Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  El Gallego: “El Gallego was always a very good cop. He joined the Social [the national police] right out of the military and he had no competition, I tell you. He was a hard man, he was a guy with a lot of balls. Friend to the world, a great companion, but, man, when he threw the gauntlet down on a red, there was no way to prepare yourself. And he shut down many. Many. The anarchists threw a hand grenade and all, and El Gallego, no reaction, hard, hard, hard, he finished them off in the lot of the Carmelite convent, after a shootout with these three scumbags . . . ( . . .) and then he walks out of that mess ( . . .). Then one day he stops this prick and, seriously, between us, it was like this, this happened to him, he smashed his face in, you get me . . .! That day the boy was arrested, he would have been about . . . I don’t know, fifteen or sixteen . . . ‘Leave me alone,’ you know?”

  After the blow, El Migue gets hold of El Cachas, his friend, his boss, and shows him a face with an eye dangling from a socket whose liquid would be dark red if any light shone through it. But it’s black. And everything’s already a prison.

  El Migue: “Miguel Vargas Reinoso has his skull’s smile in a glass, with water and a Corega Tabs tablet. He spends hours and hours watching it, every night, from the time he takes it from his gums until it returns to its place in his mouth. He watches it with his slanted eyes, catlike and unpleasant, while he breathes rhythmically through his nose, perhaps at a rate faster than normal. He spends whole nights staring at it and thinking that it’s been a long, long time.”

  These two are the main protagonists and the cornerstone of Prótesis, El Gallego and El Migue. Salvador Gallego and Miguel Vargas Perch Reinoso.

  The novel begins eight years after El Gallego destroys Miguel’s face and El Migue starts sucking men off in prison. The young man lives only for revenge, delirious with pain beyond measure. El Gallego has simply given up on life after losing his sense of a manhood based on extreme violence. They’re compelled to meet again, they need to meet again, they live for and through this reunion. And we, the readers, are absorbed in this story of man as a purely violent creature; the bloody loss of innocence; the twists of a homosexuality impossible to acknowledge or even think of; and the painful recovery of a society, the Spanish society, which must leave these characters of an earlier time behind in order to build a democracy, because they’re trouble, and they can’t be rehabilitated.

  I close with two quotes from the author about his work, which undoubtedly left a mark on his (very successful) later career, to the point of constant references to it becoming a nuisance:

  If we’re talking about Prótesis, it has an adolescent component of rebellion against institutions. When I wrote it, many things had blown up. Andreu Martín has grown up, and now, at my age, I wouldn’t write Prótesis. Violence is not heroic, it is not the solution to anything.

  —(El País, February 3, 2011)

  In my teens (an age of solitary pleasures, such as writing, for example), I found the underworld very attractive. The dirty streets, the threat of thugs everywhere, whores on street corners and in barroom doorways, the shell-game operators, the covetous eyes of those men who never seemed to have anything to do. It makes sense that the underworld would fascinate an adolescent: it represents rebellion against the laws imposed by adults (the unknown world, menacing and terrifying), and the rule-breaking represents self-assertion and a sense of discovery distinct from the thoughts and feelings they taught us in childhood. I guess my father (anarchist, sinner and provocateur) also fed the taste for Chinatown.

  —(Revisiting Prótesis, May 2010)

  Cristina Fallarás is a journalist and writer who lives in Barcelona. She has worked as a journalist at different levels for El Mundo, Cadena SER, Radio Nacional de España, El Periódico de Catalunya, Antena3 de Televisión, Cuatro Televisión, COMRàdio, and Radiotelevisión del Principado de Asturias. She has been an editor of street interviews, a reporter, a radio and television writer, an opinion columnist, a writer, a section chief, and a deputy managing editor. She was involved in the design and writing of the daily newspaper ADN project, of which she is cofounder and deputy director. She is also cofounder of the online newspaper Factual. She currently directs the opinion page and the editing of Sigueleyendo.es, serves as a consultant on communications issues for the publishing sector and the media, and keeps a blog in the Ellas section of El Mundo. She is the author of five novels, including Thus Died the Poet Guadeloupe (2009), a finalist for the international Hammett Prize, and The Lost Girls (2011), which won the L’H Confidencial de Novela Negra prize and the Director’s Prize at la Semana Negra de Gijón (Gijón Crime Week). She is a frequent contributor to anthologies, and her story “The Story of a Scar” was included in Akashic Books’ Barcelona Noir.

