Category: Krimi

GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.48 by 54 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: charming.

Humble, long-suffering Inspector Ganesh Ghote is sent to a cool mountain hill station in southern India, far from the mean albeit colourful streets of Bombay (as it was then).  There he finds a ghost of the Raj, the private Ooty Club whose members, British and Indian (who are more British than the British in their tweeds and wingtips).  

Into this self-contained and closed community murder has intruded.  The drunken and conniving servant Pichu has been stabbed to death on the…billiard table in the night. Ghote’s investigation is dogged by Surinder Mehta, retired ambassador and friend to prime ministers past and present, who is an avid reader of Agatha Christie novels and sets about helping Ghote with a running commentary from the Great Dame’s novels.  (For a time Ghote wonders what a dog has to do with anything.)   

This is the seventeenth title in the Ghote series and it is light, diverting, and interesting as the best of them.  How did Keating do it?   

GoodReads meta data is pages 292 rated by 3.93 by 4110 litizens.

Genre: thriller 

Verdict: No thank you.

Set-up: Dresden December 1944. Max is a police officer with a gimpy leg from a World War I wound at Ypres.  The privations of the war increase every day, but Max soldiers on, as does his wife Karen (a hausfrau without a personality).  Their two sons are in the Wehrmacht and a constant source of worry, but there is no communication.  

There follows the first of a series anatomical murders of a young woman.  Others follow.  The police chief is a Nazi zealot and does not care about the murders of these slatterns.  He is pure cardboard, sent to stymie and annoy both Max and the Reader.  

A police procedural follows as Max slowly traverses the highways and byways of Dresden after clues, thwarted by his Cardboard superior. There is a lot of Dresden, and even more on the human tide from the east as the Red Army surges ahead. Suppressed panic is the atmosphere.  

More anatomical murders follow.  Max stays at it as the world around him disintegrates.  Karen spends all day scrounging food and fuel for the apartment.  

Then it gets worse. The fire bombing occurs and there are gruelling descriptions with more anatomical details. These are well done but not to my taste.  One injured and distraught woman Max encountered wandering through the rubble after raid of 13-15 February 1945 cries out, ‘Why are these devils doing this to us.’ Why indeed? Meanwhile, the few remaining Jews are eliminated along with anyone else whose Hitler salute is not crisp enough.  

I had hoped for more on the cognitive dissonance of the last days, but there isn’t much aside from references to wonder weapons and innate superiority of Germans. Then it was over.

Then the war ends and Russians take over. The murders continue.  The Russians are amused that Germans have been reduced to killing each other.  When some Russian soldiers are living up to the stereotype and Max pleads with his Russian liaison officer to stop them, the Rusky has a good retort that silences Max. Partly it is mismatched buddy-story as Max and Rusky work together.  

I never did fathom the complications of the plot. Cardboard superior, zealot though he was, hid his one or was it two moronic (think drooling Republican congressmen and you have it) sons and….   Then there is kindly doctor upon whom no suspicion falls.  Well, you know who dun it.  Many others have things to hide and it all gets tangled.  Why did Doctor and Zealot stay?  No idea.  Explanations are given but they don’t compute.  

Both Max’s sons survive to give us a happy ending. Although the sons do not communicate with their parents each knows where the other is: One in a Russian POW camp and the other in a French prison. Telepathy?  

It is rich in descriptions of wartime Dresden and daily life as the world ends.  There is a continuous narrative and not the chopped and changed discontinuous narrative that thrillers have all too often instead of a plot. But it is over-plotted and almost incomprehensible because of that.

There is no mention of the countless French POWs worked to death in war factories in Dresden, nor any reference to the manufacture of poison gas in Dresden for use in the death camps.  It was a key transportation hub east to west. There were also USA POWs there, too, namely Kurt Vonnegut and company. And one scene in these pages takes place in a slaughterhouse. Of David Irving’s exaggerations, fabrications, distortions, and more nothing will be said here.  

Good Reads meta-data is 202 pages 4.0 by 24 litizens

Genre: krimi

Verdict: arthritic. 

Very Englishman Ludovic Travers is on his twenty-first outing in this title. Our hero gets embroiled in the art scene in Paris. Because he is so handsome, so charming, so rich, so smart, speaks such perfect French he makes friends easily.  Meanwhile his personality-zero wife shops.

