Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  The background to the novel was a real-life crime. As Connelly describes it in an interview that I conducted with him in 2002:

  It was weird. I arrived in L.A. for the first time in my life on the day the story broke about the robbery that would inspire my first book. Los Angeles is basically a desert and underneath it are six hundred miles of storm water tunnels in case of flooding. Just like you can drive all over L.A. on the streets, you can also drive under L.A. in tunnels.

  A group of burglars—they think it took at least four of them—had these little Honda ATVs, and they drove three miles into one of the tunnels to a point where they were within 150 feet of a bank. They dug their own tunnel underneath the vault, broke in over a weekend, and emptied all the safety-deposit boxes, and then were gone. They were never caught. The closest they ever came to catching them was about a year later when one of the utility guys in L.A. was checking the tunnels and he noticed a piece of plywood on the wall of the tunnel painted to look like concrete. He pulled it away and found another tunnel. They had come back and were in the process of digging another tributary toward a bank so they could hit L.A. again. But this tunnel was going under Wilshire and the police got stuck with this situation of whether they should let them finish the tunnel and ambush them in the vault or, since Wilshire was a major road and might collapse, fill in the tunnel. They went with safety and filled it in, and I guess the guys saw the activity and never went back.

  Of such pieces of good fortune are careers made, but a hundred other authors would have botched even such promising material as this. Connelly, though, was gifted from the start. This is more unusual than one might think. James Lee Burke is regarded to have hit his stride with the second Dave Robicheaux novel, Heaven’s Prisoners (1988), rather than the first, The Neon Rain (1987), and Ross Macdonald’s early novels are in thrall to Chandler. Meanwhile, Chandler himself—about whom Connelly writes elsewhere in this volume—routinely cannibalized his earlier short stories for plots for his novels: the joins between disparate stories show more obviously in The Big Sleep (1939), for example, than in Farewell, My Lovely (1940). His sixth novel, The Long Goodbye (1953), dispenses with the reworking of old ideas and is, for my money, Chandler’s most accomplished work.

  But Connelly emerged fully formed with The Black Echo, and he has continued to follow Bosch on his mission through a further fifteen books so far, a mission that is at once both professional and personal for the detective: the achievement of a measure of justice in an imperfect, unjust world, and a final understanding of his own place in it. Some of them, including The Last Coyote (1995) and Angels Flight (1999), may even be regarded as superior outings to The Black Echo, but this is not to belittle his achievement with his debut. Instead, it demonstrates just how high Connelly set the bar with that first book, both for himself and for those who followed in his footsteps.

  One final comment: it is rare to find an author who is admired by his peers as much for his own personal qualities as for the work he has produced, but Michael Connelly is one of that exceptional breed. He is, as the saying goes, the kind of man who sends the elevator down for others, and a great many of his fellow writers have benefited from his support. The Bosch novels are an adornment to the genre. Their creator is nothing less.

  John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Book of Lost Things, Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson books for younger readers, and the Charlie Parker series of mystery novels, the latest of which is The Wrath of Angels. Like most writers, he is waiting to be found out. Visit him online at www.johnconnollybooks.com.

  Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (aka Smilla’s Sense of Snow)

  by Peter Høeg (1992)

  MICHAEL ROBOTHAM

  * * *

  Peter Høeg (b. 1957) is a Danish writer of fiction who found instant critical and international popularity with his 1992 novel, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, published in the United States under the more functional title of Smilla’s Sense of Snow. It is both a thriller, with some elements of science fiction, and an exploration of the individual’s place in society, but it can also be regarded as one of the forerunners of the new wave of Scandinavian crime fiction, even if Høeg has since declined to return to the genre.

  * * *

  Long before Lisbeth Salander, Harry Hole, and Kurt Wallander emerged from the snows of Scandinavia, another giant stepped from the ice. Her name was Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, but she’s best known as Miss Smilla, a heroine with an unforgettable voice and a feeling for snow.

  There are some characters in crime fiction that are heart-stopping and others that are heartbreaking, but only occasionally does one emerge that manages to be both of these things, and captures the imagination of writers, critics, and readers as a consequence. Miss Smilla is just such a character—a loner caught between two worlds: the rich, privileged life of her father, a celebrated surgeon in Copenhagen, and the memory of her poverty-stricken yet liberated childhood in Greenland, where she grew up with her Inuit mother, who died when Smilla was a teenager.

  I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It’s the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

  Living in an apartment block in Copenhagen, Smilla befriends a six-year-old boy, Isaiah, another Greenlander, who has an alcoholic, neglectful mother and a need for companionship. They are an odd couple, clinging to the wreckage of their lives, both harboring secrets.

  All of this changes, however, when Isaiah leaps to his death from the snow-covered roof of the apartment block. While the boy’s body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident, but Smilla doesn’t agree. She knows that Isaiah was terrified of heights and, more importantly, she can “read” his footprints in the snow. He didn’t slip and fall, he ran to his death.

