Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  The loss of innocence has been a constant theme in Lehane’s work. What I’ve always admired about him is his unvarnished take on the subject. He holds nothing back. What Dave Boyle is forced to endure during his four-day ordeal is never discussed in any graphic detail, but the way he is psychologically tortured by the neighborhood’s tribal mentality is brought up again and again. It starts the day Dave returns to school. In one of the book’s most heartbreaking scenes, we see him confronted by the kind of garden-variety bully we remember from our own childhoods: “Yeah,” the bully says to Dave, “you sucked it.” Dave does what any one of us would do in this situation: he breaks down and starts crying.

  It was the range of emotions he could feel pouring from the boys in the bathroom that cut into him. Hate, disgust, anger, contempt. All directed at him. He didn’t understand why. He’d never bothered anyone his whole life. And yet they hated him. And the hate made him feel orphaned. It made him feel putrid and guilty and tiny, and he wept because he didn’t want to feel that way.

  But this is merely the start of Dave’s repeated victimization and eventual isolation. The neighborhood ostracizes anyone who is different, even if that person is an eleven-year-old boy who is the victim of a horrendous crime. In the ensuing days Dave is shunned by his “sort-of friends” and eventually ignored completely. “But in a way, that was worse,” Dave reflects. “He felt marooned by their silence.” Even Jimmy Marcus views him with an “odd mix of pity and embarrassment.”

  When the book resumes twenty-five years later, the loss of innocence revolves around another East Buckingham boy, a teenager in love: “Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love, with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his ears. He loved her waking up, going to bed, loved her all day and every second between.” Katie Marcus, unbeknownst to her father, Jimmy, is planning on leaving with Brendan. Katie goes out for a last night on the town with her girlfriends and, like Dave Boyle, climbs into a car and disappears. The next day she’s a no-show at her younger sister’s First Communion. Katie’s bruised and badly beaten body is found shortly thereafter, dumped in a neighborhood park.

  The murder and the mystery surrounding it make Mystic River a more than satisfying crime novel. Lehane, however, cleverly uses the event as a catalyst, a sort of black hole that by its sheer force of gravity pulls Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle back into each other’s orbit. Each man has been scarred by the neighborhood. Sean, the only college graduate, is a homicide investigator for the state police. Despite the fact that his personal and professional lives are a mess, he’s assigned the case since he grew up in East Buckingham and knows the neighborhood’s primal mentality, its street loyalties, its generational family alliances. Jimmy and Dave have never left the neighborhood. Jimmy, a widower and reformed safecracker who did prison time, has remarried and now operates a convenience store. Dave Boyle, drifting through a series of dead-end jobs and sleepwalking through his roles as husband and father to his only child, a young boy, is more ghost than human.

  East Buckingham looms large through the entire novel. The city is undergoing gentrification; properties are being snatched up and turned into condos and town houses, and the yuppies, with their Volvos and soy lattes, are appearing on street corners along with antique stores. The old neighborhoods and the families who lived there for generations are slowly vanishing. The tribal mentality, however, endures, making you wonder if it’s some sort of incurable virus infecting the entire city rather than a primal survivalist mind-set ingrained from one generation to the next. “Once you got in that car, Dave, you should never have come back,” an older Jimmy Marcus tells his childhood friend. “You didn’t belong. Don’t you get it? That’s all a neighborhood is: a place where people who belong together live. All others need not fucking apply.”

  The solution to the crime is shocking, but it’s nowhere near as unsettling as the brutal psychological terrain Lehane chronicles with a ruthless efficiency. Everything inside the city is laid bare. Every door is opened, every stone overturned, every motivation, secret, and sin exposed. Mystic River is haunting and epic in its scope, a Shakespearean tragedy played out on the cracked sidewalks, in apartment complexes and triple-deckers. And yet at the same time it’s a Springsteen ballad to the old neighborhoods, a poignant and oftentimes grim reminder of the scars we carry on our hearts, a hymn to the ghosts that linger in our souls.

  Chris Mooney is the internationally best-selling author of the Darby McCormick series and the stand-alone Remembering Sarah, which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Darby McCormick series have been sold in over twenty territories. The Killing House, his latest novel, is the first book featuring former profiler, and now the nation’s most wanted fugitive, Malcolm Fletcher. Mooney lives in Boston, where he is at work on the next Darby McCormick thriller. Visit him online at www.chrismooneybooks.com.

  The Broken Shore

  by Peter Temple (2005)

  JOHN HARVEY

  * * *

  Peter Temple (b. 1946) was born in South Africa and moved to Australia in 1980, where he pursued a successful career as a journalist and editor. He became self-employed in 1995 in order to begin writing crime fiction, and published his first novel, Bad Debts, in 1996. It featured the central character of Jack Irish, a part-time lawyer based in Melbourne, who featured in a number of Temple’s subsequent novels. It was The Broken Shore, a stand-alone novel, that brought him to a wider international audience, and won him the CWA Gold Dagger award for best crime novel. His novel Truth received the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010.

