Written by Dov Alfon, translated by Daniella Zamir – Lots of action is packed into Dov Alfon’s debut novel, A Long Night in Paris, Israel’s bestselling book of 2016-2017, now available in English. It’s hard to believe so much can happen in little more than twenty-four hours!
The story begins one morning when a gregarious Israeli
software engineer disappears from the arrivals hall of Charles de Gaulle
Airport. An irrepressible flirt, he peels off from a group of colleagues to
link up with a beautiful blonde before the two seemingly disappear into thin
air.
Police Commissaire Jules Léger grudgingly organizes an
investigation, predictably hampered by too many cooks: airport security, the
Israeli police representative for Europe, a mysterious Israeli security colonel
named Zeev Abadi, and, most uncooperative of all, El Al security.
Abadi is a Tunisian Jew raised in the Paris suburbs. Not until midnight does he assume his official role as the new head of Israeli intelligence’s SIGINT unit. Temporarily in charge of the unit back in Tel Aviv, with minuscule bureaucratic power, is Lieutenant Oriana Talmor.
At the airport, Abadi uncovers footage showing the hapless
Israeli attacked by a pair of Chinese thugs and thrown into a sewer pit where
survival is impossible. Abadi soon realizes the attack was a case of mistaken
identity. He must figure out who was the actual intended victim and calls on Talmor
her team back in Israel for help. Separated by more than two thousand miles,
the two try to uncover the identity of the intended victim, his current
location, and the reasons he’s a murder target.
Although most of the short chapters are written from the
point of view of Abadi, Talmor, or Léger, some are from clueless higher-ups in
the Israeli and French governments, the various criminal operatives involved,
and the real quarry of the killers, a young man named Vladislav Yerminski. What
you mostly learn about him is that he’s checked into an expensive hotel with a
suitcase full of electronic gadgetry. (I forget how that bag got through Tel
Aviv’s airport security, if I ever knew.)
It’s a multinational cast of characters and you’re well
along before you realize what game Yerminski is playing and who’s behind the
mysterious gang of Chinese pursuing him. All the bureaucrats are busy trying to
spin the first victim’s undignified death in a way that masks the shortcomings
and errors in their own intelligence work. Even though I couldn’t quite believe
in the criminal mastermind whose Chinese assassins murdered the wrong man, I
totally believed that they work in a rogue system that does not tolerate error.
Alfon came to the writing of this book with the perfect
resume. He knows Paris, having been born and raised there. He is himself a
former intelligence officer in the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200, which
is responsible for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption. His
political acumen was honed as a former cultural observer and editor in chief of
Israel’s major newspaper, Ha’aretz,
and he served as an editor for Israel’s largest publishing house. The
translation flows smoothly as well.
Edited by René Appel and Josh Pachter – Fourteen of The Netherlands’ premier authors of crime and literary fiction contributed stories to this collection, with the editors—top-rated crime authors themselves—providing the fifteenth. Amsterdam Noir is the latest in Akashic Books’ long-running series of place-based crime anthologies.
If this enterprise is in part intended to impart a vision of the locale and its residents through the lens of crime, this collection is another success.
Whenever a story purports to represent a certain place, you can fairly ask yourself, could these events have unfolded this way anywhere else? Geography, history, and culture all affect what can and does take place in a city and the official and unofficial reactions to events.
Appel and Pachter assigned the stories to four broad
headings inspired by classic film noir, and below I briefly describe a story or
two under each of their headings. The collection includes both well established
authors, like Theo Capel, and writers new to the scene, like Karin Amatmoekrim.
Meet some of the very best Dutch crime writers, right here in these pages.
Out of the Past
Welcome to Amsterdam by Michael Berg is a story of revenge—a
revenge the wronged man never thought he could achieve. It’s pretty strong
stuff. Berg was the 2013 winner of the Golden Noose, the award for the best
Dutch-language crime novel of the year. Herman Koch, who wrote 2013’s
best-selling crime novel, The Dinner,
contributed Ankle Monitor, which launches with a brilliant first line: “Maybe
it was a mistake to go back to my old neighborhood on the very first day of a
weekend leave.” No stopping reading there.
Kiss Me Deadly
All three of these stories are about ill-conceived love and
all are written by women, interestingly. Silent Days by Karin Amatmoekrim
proves that just because a woman is old and alone doesn’t mean she is helpless.
