Category Archives: Crime

***The Killing Floor

Posted on by
Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

A Quandary

Posted on by
Bitcoins

(photo: Mike Cauldwell, Creative Commons)

Can I escape this post with my First Amendment advocacy credentials intact? Doubtful.

Talking to so many accomplished writers trying mightily to get published, I’ve about decided blind luck is the key ingredient in the publication lottery. Then, in the midst of a long Wired story by Andy Greenberg on crypto-anarchy, one sentence snags my attention: Simon & Schuster has paid Cody Wilson $250,000—a figure a vanishingly small number of authors see these days—to write his memoir.

Who is Cody Wilson you ask? And why does he move to the head of the line, the top of the heap? You may recognize his name as the 26-year-old creator of the world’s first fully 3-D printable gun, which I wrote about here in May. Blueprints of his useable firearm were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days.

Wilson is also co-creator of Dark Wallet, software intended to enable fully anonymous, untraceable online payments using bitcoins. The software’s purpose is to let people anonymously trade in weapons, drugs, pornography, and general mayhem, and Wilson drapes his creation in the flag of the First Amendment. Untraceable and untouchable, he and his lawyers hope.

Since bitcoins are an international phenomenon, it’s no surprise that Iraq’s newest crop of super-violent, decapitation-loving jihadi fighters, ISIS, selectively aware of the 21st century, touts Dark Wallet as a way to fund their activities.

Wilson takes his anarchic role in stride. “Well, yes, bad things are going to happen on these marketplaces,” he says. “To quote the old civil libertarians, liberty is a dangerous thing.”

More questions for Simon & Schuster: Can he write? Does it even matter?

(if you click on either of the related links below, be sure to visit the comments.)

Related articles

*** The Bat

Posted on by
Jo Nesbo, The Bat

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Jo Nesbo–Having written about Scandinavia’s crimewave—in fiction—when I needed another book in Ottawa, I picked up Jo Nesbo’s The Bat, the first-written in his series of thrillers featuring Oslo detective Harry Hole (Harry emphasizes his name is pronounced Hoo-ley, not Hole). This book was published (at least in the U.S.) after many others in the series, and Booklist deemed it “an absolute must for devotees of the riveting train wreck that is Harry Hole.”

Oddly, the story takes place in Australia, where Harry has been sent to aid the Sydney police investigating the death of a young Norwegian woman. (The Aussies pronounce his name “Holy.”) Lots of effective humor survived translation.

The characters were nicely developed and Harry has obvious deep issues, one of which is staying on the wagon. My only problem was the plot. If you’re chasing a serial killer of beautiful young women with light hair, would you suggest your new girlfriend as bait? “It’s all right, we’ll be right behind you”? How many ways can that go wrong? And, of course, does. Some heavy-handed foreshadowing, as well. Still, though, Nesbo is so popular, he must have got his feet under him as the series developed. (It was Nesbo who was picked to rewrite Macbeth in an ongoing “Shakespeare reimagined” project.)

Here’s a juicy bit: “Was Evans White as tough as he was trying to make out, or was he suffering from deficient mental faculties? Or an inadequately developed soul, a typically Norwegian concept? Harry wondered. Did courts anywhere else in the world judge the quality of a soul?”

Related articles

**Back to Bologna

Posted on by
Bologna, Aurelio Zen, Dibdin

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Michael Dibdin – I saw a couple of these novels about Venetian detective Aurelio Zen turned into PBS Mystery presentations a few years ago, starring Rufus Sewell, and liked them a lot. But in this book, tenth in the series, Zen was whiny, ineffectual, and fixated on his recovery from surgery.

The story is peopled by egomaniacs and told with a surprising, half-comic tone, that neither aspires to nor achieves the heights of absurd human hilarity of Donald Westlake or Carl Hiassen—which made it neither fish nor fowl. By halfway through, most of the ways Dibdin would bring together the oddly-assorted elements in this Howl’s Moving Castle of a plot were

all too clear—and, most unfortunately, not very credible. Enjoyed the juicy spoof of semiotics, though. As reviewer Carlo Vennarucci said, “Dibdin didn’t take his 10th Zen novel seriously; neither should you.”

Related articles

****Ordinary Grace

Posted on by
William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace, Edgar Award

farm3.staticflickr.com

By William Kent Krueger (narrated by Rich Orlow) – Ordinary Grace: A Novel
(2013) was on many prize-giving organizations’ 2013 “best of” lists and won the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel from Mystery Writers of America. Krueger, known for his Cork O’Connor series, wrote this stand-alone, because he wanted to explore Aeschylus’s seemingly paradoxical notion of God’s “awful grace”—awful in the overworked sense of “awesome,” and started thinking about the characters that would let him do that and the situations they would be in that required the wisdom from that awful grace. The ordinary grace of the title also figures in the story at a key moment.

