Category: Krimi

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939).

Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages rated 3.94 by 167,404 litizens.

Genre: Noir. Species: Sunshine.

DNA: SoCal.

Verdict: Who dun it?

Tagline: Where in the world is Sean Regan?  

The immortal Philip Marlowe’s first big case, and today he is still on the job somewhere, in some media (paper book, film, play, poem, radio, audio book, ebook, and more) or another, doing something. Ergo, this is vintage Chandler, a man of his time and place and an ear for dialogue.  

That 1930s context means he lacks contemporary sensitivities.  Fortunately for us there are many Good Readers on the job to tell us that in the 1-Star reviews where they parade their virtues – many. Here is a sampling of their insights in bold with my reactions. 

• misogynist – It is true, and an apt reminder of those bad old days that so many people are trying to turn the clock back to now. It is a big word that is often misspelled in the tirades. 
• too many detailed descriptions – Yes, true and I also find it tedious, though sometimes it does deepen either plot or character.  Editors get paid to convince writers to cut such verbiage. Too bad it wasn’t done for this one to make it even leaner and meaner. Try Honoré Balzac, Charles Dickens, or Herman Melville sometime. These writers were paid by the word. 
• actually 0-stars – ‘actually?’ The superfluous ‘actually’ is ‘actually’ unnecessary.  Emphatically unnecessary!
• convoluted – Yes, indeed there are twists and turns and I got lost a few times with all those comings and goings. That however intrigued me rather than defeated me. If you don’t like a mystery don’t read a mystery.  
• I don’t like this author – A valuable insight for others. 
• homophobic – indeed, true and grating, and another salutary reminder of the bad old days that we are now reinventing.  
• slightly sexist  – Slightly! Hardly. Wake up! Far more than slightly.
• racism – Huh? I must have missed this one, but no doubt true.  

A lot of these comments sound like idiot’s revenge for having to read something assigned by others for classes, clubs, or sadism.  

It is also true that it is replete with brittle dialogue, memorable characters like District Attorney Wilde, General Sherwood, Eddie Mars, Butler Norris, Bernie Ohls, Harry Jones, and Agnes Lozelle, Canino; some very well judged negotiating with Cronjager, Brody, and Mars. Then there is the ghostly presence of the Irishman.  Vivian herself has no trouble holding her own despite the prevailing attitudes that outrage some readers. Carmen is addled, like it or not, such individuals exist. Finally, it did much to cement the krimi noir into the popular mind.  

After finishing The Long Goodbye the algorithm suggested this well-worn title and with little better to read at the time I started….  Yes, I have read it before, yes I have seen the totemic representation on celluloid, and yet it seemed fresh and new on the Kindle pixels.  So I went on, and on. 

Some hack is missing a chance to bring the late Sean Regan to life. 

Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated rated 4.0 by 367 litizens 

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Strine.

Verdict: One of his best!

Tagline: A lighthouse, a coffin, a naked man, and one new shoe. Oh, and a dog.

Once again Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland CID has been  summoned from afar to investigate a difficult case, this time in Victoria at the fictional Split Point near Geelong. In a concealed cranny in the local automated lighthouse a maintenance worker accidentally found a naked dead man who had been shot dead. The first question is who is he? The second is why was he there?  And third, and foremost, Who dun it? (And why?)  

To find out, Bony, as he prefers to be called, takes up residence in Split Point rather as Jules Maigret would have done.  He befriends locals, starting with Stug, the aging cattle dog, and a carpenter who can talk to and about wood all the day long. The dog finds the shoe where no shoe should be and Bony is on the job!

It is a superb rendering of place, and a meticulous police procedural as Bony connects the dots of both things done and said, and things not done and not said that seem odd omissions. He makes a mistake, and has to admit it, only to find it wasn’t the mistake he first thought it was.  

Upfield was self-taught and a fast learner who pounded a manual typewriter in the back of a caravan that he customised himself, as he travelled around Australia, mostly in the hinterlands often in the remote outback to devise his stories. 

This was number 15 in the 29 Bony mysteries that Upfield published from 1929 to 1966.  He himself would have made a good character in one of his books.  Inevitably, his oeuvre has been mangled — ‘theorised,’ as they say (and I cringe) — by PhDs looking for fodder.  The result is unintelligible.  Abandon reason all ye who enter groves academic. Oh, and he wrote another dozen books on a variety of subjects.  

Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated 3.73 by 33 litizensGenre: krimi.DNA: Brit.

Verdict:  By the numbers.

Tagline:  True crime made unreal. 

Ingredients: wealthy Murray family with many sibs clashing over the dosh, live-in beautiful house-keeper, widowed scion, various grandchildren impatient for an inheritance, and others in the menagerie.  Then House-Keepeer is found murdered in a locked room and the mystery begins. The frame seems to fit one of the other servants or a wanna be relative, but does it….  I cannot say because I didn’t finish it.  

Slow, wordy, with remote characters.

I went looking for it because I read this author’s historical biography called Machiavelli and His Times (1936), which is more restrained than many other accounts of Machia. The author published many others of this ilk on Florence Nightingale, Oliver Cromwell, and the like. But she also tried her hand at this krimi.   

Muir was Dorothy Muir (1889-1977) who used the initial ‘D’ to get through the sexist ceiling at publishers. She took up writing when her husband died young and she needed an income in Edwardian England.  Writing was one of the few careers open to a woman and it allowed working at home with her children.  

This is one of three krimis in which Muir used a true-crime as the starting point for her story.  They might appeal to other readers.  

Good Reads meta-data is 160 pages, pages rated 3.97 by 730 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA:  Brazil.

Verdict: What a setting.

Tagline: Man overboard!  And good riddance. 

It is 1933 and the prototype of that idiot has just become German Chancellor.  The Graf Zeppelin is winding its way from Wilhemshaven to Rio de Janiero with its wealthy passengers.  There is some intriguing description of such journeys and how Zeppelin’s navigated.  The first airship had been patented in 1894. Commercial flights began in 1910 with what was the first private airline. Before the start of the Great War (1914-1918) more than 10,000 passengers had travelled on 1,500 flights. In that war they had been used to bomb England.  Only in 1926 when the post-war restrictions relaxed were new German zeppelins built.  These were bigger and better than their predecessors and plied the Atlantic route in competition with steamships. A ship voyage of weeks was reduced to days on a zeppelin. By 1937 they were well known enough to figure in Charlie Chan at the Olympics (of 1936). 

Sidebar: in 1975 ground transportation magnet Peter Abeles predicted the return of the airship as a conveyance in Australia 2025 (in a library near you).  Well, we do see blimps these days hanging over football stadia for meaningless aerial views to advertise sponsors.  Maybe that is what Abeles had in mind…. 

In this story a passenger is found dead in the men’s WC much to the inconvenience of the other passengers.  On board by some manner of means (how could he afford it?) is a Berlin police detective who takes over the investigation to determine if it was suicide, accident, or murder. Since the deceased joined the fight in northern Brazil, he was only briefly on board, but he did dine at a table with five others, so they become the focus of the interrogations.  Among them is a Prussia aristocrat in love with the sound of her own voice and gin, a eugenist come to Brazil to advance the cause of racial genocide, an English scion of wealth and privilege, and some other stereotypes.  

The copper decides discretion is best – see cover art and remember Phil Sheridan on the good. Then there is a denouement in a Rio hotel room that caught me by surprise, and like a lot of these climaxes completely undermines all that went before it. Not very satisfying. 

Moreover, it leaves many a loose end flapping in this reader’s mind: the coincidence of the deceased passenger even being there, the unspoken complicity between the ‘detective’ and the lord, why was the ‘detective’ playing detective from the start if the arrival of the soon to be deceased passenger was coincidental, why was the deceased so damn nervous (had he read the next chapter? And most of all, how was the deed done?  

Whether there are any good Nazis, there are number of books with that title. 

On a forgotten island somewhere in Oceania handful of European ex-pats wile away the time among several thousand natives.  By a quirk of history, a Brit owns the island, being the third in line of succession since the islet was granted to his grandfather.  He reports annually to a consulate miles away.  

While the natives go about their own business except for a select few who act as servants for them the ex-pats pass the time in hobbies like painting, drinking alcohol, and making witty conversation.  There is too much of the latter for this reader.  

nto this edenic life blunders an outsider, whose lugger pulls into the bay, causing curiosity, consternation, and irritation to the residents.  Who is it that would intrude on their retreat?  It turns out to be a blustery know-it-all who upsets one and all.  

