Category Archives: Crime

A Most Violent Year

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Oscar Isaac, A Most Violent YearMissed this December 2014 crime drama (trailer) in theaters, but finally had a chance to watch it on the small screen. Oscar Isaac, who was quite likable in Inside Llewyn Davis and even stronger here, does a fine job as Abel Morales, head of a New York City heating oil company; Jessica Chastain, always good, plays his wife. Morales’s trucks are being hijacked and his drivers beaten up by—who?—shady competitors, ambitious freelancers, organized crime? With his drivers and sales people at risk, the default of everyone around him is to arm themselves (which makes for some pretty scary scenarios in city traffic), but Morales resists.

He wants to remain an upstanding businessman, to keep taking the high road despite the growing chaos around him. This includes a lengthy and apparently stalled investigation by the city prosecutor (David Oyelowo) of financial sins in the heating oil industry and Morales’s company in particular. Morales is aided in his endeavors by the somewhat ambiguous character of his lawyer (Albert Brooks) who has the patience for long negotiations. As one protracted land acquisition looks about to successfully conclude, the other difficulties piling up put it out of reach again.

What was solid about this movie was that the business dealings seemed plausible and important, not just made up in the usual Hollywood way. The film was written and directed by J. C. Chandor, and in our cynical epoch of anti-heroes, he’s made Morales someone you want to see succeed. “There’s less violence that you would expect, given the film’s title, but the scenes of moral suspense prove just as breathtaking as the episodes of physical jeopardy,” said Jason Best in Movie Talk.

The plot took unexpected turns until the final resolution, and, whatever, viewers have many chances to see the most beautiful (and magically dirt-shedding) camel-hair coat ever!

Nice Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating of 90%; audiences 70%. The film garnered numerous awards and award nominations, as did the acting and directing.

****The White Van

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police, San Francisco, passersby

(photo: Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons license)

By Patrick Hoffman — This is a story about what happens when people get in way, way over their heads. At its center is 31-year-old Emily Rosario, a down-on-her-luck San Francisco woman living on society’s sharp edges. “She was pretty, but in a beat-up way. She would have been prettier in a different life.” One with fewer drugs and kinder men.

The story opens with Emily being picked up in a Tenderloin district dive bar. The Russian man who approaches her, doesn’t look dangerous. He has money, he’s clean. And he has crack. With these thin rationalizations, she accompanies him to his hotel near the airport. Soon she’s being fed more drugs than she’s bargained for. Three Russians keep her for a week in a state of semi-stupefaction, then, still foggy, send her into a bank to carry off the pretense of a robbery. Now in possession of a satchel containing $880,000, she stumbles out of the bank, but instead of climbing into the robbers’ waiting white van, she steps back into the bank, nabs the security guard’s gun, and sends him running. Confused, with sirens approaching, the van driver takes off. Emily emerges and runs away. The robbers have lost her and, of infinitely greater concern, the cash.

Meanwhile, Leo Elias and his younger partner Gary Trammell, members of the SFPD’s Gang Task Force cruise the streets. Elias’s recent string of lousy financial decisions is fast catching up with him. This robbery seems to Elias like a crime he might be able to solve. And in solving it, he means to steal the money for himself. Elias draws Trammell in, and as they sink deeper and deeper into a case they have no authority to investigate, Elias acts crazier and crazier. Trammell, unsure what to do, decides to just go along, at least for a while.

Emily can’t quite make up her mind to leave San Francisco, but the Russians and the two increasingly desperate cops are on her trail. A private detective has staked out her crib, and if any of her neighbors even suspect what’s in that bag she never lets out of her sight, her life will be over in a finger-snap.

Saying much more would spoil Patrick Hoffman’s well-planned plot twists, but suffice it to say, they keep coming. He has lived in San Francisco and worked as an investigator, and his knowledge of the city and its geography, his familiarity with police procedures, and—even better—his understanding of police attitudes is totally convincing. Here’s an example: “Delgado [the police union representative] leaned toward Elias and whispered, ‘There were a couple cameras in the alley, but none of them caught the incident. Which is to say, your memory of what happened is the correct version.’” He also understands the psychology of people in trouble. Through his obsessive attention to their state of mind, he puts readers right in both Elias’s and Emily’s heads as the tension and the stakes continue to mount.

This terrific debut novel is a true page-turner. Start reading this book and you won’t want to stop.

A longer version of this review is available on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

****Hold the Dark

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arctic wolf

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)

By William Giraldi, narrated by Richard Ferrone. This crime thriller set in the remote villages and tundra of Alaska lays bare different visions of civilization. The inhabitants of remote Keelut have their own ways of doing things—of dealing with birth, and death, and grief—and no matter how strong the forces of conventional culture are, in the end, the old ways win. In the process, the book “peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization,” said reviewer Alan Cheuse in the Boston Globe.

Russell Core is a nature writer and an expert on wolves, with a famous book about them. When wolves take two, then three children from Keelut, the mother of the third child, a six-year-old boy named Bailey, asks him to come help her understand what is happening. Untethered from family and any part of life he finds meaningful, Core responds to her plea, and is drawn deeper and deeper into the lives, ways, and secrets of the remote village. The child’s mother, Medora Slone is married, but her husband Vernon has joined the military, fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, this nation’s “desert wars.” Do not assume this has made a regular American of him.

Yet Slone is described as a renegade, and Core wonders how this squares with life as a soldier. His best friend, an Alaska Native named Cheeon says Slone can make himself look like he is doing what he is supposed to, but will be doing what he wants to, nonetheless. Cheeon did not join the military for that reason. He hadn’t that gift.

When Slone returns to find his son dead and his wife missing, well, in the classic crime novel vernacular, “all hell breaks loose.” Hell, in this case, plays out during the year’s longest nights—18 hours of darkness—and over a tundra so vast “whole states could fit on its frozen breadth.” The weather is practically another character in this frozen terrain: “Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it.” Before this book is through quite a few souls fall to the cold, the wolves, and the people.

Richard Ferrone’s narration perfectly fits the other-worldliness of the Alaska Natives and the care with which residents of the far north must operate in their unforgiving environment. Giraldi is the fiction editor of Boston University’s literary magazine Agni.

Left-wing Crime and Right-wing Thrillers?

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hawk

(photo: pixabay)

A recent essay in The Guardian by Scottish crime fiction writer Val McDermid suggested a key difference in the subtext of crime fiction versus thrillers. McDermid had attended an international crime writers’ conference in Lyon, France, a country where people are “deeply interested in is the place of politics in literature,” by both long tradition (think Emile Zola and Victor Hugo) and current trends. It’s hard for politics not to be top-of-mind for many French people because, as in much of Europe, right-wing parties are making gains that would have been inconceivable in the years immediately following World War II.

The political undertone of crime novels is typically left-leaning, says McDermid, when they are “critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly.” They often reveal corruption in City Hall or police departments. Moreover, they explore characters who do not fit easily into society. Even when the perpetrators are high-status, they harbor a shameful and destructive secret (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). More often, their characters emerge from society’s ragged fringes. Henning Mankell departed from his usual focus on crime to write specifically about these disenfranchised in his novel, The Shadow Girls.

By contrast, the political point of view of a thriller “tends towards the conservative,” McDermid suggests, “probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you.” Good examples are found in the work of Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal, The Avenger), Tom Clancy (Patriot Games, The Hunt for Red October).

In the end, readers of the thriller genre expect a significant return toward normalcy, despite the typical last-chapter carnage. While some criminals may be brought to justice by the end of a crime novel and the city put back in order, it isn’t always, and the reader is left with a feeling of more to come. This is in part because good crime writers—like George Pelecanos or Michael Connelly—ground their work in real problems, and these real problems are not easy to solve.

