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Sunday Salon: The Chalk Circle Man, by Fred Vargas, translated by Sian Reynolds

The Chalk Circle Man
By Fred Vargas, translated by Sian Reynolds.

So I come to the last book I have to read that is on the shortlist for the 2009 International Dagger award. It’s French, and the first in the Adamsberg series that has already won Fred Vargas this award for two years in succession (2006 and 2007).
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has been, until the start of this novel, a provincial police inspector of great unconventionality but with an unusually high success rate in solving cases. Therefore, as the novel opens, he’s recently promoted to commissioner in the Parisian force, and we see his eccentricities through the eyes of his close colleague, Inspector Danglard – himself a single parent of two sets of twins and additionally looking after a fifth child belonging to but abandoned by his ex-wife and her lover. Adamsberg has an instinctive, bordering on supernatural, style, as is shown by an initial vignette in which he correctly identifies the criminal in a case long before any evidence is found to force a confession from the suspect.
Despite the internal and external strangenesses of the sensual Adamsberg and the lugubrious Danglard, the story told in The Chalk Circle Man is at its heart a straightforward police procedural. Someone is drawing chalk circles on the Parisian streets at night, leaving strange objects in their centres. Adamsberg’s forebodings about the person behind this activity are soon borne out when a murdered body is found inside one of the circles. Despite intensive police activity, other murders follow, at different parts of the city.
An eccentric range of suspects is assembled even before the first body is found. An academic whose research speciality is deep-sea fish, Mathilde, has a hobby of following people round the city. One of these characters, a beautiful blind man called Paul Reyer, has disappeared and Mathilde, professing to be worried, reports him as missing to the police. She is ignored by all but Adamsberg, who rapidly finds the “missing” man (not missing at all). Soon, Reyer and another wanderer on the streets, an elderly woman called Clemence, are lodging with Mathilde in her fish-obsessed house. Clemence is addicted to answering lonely-hearts adverts, but is perpetually disappointed because each time she arranges to meet someone, he immediately abandons the old woman on sight.
How these three oddballs are going to become involved in the chalk circle story is not clear – but involved they are, not only with the mystery but also, in Mathilde’s case, with Adamsberg in a much more personal sense. As events reach their climax, the author plays fair with her readers and provides a satisfying, if sad, solution to the bizarre conundrum. At the same time, the author has piqued the reader's interest in the affectionate relationship (mainly unspoken) between Adamserg and Danglard, two men of very different outlook, to be explored further in future novels.
Much has been written about Vargas's alternative universe. I see her characters as acting like children in adult’s bodies. This novel is a fable, in which people live out their impulses, creative or destructive, without thought of consequence. Nobody plans for the future, living in the existential present. Yet the motivation of the murderer is cold and logically carried out – and would pass muster in a novel firmly rooted in pedestrian reality.
The book is peppered with acute social observations; cynical yet funny barbs at the media and  modern society (the excerpts from the newspaper reports of the chalk circles are hilarious); and myriad tiny delights – Mathilde’s plan to spend a day following a man who is interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, Clemence’s pointed teeth for which Mathilde likes to provide zoological comparisons, or little exchanges between Adamsberg and Danglard about Byzantium and the emperor Justinian (actually highly relevant to the mystery). If the reader is prepared to take this world as it is, then the book is very satisfying. Its eccentricities are charming (though the author is ruthless within her creation, which is no fairy tale) – they are bound up in the pace and focus of the novel, rather than distracting the reader from these essentials.

Thanks to Karen Meek of Euro Crime for my proof copy of the book.

Fred Vargas at Euro Crime: a listing of all the books translated into English, in order, with links to reviews.

Crime Scraps discusses The Chalk Circle Man and order of translations of the Vargas books, in a series of posts.

L A Times: Sarah Weinman discusses Fred Vargas's novels and the order in which they have been translated.

Other reviews of The Chalk Circle Man at:

Euro Crime by Fiona Walker

Mysteries in Paradise by Kerrie

The Independent by Jane Jakeman

The Guardian (brief) by Laura Wilson

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett

In the cold of winter in Oslo, Harry Hole is investigating the case of a young drug addict who has apparently committed suicide among the containers in a shipyard. He's undecided about his future with the police force: although he has achieved closure concerning the death of his colleague (described in three previous novels: The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star), the reverberations have left him even more outside the mainstream than before. His lover Rakel has rejected him in favour of a careerist doctor. What's more, his sympathetic boss, Bjarne Moller, has retired and been replaced by a stickler for discipline, Gunnar Hagan. It isn't long before Harry and his new boss are rubbing each other up the wrong way, as Hagan reacts against Harry's intuitive and freewheeling approach (no doubt he would be shocked at Harry's failure ever to have had business cards printed).
Harry is nothing if not a good detective, though, and rapidly unearths the facts behind the young man's death which his younger, slicker colleagues have overlooked. His method of solving the case proves critical to the climax of the next investigation, which takes up the bulk of the book.
An assassin from Vukovar is in Oslo, whose target is a member of the Salvation Army. We are told the life story of the assassin, known as the Little Redeemer for his actions in the terrible wars during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. We also learn a great amount about the workings of the Norwegian branch of the Salvation Army, the raging jealousies and relationship traumas of its younger members, and the shady business dealings concerning the lucrative properties that the Army owns in Oslo. I admired the fact that the author managed to keep me interested in the story of the Little Redeemer, because the 'disaffected assassin' theme is one that crops up quite often in thrillers and tends to create a sense of deja vu.(For an example of an excellent book in this subgenre, I highly recommend The Serbian Dane by Leif Davidson.)
I was less interested in the Salvation Army characters, finding most of them (the men, certainly) either unsympathetic or not well-drawn, or both. I would prefer to have read more about Harry, his personal life and his colleagues. As the plot thickens - and it is a very fast-moving, exciting plot - there are a couple of rather gruesome set-pieces, as well as another tragedy that strikes the Oslo police team. Harry himself presses on with the investigation, finding himself drawn to one of the Army members, which of course distracts him from his pursuit of the Redeemer. As I've found previously with this author, the final disentangling of who hired the assassin and why does really stretch credulity - however, the story of the Redeemer and his circumstances are, perhaps because more simple, rather moving, and I was pleased by Harry's choices in the end-game.
Although you don't need to have read the earlier books in the series to enjoy The Redeemer, I think you'll enjoy it a lot more if you have done. There are nuances running throughout the text, for example Harry's relationship with watches and with his retired ex-boss, that won't make much sense in isolation of the previous novels. I think the Harry Hole books comprise one of the top police-procedural series being written today. Although the books have flaws, they are flaws of ambition - the plots are very clever, and if perhaps they are sometimes a bit too clever, that's better than the opposite. These novels are thoughtful, intelligent, exciting and above all, have a great central character.

'You're moving into a difficult area for theologians, Hole. Are you a Christian?'
'No. I'm a detective. I believe in proof.'

I recommend reading all the books - in the right order. (English readers won't have been able to read the first two chronological novels in the series, which have not yet been translated, but the next one, The Snowman, will be out in English fairly soon, and follows directly on from The Redeemer.)

See yesterday's post for other reviews of the book, and links to further discussion about Nesbo's novels.

Jo Nesbo at Euro Crime: lists the books so far translated into English (excellently, all by Don Bartlett), with links to reviews.

Euro Crime news about forthcoming novels by Nesbo .

Crime Scraps: Is Jo Nesbo Europe's top crime writer?

Some books by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett

I have been having a bit of a Jo Nesbo fest recently, as part of a possibly doomed attempt to read all the shortlisted novels for the Crime Writers' Association international dagger award before the winner is announced in about a week's time. I had read four of the six books when the shortlist was announced, which admittedly helps a lot.

Although I had not read Jo Nesbo's The Redeemer, I won it at Crime Fest, so had a copy to hand. Life is not that simple, though. Nesbo's Harry Hole series is one of many to be translated into English out of chronological order - and in this particular case, it's an egregious crime because the impact of the "trilogy within the series" (The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star) is ruined if you do what I did and read the third one first, followed by the first one. The Redeemer follows on from this "trilogy".

Nothing for it, then, but to buy Nemesis and read that first. And a gripping read it is, too. The character of the police detective, Harry Hole, previously rather patchy and chaotic, began to gel in my mind. I'm sure he looks exactly like Don Bartlett, the excellent translator of the series (though Don has more hair than Harry). Nemesis turns out to be a very exciting book. Harry is mourning the death of a colleague and has his suspicions (actually, convictions) of who is the perpetrator. However, after six months he has failed to find any evidence so has agreed with his boss to go back to his usual duties. His girlfriend Rakel and her son Oleg are in Russia, where Rakel is petitioning the courts for custody of Oleg. While she's away, Harry bumps into Anna, a woman with whom he had a brief fling some years previously. Anna is now an artist of sorts, and has created a strange triptych of paintings surrounding a lighted statue - Nemesis. Harry is soon investigating two crimes, in an intensely plotted and detailed narrative (you need to read every paragraph carefully to spot all the clues). There are some real implausibilities in the plot when the ending is finally revealed - not least the perpetrator of both the crime and the way in which Harry is manipulated in his attempts to solve it - but I didn't mind because by then I was won over to Harry: he's a flawed, angst-ridden, funny alcoholic - inevitably a maverick but one who in the main uses his brain and wit rather than his fists to demonstrate his independence.

I then had to re-read The Devil's Star, of course, as in the two or three years or so since I read it previously I had forgotten most of the details. Again, I thoroughly enjoyed it - due in no large part to the excellent translation (Don Bartlett again) and the strange coincidence of identity (in my mind) between the translator and the character of Harry. Reading this book after the previous two made an extraordinary difference - it was a far more rounded, and moving, experience this time around, as Harry returns to his pursuit of the person who he believes murdered his colleague, while at the same time investigating a series of ritualised killings that seem to be related. The characters and their relationships are one of the main strengths of the book, and the convolutions of the plot are so intriguing that you have to keep reading on, driven to know how it is all going to work out. The solution to the crime is again somewhat weak, but I think more believable than the outcomes to the cases in The Redbreast and Nemesis (the latter is particularly daft).

Finally, I was ready to read The Redeemer - but given the length of this post, I'll return to that another time. If you can't wait until then, you can read reviews of the book at Crime Scraps, The Independent, Nordic Book Blog, Mysteries in Paradise, International Noir Fiction and Reviewing the Evidence. 

Crime Scraps on "Keeping Harry in Order" (a very useful post!)

Michael Walters on the Harry Hole novels.

Crime Scraps: notes from Nesbo.

Don Bartlett's website.

Some reviews, a profile and a bit of mystery twittering

Even in the summer heat and at the peak of Wimbledon, there's lots of entertaining, stimulating  reading on that ol' Internet. Via In Reference to Murder and dBusiness news, I learn that on June 15th, "the Tweet Mystery of Death became Twitter’s first live murder mystery — letting Twitter users follow nine characters to engage with the story and solve a series of crimes." The mystery is running live on Twitter from 15 June to 27 July: see  tweetmystery.com or hashtag #tmod on Twitter.com for more.

