In this third installment, crime novels from the USA (thrice), France (twice), Italy (twice), Switzerland, Japan, and Malaysia.
21. CRUMLEY, James: The Last Good Kiss (1978, USA)
This novel starts with one of the best first sentences in the history of the crime novel: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” The amount of imbibing of whisky, beer and other liquids that takes place in Crumley's world is shocking - I believe the protagonists are more or less constantly drinking - even the dog is an alcoholic. The PI who tells the story in Chandler-style is called C.W. Shugrue and he has been hired by the ex-wife of an aging, famous author who is a sort of Hemingway-type, to find her serial drinking husband who is on a bar-hopping spree through the Midwest. In the ramshackle joint where Shugrue finally catches up with Trahearne a brawl ensues and the massive writer is shot in the rear. They however soon become fast friends thanks to their common love of spiritual liquids. In the meantime, the owner of the bar, Rosie, offers Shugrue $87 to find her daughter, who ran away ten years ago. So both men start hunting down the missing woman...
James Crumley was a “writer’s writer,” who was too highbrow in his chosen genre to sell many books. But all his novels turned out as beautifully written masterpieces, which changed the perception of what a crime novel could be. The Last Good Kiss is one of the most satisfying private eye novels ever written.
22. DARD, Frédéric: The Gravedigger’s Bread (1956, France)
Things are not going well for Blaise Delange. Out of work and out of money, he's stuck in a small shithole town in the French countryside, far from Paris. What keeps him here is a mysterious blonde woman. As he watches her with fascination, he notices that she has lost her wallet. He politely brings it to her house. She turns out to be Germaine Castain, the wife of the local mortician Achille. Impressed by his sincerity, the gravedigger gives him a job as his assistant. Delange has no interest or experience in the gravedigger's work, but he decides to take the job because of his financial difficulties and his growing interest in the beautiful wife who is much younger than her husband. He develops into a ruthless coffin salesman and wins the trust of his employer with his successes. But as everyone knows, three's a crowd. He secretly longs to be alone with the beautiful Germaine and what follows is a story of jealousy and passion, culminating in a fatal ending. Why should that annoying husband have to live forever? Coincidentally, Germaine also wants to get rid of him....
This book is a fantastic noir study of the psychology of the criminal, as in the romans durs by Simenon. The beauty of it is that the fear of being discovered eventually leads the murderer to do something unnecessary that actually leads to his discovery... Beware of blonde widows.... A quick and satisfying read that ends in a shocking downward spiral.
23. DE ANGELIS, Augusto: The Murdered Banker (1935, Italy)
De Angelis was the Father of the Italian detective novel. From 1935 until his untimely death at the hands of Fascist thugs in 1944, he wrote some 20 books about Milan Inspector of Police De Vincenzi. “The Murdered Banker” is the first and as it follows the style of the Golden Age detective novels from Britain, it is fitting that it starts with an impenetrable London-type fog. For the rest, the book is happily Italian: De Vincenzi works by intuition rather than ratiocination (like that other great Latin police inspector Maigret), he likes to secretly observe the suspects to see their reactions, and he is a lover of literature and a sensitive human being. What I also liked is that the murdered victims in his novels are not regarded lightly as mere chess pieces as Agatha Christie did, but that the discovery of dead bodies is met by real shock. That being said, the solution of this first story transgresses against the rules of the classic detective, and on the whole, the plot is a bit basic, as are the characters, while the style can now and then be somewhat melodramatic. So one reads this little mystery for the old fashioned Italian atmosphere - it is a worthwhile rediscovery. Pushkin Press has published three more De Vincenzi novels by De Angelis, about whom (by the way) surprisingly little information is available online.
