The Sins of the Fathers - Lawrence Block

Having recently read and reviewed Block novels from the early days and his most recent, here we have mid-period Block, when he was starting to make a serious name for himself. Not to put too fine a point on it, The Sins of the Fathers dates from 1976 and is the first of his Matt Scudder series.

Scudder is an ex-cop, now open to filling his time with the odd private inquiry. Scudder doesn't charge for his time or expenses, but is willing to accept gifts which he then pays tithes on to a local church. Not that he is a believer or anything, it just squares things with his conscience. Scudder is divorced but on friendly terms with his ex. He has girlfriends and probably drinks a little too much. He lives in a cheap New York hotel and spends a lot of times in bars. He hires a car if he needs one, otherwise he walks and uses public transport.

Anyway, a contact puts him on to Cale Hanniford, a businessman from upstate NY, whose daughter has recently been brutally murdered. The case drew publicity for all the wrong reasons. There is no doubt who killed her - her 20 year-old roommate Richie Vanderpoel is found in the street, drenched in Wendy's blood, telling all and sundry that he's killed her. That night, in the police cells, he hangs himself.

What Hanniford wants from Scudder is an insight into his daughter's life since she dropped out of college and took to prostitution with older men. Scudder accepts. He soon finds out that Wendy was actually Hanniford's stepdaughter. She was born out of wedlock, her real father killed in WW2. Scudder tracks down her previous roommate, who also knew her in college. She confirms the prostitution and also tells Scudder why Wendy dropped out of college. There was a scandal involving one of the professors.

Scudder can't help looking into the killer, too. Richie, it turns out, is the son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. As a child, Richie found his mother exsanguinated in the bathroom. He is homosexual but has no real interest in sex, certainly he is not interested in an ongoing relationship with other men. Scudder determines that Richie and Wendy, the closeted gay guy and the prostitute, actually established a loving sexless relationship. Why then did Richie kill her? That's the twist - and it's a zinger.

Block's style is phenomenal, so easy you don't really notice. Yet his characters leap off the page, the dialogue zips along, and there is no shortage of description or depth. Here, for example, we get a thorough insight into the New York gay scene in the mid-Seventies and the coming of age of the free love generation. Recommended.

A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle

Everybody knows it - but how many have actually read it? Not as many as one might think, is my guess. I certainly read lots of Sherlock Holmes in my early teens but even after fifty years I'm sure I would have remembered this. Why? Because nearly half of it is actually a cowboy story!

To be clear, I have always thought Conan Doyle is overrated - a moderately capable writer who, from time to time, and not only in the Holmes genre - hit upon really compelling storylines and great characters. None of that applies to A Study in Scarlet. Part One, the Holmes origin and initial investigation as we would expect it, is actually extremely well done, the writing considerably better than in later works. The second part, the cowboy stuff, is guff beyond belief, filler in every sense of the term.


The reverse thinking, the famous analytic deduction, I found as unconvincing as ever. Holmes just proposes something outlandish and Conan Doyle works backwards to justify it. But it works as well here as it ever did later on in the canon. And there are many things I didn't realise would be present in the first episode. We have both Scotland Yard inspectors, Lestrade and Gregson, for example. The Baker Street Irregulars are up and running. Mrs Hudson doesn't have a name yet, but she does have a maid and a dying dog. I was under the impression that Watson had to leave the army because of a leg wound from Afghanistan but it transpires it's a shoulder wound and a bout of enteric fever contracted in hospital.


As for the title - again, everyone knows it, but who can explain it? Well, Holmes does to a certain extent: "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life and it is our duty to unravel it." Well, no there isn't. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.


In short then (and one of the best aspects is that A Study in Scarlet is only really a novella), reading the first Holmes story was something I should have done fifty years ago. Reading it now was fascinating and, even allowing for the cowboy romance, it turned out to be much better than expected. Yes, I enjoyed it.

The Haunted Hotel - Wilkie Collins

The Haunted Hotel (1879) is late Collins, strikingly modern in some ways, hopelessly Victorian in others. The plot is complex, bordering on soap-opera. Lord Montbarry has broken off his engagement to Anglo-Irish rose Agnes Lockwood and gone and married the racily exotic Countess Narona. His family, the many males of whom wanted to marry Agnes themselves, disown him; London clubland turns its back on him. So His Lordship does a bunk to Venice where he holes up in ancient palazzo with the Countess and her brutish brother. He falls ill and dies. Everybody blames the countess.


