PETRONA

Kindle reading report 1

When I was given a Kindle (wireless version) for my birthday in September this year (a couple of weeks late, not because the kind present-giver had forgotten the date but because of Amazon's order backlog), I made a resolution only to download a book when I had finished one, that is, only to have one unread book in it at a time. How am I doing on that front? Not that well, unsurprisingly.

The first book I read was one I've been wanting to read for a couple of years, but which I thought too expensive in print version (no paperback available). Silent Counsel by Ken Isaacson was reasonably priced on Kindle, so as an experiment I downloaded it and read it. So far so good: one down, none to go.

Searching my longstanding 200-300-item long Amazon shopping list was not very fruitful, as so few of the entries in it have Kindle editions. Newly published books on Amazon often do have Kindle editions but the pricing is often not competitive and I'd prefer to wait for the paperback. (I'm not surprised about the pricing as I am only too well aware of how much work goes into producing an online/digital edition of content compared with print. )  I did, however, find one Kindle book that is reasonably priced and that I would mildly like to read, The Dying Light by Henry Porter, so downloaded that to read next. The only thing is that I have not read it yet. The lesson I learn from this is only to download a book when I really want to read it, not just because it is on a list of books I might read one day. 

In the meantime, I signed up for the NetGalley service, in which if you write book reviews you can request e-copies from the publisher - which are free. With trembling heart because of the intials J.P., but very eager to read anything by Liza Marklund, I requested a copy of The Postcard Killers. Nothing happened.

Another novel I've been meaning to read for a while is Experimental Heart by Jennifer L. Rohn. I read one night on a blog or elsewhere that it is available in Kindle form, so checked out the price.  It was reasonable (higher than the previous two books I'd downloaded, but not by that much), so I downloaded and actually read it, straight away (review here). 

Getting into the swing of it, I received an email from Amazon suggesting I might like to read the latest Michael Connelly novel, The Reversal. Would I? Yes.  The publisher had agreed to send me a review copy, but after 3 weeks or so it hasn't arrived, and I'm very keen indeed to read this novel -  all the more so as it is now officially out and reviews are appearing. So I checked out the Amazon page and saw that the hardback is selling for just under £10 (as in the main real-world bookshops), but the basic Kindle edition is priced at half that. No brainer, I have purchased it. Michael Connelly also offers a more expensive, enhanced Kindle version for those who like fun add-ons, but I'm more than happy with just the text.

No sooner had I done this than I received an email from NetGalley announcing that I could have an e-copy of Postcard Killers, so after a bit of tinkering (I realise you can only receive books on your Kindle if you tell Amazon the email address of the sender, what a good idea to prevent unsolicited material), I have downloaded that, too.

So now, I have three unread Kindle books waiting. I have to finish my current print title first (as I am not one of those people who can read more than one piece of fiction at once), then I plan to rehabilitiate myself in my own eyes, and reduce my e-backlog.

I find the reading experience on the Kindle more pleasant than I had anticipated. I feel now that I shall quite happily mix my metaphors and read some books in print, others in e-form. 

Reading report, third quarter 2010

From the beginning of July to the end of September, I've read 46 books. If I hadn't been away on holiday for a couple of weeks in July, my total would have been lower than in the second quarter (42 books) - probably nearer to the 26 books I read in the first quarter of this year. My total from the start of January to the end of September is 114.

Returning to my July to September batch, of the 46 I read,  24 are by men, 18 by women, 2 by man/woman pairs, 1  by a man/man pair, and 1 is a collection of short stories by men and women (but edited by a man). Seventeen are translations: 1 Polish, 1 Japanese, 3 Spanish (1 Argentinian, 1 Cuban, 1 Bolivian), 2 Norwegian, 1 French,  3 Italian, 1 Portuguese (Brazilian), 1 Afrikaans, 3 Swedish, and 1 Icelandic. So far as I can tell, 15 of the 46 are debuts. I shan't be reviewing a few of these books, but I have written up most of them (see end of this post). 

Which gets my award for best of the quarter? As usual, this is a very hard, if not impossible, task. My personal favourite was Red Wolf (Liza Marklund), closely followed by Three Seconds (Roslund/Hellstrom), Needle in a Haystack (Ernesto Mallo), The Man in the Window (Dahl) and The Terrorists (Sjowall/Wahloo). But there are some really good debuts among this collection, particularly Witness the Night (Desai) A Beautiful Place to Die (Nunn), Midnight Cab (Nichol), The Silence of the Rain (Garcia Roza)  and The Woman Before Me (Dugdale), and some great, classic novels such as An Empty Death (Wilson), The Dragon Man (Disher), Shadowplay (Campbell)  and Dead at Daybreak (Meyer). I've starred the ones I recommend going out of your way to read.

The list in full, with links to reviews.

The Girl with the Crystal Eyes by Barbara Baraldi (Review submitted to Euro Crime)

Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay (review to come)*

Blue Heaven by C. J. Box (Petrona, July)*

Shadowplay by Karen Campbell (Review submitted to Euro Crime)*

Chinatown Beat by Henry Chang (Petrona, August)

A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex (review submitted to Euro Crime)

Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves (Petrona, August)*

Play Dead by Harlan Coben (Petrona, August)

Willing Flesh by Adam Creed (Petrona, August)

American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea (Petrona, August)

The Man in the Window by K. O. Dahl (Review submitted to Euro Crime)*

Witness the Night by Kishwar Desai (Euro Crime, August)*

The Dragon Man by Garry Disher (Petrona, August)*

The Woman Before Me by Ruth Dugdall (Petrona, September)*

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (Petrona, July)

Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum (Petrona, August)*

The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (Petrona, August)*

Vodka Doesn't Freeze by Leah Giarratano (Petrona, July)*

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton (Petrona, September)*

Tell Tale by Sam Hayes (Petrona, September)

Any Man's Death by Hazel Holt (Petrona, September)

Silent Counsel by Ken Isaacson (Petrona, September)*

Acts of Violence by Ryan David Jahn (Petrona, August)

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Petrona, July)*

Day After Day by Carlo Lucarelli (Petrona, August)*

Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo (Petrona, August)*

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund (Review submitted to Euro Crime)*

All The Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney (Petrona, September)

Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer (Petrona, August)*

Entanglement by Zygmunt Miloszewski (Petrona, July)*

Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe (Petrona, July)*

Hit by Tara Moss (Euro Crime, August)

The Twelve by Stuart Neville (Petrona, July)

Midnight Cab by James W. Nichol (Petrona, September)*

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Petrona, August)*

Havana Red by Leonardo Padura (Petrona, August)

Three Seconds by Roslund-Hellstrom (Euro Crime, September)*

Afterlight by Alex Scarrow (Petrona, July)*

Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Petrona, September)*

The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (Review submitted to Euro Crime)*

River of Shadows by Valerio Varesi (Euro Crime, September)*

An Empty Death by Laura Wilson (Petrona, September)*

 

Click here for previous reading reports. 

Started reading: Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay

The generous publisher Orion has sent me an advance copy of Linwood Barclay's latest novel, Never Look Away. I am completely hooked. A review will follow in due course, but in the meantime I'd like to share an excerpt and the trailer, made by the publisher.

The overriding concern now, with declining revenues and readership, was survival. The paper had always kept a reporter in Albany to cover state issues, but now relied on wires. The weekly book section had been killed, reduced to a page in the back end of Style. The editorial cartoonist, tremendously gifted at lampooning and harpooning local officials, was given the heave-ho, and now we picked up any number of national, syndicated cartoonists who'd probably never even heard of Promise Falls, let alone visited it, to fill the hole on the editorial page. Oh yeah, the editorials. We used to run two a day, written by staffers. Now, we ran "What Others Think", a sampling of editorials from across the country........Various city committees had a live Internet video feed. Why send a reporter? Why even pay one to watch it from the office? Why not get some guy in Mumbai to watch it, write up what he sees, then email his story back to Promise Falls, New York? 

Sad stuff, but all too true. Michael Connelly (in The Scarecrow) and The Wire (Season 5) have movingly described similar declines in Los Angeles and Baltimore, respectively. Here, Linwood Barclay made me just as mad. 

On a different but related tack, the video trailer (not watched by me) follows. Enjoy! 

 

I am hoping that the next 300 pages of this book are as exciting as the compelling first 100 - so far, no gore, no horrors, no murders, no sleaze  -  just a good story, great tension, and pure excitement. I will let you know more, when I have finished it.

What kind of a (mystery) reader are you?