Because this is not in the tradition of his crime novels and is a coming-of-age story with a crime in it, the novel focuses on a thirteen-year-old boy and his stuttering kid brother. The interactions with the townspeople all seem true, and they are vivid, rounded characters, not necessarily fully admirable. But it’s small-town Minnesota (lots of literary crime in that state in recent years), and nothing about life seems dark or dangerous to these two preacher’s boys until the bodies start showing up, down by the railroad trestle. I felt the rumble of that plot coming a long way down the track, but if the book didn’t offer big surprises, it had a few smaller ones, and was delivered with evident heart. It was refreshing to see boys the reader knows will grow into good men, not deranged serial killers. Narration excellent, especially the characters of Gus and the Sioux, Warren Redstone.

Krueger says he’s a writer “in part because of the scary stories I used to hear around campfires when I was a boy scout.” Readers can thank those dancing flames.

Related articles

At Least Someone’s Paying Attention

Posted on by
texting while driving

(photo: activerain.trulia.com)

Video about texting and driving grabs teens’ attention (link below). In the last weeks I’ve been driving the Interstates and major highways in three northeastern states and one Canadian province. From this limited cruise, only New York State showed evidence it is tackling the dangerous practice of texting while driving. We’re all familiar with the roadside “rest stops”; now NYS has added “text stops,” announced with frequent signs like “It can wait: Text stop 5 miles.” These areas are pretty close together, too, at least on Interstate 81. In some places, they’ve added “text stop” signage above existing rest stop signs, but in others, they’ve created a quarter-mile lane for cars or trucks to pull off the highway, send that vital text message, and pull back on. For what can happen when you don’t, see this absolutely brilliant video.

Truthfully, I didn’t see very many people pulled over to text, but planting the seed that there’s a time and place for texting is a worthy effort that may have a long-term impact. Better that than the kind of impact pictured above.

Nordic Noir – Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Posted on by
clouds, sky

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Readers and fans of modern crime novels have been aware of the Scandinavian writers’ mafia for some time—long before The Girl Who/With . . . trilogy commandeered airport book stalls. Stieg Larsson was, in fact, only one of the hundred or so crime authors from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark whose books have been translated into English. “The crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England: its trademark literary form,” says Lee Siegel in “Pure Evil,” a recent New Yorker essay on the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction.

An early signal of the impending invasion may have been the unexpected success of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Danish author Peter Hoeg (1992), a book I enjoyed greatly. As did a friend of mine’s mother, luckily only slightly injured when a tractor-trailer jackknifed in front of her on the New Jersey Turnpike and her car slid underneath. As the EMT’s loaded her into the ambulance, she yelled, “My book! Get my book! It’s on the front seat of the car.” Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

A line from Swedish crimewriter Henning Mankell—“every good story has a mystery in it” titles the home page of this website. He’s familiar to American readers and PBS Mystery! watchers for his Inspector Kurt Wallander mysteries. Several of these novels have been dramatized starring Kenneth Branaugh of the tiny mouth and co-starring the unutterably grey-and-gloomy Swedish skies.

From what source did all this high Nordic gloom arise? Siegel’s essay, which features Norway’s popular author Jo Nesbø cites several causes, perhaps most significantly the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot in the back while walking home from a movie theater. “The paranoia engendered by Palme’s killing,” Siegel says, “endowed the Scandinavian crime novel with a horrifying vitality.”

Also, in Norway—the territory of Nesbø’s Inspector Harry Hole novels—the discovery of oil led to a newly privileged class, and the social fears and resentments that ensued became fodder for the crime novelist, Siegel says. You will recall how in 2011, those class differences erupted in real life, when Anders Behring Breivik with bombs and guns killed 77 people, “most of them the young sons and daughters of the country’s liberal political élite” murdered at an island-based Workers’ Youth League camp.

Harry Hole of the Oslo Police Department is the protagonist in ten of Nesbø’s books—works that “stand out for their blackness.” Nesbø himself, on the interesting author-interview website Five Books (which also has interviews about Swedish and Nordic crime fiction), talks about how the mentality of the criminal is “actually very similar to the mentality of the police. And that is true for the main character in my books, Harry Hole. He experiences the same. The people he feels he can most relate to are the criminals that he is hunting.”

Nesbø’s books have sold 23 million copies in 40 languages, and several are on their way to being made into movies, suggesting that social fears and resentments are not themes confined to a single geographic locale, even if they can be presented in bleaker aspect against a lowering sky.

Read more:

Scandinavian Crime Fiction – billed as “your literary portal into Northern deviance,” featuring numerous authors, downloadable books (audio and e), and other resources

A Cold Night’s Death: The Allure of Scandinavian Crime Fiction – a guide from the New York Public Library

No. 1 With an Umlaut – Boris Kachka in New York magazine includes Iceland and Finland in his guide to this “massive iceberg of a genre.”

Enhanced by Zemanta

Plastic Guns

Posted on by
meteor

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

In the hands of a good mystery/thriller writer, the presence of undetectable plastic guns can change the dramatic equation. But in case the real-life possibility of seriously lethal 3-D printed guns existing outside the weakly regulated firearms marketplace has been a problem barely on the edge of your consciousness, a threat like a massive meteor strike—remote, but awful—it’s time to give it further thought. A Wired article by Andy Greenberg, full of anonymous sources and YouTube videos of test-firings, shows how far this technology has come. Predictably, the cost of manufacture has plummeted as lethality has risen.

A combination of libertarians, gunsmiths, and technology enthusiasts has been improving on printable handgun and rifle designs, step-by-step, moving “3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.” And, Greenberg says, leaving “legislators and regulators in the dust,” despite the Undetectable Firearms Act. Another reason this situation is like a meteor strike is, given what we know—in this case about human behavior—these developments seem unstoppable.

The RFID article below suggests how a different technology can contribute to gun safety, too, for conventional handguns.

Related articles

***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Posted on by

Just finished the May, June, and July 2014 (how do they assign the date to this publication?) issues of EQMM. As always, a real mix of styles, eras, and plotting in the 28 stories therein, by both new and established mystery writers. Among the stories I liked best were those by:

homeless, dog

(photo: shiftfrequency.com)

  • Frankie Y. Bailey really got my curiosity going. She has a new book out, The Red Queen Dies
  • Alex Grecian – in whose story, a woman’s wireless pacemaker is threatened by a mysterious caller. Grecian, author of the NYT bestselling historical mystery The Yard, might have read the April 30 story on this website!
  • Brian Tobin’s “Teddy,” about a homeless man’s love for his dog, was powerful writing. Tobin’s two novels, The Ransom and A Victimless Crime, have been well-received.
  • I’ve grown to like the EQMM stories by Dave Zeltserman—two of whose mystery tales, A Killer’s Essence and Outsourced, are being optioned for film—which put a 21st century twist on the Archie-Nero Wolfe relationship. In Zeltserman’s version, “archie” is a “two-inch rectangular piece of advanced computer technology” that his owner, Julius, wears as a tie-pin. While Julius talks, Archie researches. Cute.
  • Liza Cody has created an engaging, not-so-sure of herself police constable Shareen Manasseh to good effect, and another story with Manasseh appears in the British Crime Writers’ Association’s new collection, Deadly Pleasures, and many novels, most recently, the Dickensian Lady Bag.
Related articles

Eastern State Penitentiary

Posted on by
Eastern State Penitentiary, prison, isolation

Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia (photo: author)

Many East Coasters recognize the photo featured on this website home page as taken inside the crenelated walls of Eastern State Penitentiary. A “model” institution when it was built outside Philadelphia in the early 1820’s, Eastern Pen remained in use until 1970, by which time officials deemed it “not fit for human habitation.” Governing magazine’s David Kidd recently created a photo essay about this crumbling institution, now near the city’s downtown.

Although the felons have left, today Eastern Pen is a tourist attraction and hosts concerts and other events. If you visited it today, May 10, you could attend a reunion of inmates and guards, who would answer your questions about their former lives there. Every fall, it hosts Terror Behind the Walls, “a massive haunted house in a real prison.”

Kidd points out that the Quakers who built Eastern Pen originally constructed only single-person cells, so that miscreants would have absolute solitude to reflect on their crimes and on the Bible. This, the founders believed, would make men truly penitent (“penitentiary”). In this original sense, a penitentiary differed from a prison, where convicts mingled and shared cells. From the time a prisoner entered Eastern Pen and was led to his cell (wearing a hood) until the time he left (also hooded), he never saw or spoke to another human being. Later, with more crowding, that changed.

The city fathers were proud of their innovation and eagerly showed it to visitors, one of whom was Charles Dickens. Dickens was horrified at the suffering he believed this total isolation would produce. He was inspired to replicate it in A Tale of Two Cities, where the solitary cell in the Bastille drove his character, Dr. Manette, insane.

 

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta