GoodReads meta-data is 292 pages, rated 3.71 by 1399 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Elik (Elle + IKEA).
The setting is grand but underdeveloped in preference to descriptions of the clothes worn by everyone who passes over the page and even more detailed descriptions of furnishings and fittings of homes, offices, and elevators, but strangely — mercifully — not cars. All of that pointless detail puffs up the book far beyond plot or character.
The plot is good, too: all those items in storage a museum never has occasion to display are tempting for a thief with inside assistance who plays a long game.
But do people repeatedly tell others they have something of the utmost importance to tell them…next Friday at 3 pm. Or do they just blurt it out; do they just tell them right now! That starts it off on the wrong credibility foot and it stays that way.
An enormous red herring is so conspicuous that he could not possibly be guilty. Near the beginning there is a nice but underdeveloped incident in the First Ladies exhibit. I like some of the coming and going in DC but there is little of it. There is a distracting sidebar about a nutter claiming to be James Smithson’s heir. It adds nothing to the plot, ambience, or character. Though it does remind us that not all the idiots are in the White House.
This title is one of a series by Truman, daughter of Harry, set in D.C. For example, Murder at ….the Library of Congress, National Gallery, National Cathedral, Pentagon, Kennedy Center, Washington Tribune, and Ford’s Theatre.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages (it seemed like a lot more), rated 3.96 by 120 relatives of the publisher.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: slow and steady and slow.
Romanian public intellectual journalist muses on life, and death when late one afternoon with a colossal hangover he finds a dead body has disordered the books in his study – the library of the title. He vaguely recognised the victim as a passing acquaintance. What to do?
In his befuddled state he concludes that hiding the body in the cellar of the apartment building makes more sense than calling the militia (police). Sure he is a 98-pound weakling intellectual, lugging around a deadman in the dark of night is the safer option in a ruthless totalitarian state governed by a demon in a necktie.
Does it have to be said? None of that goes well.
He sets out then to resolve the mystery to make sure he is innocent, because all that pálinka the night before has undermined his confidence. The fraternity brothers have ordered a case of the stuff to see if it beats Romulean blue ale.
He romances a duchess who lives in a deuce palace with her father who disapproves of this slovenly journalist. She and he have enough misunderstandings to quality the title as Chick Lit.
After a while this hack realises someone is systematically plotting to bring him to ruin. He consults the list of people who hate him compiled in the telephone book, and settles on a likely prospect, a chicken farmer whom the journalist tried in the court of pubic opinion some years ago.
He gathers the principals in a room, and…..
Nit picking note: the dead man was not killed in the library, ergo there was no attack in the library. And as noted above a study with bookshelves does not a library make. A library has to have librarians, as well as books.
While it is set in Red Bucharest it is largely bleached of references either to communism or the regime. How such an all enveloping miasma can be filtered out is itself a wonder. After all, it was published in Romania by a regime that left nothing to chance. By the way, the femme fatale is not in fact a duchess but she lives like one and that is why he calls her that. Indeed how did anyone live like that in Romania in 1983?
George Arion with pipe.
This is the first in a series involving our hero, one Mladin, Andrei. In 2018 Arion was still publishing a book a year. Strength to his arm, but no more for me.
GoodReads meta-data is 304 pages rated 3.51 by 9272 litizens.
Genre: krimi, pastiche.
Verdict: Bromance.
Confession: I gulped it down a day.
In retirement Joe Biden is restless and bored, and more than a little miffed that his through-thick-and-thin buddy Barry has cut him loose. Then one night out walking with the dog, Joe sees a dark figure in the gloaming. That’s Barry, who is always dark!
Barack has broken his long silence to deliver in person some bad news. Gulp.
Aside, Joe Biden’s only claim to fame is that he rode the Amtrak back and forth to DC from Wilmington Delaware most days for thirty-six years while has was a US Senator. Joe knows Amtrak, and all who work the early and late trains he used to take. Turns out one of those workers is dead, a conductor who always had a good word, and in his pocket was a print from online telephone book of Joe’s home address. Was that the start of a call for help?
The emotional, impulsive Joe is a whirlpool of reactions. He is glad to see his BFF Barry and pissed off he hasn’t seen him a lot sooner and in better circumstances. He is stunned by the death of his nodding acquaintance and perplexed, even more than usual, as he acknowledges, by the address.