The book is padded with lengthy courtesies, accounts of taxi rides, and the praise heaped on Ludo by one and all.  It an inflated short story. The prose is laborious and leaden. There nothing for everyone: no action, no characters, no description of time or place, no police procedural, just people praising Ludo for being handsome, charming, rich, smart, Francophone, and more.

It does have a plot twist.  SPOILER.  The renown artist is presenting as his own work that of drunk whom he keeps on the sauce.  Or something like that.  

Here’s another SPOLER for Sy fy readers: there is no donkey and no donkey flies.  

The back story is slightly more interesting than the novel.  Bush wrote and published the first title in this series in 1926 and quit his job as a civil service clerk to write, thereafter cranking out sixty-two (62!) novels in which Ludo is praised by one and all. The last appeared in 1968!  One is enough for this reader. 

GoodReads meta-date is 276 pages, rated 3.93 by 193 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Po-Mo

I chose it for the Hamburg setting.  We had been planning to spend a few days there in September 2020.  

Reading some of Goodreads reviews, I was impressed that so many who commented were able to summarise the book.  I couldn’t.  I could not figure out who our hero was, what her work was, or why I should care, or much else. Still less could I fathom why I should be interested in any of it. Instead I waded through repeated laborious descriptions of hangovers, bitterness, and ponderous witticisms. To the deus ex machina finish.

I found it to be cryptic, convoluted, and disjointed, eschewing a linear narrative. It leaves the effort of integrating the parts into a whole to the reader.  This reader declined the task.  

Po(st)-Mo(dern) is it then. Whenever I see that phrase Po-Mo I always fear the worst, and so far Po-Mo has never let me down.  

GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 190 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: deliberate but obscure. 

When an unidentified, crippled homeless man is shot dead in what looks like a professional murder, putting Inspector Espinosa back on the mean streets of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in the rain. Why would anyone go to the bother of killing with such efficiency a helpless and hopeless man?  Why did the victim hobble up the steep cobblestoned hill in a thunderstorm to the place of his death?  

Then there are the guests at a nearby dinner party who parked cars on the street where the murder occurred.  Did the dinners see or hear anything in the deluge?  No, but one of them seems evasive, or is he just vague?  Espinosa has many questions and sets about getting answers.  

A police procedural follows. There is much back-and-forth in Ipanema and Copacabana as Espinosa and his team question, trace, and question again. And that part I liked as they pieced together the puzzle.

But the momentum is interrupted by unnecessary backstories of nearly everyone and anyone along the way.  Nor did I like the denouement which seemed to me to undermine most of what went before.  I had the same reactions to the two earlier titles in this series: the locale is fine, and Espinosa plods away but the plot is – well, really it is not a plot at all.  There is no way a reader can follow it.  

Spoilers alert, take warning!

1. The efficient killing was not efficient.
2. Nearly all the testimony so painstakingly pieced together is irrelevant.
3. The narrator is untrustworthy.
4. Did the wife know about the gun or not?  Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. 
5. The last character introduced is the one. (A rule violation of the procedural.) 
6. The catalyst was a psycho like a storm and not integral.  

The list could go on.

GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 4.17 by 247 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: tasty.

Vish Puri, chief of Most Private Investigations, is fully occupied with a money laundering problem when his mother brings him a new client.  

The money that needs laundering is his own, stuffed in bags under the bed off the tax radar.  However, in its wisdom the Government has abruptly decided to phase our high denomination currency in its losing war against corruption, and everyone, Puri included, has only a few days to redeem such notes, and in so doing invite the attention of the aforementioned tax authorities.  Son of an upright police officer, Puri will not break the law, but a little bending is in order, and he shifts and sways to find a way, which brings him into contact with some types he would have preferred to avoid. 

While he is bobbing and weaving, his mother, whose repeated interference in his investigations makes him appreciate his stay-at-home and mind-her-own-business wife all the more, brings in a new client, who of course cannot pay.  What’s more she claims to be the reincarnation of a dead murder victim.  Ah ha! Here is line Puri can draw.  No dead clients.

