In this second installment, crime novels from France, Germany, Thailand, USA (thrice), Italy (twice), and Britain (twice).
11. BOILEAU-NARCEJAC, Vertigo (The Living and the Dead, 1954, France)
The main character is also different from Hitchcock's vision, as Roger Flavières is, especially in the second part, a much more obsessed and cruel character than the rather laid-back James Stewart (who anyway doesn't fit this role, the only flaw of Hitchcock's film). Roger Flavières is even a dangerous, unhinged man (and increasingly a heavy drinker) and that determines the ending which is very different again from Hitchcock.
Other elements are the same: private detective Flavières is asked by an old friend to observe and stalk his wife, as he worries his wife is hiding a secret as she has rather strange ways recently. This turns out to be accurate, but Flavières falls hopelessly in love with the wife. In both book and film there are few sharp twists waiting that will pull the rug from under the reader/viewer.
The ending of the book is very powerful - even all the more devastating as it is different from the film. Vertigo is a stylish and dark thriller of obsession and weaknesses.
12. BOTTINI, Oliver: Zen and the Art of Murder (2004, Germany)
A
Japanese Zen monk wanders through the snowy woods and fields near
Freiburg in southern Germany, dressed in only sandals and a monk’s cowl.
The local population is worried at the sight of this stranger, so
Louise Boni, chief inspector with the Black Forest crime squad, gets the
assignment to trail him and see what he is doing. Louise has her own
demons to struggle with: divorced at forty-two, angry at her father for
past neglect, and above all, feeling guilty as she recently shot a
criminal to death, she seeks relief in alcohol and is glad with the new
task, for she dreads yet another dreary winter weekend alone. She
doesn’t know yet what she’ll get on her plate... This is an original
thriller - both the character of Louise Boni, the Buddhist element, and
above all the literary way of the writing. Only one minus point: the Zen
monk tramping on and on through the snow in the Black Forest is a
beautiful image, but convincing motivation is lacking. After all,
Japanese Zen monks belong to this modern world - when feeling danger,
the monk in the novel could call a taxi to take him to the airport and
fly back to Japan instead of starting to tramp in the snow.
13. BURDETT, John: Bangkok Tattoo (2003, Thailand)
London-born John Burdett is known for his crime novels set in Bangkok, centering on Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep and his Buddhist internal dialogues. Sonchai is the progeny of a retired Thai sex-worker and one of her “farang” (foreigner) clients, a long-gone Vietnam War G.I. That gives him an interesting intercultural perspective on Thailand and the West. In the police force he is something of an outsider as he doesn’t take bribes, but he also knows the moral hypocrisy of the West. The novels involve Thailand's sex industry and the red-light districts of Bangkok, but Burdett, who has a deep knowledge of Thai culture, doesn’t give in to Western exoticism. Sonchai’s mother Nong is a madame who operates a brothel as a front for her powerful investor, a police colonel who also happens to be Sonchai’s boss. Sonchai often reminds his readers that they are farangs, and thus outsiders, and that they need to be schooled in the ways of the East. With an element of satire, he juxtaposes the often conflicting Thai and Western norms and mores.
The crimes in Burdett’s cynical mystery novels are completely over the top and utterly bizarre. While in his first novel, Bangkok 8, we had the release of a container full of cobra snakes into a car where the driver is forcibly prevented from escaping, here, in this second novel, we have to face the theft of valuable tattoos (and their associated human skin) off the backs of murder victims. The book opens with one such victim, a CIA operative found disemboweled and mutilated. The prime suspect is a beautiful bar girl, Chanya, working in Sonchai’s mother’s bar, for whom Sonchai has tender feelings. But things turn out to be far more complicated than originally thought, and Sonchai must deal with Chanya's gradually revealed and unexpected secrets, CIA agents who have arrived to investigate the crime, a Thai army general who has a feud with his boss in the police force, yakuza gangsters, Japanese tattooists, Muslim fundamentalists and more. The dialogue is fast-paced, Burdett’s asides and observations are to the point and funny.