There's a highly readable profile of Yrsa Sigurdadottir in PW, by Jonathan Segura, who writes "in addition to international bestselling author, mother of two, grandmother of one and owner of two pugs, Yrsa’s a civil engineer. With the economy in a death spiral, the engineering work has slowed, but, she says, her books are doing better than ever: her most recent Thora novel debuted in December as the #2 hardcover bestseller in Iceland (its initial print run, 10,000, was huge by Icelandic standards), and she’s in the middle of writing the next, on track to deliver this fall and maintain her average of a novel per year. She doesn’t do much press in Iceland—one interview per year, so people “won’t get tired of me”—but is frequently on the road to promote her books abroad. There is much terrain to cover; she’s been translated into nearly 30 languages." See here for my Euro Crime review of Yrsa Sigurdadottir's debut, Last Rituals.

There's a lovely review of Case Histories, Kate Atkinson's first Jackson Brodie novel, by Dorte on DJ's Krimiblog. I must read One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?, both of which have been on my shelves unread for far too long, given how much I enjoyed Case Histories - especially the first two-thirds of the novel.

Very appropriate for the current weather, Norman Price reviews the latest Camilleri to be translated into English, August Heat. Norman's quote says it all:
"How about a few big platters of antipasto di mare with shrimps, prawns, baby octopus, anchovies, sardines, mussels and clams?"
"Sounds good. And for second course?"
"Mullet in onions: served cold a delight."
Served cold, a delight indeed. I'm already looking forward to Montalbano's next outing.

The Brothers Judd have just reviewed The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson, and give the book a C! "Try a Martin Beck instead", they write. I can't argue with trying Martin Beck - but you can do both! Incidentally, if, like me, you are interested in Scandinavian crime fiction and keeping up with the latest news about books, films, translations and so on, Peter at Nordic Bookblog has a very informative and useful post up - with some good news for Jo Nesbo fans.

Kim at Reading Matters writes a spiffing review of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I read and loved all Wyndham's books when I was young (I think I read them all, I may have missed a couple), and it's surprising, though maybe it shouldn't be, how often one comes across posts about his books, and how many people I encounter on the Internet are fellow-enthusiasts for this author's books. Kim writes that The Chrysalids is set in a "post-apocalyptic world a few thousands years in the future. But in this case society has regressed to the point of living a rather primitive frontier-like existence reminiscent of 18th century pastoral America..... But all is not as it seems. This is a society obsessed with fundamental Christianity to the point where anyone not born in the true Image of God is regarded as a blasphemy to be dispatched at birth or condemned to live in the Fringes, a wild untamed area where other rejected "humans" roam." Read the rest of Kim's excellent review here.

Val McDermid's summer reading selections

As part of yesterday's (Saturday) Times books "supplement"* on holiday reading, Val McDermid recommends her choice of crime and thrillers. Crime fiction may at first glance seem an odd choice for relaxing reading, she writes, but it lifts the spirits to "pick up on our favourite characters' latest travails. It can be like catching up with old friends - the ones you always go on holiday with." She also opines that murder mysteries divert the reader from committing domestic violence when cooped up for two weeks with their families, but I think I part company with her on that.

Here's what Val McDermid, a generous blurb writer with a great turn of phrase, recommends. Links are to reviews of the books at Euro Crime, Richard T. Kelly's blog, Picador blog, International Noir Fiction and It's a Crime.

Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill - "a complex story packed into 24 hours. It's a witty, wise and warm read, with rich characterisation and emotional depth".

The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri- "a cold, twisted tale of love and exploitation at its heart, but Montalbano and his team are the perfect counterweight to its darkness."

When Will There be Good News? by Kate Atkinson- thick and fast plotlines, and the coinicidences "explanations waiting to happen".

The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler- "devishly clever and mordantly funny".

The Other Half Lives by Sophie Hannah - "a corkscrew plot that performs a danse macabre around the passions and rivalries of artists".

Woman With Birthmark by Hakan Nesser- an intriguing series in which "Nesser displays more optimism in his social commentary than do most of his fellow Nordic writers."

All the Dead Voices by Declan Hughes - Irish crime that is "energetic, pacy and vivid."

Singing to the Dead by Caro Ramsay - "Well-drawn characters and a great sense of place set this head and shoulders above most of the competition."

Shatter by Michael Robotham - "a haunting read that niggles in the mind for a long time."

All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney - "Tough and uncompromising, beautifully written", it's a debut about a Glasgow journalist, due out in the UK in August.

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey - a reissue of this "bewildering devious tale of how lies devour lives" - which in part inspired Sarah Waters' "brilliant and unsettling" new novel, The Little Stranger.

A final addition from me: you could do a great deal worse than to take Val McDermid's A Darker Domain with you, if you have room in your suitcase.

*No longer a supplement but a few pages clinging on to the end of a "Review" section.

Sunday Salon: inappropriate titles

Interesting weather last night: raining steadily but mildly in Kingston, completely dry and sunny in Wimbledon 3 miles down the road, and torrential rain in north London, causing closure of the North Circular and other roads in many places due to severe flooding, and a several-hours-long power cut over Mill Hill. Today, all is calm and I turn to the topic of books.

Horace Bent of the Bookseller 26 June p. 42 (not online) notes the Sun-generated outrage that The Crimes of Josef Fritzl was selected for a prominent a father's day promotion in W H Smith and Tesco. The book was quickly removed from the shelves despite, writes Horace Bent, "Tesco's initial bold defence of their decision to stock it".

What, he asks, would rank among the most inappropriate book promotions? "The God Delusion on an Easter table? Living with Sexually Transmitted Diseases in a Valentine's promo?" He also suggests Wittgenstein as a 'Summer Read', but that doesn't seem so bad to me - especially on reading some of the holiday recommendations in yesterday's papers. Winter's Bane or Snow Falling on Cedars, now....

What would be your suggestions? Far From the Madding Crowd in a "Glastonbury special"? The Black Path to promote countryside walks? Skin and Bones in a health campaign?

[For more bookselling amusement, follow HoraceBent on Twitter]

A welcome perspective

Thank you, Dave Knadler, for providing some much-needed perspective on MJ. Here's an excerpt from his post, but do read it all - it is one of those posts which sums up all the craziness in a nutshell.

"When a major celebrity dies, it's bigger than World War II, at least for a day or two. The stars get realigned -- literally, because there's one less of them, and figuratively, because big stories have this way of becoming small when something bigger comes down the line. Who cares about Sanford any more? Who cares about Iran? We are talking Michael Jackson here, who has Touched Us All in ways we will still be discovering years from now. Personally, the coverage I've found most poignant is this piece about the time Michael Jackson inadvertantly dropped his sequined glove in the toilet."

See also Dave's RIP for a TV Angel.

The Onion: King of Pop Dead at 12; Michael Jackson dead: what do you think?; and [warning] another story that is a bit tasteless.

And for something completely different and much funnier than the previous Onion stories: Copy Editor's Revenge Takes Form of Unhyphenated Word.

Ann Pettifor on economic crisis and recovery

I'm too exhausted to post anything sensible tonight. Last night I went to a fascinating event organised by the UK resource centre for women in science, technology and engineering, on the recession. "The recession is having a major impact on science, engineering, technology and the built environment (SET) in the UK. Applications to study SET subjects are rising, while employment opportunities have diminished. Some sectors are harder-hit than others. Women in SET, alongside men, are facing reductions in working time, redundancy and unemployment."

There were several excellent speakers at the event, which was at the Institute of Physics, but I would like to highlight a speaker who is particularly inspiring: Ann Pettifor. From her Wikipedia entry: "In 2003 she correctly predicted the bursting of the credit bubble ("The Credit Crunch") in a book she edited for the new economics foundation The Real World Economic Outlook (Palgrave, 2003). You can find her blog about the crisis at Debtonation.org. In 2006 Palgrave Macmillan published her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave, 2006). She is a co-author of the Green New Deal, published by the new economics foundation in July 2008 - a set of policies to deal with threats posed by the Credit Crunch, Peak Oil and Climate Change."

Ann is an excellent speaker and inspiring (as well as friendly) person. She explained the economic crisis in terms that I (and the rest of the audience) could understand, suggested practical solutions, and explained how all the economists (each with two PhDs from Harvard) had not only not seen the crisis coming, but who have failed to realise the paradigm shift that has occurred and therefore have no idea what to do now. Whereas she says: "The best way out of the economic crisis is to cut interest rates, create jobs and raise incomes." After hearing Ann speak, I actually felt quite cheerful on the subject of the global economy for the first time in ages.

Brief biography of Ann Pettifor.

Ann Pettifor at the Huffington Post.

End of the line for science journalism?

Although I say it myself, there are some really stimulating, readable and fascinating articles in Nature this week (25 June issue) about science, journalism and communication with the lay public. Most of this post is taken from a Nature Network forum post: you're welcome to join in the discussion there.

Many researchers see science journalists as a public-relations service or as an ally in spreading the news about their work, asserts a Nature Editorial this week (459, 1033; 2009 – free to read online). The Editorial points out that there is a deeper value of journalism: to cast a fair but sceptical eye over everything in the public sphere — science included. This kind of scrutiny is easy for researchers to applaud when a news report questions dodgy statistics or dubious claims about uncertainties in evolution. It is not so easy when the story takes a critical look at animal-research practices, overblown claims about climate change or scientists’ conflicts of interest. But such examinations are to the benefit of society, which needs to see science scrutinized as well as regurgitated, and journalists are an essential part of that process.
This week’s Nature special issue, of which the Editorial is a part, shines a spotlight on the profession in changing, troubled times, and is published to mark the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists from 30 June to 2 July 2009 in London.
Scientists can do little to stem the current bloodletting, in which readers and advertisers are deserting publications that are downsizing or folding at fast pace. But, argues the Editorial, they can make worthwhile attempts to ensure that questioning and informed science journalism persists in whatever new forms might emerge from the carnage. If the future of the media truly is a dire landscape of top-100 lists, shouting heads and minimal attention span, then such efforts might at least defer the grim end. A good start would be to have a look at the advice for academics speaking to journalists provided by Brad Delong and Susan Rasky. And from the other side of the coin, the Washington Post‘s national environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin and its executive editor Marcus Brauchli discuss the future of science coverage in their newspaper in a Nature Books&Arts Q&A.
But do newspapers even matter? Blogs and microblogging services like Twitter are opening up conferences to those not actually there – how is this direct to web exposure affecting science journalism, and indeed scientists themselves and their options for peer-review and publication of their research? A range of angles on these questions are covered in a Nature News feature, including the story of a recent ’blogostorm’ about a Cold Spring Harbor meeting in which scientists seemed free to report what journalists could not.
In other articles in this week’s Nature, Toby Murcott in Toppling the priesthood argues that the process of science needs to be opened up to journalists; Boyce Rensberger (Too close for comfort) tracks the progression of scientific correspondent from cheerleader to watchdog; and Nadia El-Awady in The Arab boom suggests much room for improvement in local journalism in Arab countries. The bottom line? To what extent should scientists help — or care?
(All the Nature articles mentioned and linked here are part of the science journalism special in the issue of 25 June 2009. The three Essays and the Books&Arts article are free to read online for 2 weeks from the publication date.)

The Dolphin Man comes to an end

Don't read this blog post! It is the ending of The Dolphin Man, a publishing experiment.

If you are intrigued, start here - this is a blog you have to read backwards, starting in November last year and finishing just the other day. How it all began...

"For the few who knew I’d left, I have arrived.
Who am i?
Some people call me the dolphin man. That is all you need to know for now.
Where am I?
That is a secret: a Top Secret.
Why am I here?
I am a researcher (I dislike the word ‘scientist’) and I work with dolphins. I investigate the way dolphins communicate with each other and other pods of dolphins that may be swimming many miles away across the ocean.
Most scientists doubt that this possible that this is possible over the scale – hundreds of miles – that I’m interested in. These are the same scientists that say that dolphins don’t have a true language as such, just some fancy one-way signalling, as opposed to true two-way communication.
I will spend the next three to five years here and I will prove the sceptics wrong.
In the meantime, there’s just me, and this blog. I have a laptop with satellite broadband Internet. It would be a bit of a waste to sit here hiding from the world."
Enjoy! 

Individuality in the online age

General interest is out, niche is in - according to an article in The Atlantic on why the Economist is thriving while Time and Newsweek fade. "The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009." Michael Hirschorn describes how the Economist (by accident or design) more or less ignored the online revolution and the desperate urge to be "relevant" on the web, and has hence remained a valuable print product  - valuable that is to readers and to the owners, an enviable double-whammy for publications these days. The Economist is not innovative or intellectual, according to Hirschorn: "The “leaders,” or main articles, tend to “urge” politicians to solve complex problems, as if the key to, say, reconstituting the global banking system were but a simple act of cogitation away. A typical leader, from January, on the ongoing Gaza violence was an erudite, deeply historical write-around on Arab-Israeli violence that ended up arriving at the same conclusion everyone else arrived at long ago: Israel must give up land for peace. The science-and-technology pages tend toward Gladwell-lite popularizations of academic papers from British universities." However, the magazine cleverly distils the world into a compact survey every week - so you really can keep up with what is going on everywhere. (The other publication that is succeeding for similar reasons is The Week, an addictive digest of everything but without any orginal content.) "Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices."

Along similar lines, here's a video of Christopher R.Weingarten talking about music criticism and the web at the "140 characters" conference in New York a few days ago. It's an entertaining rant, making the point that using Twitter (etc) to find information relevant to you is the problem, not a solution, because all you find is what you already know. He writes music reviews on Twitter, and says he makes an effort to make every one poetic and infomative. His line is: don't just say "I like/hate this" and make it about you, in common with everyone else on Twitter, but be a critic, let people know the "why and the how" - there is enough room in 140 characters to elaborate and have good writing, and that way you might actually discover something new rather than following the bland majority. Those of us who read and review books know this already (the principle, rather than the bit about the 140 characters!), but I think it might be news to a few.

Stieg Larsson in the Library Journal

Via Dave Lull, Wilda Williams of the Library Journal hosts a Q&A with Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Knopf and Paul Bogaards, the publisher's executive director of publicity, about Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. From the article:

SM: I have to say that these books just keep getting better. I think Book 2 is better than Book 1, and Book 3 is better than Book 2. It's extraordinary that Larsson was able to outdo himself with each successive work.

Prior to its U.S. publication, there had been a great deal of online buzz about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. So in a way, Knopf  had a ready-made audience before the book’s debut. What role did your marketing efforts help in the novel's success? And how did libraries contribute to its commercial success?

PB: It’s true that we worked very hard to seed the book with the online community, and with influentials in the mystery blogger community. We sent out advance reading copies (ARCs) and allowed some early publicity to take place. This is an international community of fans you’re talking about, and so even before the books had been translated to English, the online community was buzzing. Word got out.

There is more in the article about the trilogy's impact and about the author himself. The same issue of Library Journal features a brief review of The Girl Who Played with Fire, which is out in the US in August. Readers in the UK can look forward to reading the final novel in the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, in October.

My review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

My review of The Girl Who Played with Fire

Round-up post on Petrona: Stieg Larsson flies to new heights

Articles about Stieg Larsson and his books on crime-fiction journeys.

What happened this weekend

I had no idea that the Fighting Nuns of Harrogate, led by the terrifying Sister Mary Agnes, had not only pursued Meg Gardiner to this year's CrimeFest (thank heavens I was quietly reading in my room and missed being attacked by a flying cocktail), but are planning a raid on London, necessitating Meg to join forces with Jeff Abbott. The gang met this weekend, planning their strategy for squashed-strawberry chucking (yes, it's Wimbeldon next week) and seeing off the Rottweillers by knitting them little pink bootees, causing them to slink away in embarrassment. "Sock" it to them, Meg and Jeff! It is anyone's guess what havoc Sister Mary Agnes will wreak when she discovers that Jo Beckett has been optioned for TV and that The Memory Collector was at number 3 on the teen bestselling charts on Amazon earlier this week. Whatever she does, I am sure it will be scary.

David Montgomery reviews Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow in the Chicago Sun-Times, headline; "Novel rips sad state of US journalism". His review starts: "There's something so comforting about knowing you're in the hands of a master when you pick up a new book. Certain writers are just so good, so dependable that you know when you buy their latest novel, you're in for a treat. George Pelecanos is one of those authors, as are Joseph Finder, Laura Lippman and Robert Ferrigno. But Michael Connelly is perhaps the best example.
Through 21 novels, Connelly has produced one of the most impressive bodies of work in crime fiction, both an in-depth study of the darker side of human nature and an ongoing biography of the city of Los Angeles, told through the guise of sharply plotted, endlessly entertaining mystery novels." I couldn't agree more. [Taking a raincheck on the other examples, as I haven't read many (or in one case, any) books by these authors.]

At Nature we call them research highlights, at DJ's Krimiblog they are called just "highlights" - for a novel in six parts. The first half is here. Can't wait for the second.

There's a superb post here by Kerrie, who has listed 17 crime-fiction awards and the 100-or so books that have been nominated for their current rounds, together with links to the titles she has read and reviewed. I've read 22 of the books on the list - about one-quarter.  

More from To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu

Bogey man

“What kind of man is Harjunpää?” Kontio asked out of the blue.
“Just…part of the furniture, really.”
“Does he drink?”
“I’ve seen him have one or two in the sauna, but he’s never passed out or anything like that. I did hear that once he was apparently so drunk that Mäki managed to slip a pair of Ulla’s knickers into his pockets, and as he reached for his wallet on the train, they fell out and he was…..”
“I mean – if someone claimed he’d been on night shift and had one or two to drink, would anyone believe it?”
“Absolutely not.”

---

His home was his castle – not one other police officer had even set foot inside it. Perhaps it would have been more correct to call it his warehouse: he had sold off some of his furniture and replaced it with shelves reaching up to the ceiling. He even had three fridges, and each of them was full. He kept a meticulous log of everything he acquired, though even without this he would have been ale to list that he had seventy-nine bottles of whisky, sixty-five bottles of Cognac and exactly forty bottles of gin; then there were the cured sausages and rounds of cheese, stacks of preserves and cans of beer, washing powders and toothpastes. It might have been easier to list the things that were not in his flat – babies’ nappies were missing from the collection.
All this was the result of years of hard work and saving. He felt this same joy almost every day upon coming home. More than anything, it made him feel that life hadn’t been wasted after all, and now he was untouchable. And the feeling became stronger every time he took out his bankbooks and looked up his balance, and no one who knew him would have believed that he was the happy owner of a fortune just shy of six-hundred-thousand marks.
Kontio walked up to the Lada, put the bags in the rear foot space so that Hämäläinen couldn’t see them properly, though Hämäläinen had learned years ago not to snoop, then he sat down in the passenger seat and sighed heavily as though he’d just brought difficult negotiations to an end.
“It’s a good job you don’t smoke either”, said Kontio once they were back on the road. “There’s nothing worse than getting into a car full of smoke. But let’s go via Paloheinä on our way back to the department. I’ve got to stop in at the house for a moment.”
“OK.”
“So what did Harjunpää do when the knickers fell out of his pocket?”
“He was so embarrassed he got off at the next stop.”
“I see”, said Kontio, not in passing, but weightily, as though something had just fallen into place.

From To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu.
Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston.
First published in 1993; first published in English in 2008.

From: To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu

Pet Shop

Harjunpää sat  on the steps at the back of the house with the night around him and the rabbit in his arms. He gently scratched Viljami’s neck. The rabbit’s jaws munched, stopped every now and then, then started munching again, and each time the rabbit finished eating its dandelion leaf Harjunpää quietly apologised and fetched him a fresh one growing by the wall.
On the horizon he could see that morning was almost upon them; the darkness was fractionally bluer. It was almost four o’clock. He’d woken up around three and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. Instead he sat there breathing in the fragrant night; he would have liked to think about the pet shop, but this time he found he couldn’t.
It was just a thought he’d had, a daydream that would have involved buying a slightly older house somewhere further away. There was a suitable house for sale in Veklahti and it even had a garage big enough; he’d already been to look at it. Then the whole family could start raising rabbits and guinea pigs and mice and everything in between, then could grow their own hay too, then they’d rent a little place in the centre of Kirkkonummi and open a shop that Elisa could run. There wasn’t a single pet shop in Kirkkonummi, but there were plenty of children and teenagers.
And somewhere deeper down another thought began to crystallise: if the business were successful he could do the same as Onerva. But he couldn’t mention it out loud: he knew all about unemployment, bankruptcy and the recession, and those who didn’t understand that all this was just a game knew to their cost far more than he did. It was as though the recession had claimed people’s very idea of happiness, too.

From To steal her love, by Matti Joensuu.
Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston.
First published in 1993; first published in English in 2008.

Twittering the Apollo 11 Moon mission, 40 years on

Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened -- 40 years on. Follow them at ApolloPlus40 ; location, the Moon.

 
Via twitpic.

Two hours ago: #Apollo 11 passes 9-hr flight readiness review: 16 July launch date approved.

Robert left a comment to my "puzzled of Twitter" post the other day recommending a service called Thwirl, which I've duly downloaded. It seems to do for Twitter what the Friend Feed notifier does for Friend Feed and other similar pop-up notifiers do for their services (eg the dreaded email notifier which I have turned off). This pop-up route is apparently "the" way to use Twitter, not RSS (I have probably been told this before by other helpful people but only just got round to focusing on this pressing issue). Once Thwirl was installed (very easy, but requires Adobe AIR, as does the Friend Feed notifier) I immediately found out that the Apollo 11 programme had started (40 years on) so I can tell you about it - and I have also found, via Andreas (whose Twitter name is, I think, @Trabesinger - follow him if you want to know lots of things about physics and probably motor racing - he is very nice), 18 beautiful rainbows from around the world. I would certainly have missed seeing those without this Thwirly thing, so I'm grateful for that.

By the way, Thwirl also lets you include other services, including Friend Feed - I think I might find that level of integration just too confusing, though, because the only people who are allowed to appear on my FF notifier are the crime-fiction room members - so if I see a FF pop-up I know it is crime-fiction related (or OT!). And I imagine that everyone else I know on Friend Feed is also on Twitter so they will all be Thwirled, now.

While I've been writing this post, the Apollo 11 programme staff have been busy, popping up regularly with updates about their preparations for launch. It's so exciting, reminding me vividly of the tension, massive public interest, and sense of awe at the sheer scale of the ambition back in the "olden days". Then, I cut out pictures and articles from the Times's coverage (they ran various special supplements) and stuck them up on my bedroom wall. I had to visit a friend's house to watch the news on the day it happened because we didn't have a TV -- waiting to see the film of the landing on that day was unbearable! How times have changed in terms of instant, constant, pictorial news reporting. (And my bedroom wall isn't the same either, believe it or not - but although this year it features a calendar of scenes of Yosemite national park, next year I just might go for planets and satellites.)

TV series, armed birds, unpresents, writing and not blogging

A few items from the web that caught my eye, in case you missed them.

A hit in the US, the psychotherapy drama has quality acting from Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest and a great script. So why are UK networks afraid to commit to the couch? Clare Birchall examines the reasons why The Treatment won't be appearing in UK TV screens on The Guardian TV and Radio blog. Pity, as it sounds a good show. Maybe it will eventually be available on DVD. There's a comment to the post that made me laugh, by someone who could try reading a book or getting out more: "As usual, UK networks underestimate the audience's desire for intelligent, quality drama. We watch stuff like Holby City or Casualty because that's mostly what's on in the evening, but it doesn't mean we love it."

If you like Improbable Research, you'll know what to expect if you check out these armed bird photos (not babes with guns). I'm nost sure if this is more silliness or welcome sanity: Scott Adams's negative Christmas (or birthday): "rather than giving gifts, you can force a family member or friend to discard one item that he or she already owns. The selected item might be a hideous shirt that you consider an abomination, or that pair of bedroom slippers that are an insult to all footwear. The idea is that the unrecipient should be better off without the item you ungift."

As is well-known, more than 90 per cent of blogs last for less than three months, many of them only ever featuring one post - a bit like the diaries I started on 1 January when a child. The New York Times recently ran a feature on this statistic, which I idly read thinking it might contain some new insight on this old (internet timescale) chestnut. It didn't - people stop blogging because nobody reads their blogs, because they don't make any money at it, because their readers get too intrusive, because they get no comments, or for other predictable reasons. You might like to read one or two of the case-histories, though, which are mildly amusing, particularly the poor mystery author who was surprised to discover that nobody read her rants against the Bush administration.

Finally, a couple of useful posts for writers. Random Jottings reviews A Seriously Useful Author's Guide to Marketing and Publicising books by Mary Cavanaugh, which sounds pretty good, in particular this excerpt provided by Elaine (the reviewer): "A bookblogger is an independent person who takes it upon themselves, for no financial reward whatsoever, to post online articles about books they have currently read, mostly on a daily basis......their reading output is amazing.....as well as being devoted and fanatical readers, they also review books. The biggest breaks of my literary career were made by Book Bloggers and without them I would have got very meagre coverage in any sphere". Hear hear! And Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works provides a very useful round-up of writers' forums, with a great set of comments providing feedback about these sites. Best comment (selected by Jane): "the major benefit in using writers' workshops is in the critiques you write on other people's work, not in the ones you receive.".

 

Spy master Eric Ambler in The Times archive

In The Times's recentish relaunch, their worst decision in the eyes of me was to lose their standalone Saturday Books supplement (book reviews now fight for a few pages in a wider scale Review section), but by far worse in the eyes of the younger generation was the mutation of the magazine "The Knowledge" into an A5 (small notebook size) rag called "The Playlist", into which the week's listings are crammed.
There is one good feature of this minor appendage, however, which is the inside back cover, "Archive: a curio from the vaults of The Times". The Times archive, going back 200 years, is subscription-only, so it is lovely to see a daily photo from days gone by, and the longer piece in the weekly edition. Last Saturday's was an appreciation of Eric Ambler from 1985, by then-Times writer James Fenton. Fenton first got to know Ambler in Saigon, where the "street urchins" sold books. They gave customers a day or two to read their most valuable stock, then wanted it back. "An Ambler was, to them, a unit of currency. There was no question of it gathering dust on a shelf. It was to be sold, read, given back, sold again, read again, given back again. That's what it was for."
James Fenton later met "Mr Ambler" (such politeness was house style in 1985), who told the journalist that at the time he took up thriller-writing he was working in advertising. He was given a promotion - the ExLax (a chocolate laxative) account. He decided instead to revamp the image of the thriller, which at the time (the 1930s) was a despised form compared with the "ingeneous and highbrow authors at work on the detective story". Mr Ambler did not like the villains in thrillers: "Power crazed or coldly sane master-criminals, or old-fashioned professional devils. I no longer believed a word of them. Nor did I believe in their passions for evil and plots against civilisation. As for their world conspiracies, they appeared to me no more substantial than toy balloons, over-inflated and squeaky to the touch."
Eric Ambler's five classic pre-war thrillers, Uncommon Danger, Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear, established his reputation, according to Fenton, still (in 1985) making people sit up when they come across one. And, it seems, in 2009.

Books and writers bibliography of Eric Ambler.

Euro Crime on Penguin reissue of Eric Ambler classics.

Eric Ambler at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

Eric Ambler at Wikipedia.

Sunday Salon: Body Count by P. D. Martin

It is all too rare that we in the UK can read some of the great Australian crime fiction currently being published. I write “great” because of all the wonderful reviews I read on the Australian (mainly) blogs devoted to the subject. I've loved Peter Temple (Jack Irish and more) and Adrian Hyland (Diamond Dove), for example, and have enjoyed the first two by Michael Robotham – who although Australian sets his books in the UK. Although some more authors are being published over here and/or are available on Amazon, there are many that aren’t – see the Crime Down Under Australian crime fiction database and this reading group for plenty of examples.
One author who is regularly recommended by crime-fiction bloggers and other reviewers is P. D. Martin, so I was very pleased to see a copy of her debut, Body Count (publisher, Mira), in my last visit to Murder One, and snapped it up.
Review:
Sophie Anderson is an Australian, working for the FBI as a profiler in their famous Quantico offices. As the book opens, she takes part in a joint operation with the Washington, DC, police to capture a serial killer, an exciting few chapters that provide a (seemingly) authentic view of an FBI operation in detail, and allow us to become acquainted with the engaging Sophie and her colleagues.
We also learn, however, that when she was a young child, Sophie’s brother John was abducted. Not only did the infant Sophie have a premonition of this horrifying event, but in a nightmare she experiences the kidnapping and subsequent events from the perpetrator’s perspective, feeling his sense of enjoyment. Determined to dedicate her life to helping victims of criminals, twenty-five years later she is an admired and respected profiler. Of course, she and the reader know that the reason for Sophie’s ability to accurately profile offenders is because of this psychic ability.
Unfortunately, clichés of the genre being what they are, the plot of the book is apparent very early on. Sophie has a best friend among her colleagues, Samantha (aka Sam). The team is overworked because resources have been diverted to combating terrorism in the wake of 9/11, so the case of the “Washington slasher” is passed to Sam and Sophie to profile. Inevitably, via Sophie’s nightmares, the reader has to share her re-enactment of the horrible ways in which this person tortures and kills. Equally inevitably, Sam and Sophie (both attractive, fit young women, of course) become targets of the killer as they are similar in several ways to the earlier victims. For me, this aspect of the book is deeply unpleasant, as the basis for the suspense is not only the fact that women are being tortured and raped, but that it is probable that one of the two friends is going to suffer this fate, and that we are going to have to experience these events through the mind of the other one. I really do not find this entertaining in any sense: to the contrary.
This having been said, the book does not fall into the category of “torture porn” that has made me fail to complete, or not even start, other books on these topics. The tale is told briskly and without dwelling too much on the gory details – but they are horrible.
It is obvious very quickly, and well before anyone in the FBI taskforce cottons on, that the villain is going to be someone working on their team. In another weakness, I knew the identity of the villain on the first appearance of this character – I am not sure why I clicked straight away, but I did - so for me there was no suspense in the eventual revelation of which character this was and how they had evaded suspicion.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to be unduly negative about the book. Its strongest aspects are in the details of the investigation – how the FBI team teases out hard clues from a profile and follows them all up in order to narrow down the options to identify a chief suspect. The story is told at a fast pace in an easy style, and the protagonist is an attractive character, although her mystic intuition is far stronger than her ability to add two and two together in the here-and-now, and she’s a bit too susceptible to a handsome guy. Although at the end of the day the subject-matter was not to my taste, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone looking for an exciting thriller to take on holiday or to pass away a couple of hours, if you don’t mind the subject matter described here. The novel easily stands up there with Karin Slaughter and earlier (i.e. good) books by Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman. And it’s better than many others in this rather crowded subgenre.

P. D. Martin bibliography (official author website).

Body Count reviewed at Shots.

Body Count reviewed by The Age newspaper.

Posts about P. D. Martin at Mysteries in Paradise.

Review of the next in the Sophie Anderson series, The Murderers' Club, at Reactions to Reading.