We hardened krimi readers know he is for the chop and he is, but it takes a long time in coming.

Now the question is who done it?  And why dun it?  And does it matter since the victim was a such scumbag?

Was it the Lord and Master of the islet himself who would do a great deal to seal the island off from the outside world?

The windy, self-professed one-time sea captain who never went to sea?

The quartermaster who works for the Lord and Master, and whose background may not bear inspection?

The retired Scotland Yard detersive who came there to forget his own troubled past?

The retiring spinister who never answers a question about herself?

The doctor who seems wasted in this wasteland, but may be there for want of a better bolthole?

There are two or three more with similar questions handing over them.

Until the death of blowhard, Lord and Master was content not to ask any of them questions, but the death opened all quesitons, the most so when it appears to have been murder.  Murder!

what follows is a puzzle of who was where when, and what motive might have led to the murder.  At first this quest is pursued almost like a board game of Clue, but then…  Yes, inevitably there is a second murder, and with the European population diminishing activity is increased.  

Those deans of krimi-lit, Jacques Barzun and Wendelll Taylor describe is as a ‘masterpiece,’ and in a their very brief comment say it is ‘atmospheric,’ ‘entertaining,’ and ‘brilliant.’  This is high praise from these two.    

The ten Good Riders who scored it at 3.20 are closer to my take on it. Several of these souls were led to it, as was I, by Barzun and Taylor.  

I found the witty conversation tedious and the epistolary exposition at the denouncement artificial.  Nor could this savant distinguish among the ex-pat characters very well. They blurred together to me.  I needed a scorecard to separate them.  

Paul McGuire may have beeb an Australian diplomat who worked in Oceania. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography there was a Dominic Mary Paul McGuire (1903-1978) who has a long entry and several publications are mentioned but not this one.  I am not sure it is the same man, but if someone knows, contact me. 

María Angélica Bosco, Death Going Down (1954).

Good Reads meta-data is 160 pages, rated 3.10 by 379 litizens. 

DNA: Argentine.

Verdict: Meh.

Tagline: Not sure I care.

Winter in Buenos Aires is wet and windy, when a resident of a small apartment block returns home late at night from the pub, well and truly tanked, to find the lift occupied by…a corpse. Befuddled he does some stupid things.

There follows a police procedural confined largely to this building where each apartment occupies a floor. Several of the residents are European flotsam and jetsam from the war. The corpse was not a resident and yet seemed to have had a key to the front door. Does the European past hold the key to this mystery.  Doh!  

I chose it for the setting but, well, I got little of post war Buenos Aires since the story unfolds mainly in the building. The translation was cryptic, or perhaps that is the original, and this reader found it hard to follow and hard to develop an interest in, or to keep straight, the characters. Ergo, be your own judge.   

It is one of eighteen or so in a series from this writer who is described as the Agatha Christie of Argentina.  I couldn’t see why.  But then one of the other Good Readers compared her Raymond Chandler and that seemed idiotic for even a Good Reader.  

Emily Brightwell, Mrs Jeffries Stands Corrected (1996).

Good Reads meta-data is 233 pages rated 3.99 by 1,204 litizens.

Genre: krimi; Species: period.

DNA: England; Victorian.

Verdict: Cute but slow.  

Tagline: He did it!  What a surprise.  

Mr Obnoxious is stabbed in the back during a party celebrating the opening of his new very posh pub. Since he was universally disliked, despised, and hated as everyone from his wife, brother, sister, and the family dog is quick to say, there is no shortage of suspects.  In addition there are all the people whom he has shortchanged, cheated, and stole from in his pursuit of free marketeering.  

By a quirk of fate a not very sharp tool at Scotland Yard has inherited, not only a grand house, but a housekeeper and her staff.  While Inspector Dull bumbles around, Mrs Jeffries and her associates get to work and uncover clues to place in his path, some of which he notices.  Others not.  Some he understands, others not.  

With this invisible help he meets with success, a surprise to him and to others, and so he muddles through. 

However, in this outing the worm turns.  Slightly.  There is a nice plot twist at the end, but it was a tedious trip to get there.  I all but drowned in the blue herrings.   

This is number nine (9) in the sequence which has, sit down, more than thirty titles. I bought in Canowindra in 2025.

