Category: Krimi

Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 4.25 by four litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Georgia, USA.

Verdict: Acute. 

Tagline: Petunia did it, and how!

A hapless graduate student in a genetics PhD program observes the ignorant, solipsistic, corrupt, narcissistic, venal, alcoholic members of the department who ingest illegal substances, give rabbits lesson in libido, cheat and lie in research, and hate each other, enslave grad students, while the student befriends a gun-toting house maid, a voodoo practicing untenured English professor, a jive-talking janitor with occult powers and a cartographic knowledge of drain pipes, and then there is the soon-to-be, and sooner-not-to-be, Doctor Frankenstein.  

The touch is light but the macabre ending is not. Be forewarned. 

Here are some of les bons mots, many of them quotations from literature. The author is clearly a reader of far more than genetics research. 

_____________

‘To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering,’ quoth Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. 

He was a monk of science, who devoted himself to his calling, ignoring minor matters of light, air, sleep, or food.

Only fiction has to seem possible, reality does not.

Words advanced to convince her were doomed soldiers sent on a suicide mission.

To quote Confucius: ‘The wise man is informed in what is right. The inferior man is informed in what will pay.’  No prizes for guessing which sort dominates the academy in these pages.

Most men believe to be true whatever they want to be true. So said Caesar. he could say it today as long as he includes women.

Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair might have been describing the successful professoriate.  

Each day I received four or five emails from the university designed to relieve it of all responsibility for anything I might do or not do or think about doing or have done in the past. Daily, it disowned me and my works. 

How void of reason are men, said Seneca. (Had he been watching Fox News?) 

They may plan to burn you at the stake, but they begin with innocuous questions. 

Selfishness has to be forgiven because there is no cure, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.

How few know their own good, and fewer still who purse it, John Dryden in his introduction to Juvenal’s Satire X.

No amount of money is compensation for the grind of graduate school.  (Amen. Hardest thing I ever did.) 

To hate all the hate-worthy people leaves one no energy for anything else, Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.

_____________

Gupta and I also did some vocabulary building: valetudinarian, maleficent, undulant, diurnal, stellate, arithmomania, flensed, eldritch, professosis, hebetade, ethology, soi-disant, and more.  (Yes, some are coinages.) 

I see from the author’s Research Gate entry that he has retired from the lists of competition for research grants. Therein he describes this book as ‘a satire of academic life, based largely on my own experience (with names changed to protect the guilty).’  He is not going to be applying for more research grants after this delightful hatchet job.  

I certainly recognised some of the personalities from my part of the jungle.  

I read it during our stay at the zoo. Seemed fitting, right, Petunia?  

Good Reads meta-data is pages rated by litizens.

Genre: krimi,

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Too many villains.  

Tagline: Who let the dog out? And why? 

Plod goes to an annual crime writers seminar (of 30 participants) to comment on the technical aspects of murder in the five krimis nominated for this year’s prize awarded by the sponsor of this seminar. In each case he faults the descriptions of the murders. The writers, each of whom is present, react to his critique in different ways. One welcomes it as a free professional consultation. Others pretend indifference, and another is passive aggressive hostile. A fifth stomps out of the room at the first quibble. (Yes, I felt like I had attended that seminar.)  

The prize awarded; murder ensues. There is an Ellery Queen story with this setting that is lighter and brighter.   

The authors and their companions are described, including the companion dog of one of them, along with some of the thirty attendees.    

There are loose ends aplenty. Unconvincing characters who are also uninteresting and hard to tell apart rendered in forced prose.  Yikes.  I chose it for the ostensible academic setting, but that offered poor consolation. 

Gill wrote many other krimis, using other pseudonyms. Her birth name was Barbara M Gill but she also used Margaret Blake and Barbara Gilmour.

Read during our stay at the zoo.

Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages, rated 5.0 by two litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Bristol, UK

Verdict:  Uphill.  

Tagline: Deviants all. 

Delightful chapter headings accompanied by epigrams from poetry, song, training manuals and other sources of high and low literature.  These are worth the effort to read the book.

Yes, I did find it an effort.  Much of it is presented in police interview transcripts – boring.  The same person may be interviewed four or five times, and each time states her legal name and address, place of employment….   