A good Irish Catholic Union man is dead in strange circumstances, and Joe does what Joe always does – the instincts of a democratic politician run deep – he dusts off the black suit and goes to the funeral. Brief discussions there with mourners and family compound the mystery.
Joe does what Joe always does and plunges ahead…into trouble and more trouble. However, before it gets too deep that black man in black reappears with his pet Secret Service agent to bail Joe out. By now Joe is in too deep to get out and Barry, well Barry, is curious about what is going on, and Joe always stood by him when the going got tough, so he joins in, albeit on his own inscrutable terms. Yoda is a transparent blabber mouth compared to this guy.
What follows is a rollicking ride involving the DEA, corrupt men in blue (good Italian Catholics though they may be), incorruptible and uncommunicative cops, mad and bad bikers, Little Beast, Navy Seal Team 4 (sorta), Steve the unflappable one-man Secret Service detail grudgingly allowed by the Thief-in-Chief, a largely absent but still influential Jill, Champ the wonder dog, a wily insurance investigator, and assorted First Staters.
The plotting is ingenious and slowly ties everything up. Maybe the tying is more attenuated than some readers might like but it is complete (down to the wig [whew!]) and there is after all no rush to the finish line.
While Joe does what Joe does and rushes about, well, as a senior citizen he hobbles about mostly, without a plan, Barry is the chess player who is seldom seen but always ten moves ahead of the game. The characterisations of these two is nicely done by the author, a journalist, who had the chance to observe them for years and did so, rather than simply react the way most mediaistas do. Biden wears his heart on his sleeve, while Obama is detached and analytic. Biden is obvious and a terrible liar. Obama is aloof and distant.
There is a lot about Wilmington and Amtrak and amid all the hurly-burly a certain amount of unexpected but effective pathos, too.
Andrew Shaffer in disguise.
Needless to say, Pox News has attacked the book with blazing incoherence.
I could not deny myself the pleasure of reading some of troll droppings on GoodReads. My, my how the anger grows out of nothing. Lear had that wrong. Well, I assume it is anger but that is guessing from the incoherent tweeting. Though there were some letters from the alphabet.
GoodReads meta-data is 260 pages, rated 4.07 by 2934 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Golden Retrievers rule!
Six years after the guilty verdict, lawyer Andy is sure that loser Joey is innocent and by a strange coincidence in which his best friend, Tara the Golden Retriever, figures
Andy finds a way to re-open the case.
Mafia, drugs, arms smuggling, cartels, nut jobs, and frontmen are all involved and the body count increases, believe it or not, past 20,000. Subtle it is not.
Andy is droll, self-deprecating, and frequently wishes he had not gone to law school. He has a lower case a-team to help his investigations, and then there is the one-man army, Marcus of few to no words, a body guard hired by Mrs. Andy to look her investment in Andy. Does he ever.
Tara makes a good listener when Andy tries to work out what is going on. There are some loose ends, like how both the Montana letter and phone call were lost, who was bugging Nicky Fats (both the FBI and Iuoto?), why was Joey so convincing in the first place?
David Rosenfeld
When the mechanical Kindle Turk recommended it I was curious about the bounding dog on the cover and tried a sample, and kept going. It is more violent than my usual fare but the canine element and good humour overcame my doubts. It is the tenth title in a long running series and I expect to read another when I am ready for another Nordic noir blood bath.
GoodReads meta-data is 303 pages, rated 3.97 by 452 litizens.
Genre: chick krimi
Verdict: Well, I nivver!
James Moriarty is in his cups, having lost his job as a professor of mathematics at Durham University, he now works at a patent office in the Big Smoke. He had clashed with Lord Professor God at a scientific society meeting, and Lord Professor God set about ruining Moriarty by starting rumours of homosexuality.
When Lord Professor God is about to demonstrate his latest invention, Morrie goes to watch. There is plenty to see because it goes BOOM, killing the chairman of board, a man whom no one mourns, and injuring others. Was this by accident or design? In the confusion after the kaboom, Morrie meets Scrumptious, and can seldom think of anything else thereafter. She has earls, lords, dukes, and sirs in pursuit but finds them all to be pretentious airheads. They must be if a chrome-dome, unemployed professor looks good to her.
Since Morrie had a history with Lord God, Plod settles on him as the culprit in the blow-up, and to clear himself he must investigate. With this familiar trope on the table, proceedings begin. By planning and by chance his path frequently crosses that of Scrumptious, and also that of an annoying prat called Sherlock Holmes who works with Plod to fit up Morrie for the crime he did not commit.