  Early Autumn

  by Robert B. Parker (1981)

  COLIN BATEMAN

  * * *

  Born and raised in Massachusetts, Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) served with the U.S. Army in Korea. His first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, featuring PI Spenser and set in Boston, was published in 1973. The author of more than sixty novels, Parker wrote a number of series alongside the Spenser titles, including the Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, and Cole & Hitch novels. In 1976, Promised Land won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Parker also authored two novels based on Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe, Poodle Springs (1989) and Perchance to Dream (1991). Parker was presented with the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 2002.

  * * *

  As a young man you fantasize about becoming a great writer and you study the classics—in my case it was Catch-22, On the Road, Catcher in the Rye—and you know you will never be able to write those books, because they are already there.

  But you are also torn, because although you crave literary acclaim and you want to write the Great American Novel—despite being from and living in Northern Ireland—what you really like reading is pulp fiction. You know that it receives no respect but you love it, and you keep turning the pages; and, as much as the writing, you love the writers. You love the idea of them being paid by the word, and how they pump out thousands and thousands of them. No fannying around taking five years to complete a novel—Jesus, no. Five weeks maximum, with breaks only for sex and whiskey.

  In 1990 I was a journalist on a small-town paper with a pile of unpublishable short stories and that same burning desire to write a novel, but not a clue how to write it or what to write it about, even though it was staring me in the face. A girlfriend insisted that I read The Godwulf Manuscript, the first Robert B. Parker Spenser mystery, and I devoured it.

  The great thing about discovering a writer who has been around for a while is the back catalog—you don’t have to wait around for a year for the next book to come out. I sailed through God Save the Child, Mortal Stakes, Promised Land, Looking for Rachel Wallace, and all the others. Then later, when I got married—different girl—we got into the habit of holidaying in the United States, and every year, the first thing that I did when I arrived was drive to the nearest bookstore and stock up on Parker, because he had never quite taken off outside of the United States, and there were always new books to be found. He was as prolific as any pulp writer, with three series on the go: Spenser, Sunny Randall, and Jesse Stone. And then there were the Westerns, all written in the same glorious pared-down style.

  With Parker there was no fluff. No pages of description, no detailed backstory. There was introspection, but not so deep that you’d drown in it. There were short sentences, smart dialogue, familiar characters and settings. It was as if he’d been given a Chandler novel and told to write one like that, but cut out all the crap, and make it half as long, and a bit warmer, and by God, you’re a Boston man, set it there, and you’re an academic, so show some smarts, but you were also an infantryman in the Korean War, so make Spenser tough as nails and brilliant with his fists.

  Spenser was a private eye, Boston Irish, who should have had all the prejudices that go with the genre and the genes, but wh
ose girl, Susan, was a Jew; whose best friend, Hawk, was black; whose adopted son, Paul, was gay; and who settled arguments with his fists but wasn’t above taking in the ballet. Spenser, who knocked back the Bushmills and turned me on to premium-label beer long before it became fashionable in the land of Guinness, but who saved his most lavish descriptions for the clothes that his suspects wore and the meals he cooked for Susan. Spenser had a code and a quest, and he lived by one and was relentlessly on the trail of the other. He was the man we’d all like to be—tough but fair, and funny, and he didn’t age, and he had great sex with a beautiful woman on a regular basis but liked his own company, too.