One of the police officers has hormonal surges that seem, well, adolescent in a trained-up cop.  

It has an excellent plot all the same, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the academics, though I did not notice a seminar.  The pompous, opinionated, solipsistic, alcoholic, and lecherous are all on parade.  I certainly recognised some of them.  

I did get muddled up about the presence of high school students.  No doubt I blinked when that was explained.  But there were a lot of explanations and I skipped many on the assumption they were padding and not blocks in the plot wall.  

I hope the author has more to offer.  

Read while disporting at the Retreat in Taronga Park Zoo.

Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.74 by 943 citizens 

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Japan.

Verdict: Unusual.

Tagline: Tell me a story.  

Dutiful granddaughter visits her aging grandfather regularly.  He has an unusual form of dementia (which is described in some detail for clinicians) and to hedge against that she plays a game with him that he used to play with her when she was a child.  The poser provides two or three details, and the respondent has to make up a story based on that.  I might say there is a blue house with a red bicycle parked in front of it on a rainy day.  Now weave a short story based on that information.  

One day on her way to visit her grandfather, she sees an assault and an innocent bystander who went to the aid of the victim is arrested by the police who mistakenly suppose he is the perpetrator.  This all happens far across a river and before she can get to the other side everyone is gone. Later the police show no interest in her claims because they have the culprit and she was so far away, but she is sure.

She puts this information to her grandfather and asked him to weave it into a story. He does. She checks it out…. Hmm. She finds further clues and asks him to elaborate the story with them.  He does.  She checks and adds more.  He elaborates further. Voilà! She does the legwork to feed him intel and he moves the pieces of information around until everything clicks into. Think of Archie and Nero and there it is. She does Archie’s legwork and he does Nero’s cogitation. 

There are four more such crime problems, the last being close to home.  

It is a charming set up and a delightful premise.  That the old man has visions at times when he telling the stories adds to the fun as she has to sort those out to follow the thread.    

While we had a long birthday weekend at the Retreat in the Taronga Park Zoo with a harbour view room, we took the 100 bus down Military Road to Mosman and had coffee and a stroll.  We went to Hartog’s Books where I acquired this title. (Some historians think Dutchman Derk Hartog was the first European to see Australia, the northwest coast, or even Rottnest Island off Perth.) 

The Blue Hammer (1975) by Ross Macdonald

GoodReads meta-data is 270 pages, rated 4.0 by 2,330 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: SoCal.

Verdict: Chapeaux!

Tagline: Families divided!

Archer is hired to recover a stolen painting but that quickly develops into something far more deadly.  Thirty years ago in an Arizona desert the painter’s illegitimate half brother was beaten to death, nearly beyond identification. Ten years ago, at the height of his creativity and sales, the painter himself disappeared. Presumed now to be dead. There will be more deaths to follow in the here and now, unless Archer can put the jigsaw puzzle together working from the edges inward. 

When reading an Archer novel, if a drunken blowhard boasts of his long ago high school football triumphs, pay attention because somewhere later that fact will fit into the plot.  When a clerk at a liquor store hesitates in replying to a question about the shop next door, the silence says it all. When comments about how aging changes a person are made that is thread to follow.

There are some of the signature features of Ross Macdonald’s Archer stories.  An archeological murder in the dim past.  A few mixed up youngsters in their twenties.  Half-truths, lies, and secrets.  But a new twist is that Archer is falling in love with a newspaper woman, and that makes him vulnerable, and confused.  

The title comes late in the piece and is worth waiting for because it heralded the end for Archer himself in the 18th and last of the Archers.  

I read it first in the year of publication and it stayed with me.  

I read the One (1) star reviews to remind myself why the aliens will never make contact with humanity.  

I re-read while we spend a long weekend at the Taronga Park Zoo retreat with a harbour view room.

Good Reads meta-data is 187 pages, rated by 2.67 by a measly 3 litizens.  

Genre: krimi; Species: Academic.

DNA: Oxbridge.

Verdict: Dry.

Tagline: Pass the port to the left and the sherry to the right.

It opens with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes! Regrettably Hobbes makes only one more appearance near the end.  Still that opening soupçon was bait enough to hook me.  