Meanwhile Agnes's former servant, whose husband just happens to have been the Montbarrys' courier in Venice, also disappears. A thousand pounds compensation from the late lordship arrives in the post. One of Montbarry's younger brothers, a minor son in search of a fortune, joins a partnership which buys the Venetian palazzo and turns it into an upmarket hotel. The son of the new Lord Montbarry marries his sweetheart. Where better for a honeymoon than Venice? Heck, why doesn't the whole family pitch up there? Agnes, obviously, is more or less family. Of course she should go with them.


Just one problem. The room in which the original Lord Montbarry died seems to be haunted. Will Agnes unravel the mystery of the missing courier?


Its a short novel but one in which Collins rolls out his full repertoire of literary tricks and traits. As in The Woman in White we have an occult mystery with elements of the detective story, a genre Collins more or less invented in The Moonstone. The narrative unfolds in a variety of voices and forms: letters, first and third person narration and - my absolute favourite - the technicalities of the mystery are revealed in a scenario for a play manically penned by the deranged and dying Countess.


Great fun.

The Critic - Peter May-

The Critic is the second of May's Enzo Macleod series, one of the many novels he wrote and published abroad before his Lewis Trilogy was taken up at home in the UK and The Blackhouse made him a bestseller.  All have now been rushed out to cash in on his success, thereby flooding the market and putting a lot of people off.

However, because they haven't been written to cash in, the standard is high.  May wrote them to try and become a bestseller, and was therefore both ambitious in his storytelling but careful with his prose.  Once The Critic gets going, this certainly pays off.  For the first couple of chapters, I have to say, I was in two minds.  All the descriptions of landscape were essentially the same, though what else May could have done in describing the intensive wine-making country around Albi in the south of France, I don't know.  Then the trick of the prologue paid off and I realised I was in safe hands.

Enzo Macleod, like May, is a Scottish ex-pat of middle years.  He is colourful: he sports a ponytail, a white stripe in his hair and eyes of different colours.  He is a professor of forensic science at Toulouse University but has (in Book One of the series, apparently) set himself the task of solving the unsolved cases in a book written by Roger Raffin, whose ex is now Enzo's girlfriend and who, in this book, finds an unusual way of evening the amatory score.

Essentially, the story here is that an overmighty US wine critic is found, crudely displayed, three or four years after he disappeared.  In the meantime his remains have been stored in the local wine.  Enzo therefore immerses himself in the lore and process of wine to figure out who did it.

The detail, the science and the local characteristics are well and convincingly handled.  I learnt a few French terms I didn't know which will come in useful in my own writing.  Enzo is a great character but, in this book at least, has too many women around him who are not sufficiently distinguished for easy tracking.  The male characters are little better drawn but at least there are fewer of them.  The final revelation was a bit peremptory but that never really bothers me in crime fiction.  Someone has to do the deed and their motives will always be a bit on the loopy side.  I really liked, however, the very last revelation which opens the door for Book Three, Backlight Blue, which I will happily try for the title alone.

The Complaints - Ian Rankin

This is the first of Rankin's two novels (to date) about Malcolm Fox and the Edinburgh police complaints unit.  Typically, I read the other one, The Impossible Dead, first.  I enjoyed that greatly but consider this one better.

I read Rankin when he first came out.  I read the first three Rebus novels, then gave up because they weren't up to scratch.  I found the TV dramatisations clichéd and avoided subsequent Rebus novels like a bad cold.  I should probably reconsider and try revisiting the series halfway through - something like Dead Souls or The Falls - because I always enjoyed his stand-alone Jack Harvey thrillers and consider the Complaints novels to be of superior quality.

Rankin is still fond of a cliché - the Complaints quickly becoming the subject of complaints - but they are virtually impossible to avoid in genre fiction.  It's what you do with them that counts.  And here it's the starting point for a complex, multi-layered conspiracy set against the collapse of the banks in 2008-9 which, thanks to the Royal Bank of Scotland, was an extreme blow to Scottish pride and the Scottish economy.  Current events are central to the story and totally engrained in the action and for me, that sets this book head-and-shoulders above its competitors.

A great way to start my reading year.

A Question of Belief - Donna Leon

A Question of Belief is the 19th Commissario Brunetti novel but the first to swim into my ken.  It is very different to much contemporary Eurocrime - there is nothing noir about it, nor is it particularly a police procedural.  It certainly isn't a thriller - we're virtually a third of the way through before anybody dies.  Yet it is compelling, the compulsion to continue arising from the recognition that you are in the presence of extremely developed characters created by a writer utterly immersed in her world.