Touch of Evil
Here you have Satan himself, a pedophile, an alcoholic
fratricide, and a man channelling Ted Bundy (for an international touch), plus
a hard-working police detective who unexpectedly comes out on top in Theo
Capel’s entertaining Lucky Sevens.
They Live By Night
Echoing that film’s theme of inescapable tragedy, most of
these stories are from the victim’s point of view, but Abdelkader Benali’s The
Girl at the End of the Line is told through the eyes of a Moroccan police
officer assigned to find the killer of a Muslim girl. Winner of a top literary
prize, Benali opens this story, “A farmer found her with her head facing
southeast, toward Mecca, as if in prayer.” It’s an effective reminder of the
pluralistic culture of Western European cities today and a strong intimation of
the layers of social complexity the story will probe.
By Ruth Ware – It was a big house, with big grounds, supervised by a noisy tiding of magpies. Harriet Westaway, barely eking a living as a psychic advisor on the Brighton Pier, receives a letter from faraway Penzance inviting her to the funeral and will-reading of her grandmother, the wealthy Hester Westaway. Trouble is, her grandparents are all dead.
Curiosity wins out and she shows up for the event. What starts as something she could explain as a misunderstanding draws her in deeper and deeper, and the search for her real family takes off. Liked it. The Death of Mrs. Westaway
****The Bolivian Sailor
By Donald Dewey – Sometimes a book arrives unexpectedly in the mailbox, or “over the transom,” as publishers used to say, as this one did. To my delight, there were many things to like about this book. Poor P.I. Paul Finley finds himself enmeshed in a deadly plot when a Bolivian seaman is murdered in a seedy motel. He keeps his sense of humor, though, if not his part-time gig teaching a college course in Practical Problems in Law Enforcement. Alas, quite a few of those problems are playing out in front of him. Fun! The Bolivian Sailor
***Low Down Dirty Vote
Edited by Mysti Berry – A timely collection of eleven crime and mystery stories on the theme of fighting voter suppression. Women, blacks, the elderly—in these stories, various groups are discouraged from voting because of presumptions about how they’ll cast their ballots. Most unexpected and amusing use of the vote appeared in Catronia McPherson’s tale about the comeuppance of a man in a crowded commuter train. Good job, all! Low Down Dirty Vote
***A Deadly Indifference
By Marshall Jevons – Harvard economics professor Henry Spearman travels to Cambridge, England, to help a friend wanting to buy the former home of economist Alfred Marshall and establish a foundation there. Marshall may be dear to some economic theorists, including Spearman, but the university faculty is dominated by leftists opposing Marshall’s legacy. Soon, intellectual sparring is replaced by violence and murder. Spearman engagingly calls on economics theory (sometimes a lot of it) to explain these events. Secondary characters, not required to trot out their supply-and-demand curves, are nicely drawn too. A Deadly Indifference
By Jan Moore, narrated by Jilly Bond – It’s January 1608.
London is dark most of the time, and the citizens are restless. Food shortages
put residents of the poorer neighborhoods in increasing peril, though the
authorities are still hiding the extent of the grain shortage. When a well
respected woman of the Aldgate neighborhood dies under mysterious circumstances
there is no lack of suspects. Just proof.
In Mrs. Cox, Jan Moore has created a powerful sense of time and place, and one of her story’s most salient features is the disregard the men have for women. The victim’s landlord, Mr. Sutton, proprietor of the alehouse across the street, investigates her disappearance and discovers not a body, but the bones of a hand, burnt in the fireplace, a detail based on a true crime of the era. He’s a rascally sort and people are willing to believe he might have done her in.
The local Alderman, Blincoe, is trying to expand the domain
of Aldgate through the acquisition of Duke’s Place, widening of the roads, and
construction of housing projects, with an eye eventually to becoming Mayor. A
number of people, including the current mayor, suspect him of dirty dealing,
but aren’t sure how to stop him. Blincoe also had a motive for murder, because
the victim could thwart his development plans.
Moore’s narrative is as full of colorful characters as a
Dickens novel, and some of their names are equally apt. Particularly
entertaining is the newspaperwoman Mrs. Gosson, so close in sound to gossip,
which well describes her stock-in-trade. The irrepressible laundress Bitty is a
lot of fun, and the vivid procession of sticky-fingered maids, apprentice
needleworkers, and persons of both sexes harboring secrets will stay in your
mind long after the story ends.
Rumors suggest the murderer was a woman called Mrs. Abbott, who was wearing a dress decorated with cobweb lace. Eventually, a woman so described is found. She’s tried, found guilty, and due to hang, but Mrs. Cox knows she’s not guilty and persists in trying to save her. Moore has done a creditable job imagining the difficulties and prejudices the women would face, confronting the disinterest and intransigence of the male authorities and the venality of those with a smidge of influence.