Only when other murders occur related to the first (though quite how escaped this reader) does Plod release Morrie so he can pursue Scrumptious again. In time he learns that she has own agenda, and a team at work on it.
These lovers are star-crossed but as the subtitle indicates, all’s well that ends well. (I omitted the subtitle above to suck the reader in. Did it work?)
Moriarty is a victim here and is clever enough to find his way out of the trap with the help of Scrumptious. Holmes is an annoying blow-fly with his amanuensis Watson in tow.
There is much about how Scrumptious and Morrie misunderstand each other. Much. Maybe too much hence the label above ‘chick krimi.’ That is relieved by a great deal of to’ing and fro’ing. Again maybe too much. There are so many incidents that this reader got the feeling that they inserted because the author thought of them, and not because they added anything to plot or character.
Anna Castle
Quibbling aside, it moves right along with a varied and interesting cast of characters, and it is plain that Morrie is Scrumptious whipped. He has no will of his own where she is concerned. It is first in a series and I expect to read another.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.58 by 201 litizens.
Verdict: more.
In rural north east Ohio among a largely Amish farming community, one teenage Amish girl is found shot to death. Bad. It was no NRA-inspired school shooting. The bullet comes a serious organised crime handgun sanctioned by the NRA for every trigger finger. Worse. Crime scene tests find traces of cocaine. Worst. How could a sheltered Amish teenager get involved with a drug crime?
What follows is a police procedural with emphasis on questioning those who knew her again and again and piecing together an inferential picture of what might have happened. This is done against the background of the shock and grief of her family and friends at this ugly intrusion into their largely cocooned life.
The trail extends to Sarasota in Florida where many Amish go to winter in the off season of Ohio farming. There is quite a bit of back and forth between Ohio and Florida.
The manners and mores of the Amish are treated with respect, as are their interactions with the sheriff who investigates and who seems to have a bottomless budget as he goes all out. No McKinsey manager is in sight telling the sheriff to go back to writing parking fines where there is revenue flow.
There is a side bar about an EPA investigation that allows the author through the sheriff to tweak the nose of Federal authority, but which adds nothing to the main line, though I, too enjoyed seeing the bumptious cardboard stereotype come undone.
One the things I learned about Amish practice in this book is the daadihaus. The dictionary defines it as a Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish) term for a granny flat near or attached to the extended family home, with the difference that is grandpa. In practice, in this book it seemed to be a man cave where the elder male of the clan may retire in privacy to do things that might not be 100% Amish in the eyes of the local Bishop. Though the story is tragic, it does not have a morally satisfying end, but I guess that is lifelike.
P L Gaus
Eighth in a long running series but the first I have read. I have already acquired another for future reference.
GoodReads meta-data is 252 pages, rated 3.54 by 129 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: flying start, shuddering halt.
MetroPlex Studios begins pre-production work on a film version of Sherlock Holmes’s story The Speckled Band. So far so normal. What is less than normal is that for reasons unknown the studio has hired a screenwriter for the project who loathes the Sherlock Homes stories and is loathed by the Irregulars. He is one Stephen Worth, a vulgar representative of the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction of the gentlemanly Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. As the fiction gods would have it Worth has an impregnable contract for the job and a clause that prevents the Studio from making the film without his script.
As the protests roll in from the keepers of the Holmes faith, the head of the Studio has a bright idea. He will employ a selection of these Irregulars as technical consultants. Their intrusion might cause Worth to quit, and if not, their intrusion might steer the project to a lee shore. It’s win either way. What can possibly go wrong?
We all know that answer to that closing rhetorical question, now don’t we. ‘Everything,’ in a word.
The five Irregulars whom he brings to California, houses, and hosts squabble among themselves over minutiae of the sacred canon in their competition for acclaim as the one true prophet of Holmes. Worth, the screenwriter nemesis, becomes even more obnoxious — some had thought that was not possible, but they were proven wrong — and determined to see the task through and tells everyone that, right to the moment he stops talking, because, Jim, he is d-e-a-d.
As the wind carries the news of the dissension and then the demise, Studio creditors begin to circle. All of this activity rouses journalists to smell the blood, and they splash headlines which prove that there is such a thing as bad publicity.
A roller coaster ride ensues, as the loyal Maureen tries to manage the situation while the police investigate, as the Irregulars pontificate.
