A Question of Blood - Ian Rankin

 A Question of Blood (2003) is one of the best Rebus novels.   I read and did't much rate the early ones as they came out.   The latest additions are expertly written but Rebus is retired, his involvement in crime solving increasingly difficult to justify and the police element split between the promoted Siobhan Clarke and the Complaints officer Malcolm Fox.   2003 is Rebus at the height of his buccaneering career.  At the start of A Question of Blood we are led to believe he has murdered Martin Fairstone, DS Clarke's stalker.   Fairstone died in a chip pan fire and Rebus is in hospital with what he claims are scalded hands but which others suspect might be burns.

A shooting incident at a private school in Queensferry gives Rebus and Clarke a chance to keep out of sight.   The officer in charge, DI Bobby Hogan, asks for Rebus's help and, since Rebus can't even light his own cigarettes, Clarke will have to assistt.   Hogan calls on Rebus because the shooter, who then killed himself, was an ex-SAS man called Lee Herdman, and Hogan knows that Rebus tried out for the SAS during his military service.   The two dead youths are the son of a judge and what Rebus suddenly realises is the son of a cousin he used to look after when he was on leave.   Rebus's family relations are always distant, so it is somewhat awkward when he visits his distraught cousin.

Rebus obviously shouldn't be involved because of the family link, but this is easily navigated as he is, and because of his hands can only be, a consultant.   He comes across a goth princess called Miss Teri who also attends the same school as the victims.   And then there is the youth who was shot and survived, James Bell, soon of Jack Bell the publicity hungry MSP whom Rebus has come across before.   Other old acquaintances with links to the crime are Peacock Johnson, gun supplier to Edinburgh's more militant thugs, and his henchman Evil Bob.

Clarke meanwhile comes across another SAS veteran called Doug Brimson, who was a friend of Herdman.  Brimson now runs a flying school.   He his handsome and friendly, obviously well off, and Siobhan takes a fancy to him.

The storytelling is masterful.   I guessed the twist in the main investigation but got nowhere near the motivation.   As I say, for me A Question of Blood is one of the best Rebus novels and highly recommended.

City of Glass - Paul Auster

 City of Glass is the first novella in Auster's New York Trilogy, one of his earliest works and still probably the best known.   I bought it when it came out in the UK but only got round to reading it now, almost thirty years later.

It is, paradoxically, a late existential work.  Daniel Quinn has built a reputation as a modernist author but hit the payload as 'William Wilson', reclusive creator of the Max Work detective mysteries.   Quinn doesn't care about the money, so long as he has enough to live on.   It is the reclusiveness he craves.   His wife and young son were killed in an accident.  A large part of Quinn died with them.   Now he has a quasi=posthumous existence - until he gets a call from a weird late night phone call from an odd-sounding man called Peter Stillman, who wants to contact the Paul Auster Detective Agency.

At first, of course, Quinn assumes it's a wrong number call.   He explains but Stillman keeps calling.  He sounds distressed.   In the end Quinn says he is Auster, how can he help?   He visits Stillman and finds an sexless young man who can clearly afford to live without working and who has an attractive wife who was originally his wife.   It is Mrs Stillman who persaudes Quinn/Auster to help.  It turns out Peter was the victim of his genius father - also Peter Stillman - who experimented on his son, depriving him of all contact with the outside world in his search for an inherent natural form of communication.   Peter senior got a substantial prison sentence for child cruelty but is now due for release.  He has let it be known that he intends to visit his son in New York.   Mrs Stillman is terrified what might happen to her husband if he sees his father again.   She knows the train on which Peter Senior is due to arrive ar Grand Central staion...

so Quinn turns detective.   He trails the elder Stillman from the station to a grubby hotel.  He follows him over the coming days as he wanders round the distrrict.   The wanderings seem aimless until Quinn traces them onto a streetmap, when he realises that the former professor is sending a message through the streets.  Quinn goes deeper.   It occurs to him that maybe there is a Paul Auster Detective Agency.  There isn't, but he tracks down Paul Auster, critically acclaimed modernist author and translator.  They meet.  Auster digresses into his latest project, an abstrusive essay about who really wrote Don Quixote.  Quinn notices the confluence of initials...

It's a brilliant fiction of ideas about identity and authorship.   As Quinn delves ever deeper he withdraws further and further from reality and even existence.  In the end Auster (the fictional Auster) solves the case in so far as it is ever solved.   That makes the ending sound trivial but it absolutely isn't.   It certainly got me thinking and I look forward to Part Two, Ghosts.  

Night Agent = Matthew Quirk

 Night Agent belongs to the thriller sub-genre pioneered by TV series 24 and Homeland, in which the deep state - supposedly the upholders of order - turn out to be the enemy, the enablers of chaos.   Night Agent itself is now the heavily promoted season headliner on Netflix.  I neither have nor especially want Netflix, so the book is all I can comment upon.

It's a great read, well-written and extremely well constructed, the twists coming at regulat intervals.   Yes, like so many contemporary books, it goes on a tad too long for my taste.  That said, the plot is so high-concept that I do feel some explanation was necessary after the denouement.   I don't want to give too much away, but the concept is a high as it can get in the sub-genre.   Does the rot rise all the way to the highest office?