I enjoyed the book’s award-winning narrator, Jilly Bond. She has a significant challenge in developing distinctive voices and speech mannerisms for this colorful cast and conveys the different women expertly. The men’s voices are a little less convincing, yet they are easily told apart. If you like historical mysteries or pre-Dickensian London, you’ll find this book both intriguing and delightful! Mrs. Cox is currently available only in its audio version, was a UK finalist for an Audible New Writing Grant: Crime Edition 2018.
Photo above: John O’Nolan, creative commons license
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The absurdity of a Seth Rogen movie precipitating an
international incident may have obscured that episode’s significance as a
bellwether in international cyberterrorism. Companies around the world have experienced
massive thefts of intellectual property and disruption to their operations. Yet
there’s no clear way forward for them. Three dramatic episodes illustrate.
Destruction of a
Target’s Network
Remember Sony’s 2014 dust-up with North Korea? Given the reviews, The Interview would likely have quickly sunk into obscurity had The Hermit Kingdom not made an escalating series of threats, saying release of the film would be considered an act of terrorism. While the U.S. State Department was telling Sony it wasn’t in the business of censoring movies, North Korean hackers were penetrating Sony’s computer system top-to-bottom.
Our government was clueless about the company’s peril. Says
David Sanger, “hackers working from laptops somewhere in Asia were not the kind
of security threat [the NSA] was established to detect. And movie studios weren’t
the targets the American intelligence community was focused on protecting.” The
result was a worldwide takedown of the company’s computer systems.
Proliferating Malware
The NotPetya
code, the malicious product of Russian military hackers, ultimately hit two
thousand targets worldwide and cost companies an estimated $10 billion. Among the
worst affected were the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck, FedEx’s European
subsidiary, a French construction company, and Danish shipping company Maersk. Maersk,
which lost some $300 million, salvaged its business only because a domain
controller in Ghana already had been knocked offline when the malware struck.
Corporate Espionage
You’re probably familiar with how three Chinese hackers
stole some 630,000 computer files related to the development and design of
Boeing’s C-17 military transport plane, saving the Chinese government decades
and billions in R&D. When the Chinese plane—the Xian Y-20—debuted at a Zhuhai
air show, parked near the American C-17, the similarity between the two planes
was inescapable. A gift to the Chinese from U.S. taxpayers.
According to a recent Wired
article by Garrett
M. Graff, “China’s extended campaign of commercial espionage has raided
almost every highly developed economy, but far and away its biggest targets
have been the military secrets of the United States.” He says many American
companies were aware of the hacking, but have kept quiet to keep the huge China
market.
What Next?
Such intrusions demonstrate that it isn’t enough to assume every company can (or will) sufficiently protect its own networks. “An individual company simply doesn’t have the resources or the capabilities to defend against a committed nation state attacker,” said Jamil Jaffer, founder of George Mason University’s National Security Institute in a recent Cipher Brief interview. Yet, for a host of reasons, government can’t do protect every business either.
Jaffer believes companies in key industries must start sharing threat data with each other. Though that’s against the grain, in a small way, it’s beginning to happen. Government may have a role, too, in some cases, depending on the target, the severity of the threat, and applicable law. But this strategy will take time, and as all these complex relationships and responsibilities are being debated and worked out, the hackers hurtle full speed ahead.
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By Joe Clifford – Clifford has an innovative premise for
this crime thriller about a woman who turned out to be the last kidnap victim
of a serial killer plaguing a dreary upstate New York town called Reine. Alex
Salerno was 17 when she was kidnapped, then rescued, and the murderer brought
to justice. The town celebrated her and the end of its reign of terror for only
a short while until another girl, Kira Shanks, disappeared and was believed murdered.
That was a dozen years ago, and now Alex has made a rare
trip back to Reine because a reporter wants to hear her story. This is the
first time anyone has shown a flicker of interest in her in a very long while, and
Alex wants to believe her story’s worth telling. Maybe the reporter will even
pay for it. She soon learns he’s no reporter, just a journalism student needing
dirt for a class project that might—or might not—become a story for the college
newspaper.
The student takes hardly a moment before bringing up the
name Sean Riley, the detective who rescued Alex from that basement bunker,
starving, dehydrated, terrified. Riley was the one bright spot in that time,
the one person who could evoke her tender feelings. And did. Too bad an affair
between a married detective and a 17-year-old victim could only end badly. Though
it was a long time ago, it still hurts.