Nick Hornby on the English 'can't do' spirit

Nick Hornby is interviewed in the Bookseller this week (12 June) by Graeme Neill. Hornby’s latest novel, Juliet, Naked, is out soon in the UK. In the novel, a famous US singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe, wrote one of the great break-up albums of the 1980s, Juliet, before disappearing. Duncan is an obsessive fan of the singer, and discovers an acoustic version of the album (hence Juliet, Naked). Although he’s initially delighted, he discovers that his girlfriend, Annie, has already heard the “naked” version, hates it, and has written a negative review of it. Cue strain on the relationship between Duncan and Annie. So far, so predictable, but soon Annie is contacted via email by the reclusive Crowe, who has read her review, and agrees with it, hence starting a friendship. Intriguing.
Hornby makes some astute comments in the interview. His new book, he says, epitomises the English “can’t do” spirit. “It’s a sad book because there’s a sense of people who have not achieved what they wanted to achieve with their lives.” Hornby cites his hero Arsene Wenger, Arsenal manager (the club Hornby is famous for miserably yet obsessively supporting – see Fever Pitch) and  “great philosopher”, who apparently said on becoming 50 that he realised he was not going to live the life that he wanted to.
Hornby also comments on E-readers. He doesn’t hold out much hope for them (unlike the iPod, to which he’s devoted), not on emotional grounds but because “people don’t read enough. Their consumption is during summer holidays and they like to take a couple of paperbacks away with them. That’s a three-for-two offer. They read maybe seven or eight books per year. You don’t need one of those machines to do that.”
Too true. On similar, refreshingly pragmatic grounds, he has a go at the “lit snobs”, otherwise known as the “literati”. “I completely understand people’s reluctance to pick up a literary novel that is not going to entertain them in the 30 minutes they have before they go to sleep at night. I think the world of books forgets that because so many of us do our reading during the day. That’s a luxury so many people forget.” Hornby has written about these themes of accessibility on his blog, saying that writers who challenge their readers without entertaining them sometimes forget that readers are people with “jobs and worries and dependents, people who are tired after a hard working day or week.”
Nick Hornby is said to have “crossed genders” in terms of his readership. For me, this is true. His first two books, Fever Pitch (soccer) and High Fidelity (music), were read mainly by men. I didn’t read them but, on a recommendation, Prof Petrona did, and enjoyed them. Then came About a Boy, How to be Good and (skipping 31 Songs, not to the taste either of me or Prof P) Falling Down, all of which are said to appeal more to women:  I’ve read and enjoyed them (some more than others). About a Boy prompted me to go back and read the first two, which really are pretty funny in their observations of a certain type and era of British male. Hornby has recently written a couple of books for children, which I haven’t read. I do, however, recommend his (occasional) blog.

Nick Hornby's website (Penguin books). Dig around for all kinds of fascinating articles, for example the time the author took Mr Darcy (a.k.a. Colin Firth, actor in Fever Pitch as well as Pride and Prejudice and, in a perfect nestedly referential bit of casting, Bridget Jones's Diary) to see Arsenal play.

Nick Hornby's books (listing, links to reviews and extracts).

 

I don't understand Twitter

So, a genuine question about Twitter and why I fundamentally don't get it. When something like the below (actually, the below) pops up in your RSS reader, what do you click on? I am "following" @CrimeFiction. I see the below, I click on #FF Pt. 2 and get a load of rubbish - i.e. nothing except a picture of a smiling woman. No message, on any topic. Is this TwitterSpam? If so, what's in it for the spammer? I click on @CrimeFiction in this chain and just see the last thing he/she did (31 May). What has happened that is new or interesting about crime fiction? What has even happened at all? I just don't get it. Unless the answer is that Twitter is just on some kind of global autopilot and therefore irrelevant and/or annoying. I would appreciate anyone's expertise on this question - what's the point, if what I "follow" results in this?

#FF Pt. 2 @DakotaCassidy @NicolePeeler @preyforhuntress @michelebardsley @ScifiWatch @CrimeFiction

from crimefiction at Twitter by JeannieHolmes (Jeannie Holmes)

#FF Pt. 2 @DakotaCassidy @NicolePeeler @preyforhuntress @michelebardsley @ScifiWatch @CrimeFiction

#FF Pt. 2 @DakotaCassidy @NicolePeeler @preyforhuntress @michelebardsley @ScifiWatch @CrimeFiction

Google wave, squared and translation tool-kit

Today there was one of those articles in The Times 2 (the features bit of the paper) by James Harkin about how Google used to be supreme but might not be any more due to Twitter, Bing and Ask. (How many of these have I read in the past few years?) As well as the usual failure of these articles to make the point that there are right ways and not so good ways to perform searches, it is curiously out of date because it fails to mention Google Wave, the company's next big evolutionary shift, if all the buzz is to be believed. Google Wave will allow you to aggregate all your online activity in real time, which sounds boring but isn't. As David Brown puts it, it is like "a conglomeration of all your favourite web applications, but on steroids". David's post provides Google's demonstration video and a few ways in which the Wave will help authors, editors and publishers. An even better article, I'm told, also including the demonstration video and some screen shots, is the one by Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times. It's well worth reading, as it is by someone who has, apparently, had a play with it and is a longstanding writer and observer of this scene.  And, as the author writes: "Sophistication isn’t about a million beeping lights and the audible grinding of thick gears. It’s a system that Simply Works, and which makes you wonder just how the Humanity managed to get along for so many years without it." If Google Wave fulfils a fraction of its promise, it puts the The Times piece somewhat in the shade. Nevertheless, the article does have a funny sidebar by Hugo Rifkind, so that's something.

Google have been busy making announcements in the past week or two. You can't play with Google Wave yet but you can try out Google Squared, which collects facts from the web for you and organises them for you, a bit like a spreadsheet. There is admiration from an independent, expert source, O'Reilly Radar, where you can read how James Turner got on looking at science-fiction conventions and other parameters. He calls it "an exponential improvement in search". When I've got some time, I might try it out on crime fiction.

Finally for this Google round-up, the company (perhaps recognising the many hilarities of its automatic translator) has launched a translator tool-kit, which it calls "a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation." If you want to know more, there's a demonstration video at the link provided. Just don't think of using it for a novel.

Nick Oldham's write crime course

A long time ago
a million years BC
the best things in life
were absolutely free.

So goes the song "Pennies from Heaven", though this being the Internet, someone will probably contradict me. It's on my old tape of the original music on which the Dennis Potter TV series was based, anyway, which I played incessantly on my cassette recorder at the time. Well it wasn't a million years BC but it feels like it, when I discovered via my book club (a pre-Internet source of new-to-me authors) Nick Oldham, and an excellent, gripping trilogy Nightmare, One Dead Witness and The Last Big Job. I didn't know anything about genres in those innocent days of yore, but nowadays I'd call them Blackburn noir - tight police-procedurals with a whopping punch at the end of the last one that I read.

I then lost touch with Nick Oldham's books, so was delighted when at the recent Crime Fest meeting in Bristol when his name caught my eye on a flyer on the "swaps" table (where I was a regular visitor, donating a total of about 30 books, some bought with me and some acquired at the meeting. A bit of a digression but despite my best intentions and largely due to Karen of Euro Crime, I carried back almost as many and had to forego my life-long feminist principles and ask for a lift home from the station as my back had given up by the time I had hoisted them from Bristol across London underground to the far reaches of zone 6.)

Returning to the point: Mr Oldham's flyer says that he is an "established crime writer with 12 published crime novels to his credit", with a thirteenth in progress. Interesting, I think, knowing only of the above three titles and realising then that "trilogy" was not the correct noun. Nick Oldham took early retirement from the police force and "dedicated himself to writing about what he knows best - police work". He is running a writing course on 18-20 September 2009 at the Hayes Conference Centre in Derbyshire, UK. It is suitable for all levels, according to the flyer, including sessions on developing your plot, creating characters, realistic descriptions and setting the scene with up-to-date procedures. Writing crime fiction is not my scene, as I prefer to read it, but if you are interested in such a course, I am sure this would be an excellent choice.

Nick Oldham's website, including bibliography, diary and links to further details of the course.

Euro Crime's list of Nick Oldham's novels, in date order.

Nick Oldham at Tangled Web.

The Nothing Job is Nick Oldham's latest book, featuring DCI Henry Christie, published in May 2009.

And as a PS, back to Crime Fest - via Crime Fiction Reader, Zoe Sharp has now posted her photographs of the meeting.

Indridason et al.: books for September in the UK

This is a bit of a laundry list post, I'm afraid, but I don't feel creative enough to write anything more brain-engaging tonight. The "big sellers" predicted for September by the Bookseller (5 June issue, p 29) include Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam, £18.99 but half that on Amazon, probably in common with all these "big sellers"), James Patterson's Alex Cross's Trial (Century, £18.99), The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith (Little, Brown, £17.99), an Isabel Dalhousie novel, and Dick and Felix Francis's Even Money (Michael Joseph, £18.99). There are some interesting general fiction books also: Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (Viking, £18.99); A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £18.99); and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, £18.99), which includes some of the same characters from Oryx and Crake although it is not strictly a sequel. I've read a couple of features about Atwood's new novel and I am half-tempted, though I could not honestly say I have enjoyed any of the four or five of her books I've read - including Oryx and Crake, which was well-written but had an utterly predictable plot and a very annoying "who cares about the reader" ending. Non-fiction-wise, you might be intrigued by Andy MacNab's Spoken from the Front (Bantam, £20), a collection of "true tales from the battlefields of Afghanistan...to convey all of the courage and hardship of British servicemen and the unique difficulties posed by the conflict". Watch out for a linked TV series.

Of much more relevance to the main theme of this blog are the regular crime fiction titles due out. Top of my list is Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill, £11.99 trade PB) - can't wait for that one! There's a Val McDermid, Fever of the Bone, her first with her new publisher Little, Brown (£18.99), and a Tony Hill series novel. Quercus has several titles due out: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr, a new Bernie Gunther novel (£17.99), Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass (£12.99), and a reissue of David Pearce's 1974 and 1977 (£12.99 each), in "gorgeous" hardback editions. Peter [son of Elmore] Leonard's second novel, Trust Me, is published by Faber (£12.99, trade PB) and Brian Freeman's thriller The Burying Place (Headline, £12.99) sounds good. A couple of very experienced, prolific authors also have titles due out in September: Lynda La Plante's latest has a publisher, Simon&Schuster, a price, £18.99, but no title (unless it's Untitled ;-) ); and John Sandford (same publisher, £12.99 for a trade PB) offers Rough Country, a Virgil Flowers novel (the character, a homicide detective,  is a protege of Sandford's usual hero, Lucas Davenport). I've heard good things about Gerald Seymour's The Collaborator (Hodder, £16.99), and Macmillan is serving up Chelsea Cain's fourth novel, Evil at Heart (£12.99). The featured crime debut for September is Walking in Pimlico by Ann Featherstone (John Murray, £14.99), a murder mystery set in the world of Victorian music hall.

Andrea Camilleri competition at Pan Macmillan

To celebrate the release of Andrea Camilleri's new crime novel, August Heat, Pan Macmillan are running a competition to win a set of "terrific Euro crime books" as they enthusiastically call them. The publisher is giving away two sets of books including August Heat, Dante's Numbers by David Hewson, Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser and Bleed a River Deep by Brian McGilloway (UK addresses only, I'm afraid). The competition is open until the end of June, and having had a look at the questions, I can safely say that they are not as fiendish as those of a certain retired health-care professional, who also points out a similarity between Camilleri and another featured author here, Nesser. So do give the competition a try - I can highly recommend the two books on the list I have read, August Heat and Bleed a River Deep, and would be thrilled if I could enter (which I can't as I work for a different part of the same company) so I could have a chance of winning Woman with Birthmark by the admirable Hakan Nesser.

August Heat has just been reviewed by Glenn Harper at one of my very favourite blogs, International Noir Fiction. From Glenn's review: The comedy, much less the surprises in the investigation, would be spoiled if I say much at all about the plot, so I will add only that Camilleri proves once again that he is the deserving heir to Leonardo Sciascia's terse, evocative portrayals of life in Mafia-ridden Sicily, and Camilleri adds to that deep note a light tone and comic touch that are decidedly his own.