24. DJIAN, Philippe: Elle (2012, France)
Elle (titled "Oh..." in French) is narrated in a bitingly sarcastic and detached tone by its protagonist, Michèle. A few weeks before Christmas, she comes to on the floor of her living room: she has been brutally raped by a masked intruder. What surprises, are Michèle’s actions afterwards. She doesn’t call the police. Instead she picks herself up, takes a bath and orders sushi for her son and his pregnant girlfriend. She remembers almost nothing of her attacker, but she feels his presence and this uncanny feeling sets off a whirlwind of events and memories. She begins to fear losing her grip on a life that is already far too complicated, due to a demanding job, an ex-husband with a new girlfriend, a jealous lover, and a son trapped in a relationship with his girlfriend who is pregnant by another man... but Michèle is hardened by the effects of her father's violent past. She is independent and unsentimental. She refuses to be reduced to a victim. When her rapist starts stalking her with emails, she takes the necessary measures to protect herself until she discovers his identity.... but note that this book, thanks to the enigma which is Michèle, is much darker than just a revenge tale.
A great psychological thriller, about a strong woman, powerfully portrayed by Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven's beautiful award-winning film. This dark tale, which in places is perhaps a bit too thinly narrated, is a quick and absorbing read.
25. DURRENMATT, Friedrich: The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel (1958, Switzerland)
The mystery to end all mysteries. This short read is set in small-town Switzerland.
Mathieu is a very talented police officer. A few days before his transfer to become an adviser of the police in Jordan (a sweet retirement job), he learns that a young girl has been found dead in a forest. Mathieu makes a solemn promise to the girl's mother to find the murderer. Very quickly, the man who found the body emerges as the ideal culprit. After long hours of interrogation, he finally confesses and hangs himself in his cell. The case seems closed. However, Mathieu is convinced that the culprit is someone else. He cancels his transfer to Jordan and embarks on a private investigation to find the murderer. He lays a trap for the real killer, setting up at a gas station in the area where he suspects the killer came from, using another young girl as bait. But as the years go by, and no new murders happen, the continuing investigation ruins his life, he becomes an alcoholic, and almost goes crazy... The ending is ironical: after many years a man is caught who confesses to the murder, but the arrest was completely by chance and for other reasons - nobody was looking for this man as the murderer. Durrenmatt in this way emphasizes the large role played by chance in police work, and the fact that detective novels are often unrealistic and too neat. Beautifully filmed in 2001 by Sean Penn with Jack Nicholson.
26. ECO, Umberto: The Name of the Rose (1980, Italy)
A typical postmodern novel: a pastiche of a detective novel and a mixture of high and low culture, this is also a historical novel written from a great familiarity with the Middle Ages, and a philosophical novel in which the plot mirrors the theological discussions of the age, such as the millenarian heresy. Eco provides more than only an imitation of the detective novel style: we also have a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes in the “hero,” William of Baskerville. Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his Benedictine novice and scribe Adso of Melk (his young Watson, so to speak – likewise, Adso serves as the narrator) travel to a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy to attend a theological dispute. As they arrive, the monastery is disturbed by a suicide (or murder?) and in the next days, more monks mysteriously die. William is asked by the abbot of the monastery to investigate the deaths. His exploration leads him to the labyrinthine library of the monastery where the clue to the mystery seems to be hidden. For a detailed review see
The Name of the Rose at this blog.
27. Edogawa Ranpo: The Beast in the Shadows (1928, Japan)
Combines classic detective elements with the erotic and grotesque. It also contains the doppelganger motif we so often find in Ranpo's fiction. The narrator is a detective novelist who is asked for help by an alluring young woman named Shizuko. She claims she is receiving threatening letters from a jilted lover who also is a detective novelist (a rival of the narrator) who apparently writes Ero-Guro mysteries under the pen name Oe Shundei. The letters contain many intimate details, as if Shundei is even peeping into her bedroom from above the ceiling and observing her intimate relations with her husband, a rich businessman. However, the narrator is led to believe that Shizuko's husband is the culprit, and that he is impersonating Shundei who in fact does not exist. A riding crop the narrator spots in the couple’s bedroom suggests a sadomasochistic relationship. In the meantime, the narrator and Shizuko slip into a secret romance. Then the husband is found murdered, his body drifting in the River Sumida which flows behind the house. Now the narrator starts thinking that perhaps Shizuko is the culprit - she may have used the story about Shundei as a ruse to be able to murder her husband. But when Shizuko commits suicide because of the accusations leveled at her, the narrator is shocked... was his suspicion of Shizuko premature? Does a man called Shundei exist or is he purely fictional? Where lies the truth? Although there is a lot of ratiocination in this story, it ultimately leads nowhere, as if Ranpo wants to say that in a world of doppelgangers and mirrors the truth is elusive. For more on Ranpo, see
The "Ero-Guro" Mysteries of Edogawa Ranpo at this blog.
