Tag Archives: mystery

**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

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

***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

Everybody’s Favorite Read

Posted on by
The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Yesterday the Mystery Writers of America announced winners of the 2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the “best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television published or produced in 2013.” Among the winners were:

Links are to the Amazon.com descriptions, but here’s a directory of independent mystery booksellers, organized by state. Maybe one is close to you!

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Best Mysteries and Thrillers

Posted on by
book cover

(photo: catalog.lambertvillelibrary.org)

How many of the “best” in mysteries and thrillers have you read? I’ve read about 30 of the Amazon 100 best list, though if I could count the movie versions the number would rise to about 42. No double-counting for both reading From Russia with Love and falling for Sean Connery. Especially note how the cover for Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase could be mistaken for a “Carolyn Keene,” represented in the Amazon list by The Secret of the Old Clock, my very first Nancy Drew.

The compilers seemed to go for the first in a series, like the first Jason Bourne or the first Inspector Gamache, perhaps thinking that a strong beginning will lead people to subsequent books in the series.

We’ve read the statistics about how Americans are reading fewer books. But they still love mysteries and thrillers. Some people are drawn to reading because they can identify with the characters and others because of “that excitement of trying to discover that unknown world,” said author Azar Nafisi. That might be a foreign country, a foreign planet, a foreign psyche. Mystery and thriller readers get both. A protagonist they can identify with and a journey through that foreign world (of crime, of spies).

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

**** The Reversal

Posted on by
Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln Lawyer

If you’ve read the Lincoln Lawyer series, you know Mickey Haller does most of his legal work from the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, which has the vanity plate NT GLTY

Got my Michael Connelly fix for the year—The Reversal—a 2010 crime thriller that alternates chapters between brash lawyer Mickey Haller and his half-brother (or did you miss that one?) cynical LAPD detective Harry Bosch. Both men have teen daughters so are especially anxiety-prone when a man convicted of abducting and murdering a young girl is released from San Quentin as a result of DNA evidence and must face trial again after 24 years.

It’s interesting how Haller—working for the prosecution this time—must introduce old evidence without revealing to the jury the prejudicial information that the accused has already been convicted once. Nor can he say why some witnesses are unable to appear (dead or demented) and interviews with them, actually their previous trial testimony, must be read aloud.

While this isn’t Connelly’s best, he never disappoints and received four Amazon stars from readers. If you like every plot angle tied up with a bow, in this one, that doesn’t happen, and the author leaves Harry still pursuing leads as to the convict’s possible involvement in other crimes. It’s as if Connelly was leaving the door open for a never-written sequel.

Matthew McConaughey, Lincoln Lawyer

Matthew McConaughey stars in the movie version – note vanity plate!

For a fun Netflix pick, Matthew McConaghey in The Lincoln Lawyer. Rotten Tomatoes Critics rating: 83%. I thought it was better than that, and I’d read the book! Also notice how the movie poster changed the license plate to “NT GUILTY,” thinking viewers were too dim to figure it out, I suppose.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

The Bletchley Circle

Posted on by

Bletchley Park, Bletchley CircleFans of the PBS program The Bletchley Circle—I’m one!—who have been waiting for the return of the series, mark your calendars! The second season (which will consist of two, two-episode stories) begins Sunday night, April 13, after Masterpiece Theater. This smart series, harnesses the brain power of a group of women who worked as codebreakers at fabled Bletchley Park during World War II.

In Season 1, the patronizing attitude of the males (husbands, police, etc.) toward these women who were thinking rings around them was delightful. Their skills in pattern recognition, especially, to analyze massive amounts of seemingly random data stood them in good stead. And, the show apparently, despite minor quibbles, reaches standards of factual correctness about Bletchley Park itself. (One can only imagine how Hollywood’s funhouse mirrors would have distorted reality.) Can’t wait.

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

**** The Cold, Cold Ground

Posted on by

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).

Related articles

Planner or Pantser?

Posted on by
pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta