Laura - Vera Caspary

Laura was Caspary's break into the big time. It came out in 1943, having previously been serialised in a magazine, became a Otto Preminger movie in 1944 and a stage play the year after. It is a hard-boiled crime of passion novel with all the qualities of the best literary fiction.

Waldo Lydecker is a New York writer of literary fiction. He is fat, snobbish and affected, with a silly beard and an ebony cane. He is our first story-teller, for Caspary has emulated the Moonstone device of multiple first-person narration. Lydecker is besotted with Laura, as is every man she ever met. Lydecker was seeking to introduce her to art and society, so when she is found dead in her apartment, shot in the bewitching face, Lydecker is the second person Detective Mark McPherson calls on, after Laura's fiance, Shelby Carpenter. Laura and Shelby were due to be married the next week. She had planned a final solo holiday but before she left was due to dine with Lydecker.

The plot is astonishing. My jaw genuinely dropped at the big twist. Caspary drip-feeds the clues like a research scientist breeding bacteria. Everything you need to know is there, none of it apparent without hindsight. The novel is short, exquisitely so, but every word is loaded with meaning. And the style, like the cover art on this Vintage edition, is superb. The following is from Detective McPherson, the fish out of water in the refined circle inhabited by Lydecker, Laura and Carpenter:

Even professionally I've never been inside a night club with leopard-skin covers on the chairs. When these people want to insult one another, they say darling, and when they get affectionate they throw around words that a Jefferson Market bailiff wouldn't use to a pimp. [...] It takes a college education to teach a man that he can put on paper what he used to write on a fence.

Europa Blues - Arne Dahl

At last! After several of the TV movies have been broadcast in the UK, some of Arne Dahl's ten novels featuring the A-unit team of Stockholm Police are starting to appear in English translation. And this is a weird one, one which I suspect would not have been easy to adapt for TV. A stoned-out-of-his-head pimp gets eaten by the wolverines in Stockholm Zoo. An elderly professor has his brain pierced while hanging upside down over the grave of an unknown man who had no nose. A lone female on an underground station platform strikes back with a vengeance when hoodies try to steal her phone.

Of course all these incidents turn out to be connected. It's a trail which leads the team all over Europe. Fortunately Arto Soderstedt is already in Italy on an extended holiday, so that saves Stockholm a fare. All the familiar faces from the TV series are here, of course: Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm, Jorge Chavez, Sara Svenhagen and, my favourite, Gunnar Nyberg, memorably played on TV by former World's Strongest Man Magnus Samuelsson. This is what's different about Arne Dahl - even Nordic procedurals like Martin Beck have a limited number of active participants but with Dahl the entire team is involved. Here, Arto is the one who is involved to the greatest extent - the one who faces jeopardy and ultimately restores order in the world - but I know that others have led in other novels.

The story is a cracker but for once I spotted the key clue straightaway. That didn't lessen my enjoyment one iota. The translation - by Alice Menzies - reads very well and I suspect that wasn't easy to achieve. Because the publisher is Vintage, the cover is more interesting than so many of the second wave Scandinavian policiers. But yet again they are publishing out of sequence - which flummoxes me completely.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea -Yukio Mishima

Perhaps Mishima's best known novel in the West, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is set in the era of the post-defeat reconstruction.  It is a novel of the early Sixties.  The characters, even the children too young to remember, are touched by the aftermath of the war and the subjugation of their nation.  The peephole in Noboru's bedroom and the 'dry dock' where the gruesome denouement takes place, are both relics of US occupation.

The focus is kept tight on Noboru, his widowed mother Fusako, and the new man in Fusako's life Ryuji, the titular sailor.  Aside from the actress Yoriko and the assistant manager Shibuya, who represent the two sides of Fusako's character, passion and punctiliousness, other key characters are not named.  Noboru's schoolmates - his gang - are simply the chief and number one, number two, and so on.  Noboru is number three.  They are all good students from good families, but we soon discover there is very little good about them.  They consider themselves superior.  They disdain their inferiors.  They set their own rules.  The chief has a book of Japanese law.  He knows time is running out for them.  Consequences will be different when they turn fourteen.

Mishima is such a genius in his structure.  We get drawn in to the nob of the story via the gang.  Noboru finds the peephole and watches his mother naked and masturbating.  Soon after he watches Fusako and Ryuji having sex.  As romance blossoms, sex turns to love, and their lovemaking becomes more private.  Noboru starts listing Ryuji's offences, perceived slights to the boy's elite status.  All of this he shares with his gang, the first intimation we have that these children are not normal.  In the middle of the book Mishima shows us just how abnormal they are, setting us up for the ending which he brilliantly doesn't show because what we imagine is so horrible.

In many ways this is Japanese noir.  The tension, the torrid atmosphere - literally, the fall from grace.  A modern masterpiece without any doubt.  My only criticism is that translator John Nathan (admittedly doing the work in 1965) is too quick with American colloquialisms.