Am I alone in feeling permanently guilty for not commenting more on people's blogs? I am always so thrilled when people comment here, so feel doubly at fault for so rarely commenting elsewhere myself. I do read a lot of blogs, courtesy of Google Reader. (The reader is hooked up here so that it is also Petrona's blogroll, therefore if you look to the right and scroll down, you will see I am not telling a lie when I write that I read a lot of blogs!) But somehow, I only comment on the statutory 1 per cent of posts that I read, fulfilling some statistical observation or other. Most of the time this is because even when I have enjoyed a post I can't think of anything interesting to write about it - or if I do have a thought, I go to the blog and find out that six other people have already written it. Some of the time I just can't face going through all the palaver of trying to comment, crashes, signing in or other slowing-down factors. I am around a bit on the internet (see my Google profile for where) and  I do comment quite a bit at the Friend Feed crime and mystery group (for online discussion of crime novels), but I am aware that a comment there is not the same as a comment at the actual blog itself. I will try to improve.

I don't really know why I wrote all that, because what I intended to do when I started this post was to highlight a discussion at Martin Edwards's excellent blog (Do you write under your own name?) about how one reads a mystery. (It was probably my awareness that I have not commented there for a while, and feeling bad about that, that made me write the first paragraph above!) Martin divides such readers into two groups, "those who like to try to solve the mystery themselves, before the solution is revealed, and those who simply enjoy the story and make no serious effort to work out what is going on." He's in the former group, and of the people who have commented to the post, about half are in each.  Here is the gist of my response:

Martin, I am in your camp. Well I think I am. I started out with Sherlock Holmes and ever since have enjoyed the "race" to see if I could work out the solution before the author. But now that I am (a lot) older and have read so much crime fiction, I am not so sure. For example, I have recently finished a really wonderful book, An Empty Death by Laura Wilson (Orion, 2009). It is such an absorbing book, written by a talented author who is so enjoying the universe she has created and conveying it to the reader, in three main plot lines. However, the actual main mystery at the heart of it is not that difficult to work out, mainly because of the dearth of suspects. Yet I found myself deliberately not trying to second-guess the author, because there were so many aspects of this rich book to enjoy, and I was just happy to go with the flow.

So, eeek! I became of the second category without meaning to. 

On the whole, though, I like to try to work out the puzzle before the author reveals all. In addition, if a crime book is not that well written and/or not a lot of effort has been put into it, I like to guess who did it before the author tells me - to get even! How sad or bad is that?!

Scandinavian crime-fiction book club at London University

Towards the end of July I received some interesting news via Simon Clarke. Thank you so much, Simon. Here is the news, from the University College London website:

Nordic Noir - Scandinavian Crime Book Club
Join and meet other Scandinavian crime lovers in London, authors, translators and specialists in Scandinavian languages, literature, history and cultures.
January to April 2011.

Scandinavian crime fiction has had an unrivalled success in the UK over the past ten years. Authors such as the Dane Peter Høeg and the Swede Stieg Larsson are best-selling authors worldwide, and BBC has recently been running the original Swedish miniseries and a remake with Kenneth Branagh based on Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books. Book stores such as Waterstones feature sections with “Scandinavian Chillers” testifying to the popularity and breadth of Nordic crime fiction translated for a British audience. Today, crime writers from all the Nordic countries are in translation, which is a rare occurrence in a British publishing market, where less than 5 percent of available books are translations.
The planned events will bring crime fiction lovers, UCL researchers and students in Scandinavian literature, language, film, history, mythology, politics and sociology, UK translators, publishers, authors, film makers and producers together to share their knowledge of and interest in crime fiction and Nordic cultures. We will investigate the seemingly paradoxical popularity of violent crime fiction in countries well-known for their safe and peaceful welfare states, where people, according to research, are amongst the happiest and most satisfied with their lives in the world. We shall explore what Scandinavian crime fiction has learned from the British tradition, and what makes crime fiction from the Nordic countries particularly Nordic.
Please return to this page to read about the book club we are planning for Spring 2011. More information about how to join, the programme and the books we will read will soon be available.
If you would like to be included on the Nordic Noir email list please contact Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen ([email protected]).

Progress on reading books eligible for the 2010 International Dagger

It is a while (5 March, in fact) since I have posted about my attempt to read as many as possible of the 61 books eligible for this year's International Dagger award - the annual CWA prize for a novel originally written in another language and translated into English. My end-date is the announcement of the shortlist, which will happen at CrimeFest next month (May). 

In my 5 March post, I reported that I had read fifteen of the books, which are listed below, with links to my reviews either at Euro Crime or at Petrona. 

Mikkel Birkegaard - The Library of Shadows (review t/c)
Andrea Camilleri - August Heat  
Leif Davidsen - The Woman from Bratislava (review t/c)
Karin Fossum - The Water's Edge
Petra Hammesfahr - The Lie
Anne Holt - Death in Oslo
Arnaldur Indridason - Hypothermia
Camilla Lackberg - The Stonecutter
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
Deon Meyer - Thirteen Hours
Jo Nesbo - The Snowman (review t/c)
Claudia Pineiro - Thursday Night Widows
Andrea Maria Schenkel - Ice Cold
Gunnar Staalesen - The Consorts of Death
Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

Since then, I have read the following eligible books:

Tonino Benaquista - Badfellas
Eugenio Fuentes - At Close Quarters
Luigi Guicciardi - Inspector Cataldo's Criminal Summer
Henning Mankell - The Man from Beijing
Dominique Manotti- Affairs of State 
Petros Markaris - Che Committed Suicide (review t/c)
Juli Zeh - Dark Matter (review t/c) 

This takes my total to 22, that is, about one-third of the total eligible. As things stand, I think the judges have a real problem on their hands, because only three of these 22 are, in my opinion, not likely to make the shortlist. I would be happy to see any of the remaining 19 go forward to the next round! Maybe I have been lucky in the particular books I have read out of the 61 possibles. (Not all of these 61 will have been put forward for the competition by the publishers, I guess, so it is possible that the judges will have an easier task if some of them were not submitted!)

In the meantime, any recommendations from among the remaining 39 books would be much appreciated.

Reading report, first quarter 2010

So far this year, I've read 26 books, which (excitingly) are listed below. I've reviewed all of these except one (The Winter House by Nicci Gerrard, a non-crime fiction book which I did not enjoy very much). Some of the reviews are posted here on Petrona, others at Euro Crime, and others are in the queue at Euro Crime. So far this year, 35 of my reviews have been posted in one of those two places (the discrepancy is due to a backlog of submitted reviews at Euro Crime).

Siren of the Waters - Michael Genelin ***
The Winter House - Nicci Gerrard **
The Last Surgeon - Michael Palmer ***
Whispers of the Dead - Simon Beckett ****
Like Clockwork - Maggie Orford **
The Snowman - Jo Nesbo *****
The Woman from Bratislava - Lief Davidsen ****
Thursday Night Widows - Claudia Pineiro ****
Where The Dead Lay - David Levien ***
The Stonecutter - Camilla Lackberg ***
Last Light - Alex Scarrow ***
The Serpent Pool - Martin Edwards *****
The Last Ten Seconds - Simon Kernick **
The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths ****
Snow Angels - James Thompson ****
The Missing - Jane Casey ***
The Rising - Brian McGilloway *****
Thirteen Hours - Deon Meyer *****
At Close Quarters - Eugenio Fuentes ****
61 Hours - Lee Child ***
A Room Left White - Sophie Hannah ***
The Man From Beijing- Henning Mankell *****
Rupture - Simon Lelic ****
The Wings of the Sphinx by Andrea Camilleri *****
Death of a Red Heroine - Qiu Xiaolong ***
What to do When Someone Dies - Nicci French ***

Some thrilling statistics: of these 26, eight are translated (1 Italian, 2 Swedish, 1 Afrikaans, 1 Danish, 1 Spanish, 1 Norwegian, 1 Argentinian). Seven of the 26 are by women (plus one by a male-female duo). Seven of the 26 are debut novels, and 10 are by authors new to me. I have attempted to rank them with 1-5 stars but I find this type of exercise very difficult, partuclarly as the books are so different from each other.

I'm not going to provide a separate link to my review for each book above, but for those interested, a link to all the reviews I've published in 2010 is provided on a handy list at this Petrona page.
I archive all my book reviews at my Vox blog. I have organised the tags on this blog so you can see collections of reviews by country or by subgenre, such as police procedural, PI, psychology thriller, journalism, legal, political, etc. So far, for example, I have 36 reviews of books by Swedish authors, 10 reviews of Australian crime fiction,  25 reviews of psychological thrillers, and 7 reviews under 'journalism crime'.

Bernadette and why I read crime fiction

As I am a bit short of time and inspiration today, I thought I would return to that old chestnut of "why I read crime fiction". This thought was sparked on this occasion by an excellent post by Bernadette of Reactions to Reading blog (a must-read blog), with the title Am I a traitor to my gender? The question arose from the announcement of the Orange prize long-list, in which the chair of judges, Daisy Goodwin, is saying (in Bernadette's words):  she despaired over the number of the submitted novels (129) which were what she termed ‘misery memoirs’. Covering such topics as rape, bereavement and child abuse a lot of the novels, according to Goodwin, were lacking any pleasurable or joyful element.
I just want to say thank you Daisy. I don’t know you from the proverbial bar of soap but thank you from the bottom of my heart for expressing what I have been feeling for several years now.

Bernadette goes on to highlight examples of "misery fiction written by women" over the years, and wonders who is buying and (presumably) reading it. Women, she assumes, rather than men. As a result, Bernadette turned to crime fiction, but now has the "hopeful thought that with someone of Daisy’s opinions on this matter guiding the choices for this year’s longlist it might be safe for me to venture back to the ‘literature by women’ shelves without needing a new prescription of Prozac."

Among other reactions, Bernadette's post made me recall why I read crime fiction. As I wrote in a comment there, for about 10 years I dutifully read the Booker shortlist each year, but got so dispirited and fed up with it all. All those miniature accounts of depressed, languid women, etc. In those days, I also consistently read new “good” literature, particularly American, as defined by the reviews. Talk about male self-indulgent rubbish! (Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Martin Amis etc) . Such horrific navel gazing self-importance that they would think readers would be fascinated by all the tiny details of their (often paralysed) existence.

So, ultimately I gave up and now I read mainly crime fiction – which is ghettoised by many opinion-formers as “crime fiction” but I always experience, and see, it as “traditional story telling” which has its roots in Greek drama, other classical drama to and including Shakespeare and beyond,  and the great Victorian and other period novels. The books I loved as a child and young woman were by Dickens, George Elliot, Arnold Bennett, the Brontes, Wilkie Collins, Emile Zola and so on,  and before that Conan Doyle, Lancelyn Green, Stevenson, Rosemary Sutcliffe, C. S. Lewis et al. - to me, crime fiction is a natural extension of those.

Crime fiction is plot-driven, true, but the better examples of it have much additional depth in terms of character, craft, setting, conviction (political or ethical beliefs, for example) and insight. Crime fiction, like children's fiction (think J. K. Rowling), is not afraid to tackle the big issues. Literary fiction, in attempting the same, is too often self-regarding, tentative (one can almost feel the author's awareness of the "literary" review, along the lines of "the goalkeeper's fear of the penalty" to quote Wim Wenders), and hence over-personalised or over-intricate. I would even go so far as to suggest that the better literary fiction has its roots in crime fiction, thinking of Ian McEwan's evolution as a novelist, for example.

Though the endings of crime novels are often overly complicated and let the book down, as if the author does not have enough confidence to let the book speak for itself but needs some artificial climax, the best of crime fiction does not do this. Non-English language crime fiction escapes this problem far more often than English language novels, in my reading experience. But it is great that we seem to be returning to a view that these exciting, dramatic novels are actually "worthy" (I use the term ironically in case that isn't obvious.) The prizewinning success of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (and its inclusion on this same Orange long-list) may indeed be the turning of a tide. From the Guardian review: Though set in Henry's court and, overwhelmingly, about his long, panting battle to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Wolf Hall is really the story of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's boy who became the king's right-hand man. When we first meet Thomas, he is sprawled on the floor, bloody and beaten. His father, drunken Walter, has just put the boot in and not for the first time. "Inch by inch forward," he orders himself, as he crawls, spewing and fainting, resolutely out of the life he was born to.

Excerpts from At Close Quarters, by Eugenio Fuentes

I've recently finished At Close Quarters by Eugenio Fuentes. My review will shortly be submitted to Euro Crime, but in the meantime I thought I'd share some small extracts from this lovely book:

The only solution was to go to the detective. He was a quiet guy for his trade, but Samuel remembered him well, a tall calm person who waited patiently for his answers. Neither had Samuel forgotten his questions or the way he'd phrased them. Because he did not put you on the spot like a priest or a lawyer, but asked things in the manner of a doctor who won't give a diagnosis before he has all the information and cannot but sympathise with the patient.

---

Cupido pictured the kind of people living there: a slightly pretentious middle class, so used to comfort, security and consumerism that they would get anxious if, of a morning, they didn't find at least three menu options in their capacious fridges. An urban middle class, well adapted to their times, who regarded the past century as deep in the past, who had barely any recollections of the countryside, the fields which seemed to them an exotic place one could never return to. A satisfied middle class, not necessarily conservative, for whom luxury did not consist of jewels, dresses, aristocratic circles, owning land, founding big companies, or consolidating lineages of prestigious surnames whose scions achieved more than the parents, but a sceptical, well-meaning middle class who often had children rather late in life and did not expect them to be heroes or landowners or millionaires or geniuses, but were concerned only with their well-being, people who were happy for their children to have a professional future like their own present, untouched by uncertainty, conflicts and global instability.

---

"What kind of person do you have to be to become a private detective? What happened to him that he chose such a profession?"
"I don't know. It used to be said that they were all ex-cops... fired from their jobs because of drinking problems."

---

Not only the soldiers answered the call. Patriotic voices could be heard coming from the civilians' stands, while the detective remained in stony silence, alone and removed from everyone around him. He was no longer touched by stories that weren't intimate and individual. Any collective outburst to do with politics, religion or one's homeland left him cold.

---

The world of teenagers was incomprehensible to him. He didn't find it easy to communicate with them; at times they spoke like parrots and at others barely used one-syllable words. He was disconcerted by their sudden oscillations between apathy and excess, the enthusiasm with which they embraced some fashion and the scorn with which they later rejected it, their nearly violent sulkiness and their occasional, impulsive displays of affection, the sincerity of their promises and the ease with which they broke them, their lack of appetite and their feeding frenzies.

Rob Kitchin's classic crime fiction curriculum challenge

Rob Kitchin, author of The Rule Book and who blogs at The View from the Blue House, has an unusual dilemma - he wants some recommendations for books to read. Not just any book, as he explains: "Imagine a reader new to crime fiction and wanting an education in the classics. Or consider a seasoned crime fiction reader who’s barely read a crime novel published prior to 1970. Well I’m that latter reader."

Rob is therefore issuing a challenge:set a ten book, pre-1970, crime fiction curriculum (ideally, of different subgenres and styles) and either post the list on your own blog and send Rob the link by email  ([email protected]), or post the list in a comment to his "challenge" post, by 31 January. Rob will then compile a curriculum based on the most popular choices (and provide link-backs to posts).

My suggestions, made on the fly in about five minutes, are:

1. Dashiell Hammett (the master) - I like The Dain Curse best but most people like The Maltese Falcon.
2. Ross Macdonald - any really, eg The Drowning Pool
3. James Hadley Chase eg No Orchids for Miss Blandish
4. Hillary Waugh, Last Seen Wearing, usually said to be the first police procedural told from the point of view of the details of the investigation, and fantastic.
5. Ngaio Marsh - again, any, really - I'd pick one with Agatha Troy in it. (wife of the detective, Roderick Alleyn)
6.Patricia Highsmith - the Ripley books were the start of something really else in the genre, but other books are also good: Strangers on a Train is great, much darker than the movie.
7. James Cain, eg The Postman Always Rings Twice
8. Raymond Chandler, any. (Lady in the Lake, perhaps?)
9. Wilkie Collins, either The Woman in White or No Name or Armadale (The Moonstone, to my mind, has not stood the test of time so well because the police detective novel has been so regularly imitated, and dare I say it, developed in more interesting ways)
10. I've run out! So many more I could choose. Dorothy Sayers is a bit snobbish but she is a classic so one of hers , eg Nine Tailors or Have His Carcasse.

Breaking the rules, I continued a full Baker's dozen:
11. John Franklin Bardin, who wrote three extraordinary novels - one could buy them in a three-in-one Penguin edition years ago. 
12. Julian Symons, a superb author. One of his earlier ones (pre-1970), eg The Man who killed himself or the Solomon Grundy one.
13 Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's books were mainly written after 1970 but Roseanna, the first, just about scrapes in and of all these old books, is perhaps the freshest today in terms of its lean prose and lack of "style of the times". (I've only read one Ed McBain, who is often compared to S/W or vice versa, but I prefer S/W on that basis.)

What do you think? Can you compile your own list, post it on your blog, and provide Rob with the link? (There are already several lists in the comment field to Rob's challenge post and some further discussion at Friend Feed.) I'm eagerly anticipating the final breakdown on 1 Feb or thereabouts.

Join Dorte's Global Reading Challenge for 2010

Dorte of DJ's Krimiblog has had the great idea of a global reading challenge to collect reviews of books written by authors from all the continents, during 2010. She's set up a global reading challenge blog in which each continent has a separate post. To enter the challenge (which has three levels), all you need to do is to add a link to your blog or website to this post. So far (3 Jan), 45 people have signed up, including authors of books, bloggers and others.

To participate, when you review a book, simply post a link to your review (using "Mr Linky") at the global challenge blog post for the continent relevant to the book's author. Thus, a collection of reviews grouped by continent/country will be built up over 2010, to provide a great snapshot of books from each region.

As of today, the leading continents are Asia (two linked reviews of books, one from Japan and the other Turkey) and Australasia (two linked reviews of the same Australian book!). There is one linked review for each of South America (Brazil), North America (USA) and Africa (South Africa). Europe and Antarctica are waiting for their first links to reviews.