  * * *

  It begins calmly enough, on a cold morning in late autumn; a bloke out walking his dogs, routine. Time to notice the last leaves on the maples before the call from the station, an intruder, a woman living alone. He felt the fear rising in him like nausea. Cashin. Melbourne police, homicide, put out to grass. This, or something like it, has happened before. Darkness, danger, blood puddling on tarmac, in corners, life leaking away. Another phone call, fast after the first, fast as night follows day: a rich old man found facedown, his naked back lined with stripes of dried and drying blood. Nothing as simple as a robbery gone wrong: nothing simple here at all.

  Conspiracy in Peter Temple’s novel creeps up on you as conspiracy should: wealth, power, the power to corrupt, the sweet stench of it echoing back to Chandler’s The Big Sleep and another rich old man, living out a living death in a hothouse of orchids, the cloying smell of their flesh too much like the flesh of men, ripe with decay.

  Cashin thought there was no firm ground in life. Just crusts of different thicknesses over the ooze.

  A decent man, Cashin, not above mistakes, mistakes that have taken the lives of others, good and bad, foe and friend. Mistakes that, like the enduring pain from injuries incurred, he can never forget.

  “A man going forward while looking back,” said Cashin. “I know that feeling.”

  Going forward, looking back. Cashin’s father died when he was twelve. His mother packed two suitcases and, for three years, took him with her on the road. Gone walkabout. Shacks, rented rooms, motels. Ever since, perhaps without recognizing it, he has been looking for a father, looking for a home. Desperate for the sight of his own unacknowledged son.

  All he wanted was to see him, talk to him. He didn’t know why. What he knew was that the thought of the boy ached in him like his broken bones.

  Right now, Cashin is living in the lee of a memory he is trying, with the aid of a swagman he’s befriended, literally, to reconstruct—the grand palace of a house his great-grandfather’s brother built then dynamited to the ground. Something of a lesson there, you might think: a moral.

  But if the family home Cashin is intent on rebuilding is one of the book’s organizing metaphors, the other—more dynamic, more central—is the Broken Shore of the title and the Kettle at its violent heart, within which the water rips and tears.

  They went to see it f
or the first time when he was six or seven, everyone had to see the Kettle and the Dangar Steps. Even standing well back from the crumbling edge of the keyhole, the scene scared him, the huge sea, the grey-green water skeined with foam, sliding, falling, surging, full of little peaks and breaks, hollows and rolls, the sense of unimaginable power beneath the surface, terrible forces that could lift you up and suck you down and spin you and you would breathe in icy salt water, swallow it, choke, the power of the surge would push you through the gap in the cliff and then it would slam you against the pocked walls of the Kettle, slam you and slam you until your clothes were threads and you were just tenderised meat.

  It was called the Broken Shore, that piece of coast.

  It is here that the body of one of the potential murder suspects is found, here that the teenaged Cashin, full of lust and full of wonder, sat close and in awe alongside the young Helen Castleman, too beautiful, too rich, too far out of his class—Castleman, who is now a lawyer working for the Aboriginal Legal Service on behalf of another suspect and the owner of a property neighboring Cashin’s unbuilt dream. Here that Cashin’s father committed suicide.

  And there is one further thing that, for this reader, anyway, resonates from the title: the echo of Robert Hughes’s 1987 account of the founding of Australia, The Fatal Shore. For this novel is not just expertly set in a particular country—a particular area of country, a particular place—permeated by generations of history: it shows both the shifts and virtual disintegration of some communities, and the rabid racial discrimination—shockingly outspoken in some instances here—that demonizes the Aboriginal people as belonging to a feral underclass.

  When it was published, I was happy to be quoted as saying: “Put simply, Temple is a master, and The Broken Shore is a masterful book.” Nothing, in the four or five times that I have since read it, has given me cause to change my mind.

  What was it Raymond Chandler said about Dashiell Hammett? Something about him taking murder out of the Venetian vase and dropping it into the alley. No longer the candlestick in the library, but the sap to the back of the head going the wrong way up a dingy one-way street.

  Real crimes committed by real people.

  Chandler didn’t do a bad job of that himself.

  Neither, closer to hand, did Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö with their ten books featuring the Swedish policeman Martin Beck; nor William McIlvanney in his brilliant and inspirational 1977 novel Laidlaw, set in Glasgow.

  Whether Temple has read McIlvanney or Sjöwall and Wahlöö, or whether he’s read George Pelecanos, say, or Walter Mosley, is neither here nor there. What is relevant is that they all utilize the crime novel in similar ways: telling a story, yes, and a story about people, some of whom you come to care about, care deeply, but also—more importantly? as importantly—they use it as a tool, a tool with which to open up and expose a small area of society for us to examine and understand.

  I am drawn to the sparse and the dry and to the idea that if you concentrate you can do powerful things with a few sticks and bones.

  Peter Temple’s own words.

  The Broken Shore is very powerful indeed.