  Isaiah is lying with his legs tucked up under him, with his face in the snow and his hands round his head, as if he were shielding himself from the little spotlight shining on him, as if the snow were a window through which he has caught sight of something deep inside the earth.

  Smilla has an almost intuitive understanding of all types of snow, a “feeling” that is visceral and powerful. When the police don’t believe her, she launches her own investigation, talking to pathologists and policemen, tax inspectors and retired accountants, piecing together a decades-old conspiracy. The young boy’s death gives Smilla’s life a sense of purpose and becomes a vehicle for her own self-exploration.

  Published in Danish in 1992, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow was translated into English a year later, leaping out of the crime genre and stunning literary audiences. It won the CWA Silver Dagger in 1992 and spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Renamed Smilla’s Sense of Snow in the United States, it was honored as Best Fiction Book of the Year by Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly. Current world sales are estimated at nearly 40 million copies.

  Like all great crime novels, this one is far more than a mystery. Beneath the surface, Peter Høeg is concerned with deeper cultural issues, particularly Denmark’s curious postcolonial history and the relationships that exist between individuals and societies. Despite her education and wealthy father, Smilla doesn’t feel that she belongs in either Denmark or Greenland. She is stateless, trapped between two fractured worlds—one wealthy and ordered, the other chaotic and beautiful.

  Full of action, suspense, contradictions, and mystery, there are undoubted flaws in the novel. Most of the negative comments focus on the conclusion, which drifts into the realm of science fiction and leaves many questions unanswered, but nobody has ever faulted the quality of the writing, which is littered with humor and memorable descriptions.

  This is how Smilla describes the mechanic who lives downstairs.

  He is very broad, like a bear, and if he straightened up his head he would be quite imposing. But he keeps his head down, perhaps to ap
ologize for his height, perhaps to avoid the doorframes of this world.

  I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I’ve always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.

  Smilla meets Isaiah for the first time on the stairs. She’s carrying a book and the boy asks her to read him a story.

  One might say that he looks like a forest elf. But since he is filthy, dressed only in underpants and glistening with sweat, one might also say he looks like a seal pup.

  “Piss off,” I say.

  “Don’t you like kids?”

  “I eat kids.”

  He steps aside.

  Until the appearance of Lisbeth Salander, I doubt if a more powerful or interesting female character had emerged from Scandinavian fiction. Tough, acerbic, vulnerable, feisty, intelligent, sarcastic, and heartbreaking, Smilla carries the novel from the icy streets of Copenhagen to the edge of the Arctic Circle, on board an icebreaker.

  Ice is important for Smilla in a deep, emotional way. Not only does it link her to her Greenlandic roots but it grounds her in the universe and connects her spiritually to the “absolute space.” Humankind can understand the mathematical fractals of a snowflake, but we will never control nature, which is beautiful, powerful, brutal, and unforgiving.

  This is not a formulaic detective story or a techno-political thriller slowly gathering pace and tension as clues are slowly revealed. Nor is it a Gorky Park, or a classic whodunit. It straddles all of these, breaking down the borders between genres.

  My favorite passages involve Smilla’s introspection and her ruminations on love, loss, and displacement. I don’t care that the climax of the novel is, well, anticlimactic, unresolved and inconclusive. It doesn’t matter. The underlying mystery is my excuse to spend time with Smilla and hear her views on the world.

  Peter Høeg is a serious literary novelist in Denmark and the author of four novels, each radically different from the next. I sometimes wonder if the success of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow almost embarrassed him because he committed a cardinal sin among literary readers and writers—he became popular. I have read his later novels, which are complex and postmodern but lack the same charm as Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, despite his obvious talent. It doesn’t matter. He created Miss Smilla and proved that serious literature can be both entertaining and artful.

  Only a handful of books have made me want to be a writer, and this is one of them. I go back to it time and again, searching for secrets and marveling at the language. It’s not perfect, it’s not conventional, but I’m in love with Miss Smilla and I want us to grow old together.

  Michael Robotham is a former journalist and ghostwriter, whose psychological thrillers have been published in twenty-two languages. His career highlights include uncovering Stalin’s Hitler files, interviewing Jackie Collins in a bubble bath, and getting into George Michael’s shorts. Michael can most often be found on Sydney’s northern beaches, where he wrestles with words in a “mezzanine of misery” (room with a view) and funds the extravagant lifestyles of a wife and three teenaged daughters. Visit him online at www.michaelrobotham.com.

  A Philosophical Investigation

  by Philip Kerr (1992)

  PAUL JOHNSTON

  * * *

  Philip Kerr (b. 1956) was an advertising copywriter for Saatchi & Saatchi before publishing his first novel, March Violets, in 1989. The first of the “Berlin Noir Trilogy,” it featured Bernie Gunther, a detective and former police officer working in Germany in 1936. Five Bernie Gunther titles were published after the trilogy was completed, the most recent being Prague Fatale (2011). Kerr has also published nine nonseries novels for adults, as well as seven titles for young adults under the pseudonym P. B. Kerr. In 2009, Kerr was awarded the Ellis Peters Historical Award for his Bernie Gunther novel If the Dead Rise Not.