The police identified the person they believe took Kira
Shanks, a mentally challenged young man named Benny Brudzienski. When word got
out, Benny was badly beaten and has spent the years since in a mental hospital,
unable to speak. In that condition, he will never go to trial.
Alex has tried to forget her life in Reine, and author
Clifford does a good job describing the dismal town. She pretends—to herself,
even—that she’s helping the student with his story and visits Benny in the mental
hospital. Something in his eyes suggests more going on inside his brain than
people believe, though the chapters told from Bennie’s point of view didn’t
ring true to me.
After that insightful look, Alex is determined to find out
what really happened to Kira. Meanwhile, plenty of people want her to leave it
alone. Someone is following her. She’s attacked. Riley resurfaces. Because
their past relationship is never far from the mind of either of them, they
teeter between attraction and hostility.
Clifford plausibly describes Alex’s initial feelings, but
never lets her develop further, replaying the same emotional notes. She’s
unpleasant and hostile in her dealings with people. It’s puzzling her
people-skills are so weak and that anyone would cooperate with her
pseudo-investigation. Yet Alex has caught the eye of one young man determined
to find a soft spot in her shell.
Occasionally, Clifford constructs a too-obvious and
unnecessary cliff-hanger at the end of a chapter, even though what’s coming
follows the predictable plotting of thrillers—the false starts, the red
herrings, the apparent threats that evaporate, the climactic confrontation.
The unwanted role of victim was Alex Salerno’s only and brief claim to fame. You can only hope her most recent experience in her home town will finally let her move on. She’s already come a long way from that dark cellar.
photo: xusenru on pixabay
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Edited by Louise Penny – What an entertaining collection this is! The stories cover a wide range of mystery/crime/suspense writing, with a fair bit of edge. Edited by Louise Penny from a collection assembled under the direction of Otto Penzler, the twenty stories, all published in 2017, first appeared in US crime magazines, in literary magazines, in themed anthologies, and in single-author collections by T.C. Boyle, Lee Child, Scott Loring Sanders.
Says editor Penny, “A great short story is like a great
poem. Crystalline in clarity. Each word with purpose. Lean, muscular, graceful.
Nothing wasted. A brilliant marriage of intellect, rational thought, and
creativity.” This edition underscores her point on every page.
Though most of the stories run to about twenty pages, Lee
Child, with “Too Much Time,” doubles that length. He meticulously describes how
the redoubtable Jack Reacher digs himself in deeper and deeper with Maine
police while all the time working on an unexpected (by this reader) solution to
his precarious situation. Joyce Carol Oates also provides a near-novella with
“Phantomwise: 1972,” about a naïve college coed who makes consistently bad
choices and the men who exploit them.
Most of the stories take place in the good old US of A, from
the sketchy surrounds of Paul Marks’s Venice Beach (“Windward”) to James Lee
Burke’s Cajun country (“The Wild Side of Life”), though a few are set in more
exotic climes: Africa in David H. Hendrickson’s Derringer-winning “Death in the
Serengeti,” the tropical and fictional island of St. Pierre (“Breadfruit” by
Brian Silverman), and the Republic of Korea (“PX Christmas” by Martin Limón).
The selected authors found clever and creative ways to
deploy the staple characters of crime fiction—unfaithful wives (“Waiting on
Joe” by Scott Loring Sanders), assassins (“Takeout” by Rob Hart) and serial
killers (“All Our Yesterdays” by Andrew Klavan). They deal with classic crime
situations too: trying to escape a difficult past (“Smoked” by Michael Bracken
and “Gun Work” by John M. Floyd) or the long tail of a super-secret job (“Small
Signs” by Charlaine Harris); prison breaks (“Cabin Fever” by David Edgerley
Gates), and the double or is it triple? cross (“Y is for Yangchuan Lizard” by
Andrew Bourelle and “Rule Number One” by Alan Orloff).
A couple of the scams were so deftly described that you may
find yourself grinning with the vigilante surprise of Michael Connelly’s “The
Third Panel” and the flim-flamming of an elderly man in TC Boyle’s “The Designee,”
in which you must decide how complicit the elderly “victim” is. It’s the best
story of his I’ve ever read. There’s also a thought-provoking twist in “Banana
Triangle Six” by Louis Bayard.