That is, until he realised that the ostensible victim’s death was one his deceased father investigated to no avail because it was caught up in the terrible 1984 Sikh riots following the murder of Indira Gandhi.  His father was sure the victim was murdered and not yet another victim of the riots, but in the chaos of the time he could turn up no evidence. Reluctantly then, Puri opens a file to honour his revered father and placate his mother who seldom takes no for an answer.

Meanwhile, an unhappy former client wants him to cure his new son-in-law’s snoring or give back the handsome fee Puri was paid to assess the young man as a suitable husband for this client’s daughter.  Whew!  Clients do ask for a lot for their money.  Puri offers a refund but that is refused with a threat of bad publicity or even court action. With no choice he adds snoring to his list of tasks.  

To deal with the trifecta Puri mobilises his operatives: Hand Brake, Facecream, Tubelight, Flush, and Ms Elizabeth Rami who is the office manager, and no one dares to take liberties with her name. Then there is the spy gecko, a drone of sorts. Much of the telling is light-hearted, and Puri offers again a guide to Indian cuisine as he munches his way around Delhi trying to find ways to deal with the money, the murder, and the snorer.  In the course of so doing, his Hindustan Ambassador automobile is wrecked, and his operatives torture a hitman with a cat, and his youngest daughter wants to get married with or without his permission!  Meanwhile, a tax man cometh.   

This is the fifth in the series, and as always recent Indian history provides the backdrop, in this case the riots that saw countless Sikhs murdered for being Sikhs following the killing of Prime Minister Gandhi (by the Sikh bodyguards). Madness and badness are not confined to the USA.   

I tried the web site on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome without success, and then quit while I was behind. Try if you must:  http://www.vishpuri.com/#http://

The change of currency reminded me of the phasing out of the 500 Euro note. It was done to make black market transaction in the drug business more difficult, because the €500 was the favourite of drug cartels.  Evidence? Well, one news account said that at one large European bank 5000 of the €500 notes were tested and all of them but four (4) tested positive for traces of cocaine!  I found that pretty convincing, leaving aside the larger question of whether drug use should be illegal.  Regrettably, I did not bookmark that article for the reader’s reference. 

Goodreads metadata is 273 pages, rated 3.73 by 453 citizens.

Genre: Cold War espionage fiction.

In 1949 West Germany entered its first post-war democratic election with an unspoken bipartisan agreement not to mention the only issue that mattered: reunification.  Incumbent chancellor by appointment Konrad Adenauer, der Alte, was expected to win easily.  Into this milieu Blackford Oakes (aka the alter ego of William Buckley, Jr.) is dropped.  

Start with that name: Blackford Oakes, a New England wanna be aristocrat who is suave, so resourceful that he makes MacGyver look like a boy scout, a lady killer in every way, and never, ever at a loss.  (See his Wikipedia entry for more hyperbole.)  He is tall, lanky, handsome, multi-lingual, and just about perfect for a CIA agent.  James Bond is an uncouth oaf in comparison.  Oh, and Blackford is humourless, unlike Mr. Bond.

The neatly arranged German apple cart is threatened by Prussian Count Axel Wintergrin who has formed a reunification movement and could well best Der Alte at the polls. Such an outcome might prompt the Soviets to intercede.  As always, Washington decides to interfere. The D.C. intercession has three parts: (1) diplomatic as the USA tries to convince the USSR to accept the situation, (2) while itself working feverishly to discredit Wintergrin with all kinds of Pox News from this spotless past (he sat out the war in far north Norway), and (3) by inserting the polymath BO into his entourage as an engineer employed through a Marshall Plan grant to restore the Wintergrins’ private chapel. BO is the backstop if all else fails.  See that coming…?

The reader realises far sooner than the smug and self-confident BO that the final phase of the Washington plan will be to murder Wintergrin to keep the Soviets from invading.  BO finally does figure this out and there are pages and pages of his crisis of conscience.  He likes, he respects, he has a man-crush on Wintergrin and the prospect of pulling the trigger on him gives him sleepless nights. Let us pause here and reflect.

Wintergrin is a mirror for BO: two peas in two pods.  Both devastatingly attractive, omni-competent, far-seeing, in short, god-like.  If Wintergrin had been a working class stiff, say like the real German opponent of Der Alte, Kurt Schumacher, it seems doubtful to this reader that BO would have thought twice about murdering him for the greater good. By the way Adenauer is named in the novel, but the Socialist Party leader is made fictional, and not named as Schumacher. Go figure. I read a biography of Schumacher so long ago I have forgotten whatever I learned from it. 