  He arrived on the scene mostly formed, but Parker and Spenser really hit their stride with two books—Looking for Rachel Wallace (1980) and my favorite, Early Autumn (1981)—tackling gender politics in the former, and parental strife and the damage it does to children in the latter. In Early Autumn, Spenser is hired to protect a boy, Paul Giacomin, who has been kidnapped as part of a custody battle. The book isn’t really about solving a case at all, but literally and metaphorically about rescuing a child. Spenser’s approach is a mix of old school and liberal arts: realizing that both parents are equally malicious, he more or less kidnaps Paul himself, and brings the poor, wasted, effeminate sloth with him on a camping trip, teaches him to box and lift weights, and literally builds a home with him, while also taking him to galleries and introducing him to the joys of reading: all of this not so much to man him up, but to teach him about life and how to function as an adult in the real world. This wasn’t the kind of thing we were used to in crime fiction: yup, Parker was still using the established template, but messing with it, too, and in so doing he changed it for good.

  Parker has been described as the bridge between Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, and the modern crime novel, but he was more than that, because being a bridge suggests that he wasn’t a destination in himself. He was. The problem with the PI novel was that it had become a parody of itself: in the same way that the Western was forever ruined by Blazing Saddles, so Play It Again, Sam and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid were threatening to make it impossible to enjoy the PI genre again.

  But somehow Parker took the clichés and filed them down. He gave the PI warmth, and a conscience, and self-awareness while still giving us broads, and lugheads, and fisticuffs, and corpses galore. He also gave us the site-specific PI. Boston is as much a character in the Spenser books as Spenser himself; in his wake, there is not a state in the Union that does not have its own Spenser, and hardly a country in the world.

  When I read Spenser it suddenly became clear to me that my story was staring me in the face: thirty years of terrorist Troubles that no one had ever treated with a cool, cynical, sarcastic eye, with one-liners and short scenes and shorter sentences.

  When I finally started my first novel, Divorcing Jack, Spenser was the model, and Parker’s was the style; I even named one of my main characters after Parker—though I killed him off pretty soon. Not the style thing, though—it has me yet, and more than twenty novels down the line I still catch myself aping those mannerisms. Back then it was copying; now I prefer to think of it as paying tribute.

  Born in Bangor, Northern Ireland, in 1962, Colin Bateman worked as a journalist before publishing Divorcing Jack in 1995. That novel won the Betty Trask Award, and was subsequently adapted for film. A prolific author, Bateman has written twenty-one novels for adults and an additional eight titles for children and young adults, as well as TV screenplays, a play, and an opera. He was the chief writer on Murphy’s Law, a TV series that ran from 2001 to 2007. The Day of the Jack Russell won the Last Laugh Award for comic crime fiction in 2009. Visit him online at www.colinbateman.com.

  Gorky Park

  by Martin Cruz Smith (1981)

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE GRANGÉ

  (essay translated from the French by Ellen Clair Lamb)

  * * *

  Martin Cruz Smith (b. 1942), the son of a jazz musician and a nightclub singer who met at the 1939 World’s Fair, is a former journalist, and has been a published writer for almost four decades. He is the author, among other works, of an acclaimed series of mystery novels featuring a Russian investigator named Arkady Renko (“a truth-teller,” as the author describes him, “an honest man in a dishonest system”), the first of which was Gorky Park. It has since been followed by six other novels featuring Renko, the latest of which is Three Stations (2010).

  * * *

  Generally speaking, in a detective novel, we engage first with the story. We then notice characters that, if the book is good, show themselves to be moving, amazing, or exciting. If the book is better still, we find ourselves transported into a certain mood, a setting, a way of looking at the world. And, if the novel is a complete success, we further delight in an original style, a unique manner of expression, which provides a genuine aesthetic thrill.

  Gorky Park offers all of these pleasures, but in reverse order. We first encounter a breathtaking style, the mark of a great artist. Then, in the mists of an icy Moscow, we discover a series of fascinating characters, men and women who are struggling in the clutches of a terrifying system (we are in the 1980s). Bit by bit, we take the measure of the city and the country as we explore an ecosystem, an environment: the architecture of the streets, the insanity of Soviet tyranny, the depth of Russian tradition . . . until, at last, we realize we are completely spellbound by a story that never disappoints, and holds us to the very last line.