Ghost Stories - M R James

Why is it I didn't take to the stories of Thomas Ligotti (see below) but fell instantly under the spell of M R James?  They have much in common - James is obviously a key influence on Ligotti.  Both writers tend to use the same type of narrator - learned, single, often a writer - and both use distancing devices such as "this is the story as someone told it to me."  I have thought about it for some days now, and have concluded that the difference is the attitude of the narrator/protagonist.  Ligotti's are inert, accepting, and thus alienate us; James's academic old buffers, on the other hand, rebel against their disturbing experiences and strive to put the world back in order.  That makes them appealing.  They do what we would hope to do in their position.

This selection, for Vintage Classics, includes an introduction by Ruth Rendell.  I like Rendell but hate it when publishers feel they need to add a 'name' to a classic.  This introduction is amiable enough but in the end it is piffle.  It tells us nothing about James and even less about his works.

On to the stories themselves, there are thirteen of them, naturally, and the best for me was the story "Number 13".  Can I say why I preferred it?  Well, to an extent.  It is odd, as hotel rooms tend to be odd, especially old hotels which have been converted from something else.  Hotel rooms strive to be comfortable, to be a temporary home from home, but they always fail because most of us can never be truly comfortable away from home.  We never fully have our bearings because there's always somewhere else, staff areas and other people's rooms, which we cannot access.

As always with ghost stories, it depends what you find frightening.  If you have a problem with spiders, then James is definitely the boy for you.  Personally, it's the oddness rather than the apparition which unsettles me.  The flapping sheet on the beach in "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" is, for me, much scarier than the attack on Parkins by his bedsheets.  But even if the thing itself in a particular story doesn't raise your gooseflesh you can always enjoy the sheer mastery of James's writing.  James, of course, was far more learned than any of his protagonists; that means he does not need to show off, and he doesn't.  Instead his pen flows like Picasso's line, effortless and yet magnificent.

The Aerodrome - Rex Warner

The most striking thing about Warner's dystopian classic is the date of its composition.  The Shape of Things to Come and Brave New World were both written in the Thirties and allegorised the rising threat of Fascism,  Animal Farm and 1984 are both postwar Forties and reflect the perceived Soviet threat.  But The Aerodrome came out in 1941, when the war was well under way and Germany and Russia were still allied.  What threat is Warner dealing with here?

It seems to me he is dealing with a much earlier threat, one which never came to anything.  In the immediate aftermath of World War I, when Britain had faced airborne invasion for the first time, when millions had died for no apparent gain and millions more were dying from Spanish flu, spread by the returning survivors of war - back then it must have seemed that revolution was a real possibility and the most likely revolutionaries were the newly skilled servicemen, especially those masters of the newest war technology, airmen.

That is certainly what they are up to on the unnamed aerodrome outside Warner's unnamed country village.  The airmen are unaccountable - the Flying Officer shoots the Rector, by accident, at the fair and succeeds him as Rector in time for the funeral.  Then the Air Vice-Marshal, who attends the funeral, takes a shine to young Roy, who has only just found out he isn't really the Rector's son, and persuades him to join the Air Force.  The Air Vice-Marshal has a plan; it seems to involve taking over; but we never find out what it is because---

And underneath all this is the question who is actually the child of whom?  It's not just Roy.  No relationship in this neck of the woods seem to be what it really ought to be.  It doesn't help that only three characters are referred to by name - Roy, Bess and Dr Faulkner.  Everyone else is the Rector's Wife, the Squire's Sister, etc.

It's all very enigmatic, almost deliberately obscure.  Take, for example, the subtitle, 'A Love Story'.  Oh no it isn't.  Yet it is constantly entertaining and beautifully written.  Chapter Twelve, in which the Air Vice-Marshal addresses his new recruits, is a masterpiece of dystopia in its own right.  This Vintage edition also has the bonus of an excellent introduction by Michael Moorcock.  Well worth checking out.

Bad Intentions - Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions (2010) is the eighth in Fossum's Inspector Sejer series.  I had previously read the seventh, The Water's Edge (2009) and the standalone novel Broken (2008), both of which I rated highly.  Indeed, Fossum was my personal discovery of the year 2010.  Why is she not featured on this blog as often as other purveyors of Nordic noir?  Because she is seriously badly published in the UK by vintage.  The covers are uninspiring (I mean, just look at it) and they seem to do almost zero marketing.  You never find them in major national bookstores and happening on one in your local library, as I have done for all three aforementioned, is pure fluke.

Fossum, who is Norwegian, writes psychological crime in the manner of Ruth Rendell.  She eschews serial killers and conspiracy.  In this novel we are not sure if there has been a crime at all.  If there has been, we know for sure whodunit, but not exactly what has been done or why.  There is no gore, no startling twists, and yet Fossum holds our attention from the first sentence to the last.  She is a major writer and deserves to be better known.  I mean, the least Vintage could do is give her an English-language website.