Spoiler.  In the end all of BO’s posturing is pointless since his superiors, after having wasted much time and effort in priming him, arranged another end for Wintergrin, whose omniscience extended to his own Christ-like death.   

Loose ends are many:  the resident KGB agent is left in place, the nuclear weapon Wintergrin had purloined are not retrieved, the election outcome is not mentioned (Der Alte won by a whisker), and Wintergrin was wrong about his own death. Yet the closing is reverential. This is the second in a series of ten of these potboilers.  Not sure I can brook another bout of BO’s smug complacence. Far better on a similar theme is A Small Town in Germany (1968) by John le Carré.      

In fact, I read this one eons ago and forgot it, until I read Buckley’s Unmaking of a Mayor.  That prompted me to try again with the same reaction: what a tiresome prat is BO.   

GoodReads meta-data is 186 pages, rated 3.70 by 165 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict:  Action!

Charles Paris is fifty something, living alone in a bedsit, scraping a living by acting in provincial theatres and anywhere else there is a fee.  He frequently thinks of contacting his ex-wife with a view to reconciliation.  But.., well, the time never seems right what with drinks after work or drinks before work or drinks with no work, and then there are the ingénues about, and Charles is ever hopeful and occasionally lucky.  

In this outing his ship has come in, and he is contracted as a continuing, albeit very minor character, in a television situation comedy that – with its all-star cast (a list that certainly does not include Charles) –  is sure to be a hit. With this income, Charles is expansive, and optimistic, in a guarded way.  Sure enough it is all too good to be true.  The tyrannical floor manager falls down stairs and dies. Too much drink ruled the police.  See above about drinks before, during, and after work. She was a dragon but she did the job well. leaving singed egos behind.  Still the show had to go on, and it did after a two-day gap.  

Then the annoying director, who seemed to think this sit-com would show Michelangelo Antonioni a thing or two with pretentious camera angles and artistic pauses, totalled his brand new Porsche and himself with it. Another hiatus for sure, but a new director is found – one who by contrast is no nonsense and with his four-letter word impetus the time lost is regained (eh Marcel) and the show keeps going on.  In each episode Charles has three or four lines and one or two movements as a golf club barman (seen only from the waist up).  

He passes the time on the set while others work by watching the mechanics of filming and thinking about those two deaths, when ….   Yep there is a third.  A light standard fell on the writer. Wallop! Sad and bad, but well there are plenty more sit-com writers out there and a husband-and-wife team come on board to do that duty, proving to be even more annoying to one and all than the late director.  Not all the clowns are in the circus. Why did they remind me of the repute of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson?

The mechanics of television making are well integrated into the plot and characters of the protagonists.  And fascinating in their own right. 

On each occasion plod rules the death an accident and leaves it at that, though in the last case plod briefly makes an effort to implicate a well known local stirrer but to no avail.  All those cameras on the location shoot clearly show he was never anywhere near the light standard.  The failure to bang him up irritates the plod so much its members are even less inclined that usual to entertain Charles’s suggestion that all these accidents are not accidents but are connected in some way.  

The plot is a corker: this jaded hack did not see it coming until it came.  

Punctuated throughout in his alcoholic reveries are reviews of past productions that mention him, e.g., 

‘Charles Paris makes a nearly passable Estragon,’ Sudbury Chronicle. 

‘Charles Paris played Baron Hardup, and lost,’ Worthing Herald.

‘It was hard to tell whether Charles Paris’s curled nostril was a response to the farmyard smells or to the script,’ Hampstead and Highgate Express.

‘Charles Paris seemed unsure as to whether he was Rosencrantz or Guildenstern and, quite honestly, the way he played the part, who cared?’ Romford Recorder. 

‘Charles Paris’s character died of a heart attack towards the end of Act One – a merciful release for all concerned,’ Malvern Gazette.

‘Charles Paris’s accent kept slipping like a recalcitrant bra-strap,’ Teeside Evening Gazette.

‘With Charles Paris representing the Soviet opposition, democracy will be safe for a good few years,’ Observer.

‘Charles Paris looked as if he’d wandered in from another show (and would rather be back there),’ Eastbourne Herald. 

Ah, but they all mention his name and that in itself is good publicity.  

This is seventh in a long running series about the (mis)adventures of Charles in the theatrical world of England, Scotland, and Wales.  He has yet to make it to Northern Ireland in my ken. I have read several over the years and always enjoy the thespian environment, Charles’s modesty, and the ingenious plotting. He acts in television commercials, television sitcoms, movies, radio and tv commercials, audio tapes, radio dramas, corporate events, on site, in studios, on location, in the West End, in the provinces wherever there is a cheque to be had.  

But I do find his love affair with scotch repetitive and boring padding. 

Simon Brett is a one-man industry with at least four other multi-volume sequences with other protagonists and other settings.  

Ellery Queen (EQ) started work in 1929 and has little rest since then.  Frederic Danny and Manfred Lee wrote more than thirty novels and scores of short stories featuring Ellery Queen until 1971. Then ghost writers took over the franchise. Then there have been radio, film and television adaptations. These are puzzle mysteries, locked rooms, disappearing items, and the like.  

Confession:  I have not read word one. I know Ellery Queen only from the air.  

Radio: 

The Adventures of Ellery Queen 1939-1949 on CBS, NBC, and then ABC voiced by Hugh Marlowe and others.

Here are some of the television series:

The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950-1952) with Richard Hunt/Lee Bowman/Hugh Marlowe

The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen (1958-1959) with George Nader

Ellery Queen (1975-1976) with Jim Hutton

Films:

The Spanish Cape Mystery 1935 Donald Cook

The Mandarin Mystery 1936 with Eddie Quillan

Ellery Queen, Master Detective 1940 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

A Close Call for Ellery Queen 1942 with William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay

Enemy Agents meet Ellery Queen 1942 William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay

A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen1942 with William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen Don’t Look Behind You 1971 with Peter Lawford

Too Many Suspects 1975 with Jim Hutton

Nor should we overlook the Ellery Queen(‘) Mystery Magazine (1941+). It started with the possessive comma which it has since shed. It seems to be digital as well as print now, but it continues with an official web site where officiating occurs.

I rather liked best the sophomoric enthusiasm of Eddie Quillan. He projected energy, wit, and tenacity.  The staging of Hutton’s television series was engaging and some episodes can be found on You Tube and Daily Motion.    

Iowa’s Margaret Lindsay played Ellery Queen’s typist seven straight times and steals the show when the opportunity occurs. She is bright, energetic, and engaging unlike the catatonic Ralph Bellamy and the comatose William Gargan, but in the conventions of the time, often she is confined largely to the screaming and fainting duties.

Nota Bene, Ralph Bellamy is credited with keeping the ravening beast HUAC off Broadway later during his tenure as President of the actors guild. The easy success of dividing and pillorying Hollywood for headlines tempted the cannibals of HUAC turn east for more flesh to eat but Bellamy secured a nearly unanimous front of Broadway actors, producers, directors, and investors to refuse to cooperate. That must have taken some doing among all those enemies, rivalries, and egos. Read the details in his biography on Wikipedia.

GoodReads meta-data is 180 pages, rated 3.71 by 1376 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Midsomeresque.

Contemporary outsized, lumpy vicar Annabel Dixon cannot resist a mystery in picturesque England today. When Sir John Many Pounds buys a mansion in the woods she sets off to snoop, and welcome him to Upton Saint Mary in Cornwall.  No sooner does she arrive at the mansion than Sir is shot dead with a crossbow arrow. (Turns out everyone in rural England is a dab hand at a crossbow.)

When not salivating over men in uniform, Vicar finds clues and then Plod arrests the most likely suspect and repeatedly ask him to confess which he does.  End.    

I liked the rural setting, the jolly Vicar (though not her constant swooning over men in blue), the village gossips, the cup cakes, and the cat, aptly named Biscuit, but not the plot.  Do English courts really send blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, youthful men and women to prison for pilfering, when there are so many immigrants to slam-up. Do not the fairest of them all get off with words of warning, while the immigrants do porridge?  

Do suspects confess when asked nicely to do so?  Are there no lawyers in rustic England?  This is the first of series.