Sign up for the global reading challenge here. (Any genre of book, fiction and non-fiction, is eligible). This post contains the details of the three levels of challenge.

Crime-fiction websites for readers

For those interested in international crime writing, Crime Scene is a Crime Time series edited by Bob Cornwell, which looks at "the very best of the international crime writing scene", country by country. Each country profile collects key facts, relevant figures, publishing trends, notable writers, crime fiction festivals and prizes. And each issue is compiled by writers, bibliographers, or other experts active on the Crime Scene in question. Each profile is available to download in PDF format and more will be added as the series develops. So far, countries profiled are France, The Netherlands and Switzerland, characterised by cover images of a mean street, a pair of legs wearing pink high heels, and a pile of sausages, respectively. These PDFs look like excellent resources, and just as soon as I can get my new(ish) computer to talk to the printer, I shall be downloading them to plan some reading. I'll also be checking the Crime Scene index page now and again to see which country will be added next.

Another crime-fiction website, CrimeSquad, among other riches is running an interview with Camilla Noli, who has written a highly controversial debut, The Mother's Tale, about the extraordinary pressures on a new mother and her desire to kill her own child. According to CrimeSquad, the book was deemed so controversial that it was delayed a year in publication in deference to public outrage at the Baby P case. (I can't find the interview with the author at the CrimeSquad site, but maybe others have better detective skills than me.)

Other crime-fiction resources include:

Mystery Readers Journal

Shots Ezine

Reviewing the Evidence, whose home page is currently featuring Sharon and Yvonne's top-ten reading lists for the year - with only one overlapping title.

Euro Crime  (my favourite! but they are all great sites.)

Sunday Salon: enchancing the reading experience

Clare Dudman, on her blog Keeper of the Snails, writes about the ways in which the internet can enhance the experience of reading a book. In addition to her list, there is an interesting group of suggestions in the comments discussion, as well as a debate about whether the pleasure of reading is best limited to the book itself, rather than including secondary activities such as looking up the location of the setting on Google maps.

For me, the main way in which the internet enhances the reading experienceis to use the plethora of online book reviews. If I am deciding whether or not to read a book, I might search for the title/author and then skim reviews on blogs or other websites (eg newspapers) - but not read them very thoroughly as I don't want to know too many details or opinions at that stage. After I have read the book, however, I very much enjoy reading other people's review of the book to see other perspectives on it  - and, if there are online comments for the review I'm reading, I like reading those and perhaps joining in the discussion.

Our Friend Feed crime and mystery group (which anyone is welcome to join - if you are quick you can be the 100th subscriber as we reached 99 this morning) is an extension of this process. Links to reviews of books are posted, either automatically or manually. The stimulating book-focused discussions that develop, either at Friend Feed or at the linked article, can either persuade me to read the book (or not to read it!), or bring out aspects of it that had not previously occurred to me.

The internet is so good at enabling one to discover books and to read them, either by visiting good book websites (my favourite is Euro Crime as I am becoming increasingly taken with translated fiction) or by general searches. Buying the chosen book online is also a huge advantage on the old days (pre-Internet) of traipsing round bookstores and not finding a desired title in stock (but being tempted into buying other books in the process, of course). Although Amazon does feature "customer reviews" of books, I don't usually find these as useful or engaging as the reviews I read on blogs (particularly the blogs I regularly visit) or via an internet search, which identifies newspaper or magazine reviews as well as reviews on blogs I didn't previously know about. So I tend to use Amazon (or other bookselling site) mainly for the purchasing function and not for the reviewing/recommending option.

Holiday reading statistics and highlights

I am back from my holiday and return to work tomorrow, so will be in catch-up mode for a while or for ever. Before memories fade irretrievably, I'll report that I read 16 books while I am away - there were four books on the pile in the previous post that I could not in the end take for weight reasons (!), although I did buy Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay at the airport and slipped it into my hand baggage; so when I finished all those I bought a few more: Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night and The Demon of Dakar; Michael Palmer's The First Patient and Stephen White's Dead Time (the last of which I began reading at 2 a.m. today when I woke up with my brain convinced it was morning - very good so far). In return, I left a few titles behind, donated to future visitors.

Of the 16 books I read, eight (half) were translated - five from Swedish, one Danish, one Dutch and one German. The remainder were a mix of English, Irish, US, Canadian and Australian. Outstanding among these is Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room*, the highlight of my holiday. I also found the following to be excellent reads and would highly recommend them: The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves, Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort, Cop Killer by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo*, Woman with Birthmark by Hakan Nesser* and the two by Kjell Eriksson*.

You may notice a trend here: of 16 books read, seven are very good (which is an excellent average based on my pre-blogging years ;-) ).  Six of these seven are translated. (!) The remaining nine varied from "OK" through "meh" (Bernadette's expressively economical term) to "not my cup of tea"/boring.

Further reports will be in the shape of reviews on as many of these titles as I can manage. I'll just note, though, how impressively the Sjowall/Wahloo holds up compared with the rest of my selection, all written some time later. Although dated in some minor details, the book, the ninth in their Martin Beck series, is consistently compelling, not only in its story but also in its clearly articulated authorial viewpoint. it was particularly interesting to read the books by other Swedes, Theorin, Nesser and Eriksson, as part of the same "splurge" as the Sjowall/Wahloo title, as all these books are (to a greater or lesser degree) police procedurals with a social context, each reflecting their own author's preoccupations.

Thank you very much to all those who provided welcome recommendations, either directly for the purpose or via reviews and discussion during the previous few months or so. 

[* denotes series, best read in chronological order (see author bibliographies at Euro Crime for correct (and recommended) reading order). The Crow Trap is also a series, but this is the first title in it.]

Sunday Salon: translated fiction to read this Summer

With the holiday season well-advanced in some regions of the world, and about to hit this small island mid-next-week with the end of the school term, I present a few holiday reading recommendations from books reviewed in the past few weeks. The two parameters I've chosen are: (1) translated into English; and (2) not on the shortlist for the CWA 2009 International Dagger award.

First, my review of Island of the Naked Women, by Inger Frimansson and translated by Laura A. Wideburg, is up today at Euro Crime. From my review: "I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which is a strong candidate for my "best of" list for this year. As well as the satisfying "on the surface" mystery, there is an allegorical aspect to the story, which gives it a haunting quality. The island of the naked women (Shame Island) is where legend has it that, in the olden days, wives from the village who had been unfaithful to their husbands were sent, naked, to fend for themselves. It is presumed they starved. The wives in the story told in the book live in more enlightened times, but is their fate any better than that of their historical counterparts?" Read my full review at Euro Crime.

Second, up last week at Euro Crime, is my review of The Water's Edge by Karin Fossum, translated by Charlotte Barsund. "As usual, I am very impressed by Karin Fossum's talent and originality. In THE WATER'S EDGE she has taken an upsetting and controversial topic– the painful death of a child or children - and has made it palatable and interesting even to a sensitive reader who, frankly, cannot usually bear to think about the subject. The author uses the events in the book to look at people, their attitudes and relationships, in both small and large ways." Read the whole review here.

Over at Reactions to Reading, Bernadette reviews Karin Alvtegen's Missing, translated by Anna Paterson (I presume, if it is the same edition as the one I read). Bernadette writes: "I  intended to read a few pages of this before going to sleep last night. I quite literally could not put it down and finished the whole thing in one sitting ....Here is story telling at its absolute finest: I was hooked from page one of this simple and moving tale." The rest of Bernadette's 5/5 review is here.

For those, like me, who enjoyed Johan Theorin's debut Echoes from the Dead, Peter of Nordic Bookblog writes an early review of the second in the series, The Darkest Room Peter says that like Theorin's "first novel, this too is an intelligent book somewhere in between a crime fiction book and a ghost story." I am shocked to note that there is no mention of the translator of this novel either in this review, or at the publishers' website, or Amazon, or on the Guardian review. I guess that it is translated by Marlaine Delargy, who translated the author's first novel, but I hope the name of the translator is provided in at least some of these places by the time the book is on sale.

Finally for this post, a new (to me, and in fact quite new) blog called The View from the Blue House posts a review of The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett (a.k.a. Harry Hole). Rob Kitchin, the reviewer, calls the book "a highly enjoyable read and I zipped through it, picking it up at every opportunity so I could find out what happened next. Nesbø is particularly good at keeping the pace and tension high, running several sub-plots simultaneously and linking them in and out of each other." Read on here. [If you are tempted to read this book, my strong advice is don't do so until you've read first The Redbreast and then Nemesis - the correct reading order is here.]

Sunday Salon: Reinventing plots

As well as featuring 12 crime fiction novels, the current issue of Waterstones Quarterly contains an interview with Sarah Waters about her life and work, especially her latest book The Little Stranger. I found a paragraph about influences on this novel extraordinary for two reasons:

"That's right" [says Waters]. "I'd been thinking a lot about Brideshead and other country-house novels. One in particular actually: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. It's about a working class girl who's abducted by a mother and daughter living in an isolated house. It's brilliant in lots of ways, but repellent: the narrator's sympathies are completely with the middle-class people and the girl is made a repository for all this class loathing. At first I wanted to do a rewrite of it, but I worried that Tey's estate might not be happy. So I decided to find another way to explore that landscape."

First, has Waters actually read the book? Of course she must have done, but anyone who has read it will surely agree that her encapsulation of the plot is bizarre.

Second, the idea of Tey's novel as a ruthless salvo in the class war had not occurred to me before. It is an interesting way to look at it. Not a perspective with which I agree, but Sarah Waters has certainly provided a stimulating, if jarring, interpretation.

I thought I might try the Sarah Waters treatment on a couple of classics.

Hamlet: a middle-aged couple is driven to distraction by a hooligan they selflessly adopted despite his ASBO. The authorities' caring attempts to save the wayward boy from his worst excesses via secret surveillance and monitoring by a female social worker are viciously repelled.

Lord of the Flies: in an over-the-top show of force, the military callously destroy the innocent game of a group of unarmed boys; the reader is encouraged to root for the oppressors, endorsing the terrible repression so prevalent in British society at that time and providing a vote for juntas worldwide.

Please feel free to try this approach yourself on your own favourites.

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

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]

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.

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".

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!

Sunday Salon: Starting The Scarecrow

I am 38 pages in to The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly, and as expected, am enjoying it tremendously. Here is a passage from page 12, just after verteran reporter Jack McEvoy has been given two weeks' notice, a grace period in order to train up his replacement:

There was no newspaper out there in the market for an over-40 cop-shop reporter. Not when they had an endless supply of cheap labor - baby reporters like Angela Cook minted fresh every year at USC and Medill and Columbia, all of them technologically savvy and willing to work for next to nothing. Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over. It was about the Internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates. It was about filing stories on your phone instead of using it to call rewrite. The morning paper might as well be called the Daily Afterthought. Everything in it was posted on the web the night before.

and here's an extract from page 18:

I turned from my reverie to look up at the lovely face of Angela Cook. I didn't know her but I knew her: a fresh hire from a top-flight school. She was what they call a mojo - a mobile journalist nimbly able to file from the filed via any electronic means. She could file text and photos for the website or paper, or video and audio for television and radio partners. She was trained to do it all but in practice she was still as green as can be. She was probably being paid $500 a week less than me, and in today's newspaper economy that made her a greater value to the company. Never mind the stories that would be missed because she had no sources. Never mind how many times she would be set up and manipulated by the police brass, who knew an opportunity when they saw it.
She was probably a short-timer anyway. She'd get a few years' experience, get some decent bylines, and move on to bigger things, law school or politics, maybe a job in TV. But Larry Bernard was right. She was a beauty, with blond hair over green eyes and full lips. The cops were going to love seeing her around headquarters. It would take no more than a week before they forgot about me.

Fantastic, perceptive stuff. This book is shaping up to be a perfect read.

Sunday Salon: Crime Fest edition

On the run-up to CrimeFest, the crime-fiction festival in Bristol starting on Thursday 14 May and continuing until Sunday, several of the books reviewed at Euro Crime today are by authors who will be at the meeting. Two of these reviews are by me; I highly recommend both titles.

Red Bones by Ann Cleeves is the third of her Shetland novels. It is best enjoyed if you have read the previous two (Raven Black and White Nights), but it isn't essential. I wrote: "Much of the appeal of this book lies in the wonderfully conveyed sense of place, the convincingly sympathetic portrayal of a way of life, and astute characterisation. But as well as these elements, there is a good solid mystery plot..." Ann will be moderating an exciting session at CrimeFest called Foreign Correspondent: Books in translation, featuring (as well as Ann herself) a world-class panel of Don Bartlett, Ros Schwartz, Reg Keelend (Steven T Murray) and Tiina Nunnally.

The Mind's Eye by Hakan Nesser is the first in the van Veeteren series. A quote from my review: "The plot is simple yet powerful; elemental themes are involved; there is lots of droll humour and neat touches; the solution is satisfying; and one is left hoping for more." I've read these books out of order by default, and think I would have enjoyed the later ones more had I read this one first. Never mind, the author has a very dry and wicked sense of humour; Laurie Thompson (also translator of several of Henning Mankell's books) has done an excellent job of translating not only the text but also the jokes. Hakan Nesser is a featured author at CrimeFest; one of the highlights of the programme for me will be his interview by Ann Cleeves.

See the Euro Crime home page for the rest of this week's new reviews, including books by CrimeFest authors Caro Ramsay, Andrew Martin and S. J. Bolton.

Sunday Salon: online reading news

The blogosphere is a busy place this week for readers and those who enjoy reading-based online socialising.

Karen of Euro Crime has set up a Euro Crime news group at Friend Feed, where she posts links to reviews of and articles about British and other European crime fiction. For more explanation, see Karen's blog post. One nice aspect of Friend Feed is that readers can comment online on the links using the easy interface, so conversations can develop about the articles. You can also get the updates via email or RSS if you like, via the simple buttons provided at the Friend Feed service.

Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise has, as usual, been very busy this week. On the day that Twitter opened up its search publicly, Kerrie (who does not hang about) set up a #crimefiction tag. So if you want to follow crime fiction conversation at Twitter, sign up to the search, and if you post on Twitter about crime fiction, use the #crimefiction tag so everyone else interested in the topic will find your pearls of wisdom. See here for Kerrie's explanation. (RSS feed for #crimefiction is here, I hope/think).

Another of Kerrie's current activities is an online collaborative crime-fiction story, whose first lines are written by best-selling author Michael Robotham. Find out about the project at Mysteries in Paradise, and join in. While you are at Kerrie's blog, you can vote on her poll. The topic changes every week, with the current question being "how often do you write a blog post?"

More memes and lists: Sunnie has reactivated the "15 books tag": name 15 books that will always stick with you, and do it within a 15-minute time frame. Sunnie's list is here; Dorte has risen to the challenge here. You might also like to list 12 events that shaped your world, or in the case of Crimefictionreader of It's a Crime, 16. Crimefictionreader, by the way, brings the excellent news that, later this month, she will be blogging the Hay festival for the BBC. Congratulations to her - I hope she isn't too introverted to undertake the task ;-).  Full story is here.

A final note: I recently discovered a blog I like a lot. Called Based on Books, it posts reviews of films that are, er, based on books, and compares the two. There's a nice box in each post, summarising the key differences and providing a rating for the adaptation. Here, for example, is Kathleen Walsh's analysis of Prince Caspian. Even though I haven't seen (and probably won't see) the movie, I very much enjoyed the "book vs film" review of a book in a series that I loved very much as a child. Other posts on this blog have been similarly top-notch. 

Sunday salon: Reading The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr

Ever since I read Fiona's review at Euro Crime, I've been very keen to read The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr, published by Bitter Lemon press and translated from the German by John Brownjohn. So keen, in fact, that I bought the book on the basis of the review. I didn't begin it until this morning, and so far (85 pages in) it is living up to my expectations, and more.

The story is about desperate housewife Cora Bender, who is so depressed that she decides to kill herself, even though she has a nice(ish) husband, sweet young son, interesting job and pleasant home. Cora has some (as yet) unknown trauma in her recent past that is causing feelings of intense panic, desperation and despair. She has also had an awful childhood at the hands of a religious maniac mother, dying younger sister and caring but weak father. One day, Cora can't take it any more and decides to commit suicide by going to the lido with her husband and son and drowning herself while swimming - she plans it this way so that her death will not be considered suicide and, by not killing herself in the car or the house, causing minimal inconvenience to her husband. Once at the lido, however, events turn out very differently.

This book is brilliant so far, I can't wait to continue with it.

Petra Hammesfahr has written more than 20 crime fiction and suspense novels, and writes for TV and film. She has won numerous prizes for her work. The Sinner seems to be the only book of hers that is available in the UK in English (according to Amazon).

Publisher's website.

Review of The Sinner at International Noir Fiction, the blog of Glenn Harper.

Review of The Sinner at Mostly Fiction, by Tony Ross (includes brief author biography).

Sunday Salon: Review of Shadow, by Karin Alvtegen

"One often reads the word "unputdownable" to describe a book – it is certainly a true description of this one. As the novel reaches its climax, I was on the edge of my seat, my heart was pounding, and by the end I felt wrecked. It has strong parallels with Wuthering Heights, in which two "normal" people (Gerda as Nelly Dean and Marianne as Lockwood) are the filter through which the reader experiences elemental, horrifically tragic and passionate events that are beyond the witness-narrators' comprehension."