The crimes in Burdett’s cynical mystery novels are completely over the top and utterly bizarre. While in his first novel, Bangkok 8, we had the release of a container full of cobra snakes into a car where the driver is forcibly prevented from escaping, here, in this second novel, we have to face the theft of valuable tattoos (and their associated human skin) off the backs of murder victims. The book opens with one such victim, a CIA operative found disemboweled and mutilated. The prime suspect is a beautiful bar girl, Chanya, working in Sonchai’s mother’s bar, for whom Sonchai has tender feelings. But things turn out to be far more complicated than originally thought, and Sonchai must deal with Chanya's gradually revealed and unexpected secrets, CIA agents who have arrived to investigate the crime, a Thai army general who has a feud with his boss in the police force, yakuza gangsters, Japanese tattooists, Muslim fundamentalists and more. The dialogue is fast-paced, Burdett’s asides and observations are to the point and funny.
14. CAIN, James M.: The Cocktail Waitress (posthumous, edited by Charles Ardai, 2012, USA)
Of course Cain's hard-boiled classics are The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, two books in which strong women, femmes fatales, entice their men to crime. The Cocktail Waitress, a novel found in pieces among his papers when Cain died in 1977, was put together by publisher Charles Ardai, who himself writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Richard Aleas. The novel is not perfect - it sags in the middle - but at least the stitches are not visible. Cain seems to have wrestled with the story in his final years.
Following her husband's death in a suspicious car accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet and to have a chance of regaining custody of her young son. At the job, in which she is very successful, she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a wealthy older man who rewards her for her attentions with a $50,000 tip and an unconventional offer of marriage.
In her account, Joan presents herself as the object of the intense desire of these two men, but she is hardly a pure innocent. She describes what happens simply and neutrally, but even so it is hard not to see her as a manipulator. The reader feels his doubts slowly growing - are we after all faced here with another one of Cain's femmes fatales?
Following her husband's death in a suspicious car accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet and to have a chance of regaining custody of her young son. At the job, in which she is very successful, she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a wealthy older man who rewards her for her attentions with a $50,000 tip and an unconventional offer of marriage.
In her account, Joan presents herself as the object of the intense desire of these two men, but she is hardly a pure innocent. She describes what happens simply and neutrally, but even so it is hard not to see her as a manipulator. The reader feels his doubts slowly growing - are we after all faced here with another one of Cain's femmes fatales?
15. CAMILLERI, Andrea: The Shape of Water (1994, Italy)
Andrea
Camilleri (1925-2019) has created one of the most popular crime series
in Europe with his Inspector Montalbano series. The books have a
mischievous sense of humor and a lovable hero in the compassionate, but
also cynical person of Montalbano. Camilleri, who studied stage and film
direction and worked as a director and screenwriter as well as TV
producer for RAI, started writing this series when he was almost 70
years of age!
Salvo Montalbano is a detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town, based on Camilleri’s home town of Porto Empedocle, on Sicily’s south-west coast. The novels contain a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases. The name Montalbano was selected by Camilleri as homage to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote a series of crime novels about a fictional private detective called Pepe Carvalho. Like Carvalho, Montalbano is a great gourmet, and we even get some interesting recipes. These are light and bubbly books, full of Italian sunshine, although the criminals are deadly and cruel and the police officers working for Montalbano not very efficient. There is little character development, throughout the series Montalbano remains the same bon vivant, who never misses a good lunch, or the delicacies prepared by his housekeeper. So you could in principle pick any novel, although “The Potter’s Field” excelled by winning the 2012 Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger. Generally speaking, I prefer the earlier novels when Camilleri's inspiration was still fresh, so the first novel, “The Shape of Water,” also forms a good start. These are books that will always put you in a good mood.