In some senses it is old fashioned, certainly more Wallander than Harry Hole.  Venice is baking in the summer heat.  Everybody at the Questura is either on holiday already or imminently about to go on holiday.  Ispettore Vianello is worried about his aunt who has fallen under the thrall of a dodgy fortune-teller.  Toni Brusca from the Commune has uncovered worrying procedural errors at the Tribunale de Vezetia.  Cases are being ludicrously and unnecessarily delayed.  One name keeps appearing on the court documents, the usher Araldo Fortuna, a career civil servant well on his way to retirement who leaves quietly at home with his mother.  Then Fortuna is found dead, his head bashed in and semen in his rectum.  Holidays abandoned, Brunetti, Vianello and the indispensable Signorina Elettra investigate.

The plotting is so defly done it pretty much constitutes slieght of hand.  There is never a hint of the manipulation you so often get with traditional detective fiction.

I shall certainly be investigating others in the series.

Poison Ivy - Peter Cheyney

In Cheyney's second novel (1937), G-man Lemmy Caution is embroiled in a Great Train Robbery heist centred upon the eponymous true-noir femme fatale, nightclub torch singer Carlotta.  The first-person, present-tense narration is reasonably convincing and often compelling, with plenty of twists and turns along the way.  The final twist was a stunner I didn't see coming.

I know that some noir fans sneer at Cheyney but they have to remember that it was through Cheyney, who was already an extremely well-known crime writer for the colourful press when he began writing novels, that the English public discovered the likes of Hammett and Chandler.  Cheyney sold millions, the others didn't - but they sold a lot more on this side of the Atlantic because Cheyney popularised the hardboiled style.  And not only in print - the earliest dramas on the British Forces Network were specially commissioned 15-minute playlets featuring the series characters Cheyney had developed by 1940 - Lemmy Caution, of course, and the British sleuths Slim Callaghan and Alonzo Mactavish.  (If you think Alonzo has an unlikely moniker, Slim's oppo is Windemere Nikolls.)

It's interesting how, in the early novels, Cheyney feels he has to Anglicise Caution - the denouement of Poison Ivy takes place in England as, apparently, did its precursor, This Man is Dangerous - and Americanise Callaghan (actually, Nikolls in Canadian).  Was he hoping for big US sales, which didn't come, or a Hollywood movie?  We shall probably never know - Cheyney died young and the only biography is by a country mile the worst book I ever read - and he has yet to be discovered by cultural historians, other than me.

Murder at Crome House - GDH & Margaret Cole

Another classic Penguin greenback from the Golden Age of detective fiction, this one from 1927.  GDH Cole (1889-1959) is the slightly better remembered half of the husband-and-wife literary team.  He was a libertarian socialist, Fabian and co-operator who also wrote political non-fiction.  His wife Margaret (1893-1980) was a pacifist and also a Fabian, who was later knighted for her services to local government.

The Murder at Crome House is only the third of about thirty novels they wrote together.  It does not feature one of their regular sleuths but is a stand-alone mystery featuring James Flint, an academic of enquiring mind who inevitably puts us in mind of GDH himself.

The set-up of the mystery - the murder of Sir Harry Wye - is so convoluted that I initially thought I was reading a spoof.  The murder has been photographed, not once but twice, by the victim and featuring two different killers.  It's not a spoof but what I suspect we have here is two clever people dreaming up the wildest possible premise and unravelling it as they go rather than plotting it out in advance.

That said, the writing is witty and smart throughout.  The Coles avoid the usual pitfall of contemporary writing and soak their scenes with layers of circumstantial detail which brings the world of 85 years ago vividly back to life for the modern reader.

I enjoyed it thoroughly without ever once believing it.  I didn't guess the murderer - I never do - but I for once I don't see that as a shortcoming on my part.

Like Mr and Mrs Cole, I overthought it.

Can Ladies Kill? - Peter Cheyney

A real treat, this - vintage hard-boiled detective fiction from a notorious Whitechapel-born English purveyor of pulp.  This is, according to the official Cheyney site, the fourth of the Lemmy Caution books.  Cheyney only started writing books in 1936 (this is from 1938 ) when he was over 40.  He knocked out fifty full-length stories before he dropped dead in his mid-50s, alongside hundreds of short stories, short plays and a mountain of tabloid journalism.

The striking thing about his Caution novels is that Cheyney instantly adopts the tricky first person present.  As he predates Raymond Chandler, I wonder if his key influence was Damon Runyon?  Cheyney keeps his punctuation extremely simple and seems to have no problem with US gumshoe slang.  The morals of his characters are very loose indeed - startlingly so for the period.  No wonder they were such enormous best sellers - even during the war, when paper was rationed and money was tight, Cheyney was selling two million a year.

I don't know who publishes Cheyney today, if anyone, and I don't care.  A bibliomaniac has to have it in a genuine vintage edition, like my 1949 Penguin greenback (above).