There a similar spin on Sherlock Holmes with Mrs Hudson, see Martin Davies, Mrs Hudson and the Malabar Rose (2005) and more.

Giulio Leoni, Crusade of Darkness (2007). 

Good Reads meta-data is 560 pages, rated 2.84 by 87 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Period (Medieval).

DNA: Italian.

Verdict: Suffocating detail. 

Tagline:  Spoiler: she Pope.  

October 1301 the Florentine Council sends Dante (Durante) Alighieri to Rome to assess and, if possible, negotiate with Pope Boniface, who was busy redefining papal corruption.  An uneasy peace exits in Florence between the Little-enders and the Big-enders, while Rome is seething.  While he waits for an audience Dante falls into company of an affable, wealthy Senator with a comely daughter.  Dante often has trouble keeping it in his robe.

In this heady atmosphere, strange things emerge.  Very strange.  That a representative of the Inquisition wants to hush things up, stimulates Dante to find out more with a great deal of to’ing and fro’ing in ruined Rome. Much. Too much. 

A fantastic plot is slowly revealed.  

This is the third and final instalment of the English translation of this series.  There remain several untranslated titles in the original Italian.

I delitti della Medusa (Book 1)

The Mosaic Crimes (or I delitti del mosaico) (Book 2)

The Kingdom of Light (or Los crímenes de la luz) (Book 3)

La Crociata delle Tenebre (or La croisade des ténèbres) (Book 4)

La regola delle ombre (Book 5)

L’ultimo segreto di Dante (Book 8)

Good Reads meta-data is 398 pages, rated 2.85 by 220 litizens.

Genre: krimi; Species: medieval period.

DNA: Italian; Species: Firenze; Sub-species: Dante.

Verdict: Second time around.

Tagline: Stupidity is god’s will. (That explains a lot.)

It is a world where whatever happens is god’s will, and that is that.  Any further consideration is blasphemous. Faith not reason prevails…for most.  In this stifling and stultifying milieu Messer Durante is an exception, one of only a few, who looks beneath this sanctimonious carpet to the see the warp and weft that weave the  Church’s hypocrisy. According to Dante (1265-1321), god means for us men (but not women) to make full use of our abilities. But this makes him a non-Believer or worse in the eyes of most others. In short, it all has a contemporary resonance. 

Dante is a Prior for a two-month term of office.  Six priors comprise the executive of the city-state government of Florence, and during their two-month terms, they live in the office dormitory. The short term is to discourage strong government by promoting rotation of the office, and the residency requirement makes it a full time job: Those are the fictions. This duty is unwelcome to those with a business to manage, a farm to tend, a sick wife to mind, or travel to do and they try to avoid the call to duty. Ergo, often the incumbents are layabouts with none of those concerns. The priors are nominees of the guilds that dominate local commerce and that commerce dominates the secular city. The historic Dante was a prior from the apothecary guild.  He had qualified for this guild because it was relatively easy, he had an interested in science, and it afforded prestige for which he was hungry from go-to-whoa. But no, he was not a drug dealer.  

In this story most of the priors are timeservers, some reluctant, others more willing, but Dante takes it very seriously when the dead start to pile up in the strangest places and in the strangest ways.  Those who answer god’s telephone tell him to back off, but he keeps going through the murk of Guelph, Ghibelline, greed, graft, and grievance.  

Confession.  I never did understand how the woman in the box worked or what the eight-sided hall of mirrors had to do with anything.  Maybe you do.  Inform me at your leisure. 

***

I have read this before but was moved to do it again after reading a biography of the poet discussed elsewhere on this blog because now I thought I now know him better. 

Good Reads meta data is 320 pages, 3.35 rated by 342 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Yankee.

Verdict: ‘Looking, Garv.’

Tagline: the squirrel did it!

Taxidermy is a dangerous trade, but Garv was not warned of this peril when he learned the business.  Now he knows.  He survives the mobsters, psychopaths, MAGAs, and more through the combined efforts of (Y)Angie his de facto wife who is an inveterate love tackler; Otto the Russian imp who honed his survival skills in the Gulag whom they shelter from ICE, his criminal brother who is less of crook than the police and lawyers after them.  Oh, and the sacrifice of Fred, the tame, because stuffed lion, in the living room.  Fortunately, it turns out the venom in a dead snake’s fangs is still toxic. Who knew.  

This is a re-read.