By Adrian McKinty (narrated by Gerard Doyle) – In the bleak Belfast spring of 1981, hunger strikers in HM Prison Maze are starting to die. Paramilitaries are setting off bombs and gunfire rakes the streets at night. Police detective Sean Duffy–a rare Catholic in the Royal Ulster Constabulary–is presented with what looks like a “normal” murder case that soon blossoms into the possibility of a serial killer at work, targeting homosexuals. At that time, homosexuality was still illegal in Northern Ireland and not tolerated. In the mix is the apparent suicide of the beautiful ex-wife of one of the hunger strikers. Mysterious mail begins to arrive. The backdrop of violence is persuasively portrayed and hearkens back to real events and people. First of a trilogy (actually, now probably a quartet).
Category Archives: thriller
In the Land of Blood and Honey
Possibly you didn’t know Angelina Jolie has directed a movie, and, if so, probably you haven’t seen it. I heard about her 2011 film about the Bosnian war, In the Land of Blood and Honey (trailer), in Serbia last fall. Due to Serbian objections to the film, it was actually shot in Hungary, with actors from the former Yugoslavia (starring Zana Marjanović, Goran Kostić, and Rade Šerbedžija). Jolie, whose humanitarian work is well known, says she was motivated to write the script after twice visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and because this conflict was the worst European genocide since World War II. An estimated 100,000 people were killed, and 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped.
It’s a love story between a Muslim woman and a Serbian military officer, with all the inter-ethnic and wartime complications you can readily imagine. But what’s interesting is that, for the most part, the story is told from the point of view of women and what they endure during wartime and how they survive.
The film received mixed reviews in the United States, Rotten Tomatoes rating: 56, with many critics seeming to take issues with Jolie’s humanitarian impulses themselves. However, Newsday’s critic Rafer Guzman said, “It’s a tough, clear-eyed look at a ghastly ethnic war, with an admirably wide perspective that affords compassion for both sides,” while Roger Ebert, who gave it a low ranking, acknowledged that “The film does what all war films must, which is to reduce the incomprehensible suffering of countless people into the ultimate triumph of a few.”
The film was highly controversial in Serbia, not surprisingly, and Jolie and some cast members received threats. Serbs claimed it was propagandistic and reduced Serbs to caricatures of evil. I didn’t see it entirely that way; there were sympathetic Serbs, including the main character. (And the Serbs did carry out “ethnic cleansing,” after all.) Interesting that it won an honorable mention in the Sarajevo Film Festival and a peace award at the Berlin film festival.
My bottom line is that the film is pretty good, even if it does use some tired tropes, but the ultimate question—what was the rest of the world doing while all this was going on?—is still worth asking. Critics might dismiss the film, but no one should forget the tragedy behind it.
The Monuments Men
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, accompanied by Gen. Omar N. Bradley, and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., inspects art treasures stolen by Germans and hidden in German salt mine in Germany. April 12, 1945. (photo: U.S. Army)
OK, reviews of The Monuments Men (trailer) have been tepid, George Clooney did give himself all the high-minded speeches, and it was hard to suspend disbelief with the star-power cast (who did a great job but are monuments themselves). Still, despite all those quibbles—and the spate of belated “the real story” websites and compelling personal stories emerging—this was an entertaining and satisfying movie, based on the book by Robert Edsel. For an exciting fictional treatment of this episode, see my review of Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
The characterizations of the architects, archivists, and artists that formed the film’s Monuments Men team are strong, and a surprising amount of humor is inherent in their personalities and the interactions between them, despite their desperate mission. Its purpose, as George keeps telling us, was not just to preserve “stuff,” but our way of life, our history, patrimony. The movie spares us conflicted opinions about its characters. They’re pure black or white, good or bad, people who want to save art or those who want to burn it. This oversimplification is a source of some of the criticism.
That is to say, there’s something comfortably old-fashioned about this film. If you’ve seen enough WWII films, you can guess the directions the plot will take, but really, the stakes are so high, does it matter?
Clooney’s character is right. This was a vitally important mission. It was hard. It was dangerous. And these heroes—seven actors representing around 350 real-life “monuments men” from many countries—accomplished it. Together they recovered more than five million paintings, sculptures, church bells, tapestries, and other works looted by the Nazis.
Edsel knew his material and made it real. Previously, he co-produced a documentary of historian Lynn Nicholas’s award-winning book, The Rape of Europa.
“Jewess with Oranges” by Aleksander Gierymski, looted, and found at an art auction near Hamburg in 2010
The Monuments Men is especially fun viewing for those of us here in Princeton, because more than a dozen of the real Monuments Men had ties to Princeton, two of whom directed the Princeton University Art Museum from 1947 to 1972.
One of the directors, Dr. Patrick Kelleher, wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1947 about St. Stephen’s crown, a Hungarian national treasure he helped recover from the Nazis . I saw it in Budapest, after it was restored to the Hungarians by former President Jimmy Carter.
Not everything the Nazis looted was saved; and not everything has been found—“The Amber Room” is a premier example. Many stolen works may today be stored in basements and attics or even hanging on the walls of the children and grandchildren of ordinary soldiers who carried them home. And they still make news, as recently as last week. (And again, on April 8 and on April 12) As author Robert Edsel says, “They can be found,” as “Jewess with Oranges” was in 2010. His Monuments Men Foundation is intended to accomplish exactly that.
At the opening of the movie in Princeton, current and retired Princeton University Art Museum leaders spoke with the audience and related this anecdote: On Christmas Eve, 1945, some Monuments Men were celebrating in a room full of unopened cartons. Someone said, “Hey, it’s Christmas, shouldn’t we open a package?” He found a crowbar and pried open a wooden crate, reached in, and pulled out the bust of Nefertiti. Was it worth it. Oh, yes.
Alas, the lessons of this extraordinary collaboration between the military and the world of art and archaeology were neglected in the 2003 assault on Baghdad, when U.S. troops failed to secure the high-priority National Museum of Iraq (below; photo: wikimedia.org) Although museum officials already had quietly hidden most of the collection, some 15,000 items looted items have still not been recovered.
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True Detective
Been enjoying Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in HBO’s True Detective? Think there’s more there there? Maybe you’re right. I’m not surprised that its weirder elements are generating the kind of easter egg hunt inspired by Twin Peaks and similar entertainments: the human mind searching for connection and sense in chaos. “I think I see a pattern here!” The hunt is so much easier with the Internet, and some people are making discoveries for the rest of us to ponder. There’s the whole thing about The Yellow King, for instance, covered extensively, and the flatness of time.
The show continues to receive excellent reviews, and you can watch it oblivious to the layers of arcane references and just focus on the psychological interplay among the characters, but for gold-miners, there’s that, too.
*** The City of the Sun
By Juliana Maio – “Cairo during the war was what Casablanca had been mythologized as in the eponymous Humphrey Bogart film–a romantic desert crossroads of the world, of spies and soldiers and cares and casbahs and women with pasts and men with futures . . .” (William Stadiem). So begins the epigram to Maio’s thriller, her first book. She picked this less well-trodden geography and a pivotal time–1941–as her setting. Rommel threatens the city from a rapidly diminishing distance and the Muslim Brotherhood and a group of dissident Egyptian Army officers threatens from within. With great potential for drama and the urgency of war, she places her two main characters, who are fairly well-rounded, and a second tier of less compelling actors. The writer relies too heavily on cliches–”happy as a clam” “looking resplendent and every inch a woman”–that made me wince, but the storytelling kept the pages turning. (2/15)
A Bitter Reminder
Strange to watch last night’s Netflix thriller, Harrison’s Flowers (clip, quite dark), recommended to us by our twenty-something guide in Croatia last fall. The movie wasn’t very good—predictable plot, relentless tank and submachine-gun fire—but the cast was good (Andie MacDowell, Adrian Brody, David Strathairn, Brendan Gleeson, Alun Amstrong). Roger Ebert’s review called Brody’s acting a tour de force, with his character using “attitude and cockiness to talk his way through touchy situations. Watch the way he walks them all through a roadblock. I don’t believe it can be done, but I believe he did it.”
The story, set in 1991, takes place during the height of the Croatian War of Independence, which U.S. media called the Yugoslav civil war, which has been barely covered in film (available here, anyway). It tells about an American photojournalist who disappears in the hotly contested Danube River town of Vukovar and the determination of his wife to travel there and find him, despite the awful risks. Said Roger Ebert about the unlikely plot, “There is a way in which a movie like this works no matter what.”
The interesting part to me was not just that it was shot in Croatia, but that Vukovar is where our river cruise docked, and I spent some time walking around it. Much has been rebuilt in the intervening years, of course, but there were still rubbly areas. Below is my photo of a famous scene from Vukovar, and the one above, taken near the port, certainly displays female determination. A 49 from the Rotten Tomatoes critics; though 77 of civilian reviewers liked it.
IMDb points out some amusing anachronisms in this movie, but don’t let the fluffs in terms of which tanks carried which identities put you off—I lost track of which side was which, and while politically that was key, cinematically, it was meaningless. The regenerated arm, though, I think I can explain: prosthesis.
Anticipation
Starting to think seriously about my next vacation—only a few weeks away now—prompted by yet another flight detail change from United. The trip will start in Budapest, then float south along the Danube to Bucharest. On the journey, the boat will slip easily through the Iron Gate, the gorge separating Romania and the Carpathian Mountains on the north from Serbia and the Balkan mountain foothills on the south. Dams constructed over a 20-year period, ending in 1984, have turned what used to be a wild stretch of river into something more like a lake.