This talented collection of authors fills their stories with
great lines, though one of my favorites comes from “The Apex Predator,” by
William Dylan Powell, wherein the main character claims he learned in Uncle
Sam’s navy the “most useful tactical skill ever developed by humankind—and it’s
not swimming or fighting or tying knots. It’s the art of bullshitting someone
so you don’t get in trouble.”
If you’ve been glancing over the author names looking for
(and finding) many that are familiar, you may also have noticed the
near-absence of women authors. Joyce Carol Oates who has more than a hundred
published books is not a surprise in this list, nor is Charlaine Harris, who’s
been publishing mystery fiction since 1981. It’s a real mystery why no other
accomplished, newer authors appear here. Women are somewhat more prominent in
the list of “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2017” at the back of the
volume, where nearly a third are women (10 of 31).
Which publications brought these stories to light in the
first place (and where you might find next year’s winner’s now)? Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine published
four of the stories, Mystery Tribune
(two), and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery
Magazine, Fiction River, and Switchblade, one apiece. Also Level Best
Books’ anthologies (Noir at the Salad Bar
and Snowbound) produced a pair of
them.
When Bruce Pritchard unlocked the door to his weekend Cape May, New Jersey, cottage one Friday early in June, the wind crowded in behind him like a presence, gusts of rain snapping at his heels. He flipped the light switch and shed the old-fashioned boots, oilskins, and sou’wester he affected, a fully wired city boy summoning the crusty New England sea captains of his imagination.
He lit the fireplace to exorcise
the weekday shadows and dispel the ocean’s powerful breath, swirling about him
like a salt-tinged mist. In the kitchen, he unpacked provisions — steaks for
friends, a purple cluster of mussels for himself, a bottle of prosecco, ditto.
This he opened at once.
He toured the four downstairs
rooms, glass of wine in hand, shedding the week’s frustrations like a sodden
overcoat. The cottage’s renovations were finally, finally finished, and the
next evening his six best friends — and investment clients — were driving down
from New York to help him celebrate.
A line of sand-clouded puddles
tracked from door to fireplace disturbed the perfection of the moment, and
Bruce chided himself as he fetched a towel to dry them.
After dinner, he sat in front of
the fire and paged through a musty volume of nautical prints — oversized
engravings of merchant ships, three-masted clippers, an artist’s impression of
The Flying Dutchman. Tonight he’d skip the blood-soaked ghosts of the Stephen
King he’d been reading, the book slumbering like a serpent on his beside table.
He’d rescued the book of engravings
from the attic, a farrago of yellowing volumes, framed pictures, half-empty
chests, and broken whatnots he’d barely glanced at as yet. The elderly sisters
who sold him the cottage said they’d never been up there and exchanged a
secretive look. “Noises,” one said, and the other said, “Best not to be too
curious.” “Or disturb things,” the first one nodded, but her sister cut off
further comment with one glance. Of course they didn’t want to call attention
to how they’d left everything “undisturbed,” and unrepaired, and unpainted, un,
un, un, which was why the place was crumbling around their ears and why he’d
been able to buy it at such a good price.
Well into the night, the storm
provided a soundtrack for dreams of howling seas and wind-battered sailors,
decks slippery as glass, whiplashing ropes and renting sails, so that he awoke
feeling he’d tussled with the elements for hours. From the bedroom window, he
watched the morning sun chase the ocean waves, a quarter-mile away. His prize
view.
Mary Benaker’s station wagon pulled
into the smoothed patch of sand next to his BMW. He threw on a robe and met her
at the front door. Mary was the real estate agent who kept an eye on the place
for him, arranged his cleaning service, and oversaw any weekday workmen. She’d
been a godsend during the renovation. All 18 harrowing months of it. Now she
greeted him, holding a flat of annuals.
“Thought you might want these,” she
said, too cheerful for the hour. “I just drove past the farmer’s market.
They’ve got strawberries.”
Bruce regarded the banal mix of
orange marigolds, red salvia, and purple and white petunias. Nothing he would
plant. Certainly not in that color combination. “No thanks. I’m headed to the
garden center today myself. Very generous of you, but, no.”
She looked a bit sadly at the
unwanted annuals, but said nothing.
As an afterthought, he said, “One
thing, though. Was the maid service here last week?”
“Next week. First and third
Wednesdays. Everything OK?”
He looked past her, head cocked.
“Yes, but …” He paused to focus a thought. “Everything looks moved, slightly,
like someone dusted. And, it just feels like … someone’s been here.” He’d had
a parade of unsettling feelings when at the house in the last few weeks, but he
wasn’t going to tell Mary about the worst of them — that someone was watching
him. That he chalked up to urban paranoia and, possibly, too much Cabernet.