16. CAROFIGLIO, Gianrico: A Fine Line (2014, Italy)
Gianrico
Carofiglio, novelist and former anti-Mafia judge, has created the
character of defense lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who works and lives in the
south-Italian city of Bari, on the Adriatic coast. “A Fine Line” is the
fifth in the series. As is the case with other novels in this series of
legal thrillers, we get an interesting law case – a detailed
presentation of the workings of the Italian justice and legal systems,
with philosophical musings about the implications - , some scenes from
the private life of the divorced and rather lonely Guerrieri, plus some
thoughts on life in general and the way time passes all too quickly.
In this volume, Guerrieri is asked to help a judge, Larocca, who thinks he is under investigation for taking a bribe to affect the outcome of a case. He wants Guerrieri to look into it, and take the appropriate actions. Guerrieri requests a very good PI, Annapaola, a friend for whom he harbors increasingly tender feelings, to find official and unofficial information about the case. This helps him to argue convincingly for Larocca’s innocence, but then he suddenly notices certain things which might mean that Larocca is not so innocent after all...
In this volume, Guerrieri is asked to help a judge, Larocca, who thinks he is under investigation for taking a bribe to affect the outcome of a case. He wants Guerrieri to look into it, and take the appropriate actions. Guerrieri requests a very good PI, Annapaola, a friend for whom he harbors increasingly tender feelings, to find official and unofficial information about the case. This helps him to argue convincingly for Larocca’s innocence, but then he suddenly notices certain things which might mean that Larocca is not so innocent after all...
17. CHASE, James Hadley: No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939, Britain)
A
British novel influenced by the work of James Cain - although he had
never visited America, Chase reportedly wrote the book as a bet to pen a
story about American gangsters that would out-do “The Postman Always
Rings Twice” in terms of obscenity and daring. So Chase pulls out all
the plugs and blasts away in mysoginysm, sexism, sado-eroticism,
violence and what have you. This is obviously not a politically correct
novel, and already in its own time caused a lot of controversy, although
it seems to have been the most popular novel among British soldiers
during WWII. It is pure pulp that today can only be read with an ironic
stance. All the women in the book are sexy with interesting curves and
of course they swoon immediately when they see the great macho guys.
Wealthy socialite Miss Blandings has been kidnapped for ransom (and for her pearl necklace) by the Riley gang, but a sadistic rival mob led by Ma Grisson and her idiotic son Slim, snuff out the inept criminals and take over the kidnap. Unfortunately, the sex-starved Slim is obsessed with Miss Blandings, although he only dares torture her when she is made unconscious by narcotics. When the police make no headway, Mr Blandings, who has paid the ransom without getting back his daughter, asks private dick Dave Fenner to look into the kidnap. In 1999, the novel was picked in Le Monde’s “100 Books of the Century.” A tough book, perhaps not for everyone.
18. CHAZE, Elliott: Black Wings Has My Angel (1953, USA)
A story of doomed love on the run, somewhat a la Bonny and Clyde. The book revolves around Tim Sunblade, an escaped convict, and Virginia, a high class escort on the run from the law. Tim happens to have an infallible plan for the ultimate heist, but he needs a partner to pull it off. When he stumbles into bad girl Virginia whom he has hired for the night, he is so impressed by her intelligence and action-readiness (plus greed) that he asks her to become his partner for the heist. What he doesn’t suspect is that this femme fatale might just prove to be more than his match.
It is bleak fun to watch everything go horribly wrong after the armored car heist – the reader wonders when Jim will finally realize that Virginia can’t be trusted at all. What follows after the crime is a road trip to Colorado colored by the love and hate relationship (plus some domestic abuse) of the two, who are at the same time in a disturbing way attracted to each other. Will they finally destroy each other? This is a forgotten noir classic from the 1950s that was brought into the limelight via a recent reprint by New York Review Books.