28. FEARING, Kenneth: The Big Clock (1946, USA)
Of course there is a femme fatale: “She was tall, ice-blonde, and splendid. The eye saw nothing but innocence, to the instincts she was undiluted sex, the brain said here was a perfect hell.” George Stroud works for a New York magazine publisher reminiscent of Time-Life. When he spends a night in town due to the absence of his wife, he dates Pauline Delos, the girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. One night, Stroud leaves Pauline on the street corner near her apartment, just as Janoth returns from a trip and enters that building. The next day, Pauline is found murdered. Janoth knows that someone saw him enter Pauline's apartment on the night of her murder, but doesn't know who it was. To find him, Janoth asks his team to find the witness, and Stroud is put in charge of the investigation... When all of the evidence seems to point towards George himself, he starts trying to block the investigation.
This book has been written in a somewhat too literary style, a sort of jocular modernism (one "joke": the protagonist is called George, his wife Georgette and their daughter Georgia...). Another modernist future is that several chapters are not narrated by Stroud (as are the first chapters) but by other characters, giving the reader multiple points of view - except that it is a bit confusing.
Interesting, on the other hand, is the setting in the publishing world. This story is about big business and how its workers are subjugated to the "big clock" (while we all are also subjugated to the "big clock of time"). In all this is a classic noir novel, cleverly plotted, tight and concise.
29. FLINT, Shamini: Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder (2009, Malaysia)
There are many detectives based in non-Western countries, as the Thai settings by John Burdett, but mysteries by native authors are relatively rare (except in the case of Japan). So I was happy to find the novels by Shamini Flint, born in Malaysia, and living in Singapore, all the more so as she writes with a great understanding of the various SE Asian cultures.
Inspector Singh is a Singaporean murder investigator with a Sikh background, who is seriously overweight. On top of that, he does not fit into the Singapore police force culture, so his superiors prefer to send him on investigations elsewhere. In this first volume of the series he is sent to Kuala Lumpur where Chelsea Liew, a famous Singaporean model, is on death row for the murder of her wealthy ex-husband. She swears she is innocent, but it is a fact that she had the best motivation to pull the trigger: her ex was taking the children away from her. Inspector Singh must pull out all the stops to crack this crime in the complex multicultural and multi-religious country that Malaysia is. The author also brings on the social and political problem of illegal logging in Borneo which destroys the rain forest and often envelops Kuala Lumpur (and Singapore) in a smokey haze because of the burning jungle. Although the story is a bit conventional, I enjoyed the intercultural vistas.
30. FOSSUM, Karin: Don’t Look Back (Norway, 1996)
The
novel begins with a trademark “Fossum diversion” that serves as an
omen. What looks like a child abduction is in fact something innocent,
but it sets the tone for a real missing person / murder case. Near an
idyllic pond in the forest, the body of a local teenage girl named Annie
is found. Annie was very popular in the small town where she lived with
her parents. Not only was she sporty, she was also a cheerful and
helpful person. She looked after the children of several families. The
initial suspect is the local eccentric of the town who was seen giving
her a lift. When inspector Sejer interrogates the girl’s family,
friends, and neighbors, the list of suspects grows and he realizes that
people may know more than they are willing to tell. He strives to
understand Annie’s true character, because he believes the answer to the
enigma lies in her strange behavior just before her death. He finally
realizes that she carried a shocking secret that she hadn’t shared with
anyone. The story unfolds slowly but surely, with much attention paid
to characterization, and to the depiction of the small town community.
Don’t look back is a true Scandinavian crime novel with a slightly
wistful, melancholic feel.
Best Crime Novels 7
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