Peter Sutherland of the FBI is the night agent in question.  His job is to sit overnight in the White House Situation Room in case the phone rings.   If it rings, there is a code to be confirmed, then Peter passes it on to either his FBI boss, James Hawkins, or the White House Chief of Staff, Diane Farr, end of involvement.   It was Farr picked Sutherland for the job.  She knows he can be relied on because of his father's sins.   Sutherland senior was a high-ranking FBI official who turned traitor and killed himself.   Sutherland also suspects he was chosen because he is a permanent outsider; if he messes up, well, you know, the sins of the father...

Peter came to Farr's attention because he was the hero of a Metro crash a year or so earlier.   Peter suspects the crash was not entirely an accident, and is quietly looking into it in his downtime, which is considerable.   The phone is only going to ring if something goes badly wrong.  And the vasr majority of the time, nothing goes that awry.

Until it does.   The phone rings.  It is a young woman, panic-stricken.   She is hiding in an empty house.   Armed men have come to the house she lives in and killed her aunt and uncle.   They are now coming for her.   She knows the pass code.   Her uncle told her before he died.   He also told her to mention a red ledger.   Peter passes her on as instructed.   But he can't resist going by her place on his way home.   He can't stay away from the funeral.   After the funeral, the girl approaches him.   She heard him speak earlier.   She recognised his voice from the phone call.   Who is he?  What is going on?   Why were her aunt and uncle executed by men speaking Russian?

As I say, it is perfectly done.   Quirk keeps the writing simple and straightforward because the plot is so complex.   The characters are well-rounded.   The good guys have flaws, the bad guys can behave reasonably.    I don't find (especially after Trump and January 6) the central concept too far-fetched.   And I absolutely devoured the book.   Great entertainment done wondrously well.   Almost makes me want Netflix, but I will continue to resist the temptation.

Marilyn the Wild - Jerome Charyn

 Marilyn the Wild is the first of the Isaac Quartet but was the second to be written.   Marilyn is the daughter of the colossus that is Isaac Sidel, Chief Inspector of the NYPD and undisputed king of the East Side.   Marilyn, as the title suggests, is a little wild.  She has just abandoned her third husband and is now shacked up with Manfred 'Blue Eyes' Coen, who happens to be Isaac's fool, the arch amid Isaac's Angels.

Isaac was once one of a trio of young High School chess prodigies.   Now all three men are in their forties, separated or divorced, and each plagued with a single more or less grown child.   Mordecai's daughter Honey is on the streets, pimped by black dudes.   Philip's teenage son Rupert has run away with an exotic Sephardic girl.

Isaac is off to Paris for an international cop conference.  Whilst there he tracks down his long-absent faher Joel, who ran off to be an artist and now lives happily in the Jewish quarter with his Vietnamese girlfriend.   Isaac's family is a constant source of stress.   His brother Leo is in the civil lock-up for unpaid alimony.   Their mother Sophie keeps a junk shop on Essex Street.   While Isaac is in Paris, he gets a call: Sophie has been attacked in her shop and is in a coma.

Isaac descends on the Easr Side like a typhoon.   He quickly establishes that a bizarre teenage gang ('lollipops) is responsible for the attack and a bunch of seemingly random, not to say pointless, petty crimes.   The gang consists of a very young male, a slightly older female, and a stocky oriental guy.   What is more, Isaac comes to realise that their crime wave is somehow focused on him personally.

It's a crime novel.   It reflects the Seventies in which it was written.   But Marilyn the Wild is much more than that.   It is a deep dive into the world of Jews in mid-century New York.   The NYPD is either Jewish or Irish (Isaac's estranged wife Kathleen is Irish, thus Marilyn's wildness is deemed inevitable), but Isaac is very aware of black and hispanic inroads being made into his domain - two of the most memorable characters are the Peruvian brothers Jorge and Zorro.   The world Charyn conjures is a racial kaliedoscope, albeit anchored in the Jewish world which is both his and Isaac's point of origin.   The prose fizzes, the dialogue zings.   The story romps along but it is the characters who stay with the reader.

I am hugely impressed.   So glad I bought the collected quartet from 1984.

Rizzio - Denise Mina

 

Polygon have launched Darkland Tales, retelling of Scottish history from contemporary Scottish authors.   Rizzio, by the fabulous Denise Mina, is the first.   It is very short - 117 pages in big, well-spaced print - and it is breathtakingly good.   Mina revels in the artifice of it all, cutting to and fro through the limited timescale and describing her characters with cool detachment.  The whole episode is a sort of pageant, albeit deeply brutal and, as all readers will know, ultimately pointless.

It introduces me, not especially versed in Scottish history, to people like Lord Ruthven, roused from his deathbed to lead the conspirators.   The first question everyone asks him is, "What are you wearing?"   Then there is Lennox, whose descent I knew about but not his personality.   He is apparently the most hated and distrusted peer in Scotland, which is some going considering he is the father of the appalling Darnley.   The standout character is probably Henry Yair, a Calvinist conspirator and thug who is unhinged by the slaughter of Rizzio and finds hunself standing over the body of a murdered priest.

Mina is right to cut her tale short with Queen Mary's escape from Holyrood.   We don't need to explore what happened after.   That is another story.