But wait! There’s more.  No sooner is Brother Hobbes consulted than the foregathered Dons unite in rejecting Sociology and all sociologists!  I began to wonder if the author had the University of Sydney in mind. 

In 1974 when my shadow darkened the door of the University of Sydney the Vice Chancellor of the day repeatedly declared his determination to keep out the barbarian sociologists clamouring at the sandstone gates of the quadrangle. It was also a time when we endured weekly faculty meetings wherein colleagues lectured we of the hapless hosts on the errors, mortal and venal of those who did not drink but the waters of neo-classical economics.  These sinners all were ‘sociologists’ by many other names!  This subtext was loud, clear, and repeated weekly.  

Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Harriet Martineau, Mary Douglas, and company be damned!  Derive those demand curves!

(Aside, an acolyte of that faith said to me once that original research in economics was impossible because all was known.  No, I am afraid he wasn’t kidding. So pure are they of the faith that when we had a Nobel Prize winner in Economics visit, few of the local economists bothered to attend his lecture or seminar, because he was not one of them. He was…shudder…a psychologist who studied the economic behaviour of people! People! Such was completely irrelevant to those who preferred faith to facts.)  

Now back to the action:  The foibles, ego centrisms, obsessions of the denizens of a fictitious but very realistic Oxford college are paraded and  parodied. Well, most scholars are self-parodying in their own microcosms. This college is old fashioned even by Oxford standards.  In my aforementioned days colleagues assured me Sydney was second only to Oxford, and now I begin to see why.  We operated according to two rules.  Rule One – everyone/thing here is excellent. Rule Two – don’t question the first rule.  

Leachers, idlers, incompetents, narcissists, blackmailers, egotists, drones, preachers, and deluded wielded their vices. Pareto’s keep the boat afloat, barely. 

In addition to its protected species of academics with arcane ranks and specialities there are students, who typically do not figure in the story, porters, administrators, and the visitors. Some of that later cross the stage.  

This well-ordered world is jarred by the need to raise money for its long-neglected physical plant, starting with the roof of the chapel no one attends in this secular age.  A professional fund raiser arrives to take stock of the needs and prospects. He expects members of the college to assist in this project in their own common interest and is puzzled by their unwillingness to lift a finger for the greater good.  Clearly he has not spent much time among this congregation or he would not have been surprised by this solipsism.  

Then comes a second and greater shock when one of the oldest and most senile Fellows of the college is murdered in the library where he goes to sleep away the day between meals.  

Enter plod who ever so deftly and politely asks questions. Being questioned, [shudder…] by an outsider is not something these cosseted men can abide, but needs must. Yes, they are all men. 

Among their number is one person whom they all despise – the only thing they agree on –  and soon every finger of blame is pointed at him. The plot thickens when it becomes apparent that he could not possibly have done it.  

Yikes.  

Plod plods on. 

By the way, Plod is Inspector Barnaby.  Yep. Same as….  (If you don’t know, then you don’t know. Got it?)

It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it.  Glad I did. 

Johannes Simmel, It Can’t Aways be Caviar (1960) (The Monte Cristo Cover-up)

Good Reads meta-data is  558 pages rated 4.26 by 1,299 litizens.

DNA: Austria.

Genre: SpyFi.

Verdict: Amusingly sophomoric. 

Tagline: Stir slowly.  

Banker Lieven, thanks to the misdeeds of his business partner, gets pressed into espionage service…. by the French, then the Germans, then the English…in this travelogue 1939-1941 – London, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Paris, Toulouse, Lisbon, and more. 

On each occasion he finds it best to go along to get along.  Unlike James Bond of the same era and ilk, Lieven is a pacifist.  

He is also a gourmet and wherever he goes he cooks, even in a war ravaged countryside.  His recipes dot the book. Wherever he goes, like Bond, the women surround him, and he does his duty by them.  He takes license to thrill but not to kill.   

It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it.  Not readily available to this reader but I came across it in the Internet Archive, and read it on the iPad screen from that source.  I didn’t finish it, partly because the antics became repetitive and partly because of the awkwardness in screen reading on the iPad.  I made it page 100 and noticing that many more awaited I withdrew. It is in print for German readers.

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 379 pages, rated 4.19 by 46,317 litizens.

Genre: Noir; Species: Sunshine.