  * * *

  Spoiler alert—this contribution contains philosophy . . .

  Philip Kerr is best known for his Bernie Gunther series, a highly unusual take on the hard-boiled novel, with Gunther starting off as a homicide detective in 1930s Berlin and continuing as a private eye in locations as distant as Argentina and Cuba. To date, there are eight in the series. What’s interesting is that Kerr seems only to have envisaged a trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem), published between 1989 and 1991, before returning to Gunther as late as 2006 with The One from the Other, to great critical and popular acclaim. But, in the final analysis, our Bernie is just another gumshoe. In 1992, Kerr tried to do something really original with the crime novel.

  At this point I should declare an interest. Philip Kerr and I were at school together in Edinburgh, though in typical Calvinist fashion we didn’t know each other, despite being only one year apart. I discovered this when I chaired an event with him at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2000. At that point in his career he was still writing the high-concept thrillers that made him a lot of money from Hollywood, although no movies were ever made. Onstage he was very critical of crime writers, seeing them as conservative and boring. This almost led my then agent to assault him for demeaning me, but it also offers a clue to this most unusual of crime writers—he knows how to handle the genre with great skill, but is ambivalent about its value. Bear that in mind during my discussion of the novel he wrote immediately after what became known as the Berlin Noir Trilogy.

  A Philosophical Investigation is set in 2013, years in the future at the time of writing, which technically makes it a work of science fiction, or rather that awkward creature: a crossover between crime and SF. The society imagined by Kerr is relatively hi-tech, but plagued by what are termed “recreational” or “Hollywood” murders—four thousand sex-killings in the European Community in one year. Serial killers are so common that police officers lay claim to the dead as victims of their favored killer—the Hackney Hammerer, the Lipstick Man, etc. Detective Chief Inspector Isadora “Jake” Jakowicz of London’s Metropolitan Police is more thoughtful than her colleagues, with her Cambridge natural sciences degree and service as a forensic psychologist at the European Bureau of Investigation. She also hates men, an inevitable consequence of her job as head of Gynocide, as well as the legacy of an abusive father. But the case that gets under her skin doesn’t involve female victims: the Lombroso Killer executes men, and not just random victims.

  The first fifty pages of Kerr’s book are so replete with intertextual references that the reader struggles to keep up. The opening paragraph refers to Mary Woolnoth and Mylae, both of which appear in the opening section of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The second of the novel’s two epigraphs is from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, establishing the poet as one of three éminences grises. The first epigraph, from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, establishes him as another of those éminences. The third is George Orwell, whose writings on murder are discussed, and whose Chestnut Tree Café from 1984 is a key location. So far so confusing, but we haven’t even broached the technological side of the novel.

  Although Orwell’s spectral presence suggests a backward-looking future, one given form by the novel’s descriptions of a run-down and dangerous London, there has been scientific progress, even if it doesn’t affect the ordinary citizen. Jake’s investigation revolves around the complex Lombroso Program, which identifies men without the neural inhibitor that stops them from becoming killers. They are informed of their condition, given code names, and investigated only if they are connected to murders. But, hey, this is a dystopia, and Jake’s antagonist, named Wittgenstein, manages to break into the archive and access his fellow sociopaths’ details. He then starts executing them.

  We know this and much more about Wittgenstein because the narrative is larded with his thoughts, many of which raise significant questions, not just about the ethics of murder—is executing potential serial killers justifiable?—but about
life in general, and also about writing. Is the crime novel a tenable proposition when, as the murderer Wittgenstein says, nothing empirical is knowable? He can’t resist playing with Descartes, saying “I kill, therefore I am.” But crime writers, to delight readers, also commit murder (usually only on paper). Shouldn’t we consider why we are so addicted to fictional death? Perhaps we amateur murderers should pay more attention to the real Wittgenstein’s dictum (quoted in the novel), “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

  This makes A Philosophical Investigation sound like a heavy read. Although it can be so in places, there is also a humorous side. Who could resist a killer named after the weirdest of philosophers doing away with victims such as Dickens, Bertrand Russell, and Socrates? And there is a philosophy professor who—guess what?—writes detective novels in his spare time.

  But the real power of the novel derives from the interplay between Jake and the killer. Female cops written by males are common these days, but were much less so in 1992. I think Kerr took a big chance with his main character and, by and large, pulled it off. Jake is mouthy, smart, and tough, but she is also touchingly empathetic, both with the female victims she has to deal with and, ultimately, with Wittgenstein himself. The scenes in which she gets close to him in extremis are very moving, and give this highly cerebral novel a powerful emotional payload. In addition, there is a haunting poetic undertone, partly derived from T. S. Eliot, that embellishes the feelings of longing and loss. Finally, as the use of Orwellian tropes suggests, Philip Kerr has a sharp satirical agenda.