But the Iron Gates of my imagination, the ones I hope to see in my mind’s eye, are as they are described in Alan Furst’s thrillers. In his books, set in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the Iron Gates were a perilous passage for desperate people—spies, refugees, terrorists, anyone caught up in the tightening net of loyalties and politics of a looming World War II:
“He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Duna [Danube] came crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria.” – Night Soldiers
“Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea.” – Night Soldiers
A few days in Budapest, an infamous spy town, is another something to look forward to:
“On 10 March 1930, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. . . . In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.”—Kingdom of Shadows
“Difficulties at the frontiers”—we can imagine exactly what those difficulties were—“for some of the passengers”—and exactly who those terrified passengers were. Laced with foreboding, those lines open Furst’s thriller Kingdom of Shadows.
Other than a literary interest in things Budapestian, I have a family history interest as well. Legend has it that my grandmother (who died when I was a toddler) was a pastry chef in Budapest before immigrating to the United States. The disappointing kernel of the story is that none of her six daughters learned the art. She came from the generation that wanted to put the Old Country behind it. Truthfully, she had to have been quite young—twenty?—when she came over, so “chef” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a pleasant thought and one that will require eating as much pastry as possible in homage.
Another feature of this trip is a three-day add-on excursion into Transylvania—ancestral home of my grandfather, who came from a tiny village annexed to the marginally larger village of Székelykeresztúr (“Holy Cross” in Hungarian) in 1926. Google maps gives the larger town no more than 12 streets. My grandfather’s home was about eight miles from the medieval walled town of Sighisoara, birthplace of Count Dracula. I have Transylvania roots, for sure.
So, of course I enjoyed reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, about a woman researching her family’s history who traverses that part of the world and at every step finds connections to Our Vlad. “Genuinely terrifying,” said the Boston Globe.
Lots to look forward to, and I have my reading for the trip all lined up:
- The Balkans: A Short History by Mark Mazower – my trip will skirt the top of this region
- Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, subtitled “On Foot to Constantinople: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates”
- Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and Times – by Boston College historians Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally. In the cover painting, The Count looks like he’s holding a cigar between his nose and upper lip.
I’ve provided links to amazon.com, in case you want more info about any of these books, but of course would encourage you to make any purchases at your local independent bookstore!
What a Thrill!
Best Hardcover Novel – Spilled Blood by Brian Freeman – two Minnesota towns in an epic battle, and there’s only the daughters paying the price . . . one with her life!
She got out of her car and stood like the last girl on earth in the center of the old main street. She studied her stricken Mustang, which was covered with a film of dust. The flabby rubber on the left rear tire looked like melted ice cream. On either side of her, the remains of a half-dozen decaying buildings loomed behind boarded-up doors and No Trespassing signs. The buildings were interspersed with weedy, overgrown lots, like missing teeth in a rotting smile.
Best Paperback Original – Lake Country by Sean Doolittle – a Minnesota architect falls asleep driving, and there’s only the daughters paying the price . . . one with her life!
He opened his door and got out. It was a clean night, scrubbed fresh by the rain. The cloud cover had pulled apart in spots overhead, showing starry black patches here and there, and the moon looked like a puddle of silver on the water.
Best First Novel – The 500 by Matthew Quirk – for a moment I thought the contest winners might have created a Midwestern juggernaut, but The 500 isn’t set in Indianapolis, it’s in the nation’s capital, and the 500 are “the elite men and women who really run Washington—and the world.” Oh-kaaaay. Sounds powerful.
Best e-Book Original Novel – Blind Faith by C. J. Lyons – this book (not her first) debuted at #2 on the NYT bestsellers list, and her own story—from pediatric Emergency Room doc to best-selling author is a good read, too. In the novel, a woman has watched the killer of her husband and son die by lethal injection, but she seeks closure, so returns to their remote Adirondack mountain home and . . . C.J.’s tagline is “thrillers with heart.”
Nominated in the “Best First Novel” category was the much-better-than-average The Expats, by Chris Pavone, which is among a number of thrillers I’ve read and listened to so far this year. You’ll find brief reviews of all of them in Reading . . .
It’s the Chills that Count!
Two weeks ago, this blog started a discussion of the differences between mysteries and thrillers. As reader David Ludlum pointed out, there can be elements of mystery in thrillers and vice-versa, since both contain suspense. Here are a few items from Carolyn Wheat’s handy list of the differences: mystery is a puzzle, suspense is a nightmare; in a mystery, the detective has skills, and in a thriller, the hero learns skills; mysteries have clues, while thrillers have surprises; and a mystery offers red herrings, whereas a thriller contains “cycles of betrayal.” John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes immediately to mind.