It is bleak fun to watch everything go horribly wrong after the armored car heist – the reader wonders when Jim will finally realize that Virginia can’t be trusted at all. What follows after the crime is a road trip to Colorado colored by the love and hate relationship (plus some domestic abuse) of the two, who are at the same time in a disturbing way attracted to each other. Will they finally destroy each other? This is a forgotten noir classic from the 1950s that was brought into the limelight via a recent reprint by New York Review Books.
19. CONNELLY, Michael: The Black Echo (1992, USA)
I bought this novel during a business trip to Los Angeles, now about ten years ago, and read it on the plane back home. How true, I thought, when I read Connelly’s soundbite about LA: “Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, and that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.” LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is a hard-drinking maverick who quarrels with his bosses and colleagues, a loner and not a team player, in short, the type of detective now so common as to be utterly boring. But The Black Echo was first written in 1992, so it must be an early example of the type. Another historical feature is the Vietnam background of the protagonist – Harry Bosch was a “tunnel rat” who had to enter the underground tunneling systems dug by the Vietcong and try to blow up America’s enemies.
Now, in a drainpipe at Mulholland Dam, the body of fellow Vietnam “tunnel rat” Billy Meadows is discovered with whom he had fought side by side. Harry is determined to find the perpetrator responsible and bring justice to his one time comrade in arms. The plot then spreads out into a dirty money scam from Saigon laundered as precious stones and kept in a bank vault in downtown LA, and that is a weaker part of the book. The strength of the story is the superb characterization of the main players. “I believe that shit happens. I believe that the best you can do in this job is come out even.” Connelly wrote a whole score of novels about Harry Bosch, and this one, the first, is despite its flaws one of the best.
20. CRISPIN, Edmund: The Moving Toyshop (1946, Britain)
Edmund Crispin (Bruce Montgomery) is known for his Gervase Fen novels, of which nine volumes appeared between 1944 and 1953, starting with The Case of The Gilded Fly. The stories feature eccentric Oxford don Gervase Fen, who is a Professor of English at the university and a fellow of St Christopher's College, a fictional institution that Crispin locates next to St John's College. The whodunit novels have complex plots and a decidedly surreal streak. They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style. The novels contain frequent references to English literature.
Poet Richard Cadogan takes a sudden holiday to Oxford, where he arrives in the middle of the night due a problem with the train connection. Walking through quiet, nightly high street, he stumbles across a shop with its awning still up. Closer inspection reveals it to be a toyshop, and on finding the door unlocked, curiosity leads Cadogan inside - especially as he is looking for a place to sleep. He climbs a flight of stairs to a flat where he finds the murdered body of an elderly woman, before being knocked unconscious. The next morning he wakes up in a supply closet, but after escaping and bringing back the police, the toyshop is no longer there, replaced, it seems, with a grocer's. Bewildered, Cadogan turns to an old friend at Oxford University, eccentric professor and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen, to help him solve the mystery of the "moving toyshop."
Crispin writes beautiful English, which alone is a pleasure to read. The silly nonsense perhaps goes on a bit too long, but at the end the suspense picks up. The book ends with an out-of-control merry-go-round sequence which was "stolen" lock, stock and barrel by Alfred Hitchcock for the finale of Strangers on a Train - all the major elements of the scene – the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, and the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to stop it – are present in Crispin's novel, though he received no screen credit for it. It is a thrilling finale to a pleasant novel.
Crispin writes beautiful English, which alone is a pleasure to read. The silly nonsense perhaps goes on a bit too long, but at the end the suspense picks up. The book ends with an out-of-control merry-go-round sequence which was "stolen" lock, stock and barrel by Alfred Hitchcock for the finale of Strangers on a Train - all the major elements of the scene – the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, and the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to stop it – are present in Crispin's novel, though he received no screen credit for it. It is a thrilling finale to a pleasant novel.
Best Crime Novels 7
Best Crime Novels 8
Best Crime Novels 9
Best Crime Novels 10