Now she hesitated. “Anything
missing?”
“Nothing like that. Probably my
imagination.” The uncertain way he said this made it clear he didn’t believe it
was his imagination at all, and he turned to go back inside the house. “Thanks,
anyway.” He indicated the plants.
“Suit yourself,” she said to the
closing door.
Bruce leaned his back against the
door, annoyed. Throughout the endless renovation, she always managed to slip in
a dig. “If that’s what you like,” “Of course, that’s up to you,” “Suit
yourself.” Her distaste for his choices, his polished style couldn’t be
clearer.
“So what!” he scolded himself, then
gasped. He took a step forward, then another, transfixed by what he saw over
the fireplace. In place of his prized large-format Robert Mapplethorpe
photograph — ambiguous portions of two male torsos, one black, one white, so
rich in tone it seemed a color print, but wasn’t — sailed a four-masted
windjammer, sheets unfurled and running with the wind, straight at him.
He wheeled and opened the door.
“Mary!” he shouted, but the station wagon turned onto the road and disappeared
behind a stand of beach plums.
The frame of the Mapplethorpe
peeked above the back of a low sofa. He pulled it from its hiding place and
marched to the fireplace to switch the two. And stepped in a puddle of seawater
containing a miniature beach of sand and trailing a seaweed thread.
Maybe a shower would clear his
head. But in the bathroom, he found scrimshaw ornaments cluttering the glass
shelf. Where the hell did those come from? Figuring they were cheap plastic
souvenirs, someone’s idea of a joke, he picked up a piece to toss it into the
trash, and noticed the weight, the fine detail, a map he recognized as
Nantucket Island, and the date: 1846. He set it back on the glass and
contemplated it.
* * *
A piece of toast in one hand and
his smartphone in the other, he called Mary. “Who lived here before me, do you
know? Before the sisters.”
“Let me ask Chuck. If he doesn’t
know, he can find out.” Chuck Benaker was her husband, another realtor and a
past president of the county historic society. These combined interests could
generate a dizzying amount of genealogical detail about any parcel of local
property. Bruce found Chuck tiresome, but Mary was right. He’d know.
Bruce was planting herbs next to
the kitchen door when Mary called back.
“Chuck says your house was built by
a retired sea captain. This would have been about 1850. The house was in his
family for 75 years or so until the Darby family bought it. The parents died
soon after World War II, and they left it to their daughters — the sisters who
sold it to you. Not many owners.”
“What does he know about this sea
captain?”
“He said the historic society has
some papers and such. They open for the season in a couple of weeks, but wait.”
Mary put her hand over the receiver and spoke to someone. “Chuck says he can
meet you there about three.”
* * *
The historic society headquarters
and museum occupied a simple clapboard house on Washington Street. Chuck
Benaker looked up from a pile of mail. “So, your house? Quite a history.” He
handed Bruce a folder. “Captain Newsome was a true legend. You have there the
original deed to the property and records of some purchases. Stuff found after
he was murdered, I suppose. Plus the registries kept by his nephew, who lived
with him and let out the upstairs rooms to lodgers. The Darbys —”
“Murdered?”
“Newsome? Oh, yeah. Made enemies
like Dunkin’ makes Donuts. If he hadn’t died, he would have been charged with a
murder or two himself. Beat the rap by bleeding to death. The clippings are
here somewhere,” Chuck walked to a file cabinet and rattled a drawer open.
“We’ve been closed since fall, and the girls left everything a mess.” He
slammed the drawer. “But I remember the story.”
Bruce leafed through the folder,
mesmerized. So much for his house as a peaceful place, a refuge. He held up a
green feather.
“Ah. Newsome’s parrot, ‘Cap’n,’”
Chuck said. “According to their diaries, the Cape May ladies were more
terrified of Cap’n than of Newsome himself. Stunning vocabulary.
“Newsome was captain of a merchant
ship in the mid-1800s, sailed out of Massachusetts,” Chuck drawled, and Bruce
could see the rest of the afternoon unwinding drearily in front of him, despite
Chuck’s rendition of the despicable Newsome. Chuck pulled open the shallow
drawer of a map cabinet and located a floor plan of the house. “Carpenter’s
records.” He pointed to a second floor room. “Happened right there. When I
unearth the newspaper stories, you can read the police description. Strong
stomach?” He looked at Bruce over the top of his half-glasses.