  Ever since he was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing in 2007, John Harvey has been trying, unsuccessfully, to shrug off the implication that everything, henceforth, is downhill. No matter how many push-ups, how many twelve-mile yomps across the South Downs, the label “veteran crime writer” clings to him like a shroud. His latest effort to disprove the onset of senility is the novel Good Bait, published in 2012 to the sound of muted applause and the disgust—well earned, one hopes—of the Daily Mail. Visit him online at www.mellotone.co.uk.

  The Outlander

  by Gil Adamson (2007)

  C. J. CARVER

  * * *

  Gil Adamson (b. 1961) was first published as a poet, in 1991, with her collection Primitive. She subsequently published a collection of short stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (1995), and another volume of poetry, Ashland (2003). Her debut novel, The Outlander, won the Hammett Prize in 2007. It remains her only novel to date.

  * * *

  I read the first line of The Outlander in a newsagent’s at Paddington station. I was in a rush, with only seconds to buy the right book for my journey.

  It was night, and the dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling.

  Oh, boy, I thought. There’s a problem ahead. Brilliant.

  It may not go down in history as the best first line of a novel ever written, but style, content, and genre were all there, and I bought the book without reading any further. By the time my train pulled in to my home station two hours later, I knew that I was reading something truly special and was trying to proceed as slowly as possible, savoring every word and desperate to make the story last as long as I could. A gripping, compelling tale of a woman on the run, it had everything needed to sweep me away: adventure, survival, murder, love, abandonment, betrayal, fear, horror, humor, and happiness (not necessarily in that order).

  What grabbed me in particular was not just the central character’s predicament but the book’s setting. Gil Adamson takes one of the harshest and most forbidding environments on earth—the Canadian Rockies at the beginning of the last century—and throws into it nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton who is, we’re told, “widowed by her own hand.” Hot on Mary’s heels are her husband’s vengeful twin brothers who have been “deputized” to bring her to justice.

  It is 1903. Mary has been raised for genteel society, not wilderness survival. She doesn’t know which direction to take, or whether she can eat grasses or the centers of pinecones, and makes herself sick trying. She begins to starve, but is saved when she falls upon a wolf’s kill. Adamson’s description of what happens when you eat rotting, raw venison on a starving stomach had me reaching for the antacid. But the real tension is ratcheted by the creepy red-haired twins who have employed a native tracker and are following her every move.

  This is no whodunit because we know right from the start that Mary is a murderess, but the question that burns through the book is, Why? And, furthermore, can she outwit the twins and find her true place in the world?

  Mary is a rare, wild girl. Although she’s obviously beautiful, she has an almost feral air about her. She is also in the thick of grief over the death of her baby son, and suffers from visions and hallucinations, but she doesn’t submit to them. This dual conflict—fighting for survival externally as well as internally—is at the heart of the novel. Although Mary is independent and strong-willed, determined to live, the trials she faces are immense. Female characters rarely rise to heroic status in this kind of situation—there is a danger that they might become unbelievable to the reader—but Mary’s character is completely credible, and with every step she takes you are willing her to win, to triumph over adversity and, perhaps, find happiness.

  This is an archetypal story that creates settings and characters so rich that you feast on every detail. The frontier towns into which Mary stumbles are captivating and peculiar places with their toughened miners and outcasts, the odd cat-skinner and lunatic, all troubled souls scratching a living in a monstrously hostile landscape. You are with Mary as she meets guides and guardians, tricksters and rogues, but even when she has a tender romance with a gentle mountain man—a chronic thief with a warrant for his arrest—there is a continuous sensation of dread as the twins close in on her.

  Adamson is an acclaimed poet and her writing is gratifyingly earthy, immersing you in a foreign world so absolutely that you swear you can smell the smoke from Mary’s campfire, the damp of the earth seeping through her clothes. If you have ever wondered how it feels to take laudanum, to survive a landslide, or to be shot with an arrow, look no further. The descriptions are so convincing that you wonder if Adamson has personally experienced each and every sensation related in her story.

  The Canadian wilderness comes alive beneath Adamson’s pen, becoming almost like another character, brutal an
d unforgiving, frightening and beautiful. But a location is more than just a place. It is also the moral environment in which characters live, and challenge the values imposed there. The plot illuminates age-old conflicts that are true to all humankind no matter what culture they come from: love/hate, despair/hope, justice/injustice, good/evil. Although the story is set over a hundred years ago, it feels contemporary because the values and humanity are the same today.

  In The Outlander, Mary struggles with her husband’s infidelity, her dependence versus her desire for independence, her illiteracy; but it is Adamson’s observation of Mary’s freedom from the control, influence, and support of others that most fascinates. Because of her crime Mary cannot return to her previous existence, or prevail upon her parents for help. For the first time in her life she is alone, and she enters a foreign world peppered with strange and remarkable characters and rough towns, exotic and hostile places where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

  Immersed in Mary’s world, in her conflicts and her fight for survival, we discover our own humanity as we at last come to understand what drove her to kill her husband. We witness her inner nature exposed when she faces her enemies. At the climax, we see that the choices she has made throughout the story have profoundly changed her. She stands before us glorious in her new identity: whole, healed, and triumphant.