DNA: SoCal.

Verdict:  And it’s goodbye from him. 

Tagline: Portrait of Madison. 

This is the last complete outing for Phillip Marlowe. It has many good moments which are outnumbered by bad ones. I found it hard to sympathises or relate to either Terry Lennox or Roger Wade, and the women in their lives seem to be clothes horses and little else.  

All in all, I found Lennox and Wade, and Marlowe himself for that matter, poor little rich boys decrying how tough life was on them. Yet they all live comfortably just as they want in what seems to be an undemanding environment without health or wealth worries.  Yet each rails against his lot in life.  Much of it seemed like an old man grumbling about contemporary society which has had the audacity to pass him by.  

Whoops! This just in! Boy, was I wrong…again! The dénouement at the end is superb and it makes use of most of what went before, some of which I had thought was useless padding. Though I have read it two or three times before I was still taken aback by the wrap. It explains a great deal about the broken characters of Terry Lennox, Eileen Wade, and Roger Wade (a stand-in for Chandler himself) that had irked me. It also gave the much put-upon Bernie Olhs a chance to shine. Chapeaux!  Chandler’s master’s touch was, well, masterful.  

Having vented that and eaten my order of crow, I enjoyed much of it. Though the policing early on was over-egged I did like the distinctions drawn among the police officers.  I rather liked the effort Lennox always made to be polite and not to slur.  I liked Dr Verringer’s affronted dignity. (On the other hand, Dr Loring seemed to be a cardboard popinjay.) I liked Earl’s showmanship and wished he had an act two. Today one might say Earl was neurodivergent.  That is, nuts! Randy Starr’s aloof chill was perfect. 

Most of all I like the importance of things not did and not said.  Like the spaces between the stars in aboriginal astronomy, they are more important than the shiny distractions.  

However, I did find the cynicism piled high for no reason other than to explain why Marlowe was such a jerk and who seemed hate everyone else who had the misfortune not to be the all-wise (to other people’s faults) Marlowe. Castigating everyone else is not social criticism; it is just ranting.  I supposed some of Marlowe’s posturing was Chandler’s effort at a Code Hero, but it was inconsistent, as Marlowe himself says.  

Notwithstanding all of that and more, I have a soft spot for this book because it was the first Chandler title I ever read; that was in 1973.  He had been recommended to me by Don Andrews, and one wintry night on a break from typing a draft chapter of the PhD dissertation in the unheated basement of the rented Edmonton house, I took a break and went out to the neighbourhood convenience store on 82nd Avenue for a snack to keep me going: deadlines to meet. It was near to the 10 pm closing time for the store. Consequently I was not alone, there was a line of a few other last minute pallid nocturnals at the cashier which meant I stood for a few moments next to a wire spinner rack of paperback books, and the one directly in my eye-line was The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler.  It seemed a message so, after checking my scant money, I added it to my boodle ( a packet of shelled and salted sunflower seeds and a  bottle of coke, I suppose)  and paid up. 

I returned to the cellar and revivified with the walk and the fuel I did complete the chapter and pushing aside the manual typewriter I took up the book, entering Chandler’s imagination. I kept reading until Earl came on the scene in Chapter 16, that means to page 129 well after the midnight hour. I was gripped; I was hooked.  There was no turning back. It was my doorway to krimi noir where I have since spent many happy hours.  

My soft spot does not extend to the egregious 1973 movie that mangled the story to fit the director’s avowed agenda, and had an atrociously miscast Marlowe, who has since monopolised the Audible recordings of Chandler stories.  Aaargh!  

For entertainment I read some of the one-star reviews on Good Reads.  The prize one declared the book to be irrelevant to India. If that is the criterion let’s put it to the test. That means no comfortable well-off person in India is gnawed by self-doubts. Nor that any drunk is unsure about what he did when tanked.  That no wife grew quietly to despise her husband. There is no Indian doctor was so full of self-importance that the rules did not apply to him. That no All India police officer manipulates suspects to get the result he wants. That no elected officials is too busy courting votes to do the job he was elected to do. That no soldier returns home broken in spirit by the experience of combat, capture, and torture. India must be quite a place if none of its billion people are like these.  

And they say, reading broadens the mind.