“That’s my bedroom,” Bruce said,
staring at Chuck’s tapping finger.
“Really.” Chuck paused, as if he
found that fact somehow significant, and the word hung ambiguously in the air.
“Newsome and his killer, Henry Carver — now that was a prophetic name — had a
royal feud about your property. Came to a head one night, both of them drunk.
Carver tried to escape across the Pine Barrens, but a timber rattler got him,
so the police said.”
Bruce caught the skepticism. “You
don’t believe it?”
Benaker shrugged. “The other
lodgers didn’t believe it. The night in question they were all jammed in the
doorway of the murder room, but none of them lifted a hand while Carver did the
bloody deed. Newsome’s last words were, ‘I’ll come back and get you,’ and he
shook his fist at the lot of them. When Carver turned up dead, they hightailed
it.”
“What time is it?” Bruce startled,
as if wakened from a bad dream, and checked his watch. 5:30.
“Oh. Sorry to keep you.” Chuck
looked disappointed. “I get all wound up in these stories. Cape May County has
a colorful history, that’s for sure.”
Bruce stood up, a little wobbly
from information overload. “No, it was . . . helpful. But I have friends coming
at seven.”
“You go on. When I dig up those
clippings, we’ll talk again.” He rubbed his hands together, a gesture that made
Bruce wince.
Back at the cottage, The Windjammer
was back above the fireplace. He found the torn Mapplethorpe outside in the
trash barrel, frame and glass shattered.
* * *
Bruce’s guests said the cottage was
fantastic and thought the painting an inspired bit of camp. But their
admiration gave him no pleasure, and he was uncharacteristically quiet all
evening. He couldn’t talk to his New York friends about ghosts, then expect
them to invest their life savings with him.
He gave two of the men the “murder
room,” as Benaker termed it. As he stood in the doorway to point out the
switches and extra bedding, he began to shake, and he hurried back downstairs.
He slept on the sofa and hoped a sunny Sunday morning at the beach would
expunge Newsome’s gory phantom.
Too soon he was awakened by a
commotion in the kitchen. Up already before seven, his visitors prowled for
coffee. He found them clustered around the kitchen table, staring at a tall
bell-shaped object covered with a fitted cloth.
“Looks like my mother’s mixer,” said
one, “only bigger.”
“Your mother dressed her
appliances, too? I thought that was my Mom’s Midwestern chic.”
Bruce knew what the thing was. But
he lifted the cover, anyway.
“Cap’n’s back,” squawked the
parrot, followed by an outpouring of dark obscenities.
* * *
Late that afternoon the phone rang
in the Benaker real estate office, and Chuck picked up. “Hey, Bruce,” Chuck
said. He continued to listen for several minutes. “Sorry to hear that. . . .
No, I do not believe in . . .” He listened some more. “Well, OK, if you’re
sure.” Finally, he hung up.
He looked across the office and
smiled at his wife. “Your dream house? As good as yours.”
By Lisa Gabriele – The author set herself a high bar in tackling a modern reimagining of Daphne du Maurier’s classic psychological thriller, Rebecca, with its famous first line—“Last night I dreamed I went again to Manderley.” Gabriele’s first line, “Last night Rebekah tried to murder me again” is startling, if lacking the original’s poetic power.
Nevertheless, a novel is more than its opening line. I
reread the set-up for du Maurier’s gothic thriller to reacquaint myself with
the story and her style, so I could assess whether Gabriele’s new novel stands
up to the original, since it so deliberately invites the comparison. I ended up
with a mixed opinion.
As in the original, Gabriele’s (again, unnamed) narrator, a
rather unsophisticated if sincere young woman, does not fit easily in the
social set of her new fiancé, wealthy New York Senator Maxim Winter. Winter
dismisses her feelings of being out-of-place, despite (or is it because of?)
her stark dissimilarity to his late wife—the beautiful, charming, and talented
Rebekah. I didn’t really warm up to the narrator—odd, since the book is written
in the first-person—nor did I find her a wholly convincing character.
As in the original, most of the story takes place at a
legendary and enormous family residence. The Winter estate, Asherley, was built
on its own island at the far eastern end of Long Island, facing the sea.
In a brilliant move by Gabriele, the narrator’s antagonist is not the confidant of the late Mrs. Winter, the housekeeper (Mrs. Danvers in the original); in Gabriele’s version, the principal opposition to the marriage and to the narrator herself comes from Max and Rebekah’s teenage daughter, Dani. Many of us have seen how fraught relationships with step-children can be, and this was a persuasive adjustment to modern times. There is a lot going on with Dani, though her rebellious teenage machinations are hard to forgive, for narrator and reader alike.