I wrote these words as part of my Euro Crime review of Shadow, the new book by Karin Alvtegen, which is a magnificent novel. As well as the Wuthering Heights analogy, I was also struck by the name of the 92-year-old woman whose death starts the long process of thawing out the frozen wastes of the past. Her name is Gerda, which is the same name as the loyal girl whose long journey is to melt the spliter of ice put into her friend Kay's heart by the evil Snow Queen. Karin Alvtegen's story is no fairy tale, however.

As I read the novel, I was impressed by the translation, by someone I did not think I had heard of before, McKinley Burnett.  It turns out, however, that I have heard of him - and so, probably, have you. Thank you, Reg, for bringing this superb author to English language eyes (a few hints about translators' names in the comments here).

My Euro Crime review of Shadow.

Kimbofo of Reading Matters reviews Shadow.

Crimefictionreader of It's a Crime! reviews Shadow.

Sunday Salon: more on Karin Alvtegen

Last week I wrote about a wonderful author whom I'd heard about but had not, until then, read: Karin Alvtegen. Here's a quotation from one of her books, Betrayal,  and here is the author's website.

Since last week, I've read Shadow, her latest book, and immediately Missing, which has been deservedly shortlisted for the Best Novel category of the Edgars this year. Next I'll read Shame (can't wait) - and sadly, that is it (for now - there is another book, Guilt, but although it has been translated it is "unavailable"). My reviews of Betrayal and Shadow have been submitted to Euro Crime, and my review of Missing is in draft.

In my opinion, Karin Alvtegen is one of the very best crime-fiction authors I have ever read. Her books are a superb fusion of plot, character, suspense, psychology, history and insight - and they race by. Each is different, yet has certain elements in common. Fans of Lisbeth Salander, the main character of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, will I am sure find much to their taste in Missing, for example.

Shadow is about an eminent Swedish novelist, Axel, who has won the Nobel prize for literature. Although the book could not be more serious, the author has a few jokes at the expense of her profession. Early on in his career, Axel agrees to attend a literary evening in which some authors will read from their books and hope to sell a few signed copies.

The evening's organiser left the room and only the authors remained. He had known Torgny for some time, while the other two were strangers, one a first-time novelist and the other a crime writer. The latter had apparently sold a good number of books, although it was incomprehensible to Axel that people read such drivel. 

Axel's son is not of a literary disposition.

Unlike his father, Jan-Erik was the type who simply saw a dustbin when he saw a dustbin, and not a 'vessel for unwanted memories'.

Sunday Salon: David Peace and Karin Alvtegen

I wasn't sure whether to watch the Red Riding trilogy, based on the quartet by David Peace. I read the first book, 1974, but found it too black, bleak, gruesome, cynical and hard to be able to bear to read more. I sort of decided not to watch the first episode, but in the light of rave reviews in The Times and elsewhere, and an explanation from a daughter about Channel 4 catch-up and how to operate it, I changed my mind and decided to give it a go. It was repellently brilliant. Shot in semi-darkness and through a wall of cigarette smoke, the film did not hold back on the idiocy of the crass, unlikeable "hero" (a cocky young journalist), the brutality to the core of the police, and the sheer unsentimentality, horror and violence of the plot and characters. As the damage-limitation actions of the police got more and more out of control, culminating in an almost sexual frenzy of institutionalised violence, I was reminded of Lord of the Flies for grown-ups (nobody in a white uniform to rescue Ralph here). And the film struck a strong contemporary chord with me: the public trust in and private stench of the corrupt police force has parallels with the outrage a gullible population feels now that it has discovered what the banks were doing with their savings.

I watched the film while half-way through reading Betrayal, a novel by Karin Alvtegen, translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray. I've now finished the book and will be submitting a review to Euro Crime in due course. But rarely have I encountered an author who has had such an instantly compelling effect. I have immediately ordered the remaining two of her novels (I have the fourth to read, courtesy of Karen Meek). Betrayal is just as bleak as 1974, but relies entirely on the description of the domestic lives of an apparently "normal" group of people, living ordinary lives. There are no police, no detectives. The suspense depends on the ability of these characters to convince themselves of truths from imperfectly grasped facts, driven by their pasts, their internal prejudices and emotions, rather than rationality and openness. It isn't gruesome or explicit, but it's just as intense, black, cold and tense as Peace's world. Betrayal is a brilliant book, and based on it, the author is in the pantheon of Scandinavian crime fiction.

Sunday Salon: A Place of Safety and Bloodprint

I have two book reviews to share with you today. The first is Bloodprint by Kitty Sewell. The author is certainly geographically adventurous, having moved from the icy wastes of Canada and wet Wales from her first book, Ice Trap, to the heat of Florida (by way of Cuba) and Bristol in western England for her second. I enjoyed the book, but felt that too many different types of melodrama were involved, verging onto cliche in some instances. But it is certainly a rich read, with two strongly depicted women as main characters, lots of romance, passion, magic and inter-relationship skullduggery, all tied up in an art and psychotherapy theme. My full review is at Euro Crime.

The second book I've reviewed in the past week is A Place of Safety by Helen Black. Covering serious topics of racism, people trafficking, prejudice and the fate of children who run away from home and have to sleep rough, the book is very readable, largely due to the attractive and funny lawyer-heroine Lilly Valentine. From my review: "The author tries to make the reader question our cosy social assumptions, tackling racism, poverty and snobbery from all points of view. Overall, I was impressed by the author's commitment and her ability to tell a good story while maintaining a clear moral voice." Read the rest at Euro Crime.

Sunday Salon: Norman's icy challenge

Norman at Crime Scraps wrote a post asking what books in the crime-fiction genre you would recommend to someone who has never read any before. Not so much "desert island books" as "snowed-in on Dartmoor books", he writes. Norman's challenge is to recommend one book from each of twelve sub-genres recommended by BookMarcs online blog (see discussion on Friend Feed - I think the link to BookMarcs was first posted by Mack, but I can't now find the evidence). Of course, one could argue late into the night about these sub-genres (see here for Dorte's preference), but for the purposes of this exercise,  I am going to take them as read and try to recommend one book from each. Any readers who wish to take up the challenge are very welcome to do so, and to drop a line in the comments so I can read your choices!

Whodunnit:

Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh

Locked room mystery:

The Locked Room by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Golden Age mystery:

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

Historical fiction:

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

Crime fiction:

Little Criminals by Gene Kerrigan

Detective fiction:

The Black Echo by Michael Connelly

Hardboiled detective fiction:

Flood by Andrew Vachss

Inverted detective fiction:

Sleeping Beauty by Philip Margolin

Thriller fiction:

Where are the Children? by Mary Higgins Clark

Spy and espionage fiction

In the Evil Day by Peter Temple

Caper fiction:

The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L C Tyler

Psychological suspense fiction:

Losing You by Nicci French

And to make the dozen a baker's dozen,

Journalism crime fiction:

Paradise by Lisa Marklund

I could get into this - if you are interested in science-in-crime fiction:

Total Eclipse by Liz Rigbey

And chess-in-crime fiction:

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis.

OK, I'll stop there. I realise that I could repeat this process a dozen more times, listing a different set of recommendations in each list.

Here are Dorte's dozen recommendations. I haven't come across anyone else who has yet completed the Crime Scraps challenge.

Sunday Salon: The Herring Seller at Euro Crime

This week, or thereabouts, is the UK paperback debut of The Herring Seller's Apprentice, by L. C. Tyler. I was given the hardback edition as a gift some while ago, by my esteemed colleague James Long. I also had the honour of meeting the extremely pleasant, friendly, frighteningly well-educated and intelligent, multi-talented author, "Len", at CrimeFest last year, and enjoy his occasional posts on the Macmillan New Writers' blog. Unfortunately, I did not make the time until recently to read the book itself. Now I have, and I am very glad indeed to have done so. My review is up today at Euro Crime: please read it, and then, the book. It is a very short novel with a striking cover, and you will not regret spending time in its funny, perceptive and bitter-sweet world. From my review:

"THE HERRING SELLER'S APPRENTICE is a wonderful book. It is one of those books that transcends the genre of crime fiction and speaks to all readers. I was completely absorbed in it, totally enjoying my sojourn in its multilayered, trippingly written, disciplined, and astutely observed world. Bravissimo!" Read on here. And thank you, James!

Karen Meek's Euro Crime review of the book.

Review of the book at It's a Crime! (or a mystery..).

Highly readable Q and A with L. C. Tyler at Crime Always Pays.

More about the covers of L. C. Tyler's books - and about his next book - at It's a Crime! (or a mystery...).

L. C. Tyler's website.

Publisher's website.

The rest of this week's new reviews at Euro Crime - and much more.

Sunday Salon: books of the year at Euro Crime

Karen Meek of Euro Crime has compiled a list of the favourite books read by the site's reviewers during 2008. The selection (which contains links to reviews of the chosen books where one exists) is an excellent guide to some of the cream of the books read (not necessarily published) in 2008. There is a wide-ranging mix of the literary, the psychological, thriller, historical, noir, police procedural and classic fiction - with a European accent, of course - so take your pick. Many of the selections were first written in languages other than English; I have deep admiration for the translators who have so sympathetically and in such a talented way enabled us to enjoy these books. My own selections are as follows:

English language origin:
Nicci French - Losing You
Simon Lewis - Bad Traffic
Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale
Laura Wilson - Stratton's War

Translated into English:
Karin Fossum - Broken
Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill
Asa Larsson - The Black Path
Johan Theorin - Echoes from the Dead
Helene Tursten - The Torso

I like them all because they are strong books - thoughtful, interesting characters, intelligent writing, and show the effects on people of challenging circumstances. My reviews of all these books are at Euro Crime and can be found via Karen's Euro Crime page.

I read several books last year that I did not review, so did not include those in my selection criteria. However, I would like to mention one of these books here, as it was perhaps my favourite book of 2008. It is What Was Lost, by Catherine O'Flynn. This book is not "crime fiction", though it does feature an unusual detective element. It is a haunting and poignant portrait of the world as seen through the eyes of a delightfully unusual child, as well as some others on the fringes. It's a witty satire on urban values, and extremely perceptive. I cannot recommend this short, sad (but funny) book highly enough. Thanks to Karen for encouraging me to read it.

Other Euro Crime reviewers who provide selections of their 2008 favourites are: Pat Austin, Paul Blackburn, Karen Chisholm, Sunnie Gill, Amanda Gillies, Terry Halligan, Geoff Jones, Karen Meek, Michelle Peckham, Norman Price, Mike Ripley, Laura Root, Kerrie Smith and Fiona Walker. A summary of the books chosen and the combined favourites can be found at Euro Crime's blog. Some of us continue the reading conversations, with other bloggers and readers, in a "room" for Crime & Mystery fiction at FriendFeed - please do join us there, it is a very user-friendly web interface and there is lots of fascinating chat and exchange of reading news and information.

Sunday Salon: Skin and Bones by Tom Bale

  Skin and Bones by Tom Bale (Preface, £12.99)  starts grippingly and chillingly with the story of how Julia, visiting the village in Sussex where her parents recently died, runs down to the post office for a few supplies, to find herself in the middle of a massacre. A gunman is rampaging through the tiny hamlet, indiscriminately shooting people. Julia narrowly escapes – or so she thinks. She realises that the murderer is playing with her, chasing her in a macabre game. Just as he catches her and is about to shoot her, a badly wounded, older resident distracts the murderer for long enough for Julia to make a temporary escape, by climbing a tree on the village green. What she witnesses from there is even more shocking than the preceding events. Then she is shot.
After racing through these early chapters, I wondered if the rest of the book could possibly live up to this amazingly tense and dramatic start. The answer is a qualified yes. The plot is given momentum by the fact of one character knowing something that nobody else, the police included, believes – and this knowledge is exactly what is putting that person in peril. Or is it?
In a separate thread, Craig Walker, a former investigative journalist who has lost his nerve, becomes involved. He has personal connections with the village, and so helps an ex-colleague Abby, now a freelancer, to follow the story of the terrible killing and the possible reasons for it. Abby digs around and finds various shady connections with drug dealers, crime lords and property developers – not an edifying trio of professions, and one that rapidly leads her and Craig into danger themselves.
These parts of the books are the most successful, as the two main characters separately cope with the various threats to their lives, and decide to fight back. Less successful, in my opinion, are the portrayals of the villains, which do not quite gel.
Nevertheless, Skin and Bones is an extremely fast-paced thriller whose pages any reader will be desperate to turn to find out what twist and turn is coming next. There are some very good characterisations, particularly Vanessa, the wife of the local lord of the manor. But there are also some quite weak ones, for example her indolent nephew Toby, and quite a few predictable cliches. But overall, the book works. Many of the plotlines are cleverly tied together as events reach their conclusion – everything and everyone turns out to be more connected than they had realised, and there are several satisfying aspects to the resolution. Skin and Bones is definitely a book that will keep you occupied while the world carries on around you.

Skin and Bones: publisher's website review.

Video and special offer for Skin and Bones.

Review of Skin and Bones at It's a Crime! (Or a Mystery).

Sunday Salon: Useful (and not) reading guides

The Guardian and The Observer are running one of those perennially popular lists, this time "1,000 books you must read". First they did love, and today they have got onto crime - so I thought I'd better read it (thanks to Karen for the heads-up of which day to watch out for). From the introduction:

"It's obvious which genres the Agatha Christie whodunnit and the 007 spy novel belong to, but between them are sub-genres — courtroom duel, psychological thriller, suspense novel, crime caper, criminal-centred fiction — not so easily classified. Part two of this seven-part series tries to reflect as much of the crime spectrum as possible, as well as the regularity with which literary novelists have made evildoers their theme. The difference? The latter break genre rules, typically eliminating the hero who solves or prevents crime. And they usually write more stylishly; but the recent rise of the literary crime fiction epitomised by PD James has made that distinction less clear."

And, er, that is basically it. I found the paragraph above (the extent of the "introduction") rather lazy, in that it makes a proposition of the difference between genre and literary crime, then states that this proposition does not always hold. (As it indeed does not: a "genre" example is given but one could equally give literary examples that stick to the "rules", for example Stef Penny and Diane Setterfield.)

What follows is an alphabetical listing of brief paragraphs about a slew of "crime" books, written by many different contributors: part 1, part 2 and part 3. Each entry carries a link to the Guardian bookshop, so you can readily buy the book even if you don't get any context or other reason for why it was included in the list. For example, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love is followed by Henning Mankell's Sidetracked. Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson comes immediately before Barbara Vine's A Fatal Inversion.

A messy exercise in marketing, is my conclusion. Try it if you want to go from Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm) to Zola (Terese Raquin) in a jerky series of disconnected paragraphs, but if you prefer some more thoughtful reasoning, try reading some proper book reviews, which can be found in abundance on the Internet, often collected in sites like Euro Crime, Reviewing the Evidence, CrimeTime, Shotsmag, Tangled Web, Mystery Readers Journal, Crimesquad  and so on. You might prefer an analysis in book form, in which case I recommend Barry Forshaw's Rough Guide to Crime Fiction - or for an online "quick read", there have been plenty of similar articles in other newspapers, for example The Times's attempt to capture the "best 50 crime writers". One might disagree with some of the choices made in these compilations, but at least there is a reasoning provided for the selection, instead of a hodge-podge of mini-adverts.

Sunday Salon: Spring books

Now that Professor Petrona's extremely generous Christmas present, a subscription to the Bookseller, has started arriving, I shall be more reliably informed than hitherto about what books will be appearing in the next few months. So without further ado, here is what to look out for this spring (April 2009):

Long Lost by Harlan Coben (Orion), a new Myron Bolitar novel. Myron is a sports agent, and here a former girlfriend gets in touch out of the blue (i.e. we have probably not heard mention of her in previous titles). She's a suspect in a murder case, and only Myron can help.

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (Bantam): Jack Reacher is on a subway at 2 a.m. in New York, and becomes suspicious of a fellow passenger who is exhibiting "all the signs of a would-be suicide bomber". Let's hope he's better at this activity, and what to do about it, than the Metropolitan Police.

The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith (Simon and Schuster) is the second novel by the author of the phenomenally successful and highly-regarded Child 44. In this book, it is 1956 in the Soviet Union: Stalin is dead and Khrushchev is promising transformation of the whole country. But there are many who cannot forget the Stalin years and former KGB officer Leo Demidov and his family are in danger from someone who bears a grudge.

About Face by Donna Leon (Heinemann) is the new Commissiario Brunetti novel - this outing being accompanied by a practical walking guide to Venice by Toni Sepeda (same publisher). I have often hoped that "placeist" crime-fiction (and other) novels could be accompanied by travel guides to the relevant literary scenes, so maybe this is the start of a welcome trend.

My Soul to Take is the eagerly awaited second title from Yrsa Sigurdadottir (Hodder), again featuring lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, this time investigating a murder at a health resort. The author will be attending CrimeFest at Bristol in May, I'm delighted to say.

The Kill Call by Stephen Booth (HarperCollins) is the ninth in the DS Diane Fry/DC Ben Cooper series set in Derbyshire. This time they become entangled in the violent world of hunting and hunt saboteurs.

Bleed a River Deep (Macmillan) is Brian McGilloway's third Inspector Devlin novel, a superb series set in the borderlands between Northern Ireland and Eire.

Another eagerly-awaited Irish novel is Dark Times in the City by the extremely talented Gene Kerrigan (Harvill), this one set in the Dublin underworld. Danny Callagan is having a quiet drink in the pub when two men with guns enter. On impulse Callagan intervenes to save a man's life, an action that will have vicious consequences.

Comfort to the Enemy is the latest from master Elmore Leonard (Weidenfeld and Nicholson), this one a novel comprising three linked stories charting the career of lawman Carl Webster.

War Damage by Elizabeth Wilson (Serpent's Tail) is set in the aftermath of the Second World War, when a body is discovered on Hampstead Heath after one of socialite Regine Milner's legendary Sunday house parties. 

Henning Mankell, better known for his Wallendar crime novels, has a "literary" novel coming out. In Italian Shoes, a man living in self-imposed exile on a Swedish island is visited out of the blue by the only woman he ever loved, whom he abandoned 40 years earlier. They drive to a lake in northern Sweden, where he discovers she has a surprise in store. There is a chance the author will visit the UK when the book is published.

Among the rest of April's crime fiction are Black Out by Lisa Unger; debut novel Daemon by Daniel Surarez; Fatal Cut by June Hampton; Mystery Man by Bateman; The Edge by Chris Simms; The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez; The Little Victim by R. T. Raichev; Close-up by Esther Verhoef; Bone Man's Daughters by Ted Dekker; and The Devil's Bones by Jefferson Bass.

As a postscript, three new Doctor Who novels are also scheduled: The Slitheen Excursion by Simon Guerrier; Judgement of the Judoon by Colin Brake; and Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale.

That's just April.

Sunday Salon: huge advances will continue

Via Books Inq. and one degree of separation, Dave Lull, I read an article in the Wall St Journal about how the big book publishers are still going to be paying massive advances for what they hope to be best sellers, even in this time of financial crisis, mess and general insecurity. Broadly speaking, Anita Elberse's persuasive argument goes like this: book publishers generate 80 per cent of their revenues from 20 per cent of their sales; a huge best seller (the main example given is Dewey, Vicki Myron's book about an orange tabby cat, now deceased, that lived in the library) repays the advance and more; if a publisher pays a lot for a book, it will also pay a great deal to market it and push it to success; and to stay ahead of the game, a publisher cannot afford to drop out of the auctions in which agents pitch their best books, as if they do, other publishers will snap up these titles and the best editors will follow.

This explains why, then, HarperCollins has just "sent comedian Sarah Silverman a contract of $2.5 million for her first book". Of course, the strategy does not work all or even most of the time. In my recent trips round the sales, all the Christmas celebrity books are half-price or less - Dawn French, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Jeremy Clarkson, Julie Walters, Barak Obama (;-) ), Paul McKenna and so on. Some of these are probably quite good, by people who have actually spent a few years having a career, are interesting people and have something to say as a result -  e.g. Julie Walters and Dawn French, and are not your usual Christmas rubbish celeb book by a nineteen year old model/wobblyhorserider/Big Brother runner-up/person famous for wearing clothes and marrying a footballer/person famous for being rude to other people. 

So, even though the "outrageous advance" strategy is clearly not always working, and not only that but is clearly working less often than it did before people no longer had as much money to buy fripperies such as ghost-written tat, it is still working often enough from the publishers' perspective for the practice to continue.

  

Sunday Salon: another Swedish novel

My review of Murder at the Savoy, the sixth book in the Martin Beck series, is now up at Euro Crime. The book "follows the same lean, sardonic and insightful formula as the previous volumes. It is summer, and most of the events take place in Malmo, the coastal town which is the home turf of DI Per Mansson, who has collaborated with Martin Beck in previous investigations. He's assisted by the young, ambitious Benny Skacke, newly transferred to the region after his disastrous intervention at the end of THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED." Read the rest of my review here. 

Last week, my Euro Crime review was of The Outcast by Michael Walters, the third in what I call the author's Mongolian crime series. From my review: "THE OUTCAST is a book of two parts. In the first, we observe previously established characters as they deal with the various crimes and events going on in the city, trying to understand them and, particularly in Tunjin's case, avoid censure or worse. Sarangarel, the judge at the heart of events in the previous book, THE ADVERSARYand possible romantic interest for Nergui, becomes involved and she, as well as Solongo, end up in some danger as it becomes clear how much is at stake and the level of seniority of those involved."

I also draw your attention to yesterday's post, about a novel publishing experiment called The Dolphin Man. Some nice 'reading by installment' for the upcoming holiday season, if you would care to subscribe to The Dolphin Man blog. Probably more about science in fiction than crime in fiction, though don't be too sure.

Sunday Salon: Last Rituals reviewed

My review of Yrsa Sigurdardottir's Last Rituals appeared at Euro Crime in the past week. The book is "an 'academic mystery': that is, the crime takes place in a university department (a student is murdered), and the solution depends on the uncovering and understanding of the victim's research, as well as of the broader mores, religion and witchcraft in medieval Europe. Yet the book is by no means heavy-going; the opposite in fact. LAST RITUALS is an assured novel, ably translated by the late Bernard Scudder. I recommend it very highly." Read the rest of my review here.

Another review, some background, and a stimulating discussion about the book can be found at It's a crime! ...(or a mystery). Some disagreement is expressed with the Amazon reviews of the book, and about whether the author can be likened to Helene Tursten. (I think not.)

For more discussion of crime and mystery fiction, please join our Friend Feed room. If you join this Friend Feed group and have a relevant blog, let me know and I will include it with the others that feed into this room. (This means that each time you write a post, a link to it is automatically created in the Friend Feed room.)

See Euro Crime for reviews, authors, news and other information about crime fiction. The Euro Crime site has recently expanded to include non-European born authors who are strongly associated with European crime fiction.

Sunday Salon: following Wallander's footsteps

Three of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels have been filmed by the BBC; the first (Sidetracked) will be shown at 9 p.m. on Sunday 30 November and in the USA earlyish next year. The Times ran a feature in its travel section yesterday about holidays to Ystad, home of the fictional detective. Despite an initial wobble in which Wallander is said to be so similar to Colin Dexter's Inspector E. Morse (incorrect!), being referred to as "Inspector Norse", that the BBC resorted to "doing away with his penchant for classical music" in order to distinguish the two characters (subtlety not being the strong point of the film medium), the article is a fascinating account of the area in which the books are set.

Mankell's eight Wallander novels were published between 1991 and 1998 and have apparently sold more than 25 million copies, dealing with more than 100 killings. The real Ystad has experienced one murder in the past seven years, not the only reason why it is an attractive holiday destination - whether beautiful countryside, mediaeval architecture, or Mankell-related events and activities.

From the Times piece: "Five actors have played him [Wallander] in more than 20 films - it's like James Bond. Rolf Lassgård is the Sean Connery.” Cineteket is next to Ystad Studios, an impressive facility that, on the back of the series, has produced a stream of films including the award-winning Mother of Mine, transforming Ystad into one of Sweden's film-making centres. The inhabitants of the town are proud of its new celebrity: an estimated 15 per cent of its population of 17,000 has appeared as extras in a Wallander production, and many have also benefited from the influx of tourists from Sweden, the rest of Scandinavia and Germany, where Wallander is huge." Apparently there are several tours available for fans of the books; the Times article describes some of the places one can visit, as well as some more general highlights of the region. Here are some links for more information about Ystad, Skane and Sweden.

I've enjoyed the Wallander books, though like most other early fans, I read them out of order as they were translated. I have only read one of them since starting blogging and reviewing books, The Man Who Smiled, an early outing for Wallander, upon its US release. Apparently the author is not going to write any more Kurt Wallander books, though I hope he continues writing about Linda, the detective's daughter and now a police officer herself. (He has, however, just published a collection of short stories, The Pyramid, about Wallander's life before Faceless Killers, the first in the series of novels.)

Inspector Wallander website.

Kenneth Branagh on playing Kurt Wallander.

Guardian review of The Pyramid.

Sunday Salon: The Black Path, by Asa Larsson

If you like Scandinavian crime fiction, and in the main I do, you can be pretty sure you are in for a treat when a book from this notably introspective region has the title THE BLACK PATH. This novel is indeed superb: it is the third in the series featuring lawyer Rebecka Martinsson.
At the start of the book, Rebecka is again traumatised (as she was at the start of the second) by the climactic events of the previous novel. She is in a much worse state this time, being hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic for some months, then having to undertake outpatient therapy, then deciding to resign from her job in a major Stockholm law firm (partly, but not only, because she despairs of her boss, Mans, ever showing any interest in her). She takes a job as a prosecutor specialising in financial crime in Kiruna, the village where she was bought up and the main location of the previous two novels. Here, Rebecka can work in solitude to her heart's content, blanking out her sad childhood, her empty present life, and living in the only place where she feels at home - her grandmother's house (which she owns), sharing what little companionship she needs with her neighbour, the charming old Sivving, and his dog. Read the rest of my review here.

By the end of the novel, I was moved and exhausted. The author plans to write three more books in this series. The first (SUN STORM/THE SAVAGE ALTAR) won the Swedish Crime Writers' Association prize for best debut novel. The second (THE BLOOD SPILT) was Best Swedish Crime Novel of 2004. THE BLACK PATH is an even better book than the previous two, and is no doubt due to win its own accolades.

More Scandinavian crime fiction authors and reviews at Euro Crime.