottinghamshire in the 1830s, it follows the travails of pious Hester, from a wealthy Quaker family based in Bristol, whose elder sister Mercy had scandalously and clandestinely eloped with her lover and later died at Southwell Workhouse where she had ended up. Her mother tasks the much troubled Hester, who suffers from regular dream states where she thinks she is communing with the dead, with finding out where her sister’s body is buried so that the proper rites can finally be administered. She uncovers the fact that Mercy was pregnant and died from cholera, but also intuitively connects her sad fate to a local old wive’s tale of a Pale Lady roaming the nearby countryside and stealing babies. Meanwhile, the secretive workhouse denizens appear to be doing everything to impede her enquiries. Balancing dark supernatural overtones alongside a fascinating recreation of a desolate historical period and what is in essence a mystery quest, the novel proves strongly atmospheric and gripping from beginning to end. Hester proves resilient and hardy, mutating in the process from a withdrawn and gritty character in search of not just the truth to finding her true purpose in life in the process, beyond the straightjacket of religion.
William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin/THE DARK REMAINS (Canongate)
Ian Rankin has never made a secret of his admiration for the Laidlaw novels of William McIlvanney and how the Glasgow cop acted as an influence on the early stages of the creation of Edinburgh’s Inspector Rebus. He was therefore the first port of call when McIlvanney’s family uncovered substantial notes for a novel acting as a prequel to the trilogy, with insights into Laidlaw’s earlier life. It must be said that Rankin does a great job in resurrecting a classic character, an educated loner whose obsession with finding out the truth upsets both the police force’s status quo and his home life, which he neglects abominably in his devotion to the task. Rankin also catches the sometimes sardonic and cultural humour in Laidlaw’s dialogue and interactions, so why is it that the final result is adequate but no great revelation? Maybe certain characters belong to their time and gain little in being dug up? The plot, presumably McIlvanney’s, is serviceable and fast-paced, with the body of Glasgow mob lawyer Bobby Carter found outside a night club sited on the territory of a rival gang, thus precipitating a possible gang war between the three parties that dominate the city’s criminal underworld, with each of its bosses suspicious of each other and their cohorts quick on the trigger. Still a lowly DC, Laidlaw navigates the perilous currents with a sardonic form of indifference as revelations are uncovered and least likely suspects soon floating to the surface alongside a raft of extra corpses. A good serviceable read that somehow still leaves you hungry for more.
Toshihiko Yahagi/THE WRONG GOODBYE (Maclehose Press)
Lone wolf homicide cop Eiji Futamaru pursues a murky case near the Yokosuka US Air Base on Tokyo Bay, when the frozen corpse of a Vietnamese immigrant barman is discovered in the nearby docklands. He has been temporarily sidelined to working in Police Archives for his lack of cooperation with colleagues, which allows him fuller opportunity to solve crimes others are neglecting. This is hardboiled noir in the explicit tradition of Raymond Chandler but Futamaru, for whom this is the first appearance in English translation, is too much of a Marlowe avatar: hard-drinking, often going rogue, attracting femmes fatales like a magnet and somehow this Japanese transplant never quite convinces as a full-blown character in his own right. Add an ambiguous friendship/relationship with shady Vietnam vet pilot Billy Lou Bonney, flashbacks to the war with the Vietcong, triad involvement, black market intrigues, boat people, crooked land development initiatives, a Yakuza novel writer with a troubled past, and the links between US influence and the Japanese underworld all combine to make this a treacherous investigation for Futamaru. But while Philip Marlowe’s sometimes abstruse and sprawling cases always held a sense of poetry beyond their darkness, the settings here feel contrived and I was never totally convinced. An exercise in style which doesn’t quite come off, as if the mean streets ethos and Japanese culture and traditions made for uncomfortable bedmates, which a writer like Harumi Murakami, albeit strictly speaking outside of the crime genre, has spectacularly proven is not necessarily the case. A miss.