  It is at this point that we know we’ve been handed a masterpiece. As a writer of thrillers, I consider Gorky Park the quintessence of the genre, telling the best possible story in the best possible way.

  Let me begin with how I discovered this book. I was thirty at the time, and working as a freelance reporter. My wife and I had started a small press agency. Each of us was paired with a photographer, and we sold articles to magazines all over the world. In the winter of 1991–92, Virginia, my wife, embarked on a series of portraits of the world’s greatest crime novelists (James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Herbert Lieberman, etc.). Included in this list, which we had assembled with the help of publishers, was Martin Cruz Smith. Neither she nor I knew him and, to help, I offered to read some of his books. I began with Gorky Park.

  As it happened, I started reading it when I myself was heading to an assignment in China at the source of the Mekong River, in the middle of winter. I remember sitting on the plane, and discovering this book that was to determine my future career. I turned the pages, not knowing what excited me most: the plot, the psychology, the style—everything was perfect, everything was sublime.

  Ordinarily, you should not divulge too much of a detective novel’s story. It would be as if a bride arrived at the church naked. In this case, however, I cannot resist: the plot is too good.

  It all starts with the discovery of three mutilated corpses, each wearing ice skates, in Moscow’s Gorky Park. They are spotted by a militiaman who has stepped behind a tree to relieve himself. In my memory, it is this guy’s urine that melts the ice and reveals the bodies, but I’m not sure of that. What I know for certain is that, throughout the book, there is a deep collusion between the snow, the cold, and the crime—and the pitiless character of the Soviet regime as well. In the end, this conspiracy seems to extend even to trappers lost in an endless forest . . .

  This is not an idle connection, because readers will discover that the motive for the murders is an animal. The three victims (two males and one female) had been hoping to go west, taking with them one of the USSR’s essential treasures: a pair of sables.

  Crime novelists are always looking for an original puzzle, an unusual solution. With his sables, Martin Cruz Smith beats us all: it is at once unique and completely logical. In this vast empire—a superpower, but one in which everyone lives in the blackest misery—exists a treasure: the priceless genes of these little creatures, which would allow the United States to develop a flourishing trade in fur.

  We remember Alfred Hitchcock’s
dictum that for a film to succeed, the villain must succeed. Gorky Park’s villain is spectacular: John Osborne, an American businessman, cruel, cynical, omniscient. Almost a supernatural being, he is at once both Russian and American. He has distilled the darkest traits of both countries. He has a sort of instinctive savagery, Siberian tied to an icy capitalism, that is both visceral and totally unscrupulous.

  Opposing him is the antihero Arkady Renko, a marginal cop swimming against the currents of the government, his supervisors, his expected career path, and even his family (he is the son of a great Stalinist general). Beneath his listless exterior we find an incorruptible will, and the pugnacity of the lone hero. Another of the novel’s brilliant concepts: not only will the guilty not be arrested, but nobody even wants to stop them. In the USSR, crime does not exist, cannot exist. Arkady must fight everyone to conduct his investigation.

  I have always thought of the detective novel as a fairy tale for adults, featuring a knight who fights a dragon in a hostile environment. Here, all the necessary elements of the mission are present. Arkady is the hero, a samurai who, like all samurai, has sworn fidelity to his master—in this case, his country. This is one of the book’s deepest dimensions: Renko encounters only Russians who dream of moving to the West. Not him: he loves his country. The “hostile environment” is rooted within him, like a disease.

  In a good thriller, there are always high points that resemble plateaux on which we may stop and breathe the fresh air of high literature. Gorky Park is full of these scenes, such as my favorite, in which Renko interrogates judges and generals in a swimming pool. It’s a hot place, steam-filled, where one eats eggs with caviar “as big as marbles” and drinks iced vodka. Or another scene in which he meets his best friend in an abandoned church, rain-soaked, where the angels fade into the walls. It is against this symbolic backdrop that he realizes his companion has betrayed him . . .