by Dick Adler
As he did in his second Renko outing, “Polar Star,” in which the detective is punished with one of the world’s nastiest and most grueling jobs aboard a fish-processing ship, Smith manages to make the horrors of Chernobyl almost a redeeming experience—for Arkady and for us. As Renko searches for the truth about the two murders he’s investigating, he seems to single-handedly be trying to tell us that Russia and its people, New or Old, are worth the effort.
THE CONFESSION, by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
There are many ways of continuing a mystery series—including the most familiar device of focussing on one central character. Olen Steinhauer has decided to take another route. His gripping, subversive first novel, “The Bridge of Sighs,” was set in 1949, in an unnamed East European country. In this second book of what has been billed as a trilogy, it is 1956, and Emil Brod, the hopeful young homicide detective who played the central role in “The Bridge of Sighs,” has turned into a settled, pragmatic secondary character, content to search for the perfect martini.
As the socialist promises of the immediate postwar years fade, Steinhauer now focuses on another homicide detective, the hulking Ferenc Kolyeszar, who wears on each finger a ring with a bloody personal history. Ferenc is a talented novelist himself, although his one published book is long out of print. The confession of the title is to be his next book—a work as depressing about the fate of artists in the Soviet-dominated satellite countries as “The Gulag Archipelago” was about Russia.
Agonized by his wife’s infidelities and driven perversely into sins of his own, Kolyeszar also comes up against a frighteningly amiable KGB agent named Kaminsky who has been assigned to his office. As they work on several past and present murders, Ferenc digs a hole for himself that seems inescapable. More ambitious in scope and action than “The Bridge of Sighs,” with deaths and betrayals exploding out of control toward the end, “The Confession” makes us wonder just what Steinhauer will do for his final encore.
8
Brits Behaving Badly
The English might not have invented the mystery, but since the golden days of Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey they certainly know how to put a twist and a polish on it. Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill, Val McDermid and John Harvey are just a few of the fine writers who mystify us from London to Dublin. And then there’s a little-known but highly imaginative series by Paul Johnston, set in an alternative Edinburgh future, that is well worth digging out of publishing obscurity. Many of the British mysteries reviewed here were written before the current publishing superhighway between that country and America, but the thrill of their discovery still lingers.
CLUB, by Bill James (Countryman Press)
Any month that includes a new Colin Harpur book is off to a fine start. The latest arrival in this excellent British series by Bill James is just about perfect—full of all the pith and vinegar we’ve come to expect from Detective Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles.
Harpur is a remarkable creation: a dedicated copper by day and a determined adulterer in his off-hours. His sexual habits have already caused him serious injury, thanks to a romance with the wife of a police sharpshooter. Now he’s taking even greater risks by offering comfort to Iles’ errant wife.
But if Harpur is the meat of this series, Desmond Iles is the spice. A man of taste and intelligence, angry and cynical after being passed over for promotion and embittered by his wife’s unfaithfulness, Iles is fiercely protective of his friend Harpur and scathingly funny about his superiors.
In “Club,” James has concentrated more on Iles than ever before, making him a leading suspect in the murder of a low-level criminal who was also his wife’s lover. Other suspects are the heavies who persuade Ralph Ember—once known as “Panicking Ralph” for his nervous habits, now the owner of a drinking club called The Monty—to return to a life of crime.
As before, James gives equal weight to his cops and his villains, treating both sides with a delicate blend of honesty and satire. Who else could come up this domestic scene, where Iles is ironing his shirts and watching a ballet video while his wife sits grieving for her dead lover and wondering if her husband killed him:
“He set the iron on its end again and for a couple of minutes tried to imitate in the space between the board and the bookcase a sequence of steps by the lead male dancer on the video, arms and hands extremely expressive, his body taut.…‘I’m sure I could have made a bright go of ballet or possibly professional darts if I hadn’t drifted into the police.…’ ”
THE REMORSEFUL DAY, by Colin Dexter (Crown)
This review is what they call a spoiler—because it gives away essential details of a book’s plot. But the fact that Colin Dexter’s book is subtitled “The Final Inspector Morse Novel,” plus extensive coverage of its contents when it first appeared in England, make me feel justified in believing that most readers are ready to accept the inevitable.
As Joseph Conrad might have put it: Inspector Morse, he dead. His body weakened by diabetes, beer and Glenfiddich, Endeavour Morse suffers a heart attack and dies. His last words to his nurse are, “ ‘Please thank Lewis for me.’ ” But, writes Dexter, “so softly spoken were the words that she wasn’t quite able to catch them.”
Morse, of course, isn’t dead at all: There are now 13 books in this wonderfully droll, always readable and occasionally brilliant series, as well as dozens of episodes of the equally enjoyable British TV version, which pop up regularly on PBS and A&E. In his new book, Dexter thanks the producer of the series, and he’s right to do so: No book and TV character in recent memory blend together in the mind as well—or influence each other as obviously—as Morse and actor John Thaw. (Kevin Whateley as Sgt. Lewis and James Grout as Chief Supt. Strange are also perfect matches, as are the Oxford of Dexter’s imagination and the actual city caught on video.)
Because this is an epitaph of sorts, Dexter seems to be more revealing about his creation than usual, as in this early musing by Sgt. Lewis: “With most prime suspects, if female, youngish, and even moderately attractive, Morse normally managed to fall in love, sometimes only for a brief term.” Here it’s the victim with whom he had been in love (or at least lust): a 48-year-old nurse with large sexual appetites who was found beaten to death a year ago in her home in a village near Oxford. Handcuffs and other bondage items were discovered on the scene, leading to theories of a burglar’s perhaps stumbling on a wild moment. Morse and Lewis were never officially on the case (being busy elsewhere), but Morse and his boss, Strange, did know the dead woman quite intimately. Now Strange, on the verge of retirement, wants Morse to solve the murder and leave him with a clean slate and a clear conscience.
Worried about his declining health (although not enough to give up alcohol as ordered) and his own feelings for the murdered woman, Morse is at first reluctant to get involved. His world shrunk to music and booze, he feels some regret at what he has missed, as reflected in a scene in a favorite pub:
“He ordered himself a third pint, conscious that the world seemed a considerably kindlier place than heretofore. He even found himself listening to the topics of conversation around him: darts, bar-billiards, Aunt Sally, push-penny…and perhaps (he thought) his own life might have been marginally enriched by such innocent divertissements.
“Perhaps not, though.”
At first Lewis pursues the case on his own, following a man newly released from prison because of a phone tip to Strange. But annoyingly, even a semi-engaged Morse still manages to be one step ahead of his earnest, hard-working assistant. When the ex-con disappears, Morse knows just where to look: a vast garbage dump that services the Oxford area. The relationship between Morse and Lewis is, as always, a delight to observe: the intellectual battering (even when Lewis buys a tape of “Parsifal,” he can’t win); the tightwad boozer Morse still sticking his underpaid underling with a much larger share of the bar tabs. Even the praise is grudging: “When and how the circling vult
ures closed in for their shares of the kill— your guess, Lewis, is (almost) as good as mine,” Morse writes in his final summation of the case. But there is also respect and a great deal of fondness on both sides, perhaps more than ever.
Even the burly Strange, who always seems to be firing or threatening Morse, comes in for a large portion of humanizing in this final outing. Waiting for Dr. Laura Hobson, the medical examiner, in a pub that features taped Irish music, Morse astonishes Lewis by asking the landlord to turn it up instead of off. But the recently widowed Strange understands:
“ ‘You know, Morse, I’m glad you said that. The missus…we had a couple of days in Cork and we did a bit of Irish dancing together.’ ”
Then Morse asks Strange if he remembers the lines from a Yeats poem, “When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,/Folk dance like a wave of the sea.”
“ ‘Yes! Yes, I do,’ said Strange gently.
“And for a while Sergeant Lewis and Dr. Hobson remained silent, as if they knew they should be treading softly; as if they might be treading on other people’s dreams.”
As befits a series set in Oxford, Dexter’s books are ripe with quotes not only from Yeats but from Shakespeare (a lovely and most apt joke about a ladder), A.E. Housman (the titular “remorseful day,” another perfect pun), and comedian Rita Rudner. The stew, as we’ve come to expect from Chez Dexter, is rich and meaty; the herrings (clues planted to lead us in false directions) are perhaps redder than ever but still not outrageous enough to spoil the surprise of the outcome. Morse is dead: Long live Morse.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE, by Pip Granger (Poisoned Pen)
Among my late British mother-in-law’s books was a wonderful three-volume collection of Oxford paperbacks called “A Victorian Family” by M.V. Hughes—“A London Child of the 1870s,” “A London Girl of the 1880s” and “A London Home in the 1890s.” They weren’t fiction but memoirs of a bygone era—sharply observed and sweetly remembered in all their details. I suspect that Pip Granger’s mysteries about a rowdy family of survivors who live in a street called Paradise Gardens in the Hackney district of East London will become the same sort of classic texts, to be invoked whenever the spirit of the city during and just after World War II is conjured up.
While John Lawton writes an excellent World War II series full of blood and thunder (“Black Out,” “Bluffing Mr. Churchill”) about a Russian aristocrat who becomes a British copper, Granger’s books feature people as ordinary as bread. Her first two—“Not All Tarts Are Apple” and “The Widow Ginger”—were widely praised and nominated for prizes. “Trouble In Paradise” ends with the birth of Rosie, the extraordinarily moving and articulate narrator of the first two books, but it stands on its own shapely, sturdy legs as a marvelously evocative read.
The book begins in 1945 on the day the war ends. “Paradise Gardens was a miracle, or so everybody said. Somehow, throughout the war, it had remained more or less intact, although large chunks of the surrounding area had been flattened by doodlebugs or burned to blackened stumps by incendiary bombs,” says Zelda Fluck, Rosie’s mother-to-be. The end of hostilities threatens to return Zelda’s feared and loathed husband, Charlie—who got her pregnant at 17 on a drunken night and who later killed her unborn baby by throwing her downstairs. The woman who saved her then—Zinnia Makepeace, a healer and nurturer who came down from Scotland many years before to look after a dying cousin and who Zelda tells us speaks with a “tiny trace of haggis-noshing accent she still had after all her years in the East End”—is Zelda’s good friend and mentor. But Zinnia will be badly treated and put into danger when Zelda’s nephew Tony, a 12-year-old boy with the voice and looks of an angel, gets involved with the son of a local female Fagin named Ma Hole who could have walked right out of Dickens.
At the end of “Trouble In Paradise,” Zelda has moved out of Hackney and into Soho, where the first two books in the series are set, and where in the 1950s Pip Granger’s family lived above The Two Is Café on Old Compton Street. Luckily for us, she has the art and imagination to bring her past back to vigorous life.
BLUFFING MR. CHURCHILL, by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press)
John Lawton returns to the World War II London Blitz setting of “Black Out,” his memorable first thriller about Anglo-Russian cop Freddie Troy, with equal skill and energy, producing an intriguing, stimulating, all-too-plausible story. Wolfgang Stahl—a top aide to Hitler’s SS chief Heydrich—turn out to be a spy for the Americans, forced to flee Germany for England in 1941 to avoid capture and carrying with him plans for the German invasion of Russia. One of Stahl’s handlers, a shy and clumsy American intelligence agent named Calvin Cormack, is flown to London to help find and debrief the frightened Stahl—who disappears down the ratholes of bombed-out London known best by a tough old policeman called Walter Stilton. Cormack is taken in by the Stilton family, enjoying the sexual favors of daughter Kitty, also a police officer. Kitty’s (mostly) ex-boyfriend Troy gets involved in the search for Stahl through his job on the Murder Squad. The blend of Lawton’s fictional creations with real characters like Winston Churchill and distant cousin Robert Churchill (a gunsmith who plays a vital role here), H.G. Wells and newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook produces a rich and juicy montage that throbs with life.
THE WATER CLOCK, by Jim Kelly (St. Martin’s)
Another gripping and most promising debut mystery from a British journalist—this time set in the strange, wet world of Ely and the Cambridgeshire Fens, where the ever-moving and changing tides shape the lives and deaths of the natives. Philip Dryden has taken a job as chief crime reporter on the local weekly, The Crow, after an unhappy stint in London, and he is coping with the tragedy of his wife still being in a coma two years after a not-completely-explained car accident. Ferried around the Fens by a wonderfully Falstaffian minicab driver named Humph, who studies Catalan on tape between and during his runs (“Get a lot of Catalan speakers on the school run?” Dryden inquires acidly), the reporter takes full advantage of his previous connections to earn extra money covering two grotesque murders for the national press. He also walks a very sharp ethical line by promising to help an inept copper keep his job in return for a look at the file about his wife’s accident.
Kelly’s rich evocation of the area—also used to good advantage in Graham Swift’s novel “Waterland” and the ensuing film—is equalled by a plot that is well worked out and a supporting cast of fascinatingly soggy Fen folk.
THE FIRE BABY, by Jim Kelly (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
I am even more full of admiration for Jim Kelly’s second mystery about British journalist Philip Dryden than I was for his impressive debut, “The Water Clock.”
Kelly could very easily have coasted on the qualities which made his first book so distinctive; the landscape (the mysterious oozing Fens surrounding the old East Anglia cathedral town of Ely, where he and Dryden both live), the fascinating secondary characters (an about-to-retire cop who trades crime tips for bird-watching news; a minicab driver almost as large as his vehicle, which has become Dryden’s sole means of transport); the absolute sadness of Dryden’s private life, as his much-beloved wife Laura remains in a coma after a car accident.
Instead, Kelly chooses to keep those ingredients and push the envelope they came in. Laura has amazingly begun to make progress, communicating (heartbreakingly slowly and painfully) by pressing Dryden’s hand through the alphabet, stopping at letters which seem to make words. What she is trying to tell him is about a confession she heard from someone who thought she was completely comatose, concerning a murder which Philip is covering for his local newspaper, the Crow.
Maggie Beck, the woman in the other bed in Laura’s room, is the lone survivor of a fiery crash of an American bomber which plowed into her farm after a dust cloud ripped apart its jet engines in 1977. The “fire baby” of the title is Maggie’s love child, also burned to death in the disaster. But now Maggie, dying of cancer, is stirring the ashes of that painful past and seems ready to di
sclose some important new information.
You may never choose to visit the Fens—especially in the summer, which sounds particularly toxic—but it will come alive from the very first page because of Kelly’s extraordinary art and imagination.
GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, by David Wolstencroft (Dutton)
Imagine you’re a talented young TV writer, about to start his first spy thriller. Haunted by the glorious ghosts of the past—everyone from Eric Ambler to Charles McCarry, with special bows to LeCarre and Deighton—you try to come up with something fresh, some trick or treatment which might just catch readers’ attention. But all too often, such ambitions result in overkill by trying to artificially inflate the stakesDavid Wolstencroft, who created (as they say in TV land) and wrote the intriguing A&E series “MI-5,” has gone the other way—by narrowing his focus down to two unlikely spy colleagues and then keeping that focus sharp and very funny. “Good News, Bad News” could almost have been written by Samuel Beckett, so knife-like are its dark images and absurd scenes of futile bafflement.
Charlie, a budding failure in his late 20s, and George, a bluff, stout individual some 15 years older, are the entire staff of one of those instant photo printing studios buried in a subway station beneath the streets of London. (Those streets are painted as particularly noxious, making the photo shop almost an oasis of comfort.) One day, Charlie and George realize by accident that they are both also British government spies—each one ready to quit out of boredom and unmet expectations. Apparently, no one in their organization has noticed the posting mistake—but once they do, each man is ordered to kill the other.
From this brilliant start, Wolstencroft goes on to fashion an exciting, often hilarious story of a growing friendship (up to a point; one of the men will probably wind up eliminating the other) and the frustrations of being a seedy cypher in a world that was supposed to be glamorous. It’s a dazzling performance, full of surprises, and the only doubt it leaves is what will this most promising author ever do for an encore.