Elaine of the lovely blog Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover has also written an appreciation of Camilleri and review of August Heat, which she calls "one of the best Montalbano books yet".

My own review of the book, read in a pleasant couple of hours last Sunday afternoon while others were revising for their history exams, etc, is in draft and will be submitted to Euro Crime in due course. Camilleri is, to put it mildly, a bit of a favourite of the Euro Crime reviewers: a complete list of his books with links to reviews of them can be found here.

 

Inspector Singh Investigates: A most peculiar Malaysian murder

Inspector Singh Investigates: A most peculiar Malaysian murder

By Shamini Flint

Piatkus, PB original, £6.99, May 2009.

Inspector Singh is neither young nor slim. Based in Singapore, he is sent to Kuala Lumpur to look into the case of Chelsea Liew, who is on trial for murdering her husband, Alan Lee. Chelsea is from Singapore, so Inspector Singh is charged with representing her interests in a hostile Malaysian legal system.

At first, Singh is not sympathetic to the ex-model who has lived a life of luxury and indolence while married to the rich Lee. It isn’t long, however, before he is impressed with her evident sincerity despite her “ridiculous” first name, “par for the course with the adoption of Western names by Singaporeans aiming to give themselves a cosmopolitan air…..like Mayfair and Rothmans.”

The man in charge of the case is Inspector Mohammed, who keeps well clear of Singh for the first part of the book, instead providing a sergeant, Shukor, to assist. Soon, Singh and Shukor are convinced of Chelsea’s innocence and although they don’t entirely believe the fortuitous confession to the murder by one of Alan’s brothers, Singh is pleased at the opportunity to release an innocent (he thinks) woman so she can be reunited with her three sons.

Singh and Shukor continue to discover new aspects to the case. The murdered man was head of a logging operation that might have been involved in illegal operations in the protected rainforest. Chelsea may have been having an affair with a wannabe playboy and hence may have had good reason for wanting her husband out of the way. Alan was no saint: not only did he beat his wife but he also had a string of affairs, his most recent conquest being a Moslem, causing Alan to convert in his effort to convince the girl of his genuine intentions of (eventual) marriage. Chelsea is therefore struggling not only to convince the police of her innocence but also with the Syariah court, who if Alan’s conversion was genuine, would have legal jurisdiction over Chelsea’s children and take them into care. Chelsea becomes so focused on this fight that she forgets to pay a private detective who she’s hired (before Alan’s death) to obtain evidence of his infidelity. The detective’s findings are explosive, turning Chelsea’s already upside-down world into chaos and tragedy.

Shamini Flint rings these changes with panache, alternating between themes and suspects so that the reader is never short of clues and red herrings. At the same time, she paints a sweet portrait of Inspector Singh, torn between his duty to his tedious Singaporean colleagues back home and his drive to get to the bottom of the confusing tangle of events in Kuala Lumpur.

The strongest parts of this book, however, concern Chelsea. Initially unsympathetic, we follow her attempts to reconnect with her eldest son in the wake of his father’s death, her realisation of what is important despite all her trappings of fashionable wealth, and see her change from being a spoilt trophy wife into a responsible, even brave, adult.

The plot continues to be brisk, though the solution to the murder mystery is no real surprise once the reader is provided with a motive and a chief suspect, about three-quarters of the way through the book. Nevertheless, this is a story with a conscience, and the topical subjects of biofuels, logging and the fate of indigenous populations who get in the way is told with assurance.

This book will certainly pass a very pleasant couple of hours. The as-yet incomplete character of Inspector Singh will no doubt develop over the planned series, the next episode of which will take place in Bali. I thoroughly enjoyed this light but serious novel, and think that those who enjoy Colin Cotterill and Alexander McCall Smith will find a welcome companion in Shamini Flint.

 

Thanks to Priya at Little Brown for my copy of this book.

 

Read a review of this book at the Guardian.

 

Read a review of the book at Book Bag.

 

An interview with the author at High Browse Online (2006).

 

Inspector Singh Investigates at the publisher's website.

My contribution to the many posts about the CWA International Dagger shortlist

Trying to calm down a bit after that last post, I see from many blogs including Karen of Euro Crime and Norman/Uriah of Crime Scraps that the CWA International Dagger shortlist has been announced. It is an excellent list, and I think impossible to say which of these books is "better" than the others. I reproduce the list from Euro Crime blog:

Karin Alvtegen - Shadow (translated by McKinley Burnett)
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played With Fire (translated by Reg Keeland)
Johan Theorin - Echoes From The Dead (translated by Marlaine Delargy)
Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man (translated by Sian Reynolds)
Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill (translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb)
Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer (translated by Don Bartlett)

I've read four from the shortlist, and of these, after much thought, I would recommend Shadow to win the prize. (Although I haven't read these particular books by Vargas and Nesbo, I have read others by these authors, and I venture to suggest that my proposed winner would not change had I read these titles.)

Indridason's novel is part of a masterly series of books, but Arctic Chill - though I loved it -  is not quite as good as the previous novel, Draining Lake. Some of the power in Arctic Chill rests on the book being part of the series, as it requires the reader to identify with the depressive main character, rather than for the book on its own, so for this reason I would not choose it as the winner, even though I loved its sympathy for the outsiders.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is hard to judge because one does not know how it would have turned out if the author had lived to make corrections and edits to tighten it up a bit and remove one or two obvious plot howlers. Although it's an incredibly exciting read, it has one major flaw - the irrelevant first third. (This section might not be irrelevant in context of the trilogy - the third component of which is not yet published in English - or of the planned but never to happen entire series of ten books, but in terms of The Girl Who Played with Fire as a book that needs to stand alone to win a prize, it has to count against it.) I think that this thrilling, campaigning trilogy will best be judged as a trilogy, and not as separate books.

This leaves me with Echoes from the Dead and Shadow as the two front-runners. Both these books are superb. On balance I would choose Shadow because it goes further down to the line of human emotion, parable and psychology, in its relentless investigation of the price of fame - what a man will do to achieve it, and the consequences of those actions. Also, the historical perspective of the effects of a regime of terror on the most tragic character in the book - the character who never has a voice but whose story is the one that lives on in the heart of the reader - adds a dimension of sorrow that lifts the book out of formula or genre. Another plus of this book is the way that it follows through its premise to the bitter end, without sentimentality or distraction.

Nevertheless, the depiction of a mother's longstanding grief in Echoes from the Dead is truly superb. I found the author's empathy with Julia to be awesome. The character of Julia's father is also delightful and memorable, both in itself and its insight into a way of life. I found the historical aspects of this book (the back-story of the outcast which is told in the middle section) not quite as strong as the rest, though the modern story was brilliantly absorbing. Although the denouement packed a great punch, the resolution of the older story was less satisfying than the brilliantly realised modern one.

In all honesty, I'd be happy whichever of these superb books wins the prize. But if I were the judge, I would award it, by a whisker, to Shadow, Karin Alvtegen's remarkable testament of the iron-cold grip of the past, the allegories of fable, the price of fame and political manouvering, the bitter family saga and the loneliness of age, with its inevitable alienation from the modern world. (Honours shared, of course, by the able and sympathetic translator, McKinley Burnett.)

I don't know where we are going

I am disoriented and reeling. Yesterday night I attended a memorial meeting at the Royal Institution for the greatest man I have ever known well - Sir John Maddox, who hired me in August 1984 to work for a superb journal, Nature - a journal for which I am still honoured to work, whose mission is to communicate the results of science to the world. Several people, many of them as distinguished as it gets, spoke last night about aspects of John's life: his Welshness, his transforming roles as scientific correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, his two editorships of Nature, his leadership of the Nuffield foundation, his political offices, his brilliant journalism, incredible writing output, his books, restlessness, tireless travels, his awards (he was the first honorary fellow of the Royal Society), the many and varied risks he took and the fearless independence of his opinions - and his roles as a husband, father and grandfather. It was a delight and an honour to have known and to have worked for John (even though sometimes terrifying); I was deeply moved by the evening and the number of ways in which he inspired the many people present last night, and many others who were not.

Today, on the other hand, I open the paper to read that the Labour party now has won not one single local council in the country, so badly did they perform at the local elections held on Thursday. None of the councils returned a Labour majority, in such bad regard they are held. There has been an overnight cabinet reshuffle as yet more (mainly pathetic, self-serving) ministers have resigned. Lord Mandelson (an unelected person) now heads a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which brings together the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and has also been given the rarely used title of First Secretary of State as well as the post  (previously held by Baroness Royall) of Lord President of the Council. Thus, the department for the universities, created a mere two years ago, has been subsumed into a minor appendage of the business department - to summarise its clutter of names. What would John Maddox have made of that?

I am sick to read that a sexist bully TV entertainer, unelected, has been made a Lord and will be advising government. What message is that giving children and young people (the main target audiences of these inane shows)? We have three Lords in cabinet now (Mandelson, Drayson (minister for Innovation and Science in this Mandelsonian department store of a business empire) and Malloch-Brown at the foreign office). Another non-elected person, Glenys Kinnock (wife of a former leader of the Labour party) has been made minister for Europe. Again, what would John Maddox have made of these people: the Brown-Mandelson-Sugar triumverate in particular?

So, where's the vision? Where's the next generation of elected leaders for our country? Where is some simple language reflecting some simple, strong decisions (one-word government departments would be a good start)? At this time of exceptional global circumstances, it isn't exactly difficult to see the direction we need to be going in. What can we look up to and aspire to follow? I am ashamed of this government and parliament. We need a leader who faces up to the awful situation the world is in, both in respect of its natural state (its environment, which we are ruining - climate is one of the few topics, incidentally, on which John Maddox changed his mind), and in respect of the horrendous global economy which is affecting us all in so many ways on the individual level as well as generally. We need a leader who will rise above the pettiness of the grasping, moneygrubbing, sleazy expenses claims - sort out the rot and set up a decent, new system. Obama is facing many of the same problems in terms of endemic congressional corruption and coziness, a wrecked economy, global conflict and terrorism, and more - but he is rising to the challenge. He might not succeed, but he's facing up to the problems and growing in stature all the time in doing so. He isn't making it his top priority to phone up a person who came second in a talent show to commiserate, that's for sure.

Well, I am not writing anything new, or writing it particularly well. But at a time when we are remembering the brave sacrifices made by previous generations, and the serious intellectual contributions made by people like John Maddox, an inspiration to those who followed, I am ashamed by what I read in the papers today. Yet more aimless milling about, with blatant pandering to ignorance and stupidity. And, sadly, I don't see any other of our reprehensible Westminster parties being any better, as they are all far too busy looking after themselves and trying to cling on to their positions by sucking up to the media and conning the electorate. What we need is leadership, a sense of direction, and a vision for our country and the world at large, such as Obama is doing in the United States. Whether or not I voted for him, if I were an American I would be proud of Obama today and to be part of the country he is leading. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case for the United Kingdom, which is being treated with patronising contempt by its so-called leaders and other political parties.