This is not to conflate the personal politics of the author with the underlying thrust of their books’ genre, as does the rebuttal essay linked below. Plenty of thriller authors have liberal personal politics, and plenty do not. Moreover, while differing world views may influence what authors write or whom they pick to be their villain, the more popular and successful writers generally keep their political opinions on the back burner. Even so, “our views generally slip into our work precisely because they are our views, because they inform our perspective and because they’re how we interpret the world,” she says. With all the inevitable exceptions to McDermid’s formulation, it makes for a thought-provoking rule-of-thumb.

Related articles and some exceptions to McDermid’s formulation.

Crime Scene 101

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Television and the movies notoriously overstate the tools (especially the electronic ones) at a criminal investigator’s command, to the extent juries have developed increased expectations about the availability of forensic evidence. (Here’s a fascinating study of the “CSI Effect,” suggesting prosecutors and judges need to up their game.) At the same time, many writers of crime thrillers strive to accurately portray crime scene investigations and to make their fictional detectives follow more careful procedures than often occurs in real life.

crime scene investigation

(photo: U.S. Army, Europe, creative commons license)

Forensic investigator Geoff Symon recently talked to crime authors about evidence. He began by dividing it into two categories:

  • direct evidence, which means eye-witness accounts, with all their well-documented weaknesses and
  • circumstantial evidence, which is everything else.

Symon emphasized that circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and when a tv lawyer pooh-poohs a case, saying “it’s only circumstantial,” that’s not necessarily a weakness. In truth, unless there is a reliable eye-witness, all cases are circumstantial. Fingerprints, hairs, fibers, and blood and DNA other than the victim’s are all circumstantial evidence, and the accumulation of evidence of this type, when put together in a convincing narrative, can become absolutely compelling. Circumstantial evidence can relate to a particular category of people (say, all those with blood type AB negative or having a carpet with a particular kind of fiber), or to a particular individual (fingerprints or DNA).

Says Adam Plantinga in 400 Things Cops Know says “People watch crime shows on TV so they think the police can get readable prints off just about anything—human skin, stucco walls, quesadillas,” but “only a few surfaces are conducive to the retrieval of fingerprints.” Slick surfaces, like noncoated glass, glossy paper, and aluminum are best, he says.

Two additional considerations are avoiding contamination of the crime scene and maintaining the chain of evidence. No longer do hordes of people enter the room where a body lays, tromp around in their own shoes, and depart. (In the notorious 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard, “Police officers, relatives, press, and neighbors [were allowed to] troop through the house.” Subsequently, this case was a basis for the movie and tv series, The Fugitive.)

Today’s investigators recognize that “whenever you leave a room you take something with you and you leave something behind,” Symon said. Thus, the importance of hair coverings, gloves, booties, and hazmat-looking suits. Cross-contamination of the crime scene was vital to the defense of O.J. Simpson. First investigators on the scene, therefore, have a particular responsibility to document it accurately with photos, video, sketches, and notes, knowing it may be contaminated subsequently.

Similarly, the chain of custody for evidence is an essential part of “preserving” the crime scene evidence. Unless a piece of evidence has been carefully tagged, and each subsequent person who handled and tested it has signed for it, criminal prosecutors cannot claim that a trace of DNA , a hair, or other physical evidence is the same bit gathered at the crime scene and not somehow introduced subsequently.

Symon and other forensic investigators help authors by describing “reality.” The challenge for the author is to subvert reality in a believable way so their story’s plot can unfold. While in real life, procedural mess-ups may mean perpetrators are never be brought to justice, this often suits the author’s fictional purposes very well.

Amanda Knox: The Final Chapter

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Italy, street

Perugia street scene (photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto, creative commons license)

Working on a crime thriller set in Rome, I’ve had to try to come to grips with the eccentricities of the Italian judicial system. As a result, I’ve maintained a strong interest in the long saga of Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The pair was convicted, acquitted, convicted again, and now acquitted again for the final time in the 2007 murder of Knox’s British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy.

U.S. journalist Nina Burleigh went to Italy for the first trial, lived in Perugia in the lead-up to it, and intended to write a book about a young American abroad who went off the rails and became involved in a horrific crime. Instead, as she recounts in her excellent book,The Fatal Gift of Beauty, she was soon convinced by both the lack of evidence and the treatment of the accused that Knox and Sollecito are indeed innocent. Her book also explores some of the reasons behind the Italian media and public’s apparent eagerness that “Foxy Knoxy” be found guilty.

To this day, opinion about the case is strongly divided. Most prominently, Kercher’s family remains convinced of Knox’s guilt. Former FBI Agent Steve Moore provides a useful understanding of why people, especially families, tend to maintain their belief that an accused is guilty, regardless of subsequent evidence and courtroom decisions. (A heartbreaking documentary film about this phenomenon is West of Memphis, covering the case of convicted teens dubbed the “West Memphis Three.”)

The pubblico ministero (Mignini) plays a pivotal role in an Italian courtroom, somewhat like a prosecutor in a U.S. court, but with greater powers. For much of the period of legal wrangling in the Knox/Sollecito case, the prosecution was handled by a poster-man for Italian jurisprudence gone amok, Giuliano Mignini, whose erratic logic was amply documented in Douglas Preston’s true-crime book,The Monster of Florence, about a serial killer who prowled “lovers’ lanes,” primarily in the 1970s and early 1980s. Preston has called the case against Knox one “based on lies, superstition, and crazy conspiracy theories.”

It certainly is a tale with many confusing elements—Amanda’s changing story, which was one of the chief marks against her, the investigators’ mistakes in securing evidence from the crime scene, the conflicting interpretations of the DNA evidence, and especially the clash of cultures when privileged foreign students indulge their freedoms far from home, oblivious to their conservative environment, an issue Moore discusses in this thoughtful blog post.

The story has fascinating characters, irredeemable tragedy at many levels, and the ability to evoke partisanship for or against out of proportion to the definite facts of the case. One can only hope that either when the court reveals its reasoning in finally acquitting Knox and Sollecito, which is to occur with 90 days of the reversal, or at some subsequent but not too distant time, the Kercher family can be persuaded that in the loss of their beloved daughter and sister, justice was achieved.

***The Cut

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marijuana

(photo: fotobias, Creative Commons license)

By George Pelecanos – Washington, D.C.: the Capitol, White House, Smithsonian, The Mall. Forget it. Pelecanos’s Washington exists outside these tourist-trod centers of power and culture, landing squarely in the territory of drug dealers, D.C. Jail, grease-pit restaurants, and sleazy auto shops. His characters aren’t the power-brokers talking endlessly around tables on the evening news. If they make the news, its ten seconds about a corpse found, a conviction, a police gone bad.

Pelecanos, who received an Emmy nomination for his writing on HBO’s gritty cop show The Wire, writes about a Washington, D.C. as authentically as anyone else out there. In this 2011 crime thriller, investigator Spero Lucas is asked to track down who’s behind a series of thefts of marijuana shipments. Lucas is a likeable protagonist, and the book contained none of the (c’mon, really?) believability-stretching plots of many books in this genre.

It was a fun read, but I gave it only three stars because it doesn’t really do anything new, either. In his drive to be current with the tastes of the young black characters, Pelecanos includes too many recitations of long lists of music groups’ names that I, alas, have never heard of, so can’t relate to. A bit of overkill there. Perhaps the people who know all those groups are part of Pelecanos’s target audience.

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***400 Things Cops Know

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police, neighborhood

(photo: en.wikipedia)

By Adam Plantinga – If you write (or read or watch) crime stories, you’ll be fascinated by the detailed insights from a veteran Milwaukee and San Francisco patrolman (now police sergeant). The Wall Street Journal called the book “the new Bible for crime writers.” And, if you  wonder about how crimes are managed in the community, you’ll definitely gain some insights.

Plantinga, who is a Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude graduate of Marquette University, divided his 400 lessons into 19 chapters on “Things Cops Know About . . .” shots fired, juveniles, booze and drugs, domestic violence, and so on. Each chapter is not only a dive into specifics, but as important, together—with candor and humor—they provide an unfiltered view into the thought processes of the cops called out to deal with some of society’s worst and most intractable problems, deaths in circumstances that most of us never have to contemplate, much less confront, and the possibility of violence at every traffic stop. The endemic cynicism he reports arises from constant exposure to people behaving badly, as well as the internal machinations of many police departments.

In the chapter on shots fired, I was surprised to learn how hard it is to find bullets after they’re fired (unless they’re in somebody), in part because “most handguns have ranges exceeding a mile.” Of course, before a bullet can go that far, it generally hits a tree or a house or something. And most criminals aren’t very good shots, Plantinga says. But, as a responding officer, you can’t count on that.

I saw a movie about a hit-and-run accident over the weekend, and thanks to reading this book, I tried to telepathically help the on-screen investigator: “Look for prints on the rearview mirror!” Thanks, Sergeant Plantinga.

***Mortal Prey

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St. Louis arch

(photo: wikipedia.org)

By John Sandford – At a big family celebration last year, I queried my tablemates about the thriller writers they most like to read, and one guest enthusiastically endorsed John Sandford. Since I generally steer clear of Big Type book covers, I was happy to have this recommendation.

In Mortal Prey, Sandford did a strong job establishing the main characters (#13 in a loooooong series)—Lucas Davenport, a Minneapolis deputy police chief, and his primary antagonist, Clara Rinker, a hit-woman Davenport has tangled with previously. Now she’s gunning for some of the lowest lifes in St. Louis, and the FBI wants to stop her. There’s a passel of semi-bumbling FBI agents who’ve apparently spent too much time behind desks. Even more entertaining were the street-smart retired local St. Louis cops Davenport hooks up with. Lots of amusing manly banter.

In a flimsy pretext typical of thrillers that the reader can sail on by, the Minneapolis cop is working out of his jurisdiction and with the feds, which both limits his action and frees him from certain other constraints. Much of the plotting is believable (again, in the thriller context), until near the end, when Sandford abandons the point of view of the sniper, and her actions become increasingly risky to herself and others. Until she becomes a top spinning out of control, she’s a step or two ahead the feebs all the way.

I do wish Sandford had paid more attention to his character names. When Davenport met with agents Mallard and Malone and Mexican police colonel Manuel Martin and the Mejia family, I got kinda lost. No need for that. Thank goodness it wasn’t an audiobook.

Fast-paced, good humor, I’d read another one of these!

The Glass Top-Hat

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NYPD, cops

(photo: Nick Gulotta, Creative Commons license)

Loved this Alexandra Alter article about crime novelist Richard Price and his adoption of a pseudonym, in the hope of producing a quickie novel (and not suffer years over it!). Why not use his skills to dash off a plot-heavy, (shudder) “commercial” novel and reap the proceeds? In fact, he found out he is who he is, and the new book took just as much time and care as ever.

Price, interviewed this week on the PBS New Hour, is the author of the well-crafted and popular novels Freedomland, Lush Life, and Clockers. This pseudonymous endeavor has now emerged as his ninth novel, The Whites, which The New Yorker review by Joyce Carol Oates describes as “a maze of a novel” about a case that haunts NYPD detective Billy Graves. (The ghosts of unsolved cases are a universal occupational hazard for cops, as Price described it for PBS.) The book’s awkward parentage is displayed on the cover as “Richard Price Writing as Harry Brandt.” Even though The Whites came out only about two weeks ago, it’s already a hardcover fiction best-sellers (#5 on the NYT list in it first week).

“You realize you only know one way to write,” Price said during his New York Times interview. In keeping with his stripped-down approach, he did no new research, but instead called upon his extensive experience in ride-alongs with police and their lengthy conversations for his previous novels, as well as in his writing for HBO’s The Wire.

The whole pseudonym exercise was a failure, Price now says. “It seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and now I wish I hadn’t done it.” And, in a line for the ages: “This pen name is like pulling a rabbit out of a glass hat.”

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