Roseanna - Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

They dredge Roseanna from the lake, naked and dead. The local police investigate, the murder squad from Stockholm become involved, and when they realise the dead woman is American, they get in touch with Detective Kafka stateside.

This was Sjowall and Wahloo's first collaboration, the first of their ten Martin Beck novels. In a sense it was their homage to Ed McBain, who to a great extent created the police procedural in the States; but Beck is really a unique creation, the Swedish precursor of the likes of Inspector Wexford, the ultra-realistic police procedural, the grind as well as the glamour.

It is the best of the Beck books I have read so far, mainly because it takes so many risks. I suppose they reasoned that Roseanna had to be a hit otherwise the other nine would never happen, therefore it had to stand out from the crowd. Which it certainly does. I have always been a fan of the interview typescript technique which features heavily here. But what really caught me was the progressive revelation of Roseanna as a healthy young woman living (and of course dying) on the eve of the Sixties Sexual Revolution. Indeed she dies because she is sexually liberated.

Ed McBain seems realistic because he is so fantastically stylised in his writing. Sjowall and Wahloo, in translation at any rate, are genuinely downbeat and quotidian. Their mastery is in the plotting and the gradual peeling back of the layers until the truth is revealed. As Henning Mankell puts it in his introduction to this 2006 reissue: "The book describes the fundamental virtue of the police: patience."

Nobody does it better than "the godparents of Scandinavian crime fiction" (Jo Nesbo). It may well be that Sjowall and Wahloo never did it better than in Roseanna.

Faithless - Kjell Ola Dahl

This is my first encounter with Kjell Ola Dahl and his Oslo detectives, Frolich and Gunnarstranda. Given it is a series of twelve and Faithless is number ten, it goes without saying there is a great deal of back story I am not familiar with. Some of it stands out - one of the background cops has converted to Islam - but none of it gets in the way. It just makes me want to read more.


Faithless (a title wholly irrelevant to the story) has two strands. A young African student newly arrived in Oslo goes missing, and somebody murders Veronika, the fiancée of Frolich's childhood friend Karl Anders Fransgard - a day after Frolich arrests her for drug possession and twelve hours or so before he realises who she is at Karl Anders' party. Frank then goes home with Veronika's best friend Janne, who turns out to be Karl Anders' ex and his alibi for the murder. Frolich tries to recuse himself from the investigation but Gunnarsranda can't spare him.


I liked Faithless because, for all the characters' idiosyncrasies, it is a proper police procedural. The other big Norwegian crime writer, Jo Nesbo, makes his protagonist Harry Hole so horrible that he is invariably kicked off the case and has to solve the crime in his own way. The characters are well drawn. In this story Frolich features much more than Gunnarstranda so we get to know him better. I have no idea if that is always the case but will certainly find out. Gunnarstranda's occasional interventions here just make him more enigmatic and interesting. Frolich had a big finish in this story and I am keen to find out what happens to him next. Fortunately the next in the series, The Ice Swimmer, is available in English. The latest, Courier, was published this week.


I find it inexplicable that the series is being published out of order in the UK. Faithless is the fifth of seven currently available here, which would make sense if they were only publishing the later, fully fledged instalments - but the fourth to appear in English was Ola Dahl's first novel, Lethal Investments, dating all the way back to 1993! The good news is that they are all translated by Don Bartlett, who succeeds in the hardest task for any translator - making you forget it's a translation. Ola Dahl may not be best-served by Orenda Books and their terrible covers but Bartlett serves him very well indeed.

Lost Light - Michael Connolly

Lost Light (2003) sits bang in the middle of the "Harry" Hieronymus Bosch series. Harry has walked out of LAPD after twenty-odd years and registered as a private investigator. His first case, however, is one he has carried away with him.

Back in the late Nineties Harry was assigned to a movie unit using $2 million in real money for a particular shot. The shoot was raided, obviously by someone with inside knowledge. Harry shot one of the raiders but never found the body. Later, Harry found the body of a woman from the production unit who also logged the money at the bank. Later still, two cops investigating the robbery were shot in a bar. One died, the other wishes he had; he's been left in a wheelchair, totally paralysed. He is another element of Harry's motivation for putting things right.


No sooner has he opened the old file than pressure is on him to leave well alone. His former partner, Kiz, now with the chief's office, warns him off. The FBI warn him, too. Turns out one of their own has disappeared, presumed dead, whilst working the case. The same agent, it appears, contacted Dorsey, the cop killed in the bar, just before she disappeared and he died. Something about one of the stolen bills turning up where it shouldn't.


Already, in just a couple of paras, we have a story so deep and tangled that for me it was reminiscent of Connolly's early and best work. Back in the Nineties, I bought each of his books as it came out in paperback. I gave up before the Bosch series really got going because I thought Connolly had become marooned in his formula. Clearly 9/11 was a shot in the arm for him. Writing about the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers and the dark shadows of the War on Terror give us some of the very best sections of a very good book.


The denouement is as tangled as the premise. I will say no more than that - except, perhaps, to mention a revelation about Harry's personal life that I never saw coming. First rate reading by a master of his craft. Highly recommended.

Bloodline - Mark Billingham

Hard to say where Bloodline fits into the Tom Thorne series. I suspect it is Number 8. Does it matter? Not really. Bloodlines is still the right side of the dividing line which threatens all series - it is a crime thriller with bits of character development thrown in, rather than a character novel with bits of crime bolted on. In fact Billingham handles the 'personal life' stuff very well here. There is a major domestic crisis which reflects the main crime theme but the character development is that both Thorne and his partner Lou bury their feelings in their police work and prioritise the crime.

It is a serial killer story because Billingham is essentially a writer of very dark noir. The question is, in an era where genetic research is everything, can serial killing be an inherited trait? Essentially, the supposed son of a famous serial killing is going round killing the children of his father's victims in order to 'prove' that his father was obeying genetic code rather than personal inclination. It's a great idea, handled well on the whole, though I would have preferred some deeper development. Billingham rather handicaps himself in that respect by sending super-pathologist Hendricks, the fount of all theoretical argument in Thorne's world, to a conference in Sweden.

My only other reservations are these: I didn't care for the tricksy prologue and quickly fathomed out its relevance; and I really didn't like the killer's journal. These are very minor quibbles. I'm sure other people thought they were great. Yes I guessed who dunnit as soon as we were introduced but that to me is no problem at all. The plotting was as ever fiendish and Billingham writes like a well-modulated dream. The dialogue crackles, especially the banter between Thorne and Hendricks.

Has Billingham succeeded Rankin as the premier UK crime writer of today or is that Val McDermid? It's a close one and I fancy it boils down to how quickly Rankin dumps the increasingly tedious Malcolm Fox and fully revivifies Rebus.

The Dead House - Harry Bingham

Harry Bingham is one of those relatively new crime writers I've seen reviewed and wondered about reading. I have to admit that what put me off was the female lead. Not that I have anything against women detectives - but few male authors can really do great things with them; even as a male reader I get the feeling there is always something missing.

Good news - Harry Bingham is an exception to that rule of thumb. DS Fiona Griffiths is a fabulous series character. Yes, there remains something missing but that is expressly the point. The entirety of her life before adoption is missing. The people who adopted her, who love her and whom she loves in return, have dubious connections. There is a massive backstory hanging over this, the fifth in the series, which - brilliantly - Bingham refers to but does not expound upon. He is playing the long game and we, as readers, are happy to trust him to reveal it when the time comes.


The setting is Wales - big city Wales (Cardiff) where Fiona is based, and the remote village of Ystradfflur, the valley of flowers, where she finds her crime scene. As Bingham puts it---

Deep Wales. Real Wales,

This is the Wales that pre-existed the Romans, that will outlast our foolish time on earth, our crawl across the face of this dark planet.

 In Ystradfflur is a Dead House, the place by the chapel where poor Victorian villagers could lay out their loved one for visits prior to burial. There lies a young blonde woman in a white dress ringed by candles. She has had high quality plastic surgery but hasn't shaved her legs recently. Fiona notices this because she spends the night with the corpse, who she decides to call Carlotta. She communes. She holds hands. And we start to realise just how strange and damaged Fiona really is.



The supporting characters are equally well drawn - vivid where they need to be, prosaic when their main purpose is the highlight the flaws in Fiona. The plotting is multi-layered and complex. The denouement is hinted at throughout but I certainly did not see it coming. I have read a lot of books in my life, averaging at least two a week over half a century and I have never ever seen that ploy used. Yet it works brilliantly. There is real danger for Fiona, real tension for us, both there and in the caving sequence and in her interaction with Len Roberts, the failed smallholding hill farmer who has gone primitive and who is suspected of dark deeds.



The best British crime novel I've read this year. Highly recommended.

 

Standing in Another Man's Grave - Ian Rankin

This, apparently, is Rebus #18 and Fox #3, which handily also reflects their respective contributions to this story. It's a great idea to bring the two police protagonists together but it doesn't really work because Fox of Complaints only serves to tell us what we already know - that Rebus, now retired and working for Cold Cases, is a bit of a maverick.

The idea of setting Rebus's return in Cold Cases, on the other hand, works well. Every professional relationship we have followed through the preceding 19 novels is now reversed - Siobhan Clarke, formerly his oppo, is now his direct superior; Ger Cafferty, notorious gangland kingpin, is now also officially retired and Rebus's occasional, awkward, drinking buddy. Otherwise, the things which defined Rebus are thankfully much the same: nothing in his life except policework; the drive always to make things harder for himself than they need to be.