Blue light for Dead Tomorrow

Via The Times today (brief, print edition, 5 June) Peter James has donated a patrol car to Sussex police that is "branded" to promote his new book, Dead Tomorrow. The author is said to have donated the car in gratitude for the force's help in ensuring that the police work he describes in his novels is accurate. Chief Superintendent Graham Bartlett said "The car is not used to respond to emergency calls but is solely for use in the local community." I can see that screeching up to an accident with "Dead Tomorrow" all over your vehicle might not seem the height of tact. (Photo from Peter James's blog  from last year - I am unsure if the Times is a year out of date or if the donation reported today is new.)

There's lots more publicity for the UK release of the Dead Tomorrow scheduled for next week. There will be interviews with the author on Radio 5 live (Simon Mayo), Radio 4, Radio 2 (Claudia Winkelman's arts show) and the Sunday Express. Dead Tomorrow is being serialised in the Brighton Argus and will be Tesco's book of the week, W. H. Smith's deal of the week, Asda's author of the week and Sainsbury's offer of the week. There will also be a poster campaign on London Underground and elsewhere, including a short code to text in order to receive a call from Superintendent Roy Grace (via the Bookseller, brief, 5 June print edition).

RAC News: Writer donates car to help force.

Euro Crime: Peter James sponsors police car.

My review of the book, which is a jolly good thriller, is submitted to Euro Crime.

Ice Cold, by Andrea Maria Schenkel

My review of Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel went up at Euro Crime on Sunday. From my review:

"This grim tale is told amid lives of extreme poverty and ignorance, with the political propaganda applied to the population by the government always in the background. The atmosphere of working class Munich is well-conveyed, reminding me of L'Assommoir and Nana in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, which explored poverty and squalor in Paris 50 years before the events of ICE COLD."

The author previously wrote The Murder Farm, reviewed for Euro Crime by me here, and by Amanda Gilles here.

Both books have won awards, are short, and are very grim reading. Too bleak and cold for my taste, I think, but clearly they are very well respected. Which makes me think I may be missing something in my assessment of them. I think my issue with them is that the stories are told in a very clinical fashion, without embellishment. The style of providing the story as several "witness statements" increases this sense of alienation in the reader, as one cannot get involved in any of the characters (although one can feel pity for the victims). Essentially, these books leave me stumped. I don't "get" them.

Redundant, risible and sublime

"Have you ever wondered what celebrities do when they use the web?" asks Google. No, actually, I haven't. Never mind, Google ploughs on, you can now tour the homepages of your favourite celebrities, using iGoogle. Eight celebrities are mentioned; I have heard of four of them, only one of whom I know to have done anything useful (Al Gore). I can't bear to write more, but please do visit the Google blog if you want to know more about it.

As more ministers topple -- Top five political backstabbings. Funny, but is that all they could think of? Or should I write, Et tu, Brute?

Sean French writes that "DVDs are good for movies but utterly fantastic for opera". Bernard Haitink's Glyndebourne version of The Marriage of Figaro will cost you £175 to see live (the only price on offer) or £14 to buy the DVD. Advantages and one disadvantage of the recorded medium are duly noted.

Scientific terminology

Via Dara Sosulski, highlighting a sentence from a scientific paper she was reading, “The ping-pong cycle acts independently of Piwi and Armitage but requires the function of Aubergine, the RNA helicases Spindle-E and Vasa, and the Tudor-domain protein Krimper.”

I, Editor, on the other hand, muses on the origins of the term "missing link", blacklisted from all reputable scientific discourse. All ancient suggestions welcome at the I, Editor post.

rENNISance woman asks: please define "other". Ye gods! Words fail me. (But do read the comments to her post.)

Choosing what to read

Peter of Detectives Beyond Borders blog has just been at a book convention where he met someone who opined that "fans"  "pass the evenings in their rooms among their newly acquired books, missing the chance to fraternize at the hotel bar with the people who wrote those books." Having made this assertion, this person was surprised by it.
Peter riffs a different question from this exchange, but before getting to that, I, being a disagreeable type, beg to differ with his acquaintance's premise that readers (I dislike the term fans) who attend conferences do not "mingle" with the speakers. I've attended many more scientific conferences than book festivals (n> 200 compared with 3) and I have not only not observed this trend, but have seen the opposite. Science and book conferences alike have their superstar presenters who choose not to mix with the hoi polloi, true, but there are far more presenters (including some superstars!) who are only too happy to spend time with attendees who do or don't present, discussing matters of mutual interest. It helps, of course, to be interested in the subject of the meeting and to have basic interpersonal skills.
Peter's question is: "What books have you read because you met the author or liked what he or she had to say at a convention, whether during a panel, afterward, at the bar, in the hotel lobby or otherwise?"  My answer to that is, probably a few but I have learned my lesson and am less likely to do so now. I was, until a year or so ago, a bit of an easy touch for someone keen to push a book on me. Until 2005 this was basically fine, as I controlled my Internet (mainly Amazon) along with my other sources of books (bookshops, book clubs). Once I started blogging about books, though, I became inundated by offers of books, or even the books themselves without being offered them first, from authors, publishers, editors, etc. I very soon discovered that there is no relationship between my enjoyment of a book and my feelings or thoughts about the giver or seller, whether or not that person is the author. I have got a lot better at predicting whether I will like a book or not before acquiring (or reading) it, but it is still an imperfect process. I've been distinctly underwhelmed by the personality of an author or a style of publicity, then enjoyed one of the books discussed. I've been enthused by the same sources, and then felt awkward at writing my honest thoughts about the book, not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings or be a target for aggressive responses. So I'm going for the inflexible approach, now, of only reading what I want, persuaded by the input I choose (mainly recommendations or reviews by readers and reviewers I have come to trust; publishers' catalogues; and, of course, from among the Euro Crime listings and offerings). I still manage to acquire far more books than I can read, but at least I actively want to read them! And I might even go back to an old-fashioned serendipitous browse in a bookshop one of these days, who knows? ;-)

Fairly related recent posts are at Crime Scraps, "What makes a novel feel right?" ; and Mysteries in Paradise: "The dangers of genre mixing".

Publishing and reading round-up

Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog discusses a piece at the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review on the pros and cons of self-publishing. Although it can be a way to find a market for books that otherwise may not get discovered, she writes, Sarah isn't keen on them overall. "Genova, Daniel Suarez, William P. Young may be success stories, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And unless traditional publishing changes radically soon, which it won't because there's not enough economic incentive yet to do so, they will remain exceptions proving the rule for some time to come." "Genova" refers to Lisa Genova, who achieved New York Times best-seller status with Still Alice, self-published and very energetically self-marketed. One blog that I've recently discovered and whose posts I am very much enjoying is How Publishing Really Works - it is one year old today. Happy birthday!

Via email and spotted on numerous blogs already, the shortlist for the Theakston's Old Peculier crime novel of the year has been announced (12 male authors, 2 female). Despite the sad lack of translated fiction on the list, I've voted - have you?

Aargh, it's that time of year again - the Chicago Sun-Times has published its "summer reading picks" on 1 June (actually published on 31 May)..... three more months of this to go. Among the recommendations are Red Hot Lies by Laura Cauldwell (a new legal series), Joseph Finder's Vanished (David Montgomery's pick), Stieg Larsson's The Girl who Played with Fire, and Free Agent by Jeremy Duns (reviewed by Michelle yesterday at Euro Crime). 

A few more reviews:
Bernadette of Reactions to Reading reviews The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez, one of the books I bore away from CrimeFest (via the ever-kind Karen), still to read.

Glenn Harper of International Noir Fiction writes very interestingly on My Soul To Take, Yrsa Sigurdadottir's second novel, and compares her output with that of a compatriot, the superb Arnaldur Indridason.

Rafe McGregor explains why the rationale for inclusion in Favourite Sherlock Holmes stories is flawed. (My advice: just buy the collected works - or apparently, don't even buy them, as Rafe writes that they are in the public domain. I'd still buy them, though, they are certainly worth it and you can always pass a book on to your children, grandchildren etc, to remind them of what a printed page looks like.)

Based on Books reviews the most recent movie of The Importance of Being Earnest- quite a good film, apart from Reese Witherspoon's irritating fantasy sequences. Colin Firth, Judi Dench and Anna Massey, in particular, turn in performances that stick in the memory.

Finally, I know this is a bit mad, but I just had to smile at this response by the Times to the Ruth Padel (Oxford Professor of Poetry emerita) resignation: top ten smear campaigns.

Sunday Salon: reading Frimansson, Child and Bolton

Ah! I can post, now. I haven't been able to make a post so far today, but the very nice people at Typepad now seem to have fixed the problem.

This week has been a relatively slow reading week for me. I finished the excellent Island of the Naked Women by Inger Frimansson; I read Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child; and have just, today, started Sacrifice by S. J. Bolton.

Island of the Naked Women for me lived up to its early and mid-promise. I've submitted my review to Euro Crime so will not write much more here, other than to recommend Pleasure Boat Studio, the publisher. Pleasure Boat is publishing mystery books via its Caravel imprint, and so far has three of Inger Frimansson's on its list - all translated by Laura Wideburg. Good Night, My Darling has just been named Book of the Year for translations by ForeWord Magazine, so Pleasure Boat is very pleased about that. Here is an essay by Inger Frimansson on writing mysteries. There are some more links to information about and reviews of her books in my earlier post.

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child is a typical Jack Reacher book, so you'll either love it or have given up on his particular formula by now. Enough said - my review is in draft and my full assessment can wait until that is out.

Spurred by an ecstatic review in the Times yesterday of S. J. Bolton's second novel, Awakening, I picked up Sacrifice from my shelf this morning, where it has been sitting for a while, my proof copy courtesy of Karen Meek (also the generous source of my proof copies of Island of the Naked Women and Gone Tomorrow). I had been slightly put off this book as I have the impression that the supernatural is going to come into it. But so far I am completely hooked, and all is down to earth. The book is set in a remote island in the Shetlands; the main character is (so far) a competent, professional woman who in one day has to cope with finding a dead, much loved horse on her farm; dig a grave for it; discover in the grave the body of a murdered young woman; attend an emergency caesarian operation; perform a second emergency operation on the same patient; attend the post-mortem of the buried body; and advise on various aspects of the corpse. And her day isn't over yet. There's lots of nice, edgy tension between the police and medical characters, and the mystery is deepening. I can't wait to get back to it!

April European bestsellers; planning for a UK September

The Bookseller this week (29 May 2009) brings news of the April bestseller lists in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and France. Germany’s top ten fiction charts contain two crime novels, Simon Beckett’s Whispers of the Dead at no 4 and Scream for Me by Karen Rose at 9. Popular in Sweden are Elizabeth George’s Careless in Red (2) and The Private Patient by P. D. James (3). Strangely, Agnes Grey by Ann Bronte comes in at 6 – maybe there is an associated film or TV programme?
In the Netherlands, Saskia Noort tops the charts with The Transformation, with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (4), John Grisham’s The Associate (5) and Anne Holt’s What Never Happens (9) also selling well.
Harlan Coben is at no 3 in France with Hold Tight (one of his books, Tell No-One, was made into an excellent French thriller). Scarpetta (Patricia Cornwell) is at no 6, The Preacher (Camilla Lackberg) 8, and Stieg Larsson is at 9 with “Dragon” but, intriguingly, the title at no 10 is The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third in the Millennium Trilogy, which won’t be out in the UK until October.
Just a quick note for those in the UK who like to plan their reading in advance. Out in paperback in September will be the aforementioned The Private Patient by P. D. James, as well as The Other Half Lives by Sophie Hannah; The Vows of Silence, Susan Hill’s latest Serrailler novel; M. R. Hall’s excellent The Coroner; The Surrogate, a debut by Tania Carver that looks intriguing; The Maze of Cadiz by Aly Monroe; New Zealander Paul Cleave’s first novel to be published in the UK, Cemetery Lake; The Slaughter Pavilion, an excellent novel by Catherine Sampson, set in China; A Perfect Death by Kate Ellis; Blood Safari by Deon Meyer; A Deadly Paradise by Grace Brophy; Queenpin by Megan Abbott; and A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul by Shamini Flint. That’s about half of the crime, mystery, thriller and suspense novels due out in paperback in the UK in September and listed in the Bookseller!

[Reviews of many of these books, if written by UK and European authors, can be found at Euro Crime.]

Maj Sjowall interviewed by the WSJ

I very much enjoyed reading Tom Nolan's WSJ interview (by email) with the 73-year-old Maj Sjowall, who "hasn't published any crime fiction since the death of her husband 34 years ago. But all around her she sees the fictional progeny of Martin Beck, including Kurt Wallander. "Yes," she writes, "we seem to have created a model for the Swedish police procedural, and most of the authors that write them call themselves social critics as well. . . . That, I think, is something to be proud of."  "
Although (for me) the start of the WSJ piece is a tedious lead-in, focusing on the Branagh/Wallender TV films based on the books by Henning Mankell currently airing in the USA, the main part of the article is fascinating.
Maj Sjowall reveals that the series of 10 Martin Beck novels, which she wrote with her husband Per Wahloo in part to analyse criminality in a changing society from a Marxist perspective, were published at a time when Swedish crime stories were "Agatha Christie-like", rarely featuring police detectives. Sjowall and Wahloo aimed to create a "credible, trustworthy, Swedish civil servant with empathy and real concern." Having so far read eight of the ten books in the Martin Beck series, I believe they succeeded.
Sjowall also scotches the story that the Martin Beck series was modelled on or inspired by Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. She tells Nolan that she and Wahloo had never heard of McBain, but that a review of their second or third Beck novel compared it to McBain and Hillary Waugh. The Swedish authors then read these books and as a result urged their publisher to buy the rights. He did, and asked them to translate them. Sjowall and Wahloo translated a dozen of the 87th Precinct novels and so became cast as McBain's followers and imitators.
The WSJ piece goes on to accord Sjowall and Wahloo their (already undisputed) place as the parents of the Swedish police procedural with a perspective of social criticism. Sjowall comments on the lack of financial rewards for authors, saying that she and her husband could quit their jobs as journalists only when their novels were translated into German. She also comments on the various films and TV series made of the books, but connects to only one of these, Bo Widerberg's The Man on the Roof, which was adapted from the book The Man on the Balcony.

Euro Crime reviews of Sjowall and Wahloo's books.

Petrona posts about Sjowall and Wahloo.

Harper Perennial editions of the Martin Beck novels.

Photo of Maj Sjowall: Sydsvenskan.se (2005).

A bit of book chat: Badsville, Hammett, Australia, Twitter and cliffhangers

From the Bookseller.com: Jonathan Ross’ new Twitter book club showed only a small effect on print sales in its first week, prior to the online discussion on Sunday (24th May). The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, Ross' first pick, sold 166 copies last week through Nielsen BookScan. This represents a rise on the previous week, when the backlist title sold just 11 copies.

Kim of Reading Matters rounds up some Australian book blogs and links to an impressively wide-ranging list of her reviews of books by Australian authors (including Peter Temple). She welcomes recommendations for other Australian novels and novelists, "particularly if you live in Oz and keep up with "the scene" as it were!"

Sean French (or maybe Nicci Gerrard) challenges readers to come up with their best-ever chapter endings in a thriller. Here is his (or her) example: " 'Jacob's been arrested, doctor!' she said. 'In connection with the murder of Frances Raye! They found her dead in her apartment, and him, outside, drunk, ringing her doorbell, trying to get in! Oh, doctor, they think he killed her!' All I could think to ask her was: 'What did he do with the horse?' " (See link for the name of the author and the book, if you haven't guessed it.)

Welcome to the Big Beat from Badsville, a new blog to celebrate all things Scottish, crime-fiction-wise. What makes this blog a bit special is that it is run by the Queen (a.k.a. scullery maid) of Twitter, Donna Moore, author of Go To Helena Handbasket, shoe fanatic and scourge of Alaskan bears. Definitely a must-read blog.

Yesterday (27 May) would have been the 105th birthday of Dashiell Hammett, a superb author and one of my enduring favourites. Having enjoyed Conan Doyle (and, yes, before that Enid Blyton's mysteries and adventures, I have to admit) as a child, I think it was my late-teenage discovery of Dashiell Hammett that made me realise that detective novels (as I then thought of them) are a genre for adults, also. After reading Hammett I scoured the library shelves and devoured Chandler, Hadley Chase, et al, as well as their English counterparts such as Ruth Rendell, P. D. James, J. I. M. Stewart and Celia Fremlin. Janet Rudolph's post at Mystery Fanfare is typically informative and interesting, summarising Hammett's output and providing some links for further investigation.

The Scarecrow, by Michael Connelly

The Scarecrow opens as Jack McEvoy, a solid reporter for the LA Times, is given two weeks’ notice – he’s a victim of the death-by-internet of the US newspaper industry and of the decline of the global economy. Rather than go quietly, he decides the best way to show his corporate bosses that they were wrong to dismiss him is to write a fantastic story. And, as luck would have it, the one he has just finished—an apparently routine case in which a black teenager has confessed to killing a white, drug-addicted stripper and leaving her body abandoned in the trunk of a car — has a little sting in its tail. The boy’s grandmother calls Jack, telling him that the police have fixed up the conviction, and that the boy never confessed to the killing.
Jack decides to investigate, and soon becomes convinced that the woman is right. At the same time, his glamorous young partner and to-be-replacement, the multitasking and over-ambitious Angela, does some Internet searching and comes up not only with a previous case with an identical modus operandi, but also makes some dark online discoveries of her own.
Before he knows it, Jack is facing what starts out as a puzzling inconvenience, rapidly escalating into danger. He calls an old friend, FBI agent Rachel Walling, in the hope that he can convince her to help. Soon, Rachel is caught up in events, cast off by the FBI and struggling to discern what’s behind Jack’s sudden plunge of fortune. Then, the two of them make a chilling discovery.
I won’t reveal any more of the plot here: the book just goes on and on at a confident and inventive pace, never slackening off into predictability, never stepping over the mark into unnecessary contrivance; always bang-up-to-the-minute and laden with constant tension as Jack and Rachel try to stay one step ahead by out-thinking their unknown enemy. At the same time, the book is full of details of journalistic procedures, inter-colleague dynamics, internet technology, FBI protocols – never slowing the pace but cumulatively creating an atmosphere of complete believability. The ending is less interesting than the rest of the book, but that didn't bother me too much, although I smiled at the fact that Jack's professionalism comes through for him. What I also like is the way the author has set things up so that any of his four main characters (Jack and Rachel, together with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, who are both alluded to in The Scarecrow although not (if memory serves) by name) could participate in a future novel in one of several ways. Intriguing!
If you haven’t read a Michael Connelly novel before, you could start with this one, or you could start with The Poet, the only previous book in which Jack is the main character (Rachel has appeared in several other novels, though). But perhaps the best thing to do is to begin with the first, The Black Echo, and make your way through the whole catalogue. I don't think you would regret it.
If you are a keen Connelly fan, you might like to keep a note of the websites mentioned in The Scarecrow. I haven’t tried this myself, but the author told us at the recent CrimeFest meeting that he has registered these domain names and has included some content on these sites relevant to the novel. There is also a three-part video, Conflict of Interest, on the author’s website which apparently tells the story of what Rachel is doing up to the point where she makes her first appearance in the novel - in response to a phone call from Jack. (Apparently the video story ends with this same phone call.) There are also video clips of scenes in and surrounding some of the author's other novels at the same web page.
Watch a video of Michael Connelly discussing The Scarecrow.

Reviews of the book:

Maureen Corrigan at The Washington Post.
Thom Geier in Entertainment Weekly.
Michael Carlson at Irresistible Targets.

In the middle of reading...Island of the Naked Women by Inger Frimansson

So far I am loving Island of the Naked Women by Inger Frimansson, excellently translated (into American English) by Laura A. Wideburg. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Tobias travels by train to a small village to give a talk about the books he writes.

After a while, he noticed the woman sitting next to him was looking at him.
"Excuse me," she said. "Aren't you that author?"
"This one?" he lifted it and pointed to his name on the cover. She peered at the cover nearsightedly, and then held out her hand to introduce herself.
"Asa Svedsson. I'm a teacher of Swedish. But we haven't...uh..used any of your books in our classes."
"Well, I haven't written that many."
"True. And that genre...well, I saw you on TV, which is why I recognized you. Do you write short stories any longer? I liked your short stories."
"Well, you can't survive on those. Nor from poetry."
She looked at him over her glasses.
"What? I though that writers wrote because of an inner drive, because they had to."
"You're one hundred per cent correct there."
"I didn't mean it quite like that."
"So what did you mean?"
"It's really not my business, but you seem to have sold out."
"Sold out?"
"That's right."
"You make me sound like a prostitute! Is the mystery genre worse than others? Is that what you're really saying?"
"You will hardly win a Nobel Prize writing that stuff."
Tobias began to get angry. "I don't care about the Nobel Prize! I'm trying to make a living by writing! Give the readers a good story they'll enjoy! Why are mysteries seen as less than real literature? Some works are asl good as Singer or Marquez. It's old-fashioned to look down on mystery novels. Times have changed. In your field, you ought to know that."
She took off her glasses and began to clean them carefully.
"I haven't read your latest book," she admitted. "I remember when it came out. I thought, 'too bad, another good author is falling into the crime novel pit.' I thought it was a great pity."

Thanks to Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this book.
Inger Frimansson's books reviewed at Euro Crime.
Review of Island of the Naked Women at International Noir Fiction.
Read another extract from the book at the author's website (especially if you would like the title explained!).
Inger Frimansson's website.