Anthony Boucher
It starts fast and then bogs down into an all-talky drawing room investigation that takes most of the air our of the proceedings.
GoodReads metadata is 435 pages, rated 3.74 by 8858 litizens.
Genre: period krimi.
Verdict: Trying too hard.
Ex-communicate Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548 – 1600) became a peripatetic scholar, staying a few steps ahead of the Inquisition through Italy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Belgium, Nederlands, France, and then England. His travels took him to Oxford in 1583 where he found Lincoln College to be a mares nest of intrigue and backstabbing. So little has changed I shouldn’t wonder. As an enemy of the Pope, he was a welcome visitor to Anglican England, however as a born Catholic he was suspect at the same time.
In seeking refuge in England in these pages, Bruno accepts a commission to work for, that is, spy for Sir Francis Walsingham to ferret out enemies of the realm – Queen Elizabeth I. There are plenty of likely candidates in Oxford. If Bruno will merely keep his eyes open he may discern intelligence of value to Sir Francis. The arrangement suits Bruno for it secures his patronage in England and puts coins in his purse, and all he has to do is observe. Well, he is a scientist at heart, and observing is what he does. All the better to be paid to do so.
That commitment is the thin end of the wedge, and soon enough he is mired in detailed descriptions of gory murder(s) and bloody sacrilege. He is driven by his Holmesian curiosity and lust for the Lincoln dean’s daughter to dig ever deeper into comings and goings. He thwarted every step of the way by one-dimensional characters who are conjured on the page only to harass him and he stumbles under the weight of pages and pages of descriptions of woodwork, chandeliers, stone walls, floor boards, and guttering candles – all to evoke the time and place, and to bore this reader to mechanical pages thumbing on the Kindle.
B
Bruno did not want the life of a visiting professor, but his efforts to secure a tenured appointment failed each place he went. He was, perhaps, just too controversial to make a fixture. Allowing him to lecture for a few months, while he used the local library, could be branded as a sign of open-mindedness and even toleration, but to sign him up was going too far beyond the pale of conventionality. For he said in his tactless way what he believed: that the Earth orbited the Sun, that the universe was boundless, that Deism did not require an established Church, that…. Well, that is enough to kindle the fires.
A practical skill that made Bruno welcome in some princely courts was memory. He developed mnemonics to stimulate and structure memory, and devised a set of shorthand symbols to teach them. But to Republicans of the day these very symbols conjured the devil, like Arabic numbers today, and made him a devil. Idiocracy is nothing new.
Before MI5 and MI6 began their turf war, there was Walsingham (1532-1590). Wikipedia has a surprisingly informative and dispassionate entry on him right now. Read it before it gets edited again to satisfy a troll’s ego.
S J Parris
This is the first title in a series featuring Bruno. Having started it ages ago, this time I finished it but only thanks to perseverance not pleasure. After compiling a massive amount of research on the time and place, the author crams every last iota of it on the page at the expense of pace, momentum, interest, movement, character, balance, or plot. To liven the dead pages up that result, there are punctuations of fights and flights likewise described in numbing detail which I find even more boring. The result is indigestion as in a fifty-course degustation menu.
Despite the overheated tripe on the Amazon web page I downloaded and read this title out of morbid interest in the setting at Oxford University during the religious war(s) in 1585. Because Bruno was such a fascinating character I might try the second volume in the hope that the writer has gained confidence and no longer needs to force-feed the reader pointless descriptions. But not just yet.
I have been reading my way through a krimi series by Michael Pearce. The touch is light, the locale exotic, and the treatment respectful and affectionate, as the Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police strives to keep order in an essentially disordered Cairo (and beyond) in the 1900s. This fearsome Head is the Mamur Zapt to give the job its Arabic name. He is one Gareth Owen, a Welsh captain in the British Army that occupied Egypt to secure repayment of loans, as the French once tried to do in Mexico and the Germans in Venezuela.
The legal fiction at the time was that Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire at the indulgence of the Sultan in distant Constantinople who appointed the local governor, the Khedive. This arrangement came about in the aftermath of the construction of the Suez Canal which had led to vast investments and speculation in Egypt with attendant boom, corruption, and bust, occasioning ever greater tax increases to repay loans. The Khedive liked the high life and had soon sold all the Suez Canal shares assigned to Egypt to pay for his pleasure. French and British financial interests in Egypt reduced the Ottoman Empire’s sway over the region and that suited the Khedive to get away from the Sultan’s taxing reach.