While the set-up of the two novels is reasonably similar,
their plots begin to diverge about half-way through. Even so, having Dani
volunteer to help the narrator find a wedding dress evokes nail-biting echoes
of disaster that play out in a completely unexpected way.
Gabriele’s writing style is, of course, markedly different
from that of a novel written eighty years ago. Still, I miss du Maurier’s long
loopy sentences and lush descriptions. In the new version, you see the Winter
mansion through modern eyes and a more practical, less dreamy affect. In place
of a wall of blood-red rhododendrons, you have a profusion of vases full of
Rebekah’s favored deep red roses. Tastes differ as to whether a more florid
style better fits a romantic story about a woman blinded by love—or is she?—and
haunted by her dead rival.
Gabriele’s narrator is a refreshingly modern woman, appreciative
of Max Winter’s extreme wealth, but not overawed by it. Even so, she finds
herself trapped by circumstances. In today’s world, a difficult housekeeper
would be dismissed; it’s not so easy to divest oneself of a step-daughter, even
a calculating, substance-abusing, and foul-mouthed one like Dani. Gabriele,
having set aside the evil housekeeper, finds new ways for Rebekah’s memory to
torment the new Mrs. Winter, while the ghost of du Maurier’s Rebecca necessarily haunts The Winters.
You may recall Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Academy Award-winning film, Rebecca. A new version is in the works, starring Armie Hammer and Lily James.
By Tom Pitts – Book publicists are fond of the awkward adjective “unputdownable,”but in the case of Tom Pitts’s new California crime thriller, this enthusiastic description is wholly justified. Those familiar with California will recognize 101 as the highway that runs the length of California from Los Angeles—where it’s part of the world’s busiest and most nightmarish freeway interchange—north to the Oregon border and beyond. Pitts’s book focuses on that northern bit, from the Bay Area up to Humboldt County, where a different kind of traffic is all-important: weed.
The book is set in mid-2016, six months before California voters will legalize marijuana, and the impending vote has made the Humboldt County growers more paranoid than usual. They’re accustomed to warding off rustlers and junkies and deer and water-thieves, but unsure how to arm themselves for a massive market shift. Pitts’s description of the steep hillside partly covered in redwoods and brambles and the long, rutted dirt track up to where the nervous growers live is so vivid you could almost choke on the dust of their ATVs.
Vic Thomas runs one of these hillside growing operations, out of the sight of most people, which is exactly how he likes it. Twenty years before, he and a woman he’d never met before, Barbara Bertram, witnessed a horrible crime and, in self-defense, meted out a little on-the-spot justice. The experience bonded them forever. The police totally misunderstood what went on in that charnel-house and have been trying to track down Barbara and Vic ever since.
The story opens with a middle-of-the-night call from Barbara. She tells Vic her son Jerry is in trouble again, and she wants to send him to Vic so he can lie low awhile among the marijuana growers. Vic can’t tell her no. Alas, Jerry is a serial screw-up with less sense than Vic’s dogs.
Vic is not pleased when he discovers that Jerry and his girlfriend Piper stole a considerable amount of cash from a Russian who runs a Bay Area weed club. His name is Vlad—“Vlad the Inhaler”—and he and his mobsters are determined to get their money back and make an example of Jerry.
When Piper finds her way up the hill to Jerry’s “hideout,” Vic recognizes that his unwelcome guest can’t keep his mouth shut. He’s even more alarmed when he realizes Piper’s stepfather is the head of the Dead BBs, a vicious outlaw motorcycle gang. Vlad has a financial relationship with the BBs, which makes them equally determined to find Jerry and Piper and reclaim the money. The stepfather considers Jerry completely expendable and Piper only slightly less so. Pitts shifts the narrative point of view frequently, so you know not only what Vic is thinking, but also what Vlad and the Dead BBs are up to. You’re never in doubt about the danger heading up the 101 toward Vic, Jerry, Piper, and anyone else who gets in the way.
With three sets of determined antagonists—the Russians, the Dead BBs, and the cops—looking for some combination of Jerry, Piper, and Vic, the opportunities for mayhem expand exponentially, and Pitts has deftly orchestrated the chase. There’s no time here for literary flourishes, maybe just a dash to the fridge for a beer, right in step with the denizens of 101. AMAZON LINK HERE.