This week, I’m reading a mystery—Maze in Blue, by fellow U. of Michigan alumna Debra Goldstein—and the pages are littered with clues, potential clues, and red herrings. The fun is sorting them out, not to mention the familiarity of the Ann Arbor setting!
Coincidentally, the book mentions a real-life murder I was familiar with, one in a serial killer spree that began shortly after I graduated. A law student was murdered and her body draped over a tombstone in a local cemetery. Reading about the case several months after I moved away, I had a horrible flashback. On a warm spring evening in my senior year, I was pacing my second-floor apartment in a chopped up Victorian house, talking on the phone to a friend. I noticed a man standing across the street looking up into my tall second-floor windows, open to the fresh air. I didn’t pay much attention until he crossed the street, headed toward my house. The back of my neck tingled. “I think he’s coming over to look at my mailbox,” I said, slightly embarrassed to sound so paranoid. My friend and I talked a little longer, and the man recrossed the street, disappearing into the apartment building opposite. As soon as we hung up, my phone rang. “You don’t know me, but . . .” and he gave me his name. Yes, he had read my name on my mailbox, and he asked me out. “I don’t think this is a very good way to meet people,” I said and hung up, shaking, even though in those days such a casual meet-up was common. I called my friend back. “If I’m not in class tomorrow, here’s the name he gave”—the same name written in the calendar of the murdered law student on the day she disappeared. So Goldstein’s book has some resonance with me.
The most recent thriller I’ve read is Alan Furst’s latest, Mission to Paris, and while I don’t have the same kind of personal connection with pre-World War II Europe, Furst’s evocation of the era through his wonderful series of books immediately puts me there. In this one, Hollywood actor Fredric Stahl find himself enmeshed deeper and deeper in the snares of opposing spy machines and Carolyn Wheat’s “cycles of betrayal.”
Another superb read this year in the pre-war thriller mode is Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, with one big difference: it’s all true.
In their Words: Interviews with Carolyn Wheat, Alan Furst, and Erik Larson on the books mentioned here.
Mystery or Thriller?
Is this book in my hand a mystery or a thriller? Not until I started writing stories myself did I run up against the startling realization that a lot of the books I liked best—starting with Frederick Forsyth’s Icon—were not mysteries at all. They were “thrillers,” “suspense.” To me, they were just exciting books that kept me turning pages. Think Silence of the Lambs. Think Reamde. Think The Little Drummer Girl.
Oh. So? People who have actually gone to the trouble of analyzing the differences between these two genres can present quite a list of them, along with which go different reader expectations. Looking back, the short stories on my publications list (this website) were all mysteries—puzzles—especially “Evidence” and “Premeditation.” I’ve also written a novel—Witness—and it’s definitely a thriller. In writing it, I fell into thriller mode automatically.
What is the difference? Carolyn Wheat in her excellent How to Write Killer Fiction (a title that tells you these are words to live by) describes “the funhouse of mystery” and “the roller coaster of suspense.” Readers of a classic mystery identify with the detective—from a professional like Harry Bosch to an amateur busybody like Miss Marple—who is attempting to solve someone else’s problems, usually a murder or two. We readers follow “two steps behind,” Wheat says, as our detective gathers and analyzes evidence and tries to figure out who the bad guys are.
In suspense novels, the main problems belong to the main characters. They’re the ones in danger, who must figure out how to save their own lives even as they may be saving others, too, of course. Jason Bourne. Jack Ryan. We know who the bad guys are and what the threat is, because the author has shown them at work. As a result, we typically know more than the hero, and are actually two steps ahead. We’re thinking, “Don’t take that call,” “Take that call!” and “Don’t trust that guy,” and “Don’t go into the British Embassy wearing that electric blue sequined dress and that Tina Turner wig and think you can pass as a legitimate party guest,” we telepathically yell at Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
Detectives, like tv’s Inspector Lewis, have legendary ability to see through layers of disinformation and assemble logical pictures from the slimmest clues, clues equally available to us, as readers, but whose significance the author has deftly obscured. The writer’s challenge is to present all those clues without either giving away the game on page 20 or being so obtuse the reader feels unfairly dealt with. In the end, every piece is in place, and the reader’s reward is the intellectual satisfaction of tidied loose ends.
By contrast, suspense heroes, even if they achieve their goals and avert World War III, may not make it out alive. Or not in very good shape, if they do. Daniel Craig’s James Bond needed recovery time at the end of Casino Royale. And his nemesis got away, to plague him yet another day. Still, our hero has prevailed, and the reader’s reward is the emotional satisfaction of that victory, even if it is temporary and we see another battle looming over the sequel horizon.