Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Murder in the Marais

  by Cara Black (1998)

  YRSA SIGURDARDÓTTIR

  * * *

  American-born author Cara Black (b. 1951) sets her Aimée Leduc mystery novels, of which there have been twelve to date, in Paris. Her first novel, Murder in the Marais, was published in 1998 and nominated for an Anthony Award for Best First Novel, while her third, Murder in the Sentier, received an Anthony nomination for Best Novel. Her most recent book, Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, arrived in 2011. Cara Black was included in Elizabeth Lindsay’s Great Women Mystery Writers (2nd Edition).

  * * *

  Few authors of any genre conduct such successful and meticulous research into the location and history surrounding their works as Cara Black. It probably helps that her mystery series about private investigator Aimée Leduc is based in Paris, so the site-work can’t be very shabby or dismal. Each title in the series carries the name of a district, an arrondissement, or a particular location in the city, with events within the pages linked to that same location. To date Cara has written twelve novels about her half-French, half-American protagonist, two of which have been nominated for an Anthony Award and all of which are thoroughly entertaining.

  As all readers know, the single most important factor in a series is the protagonist. If well developed, this character has the power to bring you back for more, the exact quality that Aimée Leduc has in spades. She is not your average private detective, specializing in corporate security and computer forensics instead of missing persons and cheating wives. Despite this, her cases focus on much more interesting things than bytes and processors as they invariably lead her down intriguing paths, paved by human ethical failings. Aimée is a hands-on type of girl: she will leave no stone unturned once engaged, and very often finds herself in precarious situations that call for all sorts of craftiness and quick thinking. But despite the action often thrust upon her, Aimée is not one of those “female males” that one sometimes comes across in crime novels, the ones who just don’t feel right. To the contrary, Aimée rings true. Despite being tough she is also vulnerable. She harbors strong convictions, and feels for those whom she seeks to assist. She has a mystery in her past involving the disappearance of her mother, and together with the horrific and untimely death of her father, one can easily imagine these two events sculpting her into the relentless yet softhearted truth-seeker the pages of the books convincingly make her out to be.

  Aimée dresses well, managing to do so on her far from high-flying income by purchasing vintage. Her being fashionable is as refreshing as it is unique. Considering the setting of the books it would have been a total turnoff had she been frumpy; in Paris, you hardly expect a heroine to walk around in dungarees. To make her even more of a standout, her sidekick in the computing business is an odd accessory who adds charm to the mix; hacker René is a dwarf.

  It is next to impossible not to give another dame the status of a main protagonist when dissecting Cara’s series. This dame is no more a slouch than Aimée, if anything less so. I am referring here to the grand old dame that is Paris herself, so extremely well described by Cara that it is hard to imagine anyone doing it more effectively. There can be no questioning the author’s familiarity with every nook and cranny of the area placed in the spotlight in each installment. In places one can almost smell fresh coffee being served in a tiny bistro on a charming street corner, or taste a flaky, buttery croissant upon one’s tongue. Not to mention the feeling of being transported into high-ceilinged, Parisian abodes and buildings, or onto narrow streets lined with decorative lampposts. This knack for bringing to life the city’s surroundings applies to descriptions of Paris both past and present, as the plots in the series often involve events from the past, old truths and secrets hiding behind the cobwebs of time.

  The novel presently up for dissection is the first of the series, Murder in the Marais, originally published in 1998. Although the works need not be read in chronological order, it feels right to start at the beginning, at least for the purpose of this anthology. The author herself names Murder in Rue de Paradis as the one that remains closest to her heart and, having read it, I urge those not lucky enough to have done so to rectify this situation at the earliest convenience. But, for now, we will return to the point of origin, and Murder in the Marais.