Forget the Malcolm Fox stuff, which is either a failed gimmick or (as I prefer to believe) a necessary device to frame Rebus's potential return to the force; this is essentially old school Rebus. Perhaps I should amend that slightly. Standing in Another Man's Grave is Rebus after he became fully grown from around the fifth novel in the sequence, when he gradually transitioned from detective to flawed hero.

The story is a good one. Rebus is able to link a missing young woman to a series of previous disappearances which convince the inquiry team there is a serial killer on the loose. Thus Rebus is seconded to the main inquiry, reunited with Clarke, and all is business as usual. There is a good running joke about the ambitious DCI being called James Page (i.e. Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin legend). We have the usual conflict between traditional hands-on policing and modern micro-managed policing-by-computer. Rebus mixes with the Edinburgh underworld in all its glory.

The midpoint twist I expect we would all see coming - I certainly did for once in my reading life - and the ultimate solution is neither here nor there. Somebody had to do it, it has to be Rebus who finds him, no one of course believes Rebus and Clarke has to be equivocal. That is what we want from a Rebus novel. That is what we get. In this instance we also get Rankin at the height of his powers. It's a long novel, 350 pages, but Rankin is able to fill it with character and complexity.

The Rising - Brian McGilloway

I started The Rising with high hopes.  Post-Troubles Ireland is a fascinating setting for crime fiction and McGilloway seemed to have taken the trouble to polish his prose in order to bring some quality to a genre that is always at risk of slipping into cliche.  Sadly he apparently only took the trouble in the early chapters and, frankly, the unique setting quickly became irrelevant.  By the middle of the book I was losing track of which side of the border Devlin was on at any given time; there seemed to be no difference, though I'm pretty sure British citizens living in Ulster might not always be so forthcoming to Garda officers like Devlin.

The Rising itself is an extreme community group cracking down on drug dealers.  Again, early on, they seem to be verging on paramilitary tactics, but it soon wears off and they're not really the drivers of the story.  The story is about drug dealers, and it's good that McGilloway ups the ante by involving the son of Devlin's former colleague and lover, but the key twist was ludicrously obvious and when I saw that coming the tension failed.

The Rising is the fourth and latest in the Devlin series.  The problem generally with police series is that the protagonist tends to develop a barrowload of personal problems, most of which have now become cliched.  Devlin doesn't have those problems.  Unfortunately that makes him boring and characterless.  The particular issue that McGilloway has handicapped himself with is that he chosen to write in the first person.  We therefore see this world solely through Devlin's eyes.  We therefore know that he is going to see out the story, so that's the effective tension gone.  Secondly, Devlin is a bit bland, largely conservative-with-a-small-c in his outlook, and thus an uncontroversial-bordering-on-uninteresting guide to his world.  The one whose inner voice we really want to hear in this story is Caroline Williams, mother of the dead boy and ex-wife of the appalling Simon - there's the character who would have given this storyline zing.

Maybe I would be happier with the author's other series, the DC Lucy Black thrillers...

The Black Echo - Michael Connolly

I remember reading the early Connolly novels back in the 90s.  I loved The Last Coyote  and Blood Work and Trunk Music and can't remember why I stopped buying or borrowing them.  I read The Lincoln Lawyer a couple of years ago and thought it mediocre.  Presumably I read something else earlier and thought the same.  Anyway, The Black Echo is not only an early Connolly, it's the very first, published in 1992.  It features Harry Bosch, which is another plus.

It is more than a crime novel - and Connolly's best always rise above genre.  In many ways it's a Vietnam novel.  Harry and the murder victim, Billy Meadows, were tunnel rats back in 'Nam - they went blind into the network of tunnels the Viet Cong had spent decades digging, and there they encountered the Black Echo.

I liked this a lot.  I liked the way Harry already has a back story, an earlier case which led to him being reassigned to Hollywood and which incurred the undying hatred of Internal Affairs.  He's already therefore a rogue, an outsider - 'not one of the police family'.  And his alienation gets deeper with every chapter.  Connolly's style is effective, the dialogue has the tang of authenticity without being overwrought or over-simple, and his descriptions are frequently skewed from the norm.  I guess the solution to my Connolly problem is to start again at the beginning - or, this being the beginning, continue in time order - and see what happens.  So it's The Black Ice next, then!

The End of the Wasp Season - Denise Mina

Another in the DS Alex Morrow series, this one disappointed me slightly.  Firstly, because Morrow is in a happy place, heavily pregnant with twins and sorely lacking her accustomed belligerence.  Secondly, because the murder is all about rich folks and thus I find it hard to empathise.  To be fair, Mina is making a social point about the working poor, the fading gentry and super-rich financial swindlers.  For me, however, the dividing lines weren't stark enough.

That said, Mina still writes like a dream, with a gift for inhabiting the souls of even of her most transitory characters. I enjoyed the book but I didn't love it.  And my enjoyment wasn't helped by piss-poor proof-reading.  It's no wonder hard copy publishers are losing ground to e-publishing.  You'd forgive the misprints in a book that costs you under £2, but not one that costs £12.99.