The high life was very expensive because it included hundreds of pashas and their extended families who also got on the gravy train; in 1882 the party ended. A British Army intervened and the Khedive agreed to an arrangement that made Egypt a protectorate of Great Britain but still nominally associated with the Ottoman Empire so it was not coloured British pink on maps. None of this was easy. There was at least one pitched battle in 1882 before the Khedive went to the table, where he and the pashas were guaranteed British support in return for inviting the British to stay and stay and stay over the protests from the Sultan. That the Ottoman Empire could not resist this arrangement was one sign of its own decline.
Pearce was born in Sudan, educated in Cairo, and obviously knows the lands and peoples well, and holds them in high esteem. Most of the violence occurs off stage and in some titles there is no violence at all, but a mystery of a theft or — in one — a strange reappearance. Some of the events occur in what was then called Egyptian Sudan, a vast area, larger than India and nearly as diverse though not densely populated.
In these pages Cairo is a living museum of humanity with its myriad of races, ethnicities, nationalities, hundreds of religions, thousands of sects, alongside remnants of ancient histories (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman), and the endless variety among the Arabs themselves. All are dominated and much is determined by the relentless Sun and the life-giving Nile. Then there are the interlopers — Russian, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Mingrelian, French, American, English, Montenegrin — who come to steal ancient artefacts or to build casinos or railroads for maximum profit and generally exploit the region.
The author is in no hurry to crowd in his encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt but includes some title by title. Nor he is in any rush to give Owen a long and tiresome back story. We learn more about Owen as each title unfolds as the sequence continues.
Michael Pearce. Chapeaux!
One of the nationalities that is growing in awareness among Cairenes is Egyptian Nationalism: Egypt for Egyptians, and all that, but as many characters note, it is no easy matter to say who is and who is not an Egyptian. The Greek Christian Copts entered Egypt long before the Muslim Arabs and have a claim to historical priority. The Sudanese in the south were native to the region since before time. Religious conflicts among Jews, Copts, and Muslims are common as are conflicts among sects within each of these religions. Ottoman intrigues to undermine the Brits are daily. And in some of the later titles, the women of the burka become restive. Tourists are also a factor for good when the spend money, and bad when they overstep the mark or are victims of crimes.
In this swirl Owen goes about his business, censoring the local press every night and frequenting coffee houses to keep in touch with the vast network of informants he inherited when appointed. The Khedive liked a Brit in the job so that he could distance himself from any acts of the Secret Police, while being sure the acts occurred to keep his regime stable. In same spirit of McKinsey management, the Brits can also disown the Mamur Zapt, if need be, as an agent of Khedive. Thus Owen could be stabbed in the back twice. However, sometimes two masters can be played off against each other.
Owen takes a softly, softly approach that at times irritates the offstage Khedive, but he is usually more interested in the harem than anything else. Most of the Brits accept softly softy but there is an Army in occupation and sometimes it takes all of Owen’s growing skill to keep the soldiers in the barracks and out of trouble. His job is to prevent problems more than solve them and once the soldiers appear to keep order, inevitably disorder follows. There is an iron law in that.
Owen has a shambling multi-lingual Greek as his number one legman, who has the uncanny ability to get people talking to him from market porters, to hotel maids, to slumming tourists. The office is run with Prussian efficiency by Nikos, a Copt, who worships the files and who is always there with the files. Owen has speculated that he sleeps in an empty drawer with the name Nikos on it, but since Nikos keeps everything, including his door, locked Owen has never been able to confirm this suspicion. Selim provides the muscle when that is needed.
Then there is Paul, the aide-de-camp of the Consul-General, who is in fact the military governor of the protectorate. Paul is a master of never saying ‘no’ when insuring that things do not happen and likewise of never saying ‘yes’ but insuring the right things do happen. He is the consummate master of committee meetings who agrees with everyone, never commits himself, and yet the outcome is always what he wants.
Owen also has a good friend in the Egyptian judiciary with whom he works ever more closely on cases. Mahmoud el Zaki, an Egyptian nationalist, who aspires to see a modern Egypt make its own way in the world free of British suzerainty, but who himself remains wedded to many of the old ways where women are concerned.
Owen has a mistress, an Egyptian named Zeinab, who is a force of nature in her own right. No burka and veil for her. She can be counted on the stimulate Owen in many ways. She has even bamboozled that master of spin Paul more than once.
Other characters include the operational commander of the uniformed police, a tall, pudgy, pink Scots named McPhee who was a school headmaster back in the Highlands, but who wanted a job in Egypt because he loves the cultural mélange in Cairo. If ever Owen needs to trace a fragment of a tile, McPhee may be able to tell him where it was made. Though to tell him, McPhee may first try to explain the place of tiles in Egyptian culture at great length. And don’t get him started on mosques about which he knows everything and more: Sheiks have been known to consult McPhee on such matters. Windbag though he is, McPhee is an excellent organiser, having learned from unruly Scots schoolboys, and he can be relied upon in the crunch to turn out the uniforms when necessary.
No one is a cartoon in these stories. Even some pretty unlikely and unlikeable characters finish as rounded individuals like the dissolute riding’, huntin’, and shootin’ Egyptian prince who at the eleventh hour saves Owen’s life. In an earlier title Owen was rescued from an assassination attempt by some smugglers thanks to a village watchman, who was in fact a twelve-year old girl.
A word of warning for those who start at the beginning. Each of the novels, no doubt at the insistence of the publisher, is stand-alone. The result is that basic information about the Egyptian legal system, Owen’s place in Egypt and his personal life, and the basics of the context are repeated in each novel. It is like those cooking shows where in each episode the chef says heat the wok first or boil the water first. Got it. By volume fifteen below readers are jaded by this repetition and I expect it dissuades some from continuing.
1.The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins Crime. 1988.
2.The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins Crime. 1989.
3.The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins. 1990.
4.The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Harper Fontana. 1991.
5.The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins. 1992.
6.The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins Crime. 1992.
7.The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins Crime. 1993.
GoodReads meta-data is 244 pages, rated 3.58 by 108
Genre: krimi
Verdict: verbose
When the eternal Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) underwent a transformation for a few short months that are now largely forgotten. From 1989 to October 1990 it remained an independent polity, and this period is stretched for this story. In this book there is sentiment for the DDR to remain independent and go from red to pink, that is to retain many of the benefits of the communist regime without the oppression, while avoiding the myriad evils of capitalism. The benefits include health care, childcare, pensions at fifty-five, convenient public transport, and so on, but not forced labor camps, re-education, endless surveillance, disappearance, murders at the Wall. Of industrial pollution and environmental degradation and the economic distortion nothing is said. Against this opinion is the desire for Unification which is made to seem in these pages a capitalist plot.
In this context Plod is roused from his crappy east Berlin office to go to West Silesia on the eastern border of the DDR with Poland way off his patch to look at a homicide. The order came straight from the Minister’s office, so off he goes. He finds there not only the local cops but others from neighbouring Saxony. Why all the interest he wonders, but not enough to ask anyone. He contributes nothing to the investigation. When he tries to report to the Minister, he is greeted with indifference. Investigation of the homicide was urgent and then unimportant in the space of a few hours. Plod finds that both irritating and suspicious, but his lassitude prevents him from making any backchannel inquiries, yet surely a veteran officer has backchannels.
There are interesting asides about some of the Eastern landen (provinces), like Western Silesia, in the DDR seeking their own separate deals with West Germany. There is also a reference to a referendum in the DDR to unification being defeated but I could find nothing about that. I guess that is part of the fiction. In the Wikipedia account, the only impediment to Unification was the reluctance of the Western Allies, mainly in the person of Margaret Thatcher, to a resurgent Germany.
Instead of investigating anything, Plod spends far too much time arguing with everyone he meets about the virtues of the DDR. His daughter, a British Army officer, a neighbour, they all get the benefit of his explanation of the good points of the corrupt and oppressive regime he served while grizzling about it. Plod seems to be the only one who does not realise the Unification is happening, and its completion is inevitable.
To be sure even now the DDR has its defenders who battle it out in the Wikipedia editing wars everyday. Look at the editing history at the bottom of each page. Oh hum. And that is in the English language version of Wikipedia. The German language version is even more hotly contested from my brief glance with edits coming one after another. There are plenty of films about life in the DDR, but for me the best is the muted, Barbara (2012) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File (1997) says it all.
First in a series. I chose it since we are ticketed to go to Berlin 2020. I could not find a photograph of the author but on Twitter he describes himself as the author of crime and hope punk, mostly tales of East Germany. ‘Hope punk?’ Don’t know.
