Been doing a lot of reading recently – lots of turkeys but a few that have stuck in the memory. Going to start with the turkeys and work my way up to the better efforts.
Tokyo Year Zero (David Peace)
This was one of the books that I had been most looking forward to this year – the first in a post WW2 trilogy set in Japan by the author of the brilliant Leeds book “The Damned United”. It was however a huge disappointment partly I think because while it is being sold / plugged as a detective story the crime element is almost incidental to the real meat of the book which is the steady mental collapse of the detective investigating the murder and rape of a number of Japanese women in the first year after the war ends. The writing is brilliant and the grim atmosphere in post war Japan is well captured with people living a stone age existence in a Tokyo which has been firebombed back a hundred years. The occupying American forces are trying to purge the police forces of a number of war criminals who have taken refuge under assumed names with the force while a variety of criminal gangs wage a bloody war for control of the city’s black markets. The main character Detective Minami is haunted by incidents that occurred earlier in the war in China which are gradually revealed as the story unfolds. The character of the detective is a huge problem for me – he is very unlikable showing almost no regret for Japan’s actions during the war and he hates the occupation. The crime is almost secondary to the story – the killer is caught midway through the book and so suspense is lacking from there on in. All in all a massive disappointment.
(2/10)
Erast Fandorin – Special Assignments (Boris Akunin)
5th outing for Erast Fandorin who is a special investigator with the St.Petersburg government in late 19th century Russian. I’ve read most of the other 4 books and they’re easy to read but nothing really memorable. This is actually two separate books – “Jack of Clubs” which features Fandorin on the trail of a confidence trickster who is defrauding some of St.Petersburg’smost prominent citizens. Light stuff. The second story –“The Decortator” is better and is probably the darkest of the stories to date. Russian women are being butchered in a manner that suggests to Fandorin that Jack the Ripper is loose in Russia. This is a lot gorier than the other novels but falls apart very badly in the end with a few major plot strands not being tied up at all. Nicely written and the background is unusual but this will the last one I’ll read unless badly stuck. (3/10)
Days of Atonement (Michael Gregorio)
This is the second outing for early 19th century Prussian prosuector/amateur criminologist Hanno Stieffens after his first outing in “Critique of Criminal Reason” where he worked hand in hand with real life philiospoher Immanuel Kant Kant in solving a murder in Konginseberg. The book was heavy on atmosphere and menace but the plot was poor and took some serious liberties with Kant’s personality on the basis I suppose that dead men can’t sue. The second book set in 1809 in French occupied Prussia is more of the same. The entire family of a Prussian officer seems to have been wiped out in a sadistic manner and with relations between the occupying French and the Prussian population at boiling point Stieffens teams up with a French major to investigate. The strengths of the last book are again in evidence – heavy on period detail and a nice sense of atmosphere but the plotting is brutal. If you manage to finish it you will realise that you have been seriously hoodwinked as one of the major murders in the book remains unexplained at the end! It is also a murder that will make it impossible for you to guess the killer which would actually be fairly straightforward otherwise. Both books were very big European best sellers but have gotten deservedly mixed notices elsewhere.
(3/10)
Dies The Fire (S.M.Stirling)
Got this on a whim at an airport and have to say it was a very pleasant surprise. It is on the surface reminiscent of Stephen King’s “The Stand” (without the overt horror elements) but to my mind is a much superior effort. Basically the book examines the aftermath of an unexplained event that causes internal combustion to fail worldwide (no electricity, gunpowder, etc). At one swoop mankind plunges back into a 13th century world. The book itself is set in Oregon as the survivors struggle through the first bloody year afterwards as starvation and disease deceimate the population and cannibals decide that farming isn’t really the way forward. The countryside splits into small self contained groups with the book’s focus being on three in particular – a group of swords for hire the Bearkillers led by a resourceful ex pilot , the Wiccans a group of farmers led by a very annoying self styled white witch and finally the baddy of the piece – “the Protector” who wants to create a vast feudal
empire run by himself from his base in Oregon. Small parts sci fi, very small parts fantasy and a great helping of post apocalyptic alternate reality I found this a great page turner. The book is nicely paced with some set piece battle scenes and a vivid imaging of how society might respond for better or worse when the lights went out. If you like those end of the world books you’ll like this. First in a trilogy I’ve ordered the other two.
The One from the Other / The Queit Flame (Philip Kerr)
Between 1989 and 1991 Kerr wrote his first three books - a fantastic trilogy set between 1936 and 1946 and featureing hardboiled Berlin detective Bernie Gunther crossing paths with most of the Third Reich’s main actors (Himmler, Goering, Heydrich) and some interesting minor players (Orson Welles). Style wise the books were very much a Raymond Chandler pastiche but a very superior one. Bernie is a decorated WW1 veteran who has been forced out of the Kripo (criminal police) due to his opposition to the Nazis who have taken over. The third book “A German Requiem” saw him finally achieve some sort of peace. I had hoped Kerr would continue the series but instead he turned to children’s novels and half a dozen adult books in the last 15 years almost all of which were terrible.
When I heard that Kerr had a 4th book in the pipeline my feelings were decidedly mixed given his last few books – the One from the Other picks up in 1948 after a very long winded prologue as Bernie and one Adolf Eichmann travel (on a historical mission that did happen) to pre war Palestine to stir up the Arabs against the British occupying forces. Back in the "present" Bernie is now running his father in law’s hotel in sunny Dachau
which needless to say isn’t filled with tourists. His wife is in a mental institution as the rough years after 1945 have caught up with her. When a glamorous woman approaches him to confirm that her husband (a sadistic concentration camp officer) is dead so she can legally remarry, Bernie has little hesitation in accepting her offer.
Needless to say Bernie is soon up to his neck in trouble with the ex Nazis Odessa who run the “rat line” getting war criminals out of Germany, with a sinister American officer and most worryingly with a Jewish death squad who for some reason think he too is a war criminal. My fears about this book were confirmed somewhat in that the plot was easily the weakest of the 4 books so far – Bernie gets drawn into situations that seem artificially staged and should have been suspicious to anyone let alone a detective. Having said that the style is as engaging as ever and the book is redeemed somewhat by an interesting ending which features Eichmann prominently. Disappointing given what had gone before.
(6/10)
Having waited 15 years for a 4th book the 5th book (“A quiet flame”) in the series appeared less than nine months later
. Maybe because I wasn’t expecting anything much here after the so so 4th book that this was such a pleasant surprise. While it had superficial resemblances to the first book in the series featuring a serial killer preying on young girls the plot and setting were very different. It is now 1950 and following the events in “The one from the other” Bernie, Eichmann and an SS captain wanted for atrocities in Normandy by the Canadians have followed the Odessa rat line down to Argentina where Peron’s government is for reasons of its own sheltering a host of the euphemistically named “old comrades”. Almost immediately his cover of being a doctor is shredded and the sinister Argentine secret police have recruited him to track a killer who has been murdering young girls in a manner similar to that of a killer who operated in Berlin in 1932 on what would turn out to be his last case prior to the Nazis kicking him out of the police force. Needless to say the murdered girls will be the least of his worries - the plot is the most twisted of any of the books to date and red herrings abound – before long Bernie has met the Perons (and squeezed Eva’s breast
), been threatened by Otto Skorzeny (dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe” by British Intelligence at one stage of the war) and discovered that Hans Kammler (historically the highest ranked SS man unaccounted for after the war) is alive and well and up to some nasty things in the jungle. Throw in Josef Mengele and some very dirty deeds of Peron and that plot rolls along nicely. Along the way Bernie is tortured, is seconds from death and somehow manages to fall in love. The plot in this one is while twisty very logical and Kerr has used some real life incidents and real personalities to excellent effect. The ending is if anything even darker than that which ended the last book. Probably the best of the series.
(8/10)
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Michael Chabon)
This is one of the 5 nominees for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe crime fiction award this year and having read two of the others on the shortlist if this doesn’t win then the judges shouldn’t be allowed mark an under 5’s essay in the future. Chabon is a former Pultizer Prize winner and perhaps best known outside America for “The Wonder Boys” which was made into a decent movie with Michael Douglas. This is part alternate history, part detective story with some chess, romance and brilliant writing added to season. Chabon’s world is one where the Holocast was not as severe as the reality and where the Jews of Europe were given sanctuary in a strip of Alaska by the US government immediately after the war. While “only” two million have perished in Europe the state of Israel does not exist and worse the millions of Jews crowded into the state of Sitka are about to be evicted after their 60 year lease of the area expires.Life is looking very uncertain for the Jews of Sitka with less than 3 months to go before the Reversion.
The hero of the book Meyer Landsman is an alcoholic burn out police detective who for reasons explained later on has been left by his wife and who is drowning his misery in the bottle in a flea bag hotel. A junkie has been executed in the hotel leaving behind a few minor possessions and a cheap set up of a chess game where one side is 3 moves from defeat. Landsman takes the murder in his own hotel as a personal affront but for reasons unknown the authorities want to bury the case before the reversion of the state to the US. It seems that while most of the chess players in town know the victim that no one wants to identify him and it takes some serious digging for the trail to bring Landsman to the door of the biggest Jewish mafia family in Sitka and the realisation that more than one person believes that the murdered man was the Messiah.
Every character in the book is beautifully drawn from Meyer’s Indian Jew sidekick to the villains of the piece for whom the murder would
seem to be hiding something far bigger than first appears. The dialogue is laugh out loud in places and style wise this is as beautifully written as you would expect from a man who has won the highest literary award in the United States. The text is sprinkled with Yiddish words which is slightly off putting at first but with the context their meaning is fairly easily grasped in most cases. There is a nice little essay at the back of the book about how Chabon was inspired to write the book by finding a Yiddish dictionary from the 1950s in a second hand bookstore. Part of me would love to see another book with Landman but it would be very hard to better this
.(9/10) (on the basis that you should never give a 10 to anything)
Chabon’s last book “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” is incidentally also very good.
What We Reading ?
I think they have a handful of branches around.
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