  As the book’s title implies, most of the events described occur in the Marais district, which has, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, been host to Paris’s Jewish community and thus home to more than its fair share of atrocities during the Second World War, following the occupation of the city by the Nazis. The reader is introduced to thirty-four-year-old private investigator Aimée Leduc, who has turned her back on fieldwork in the aftermath of a case that led to the death of her father, which was witnessed by her. Aimée now only takes on cases involving corporate security and so manages to get by, but only just. When an old rabbi asks her to accept an assignment involving the examination of a photograph, it is mostly due to the parlous state of her small agency’s finances that she agrees. As soon as Aimée has worked out the puzzle of the picture, she visits the original owner, an old woman from the rabbi’s synagogue. Intending to discuss her findings, Aimée instead discovers that the old woman has been murdered and her body mutilated, a swastika cut into her forehead. This strongly ties in to the result of Aimée’s investigation, as the image turned out to be one of the SS officers in a Parisian café.

  The promising intro delivers what the reader surely expects. The plot is as engaging as Aimée herself, reaching back to the atrocities of WWII and slowly bringing to light buried secrets involving one of the strongest drivers of human action: hate. But this ugly emotion is not the only one propelling the story, as its counterpart, love, also makes an absorbing showing. The unwinding of a tightly knotted past and present evils is very well done, touching various bases on the way, such as the problems of immigration and the need of some, unjustifiably, to see whole groups of people as being their inferiors. And last, but not least—the ending is a surprise.

  Bravo, Cara Black, not only for this book, but for the series in its entirety.

  Yrsa Sigurdardóttir is an international best-selling crime writer from Iceland. Yrsa has written six books in a series about her protagonist, the lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir. The fourth novel in this series, The Day Is Dark, was recently published in the U.K., and the fifth, Someone to Watch Over Me, is due for publication in 2013. Yrsa’s recent stand-alone novel, I Remember You, has been nominated for the Scandinavian crime fiction prize the Glass Key, and is scheduled for publication in the U.K. in 2012. It is presently being adapted for the big screen.

  On Beulah Height

  by Reginald Hill (1998)

  VAL MCDERMID

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  Reginald Hill (1936–2012), known to his friends and fans simply as Reg, was an English mystery writer who gained gradual, well-deserved acclaim through his novels featuring the mismatched Yorkshire police detectives Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, the former earthy and instinctive, the latter urbane and reflective. They made their first appearance in 1970’s A Clubbable Woman and went on to feature in more than twenty further novels and a handful of short stories, although Hill, sometimes pseudonymously, wrote over thirty other novels, including five involving a black private detective named Joe Sixsmith. Hill delighted in wordplay and literary allusions, perhaps a consequence of his early career as a teacher. He appeared to have no qualms about his chosen literary direction, commenting in 2009: “When I get up in the morning, I ask my wife whether I should write a Booker Prize–winning novel or another best-selling crime book. We always come down on the side of the crime book.”

  * * *

  Picking a favorite crime novel is like choosing your favorite wine: so much depends on mood and situation. And once you’ve narrowed down the genre—Champagne or Shiraz, Muscatel or Riesling?—you still have to choose individual vineyards and vintages . . .

  My martini crime novel—anytim
e, anyplace, anywhere—is Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height. It’s beautifully written—elegiac, emotionally intelligent, evocative of the landscape and history that hold its characters in thrall—and its clever plotting delivers a genuine shock that does not cheat the reader. There’s intellectual satisfaction in working out a plot whose counterpoint is Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder song cycle.11 There’s darkness and light, fear and relief. And then there’s the cross-grained pairing of Dalziel and Pascoe in their seventeenth outing. Spot on.

  I chose Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height as my exemplar of the perfect crime novel with a light heart. But I sit down to write this appreciation with great heaviness of spirit because, in the interval, Reg Hill died, leaving his readers and his friends bereft.

  There is a terrible irony in the choice of On Beulah Height. As we read, we are constantly reminded of the mutability and the impermanence of our human state; rereading it, I felt the presence of my old friend most poignantly.

  When On Beulah Height was published in February 1998, I was the crime reviewer of the Manchester Evening News. I reviewed the book thus:

  When a long hot summer reveals the drowned village of Dendale, it resuscitates memories the former inhabitants would have preferred to remain dormant. The villagers were evacuated fifteen years before to make way for a new reservoir, all but four of them—three missing girls and the man suspected of abducting them, the strange and swift Benny Lightfoot.

  As the water level drops, old feelings start to emerge, exposed to fresh scrutiny by the graffiti that appears on the walls of the town where the Dendale villagers were rehoused. “Benny’s back,” it announces ominously. Then another girl goes missing.

  Every copper has a case that haunts and obsesses him, and for the eternally vulgar but acute Andy Dalziel, it’s the missing girls of Dendale. Now he’s faced with what appears to be a rerun of his old failure. This time, he’s determined not to be defeated. As past and present intertwine like the complex musical composition that also has its place in the story, we share the elegiac sense of loss that threatens to engulf Hill’s characters.

  With his customary wit and wisdom, Reginald Hill has given his readers a jewel of a book. He manages with enviable ease the difficult task of blending marvelously evocative writing with a plot that turns as cleverly as anything in the genre, leaving the reader sighing, ‘Of course!’ in affectionate exasperation. This is a master-class in the art of writing fiction. I doubt I’ll read a better book this year.

  I see no reason to change a word of that review, or alter my later decision to garland it as my book of the year.

  Although Hill’s roots were firmly in the traditional English detective novel, he brought to it an ambivalence and ambiguity that allowed him to display the complexities of contemporary life. Among the most literate of writers in the field, he brought to life a cast of characters who changed and developed in response to their experiences.

  I urge you to read this with a glass of Andy Dalziel’s favorite Highland Park and toast a great book and the memory of a great writer.

  Val McDermid is best known for her novels featuring Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, the first of which, The Mermaids Singing, appeared in 1995. In all there have been seven novels in the series, most recently The Retribution (2011). McDermid made her debut in 1987 with Report for Murder, the first in the six-book Lindsay Gordon series. Another six-book series features the private eye Kate Brannigan. McDermid has also written six stand-alone titles. The Mermaids Singing won the CWA’s Gold Dagger in 1996. The Torment of Others (2004) won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award in 2006. In 2010, Val McDermid was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger in recognition of her life’s work. Visit her online at www.valmcdermid.com.

  Tomato Red

  by Daniel Woodrell (1998)

  REED FARREL COLEMAN

  * * *

  Daniel Woodrell (b. 1953) has published eight novels to date, most of them set in the Missouri Ozarks and characterized by a tone Woodrell describes as “country noir.” He debuted with Under the Bright Lights in 1986. His most recent publication is The Outlaw Album (2011), his first collection of short stories. Woodrell received the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction for his novel Tomato Red (1998); it was also long-listed for the IMPAC prize. Winter’s Bone (2006) was adapted for film by director Debra Granik and released in 2010. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival, and was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

  * * *

  I recently did a piece for the Huffington Post in which I discussed those novels written by the current generation of crime fiction authors that would have the most influence on coming generations. Chief among my selections was Daniel Woodrell’s compact bombshell of a book Tomato Red. Originally published in 1998 by Henry Holt, Tomato Red never quite lit the fire that it should have. Much to Mr. Woodrell’s dismay, I’m sure, Tomato Red became the stuff of cult legend. As I would tour my own novels, traveling from independent bookstore to independent bookstore, I would hear the whispers. The words “Tomato Red” were spoken in hushed, reverential tones, almost as if they were passwords into a private club. What I discovered when I finally got my hands on a pink-and-black-covered uncorrected proof of the novel at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore circa 2006 was that “Tomato Red” were indeed passwords, but not into Skull and Bones or some other snootily exclusive club. They were passwords into another world; a world in which the tour guide, Daniel Woodrell, used a language that was something akin to the American-English prose I wrote in, but had far more in common with distilled poetry and the serrated edge of a knife.

  That was the thing, the language, that initially caught my eye, and I didn’t have to get to the second paragraph before it did. I didn’t even have to get to the second sentence. Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a small step, one page back to be precise. Before I began reading the text itself, something else got my attention. As if I wasn’t already curious enough, the dual epigraphs that open the novel fascinated me. The first, by renowned psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, is a philosophical observation about self-defeating behaviors. The second, an oddly prescient and related quote by Boston Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd, is a statement about the disconnect between what a person should know and what he does know. Boyd says, “It’s not all peaches and cream. But I haven’t learned that yet.”

  Oh, about that first sentence: it’s two hundred and seventy words long, give or take. Lest you fear Mr. Woodrell is a gassy writer prone to endless bouts of self-indulgence, the second paragraph is all of four words long: “That’s how it happens.” The third is eight words long: “Can’t none of this be new to you.” The thing about Woodrell’s writing is that word count and page count—the novel is short by any standard—are completely irrelevant measures. No writer, not even Ken Bruen, packs so much into so little. To paraphrase the poet, if there were world enough and time, I might be tempted to reproduce that first sentence/paragraph in its entirety. But no, I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. Let me instead quote Edgar-winning author Megan Abbott from her foreword to the star-crossed Busted Flush Press reprint of Tomato Red.

  Woodrell does it with language . . . The thing Woodrell does to words is the stuff of dark alchemy. He breaks language apart, shatters it to glittery pieces, then stitches it together new. You don’t even know what it is—are those words? Sentences? Or am I bewitched?

  Although I am at a loss to explain it, there are some writers and readers out there who aren’t floored by Tomato Red. Yet even those few people who have confessed to me that the book didn’t do it for them cannot help but be dazzled by his otherworldly use of the English language. Or as Robbie Robertson put it in the lyrics to “Up on Cripple Creek,” “I can’t take the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk.” It says something that even the book’s detractors can’t escape the gravitational pull of Mr. Woodrell’s language.

  The book itself is a self-contained masterpiece, a portal to a world that has some recognizable feature
s, but is as alien to most readers as Rabat or Jupiter. I have heard the book referred to as “Ozark” or “hillbilly noir,” but to say that is to miss the point. To try and categorize it somehow trivializes the gritty majesty of the work. Would you brush off Crime and Punishment by calling it “Russian noir”? In some ways, Tomato Red—a reference to the hair color of the novel’s tragic femme fatale, Jamalee Merridew—is more like speculative or science fiction than most crime fiction. No, even that doesn’t quite do it justice. It is such a singular accomplishment that the damned book, as much as I love it, just defies comparison. That elusiveness more than anything else probably accounts for the book flying under the radar for all these years.

  One suspects that a person reading the book fifty years from now—and I assure you, people will be reading it fifty years from now—won’t find it any more dated than it was in 1998. That world, the world of West Table, Missouri, and nearby Venus Holler, as created by Woodrell, is a timeless place, but it ain’t the Ozark Shangri-la. That’s for shit sure, as my old friends from Brooklyn might say. West Table is a place with a wrong side of town, a very wrong side, a place where crank supplies more energy than the public utility and where it’s gray and rainy even when it isn’t. If you want a job, there’s always the dog food factory in town. Still, West Table’s most abundant resource seems to be desperation. And it is on desperation that the story turns.

  I am loath to give too much of the book away and spoil it for someone who comes to Tomato Red after reading this dark love letter to the novel. The funny thing is that after I’ve spent all this time telling you how singular the novel is, I must confess that the plot of Tomato Red relies, at least to get it rolling, on one of the great conceits of crime fiction: a drifter comes to town. This drifter is an ex-con loser named Sammy Barlach. And Sammy is true to his bad karma when, cranked up and in the company of some local losers, he breaks into a house on the good side of town only to find that he’s late to the party: in the house already are the brother-and-sister team of Jason and Jamalee Merridew. But the pair aren’t so much robbing the house as they are playing house, living out, at least for a little while, their fantasies of wealth and escape. Sammy, truly a drifter in temperament and soul, falls under the influence of the Merridews.