Category: Krimi

A Murder of No Consequence (1999) by James Garcia Woods

GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages rated 4.03 by 91 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: D&D  (Deep and Dark)

It is early July 1936 in Madrid and the stifling summer suffocates everything in Madrid. Early one morning Inspector Ruiz and Sergeant Felipé are called to investigate the corpse of a young woman found in a vast Retiro public park.  These are homicide dicks and this is a homicide.  The questions start here.  Who was she?  There is a purse with money in it, lacking the all important identify card.  She is dressed in a fine silk gown, and there is no sign of sexual assault.   So it is neither robbery nor rape gone wrong.  Her calloused hands do not fit with the dress. There is no disturbance of the ground from which absence they conclude the murder — strangulation — occurred elsewhere.  

It became a police procedural in the atmosphere of the fatal storm clouds gathering in Spain at the time.  Even as Ruiz and Felipé go through their routine procedures carloads of armed hoons peel around threatening each other. Shootings and murders at political rallies occur nearly everyday.  It is an NRA paradise.  Everyone has guns and everyone uses them.  

Ruiz follows three good rules: Start where you are.  Use what you’ve got.  Do what you can.  These two have a photograph of the girl and they have the expensive dress with a maker’s tag in it.  Off they go.  Their inquiries are baulked at every turn because this is a society in which the wealthy are above the law.  Anyone who sits on a gold-plated toilet answers to no one. Think of the Thief in Chief’s ideal world. This is it.  The girl was a maid in the household of a very wealthy and politically connected man.  No one in this household is much bothered by her murder, and certainly cannot spare even a few minutes to talk to the investigating officers about it.  It fits the time and place.  

As they try to find people who knew the girl, they question milkmen, greengrocers, doormen, and the like, and are warned off in no uncertain terms by Falange Blue Shirts.  In keeping with the Krimi Writer’s Manual, being warned off spurs their desire to persist. Another warning is delivered by the Guardia Civil.  Shutter!  

Regrettably, Ruiz (but fortunately not Felipé) has a life outside policing, and we get (far too much of) his backstory, and his side story punctuated by an American exchange student who throws herself at him within five minutes of nodding on the stairway.  What dean would let a student go on exchange to Aleppo today, because that was what Madrid was like in the summer of 1936? He also moons about his youth in the Army of Africa, and pals around with his now middle-aged school mates, who have to be one Socialist and one Royalist. so we can see the country dividing. It’s all contrived, but the pace, writing, and dialogue are pretty well judged so that it moves.  

It ends at the Montaña Barracks on 20 July 1936 when the shooting became general. 

Spoiler here.  That this naive village girl could be used as a courier travelling by train hither and yon over a roiling Spain to deliver letters is a stretch.  How would she manage the logistics?  Sure Don Carlos can buy the railroad tickets, but how would she find an address in Seville?  Take a taxi, she who has never seen one, and would know how to hail one or pay the driver.  And if she travelled to distant Badajoz would she stay overnight in a hotel until the trains resumed.  She whose bed was straw on a packed earthen floor until a few weeks before the story starts? 

To think about these practical details of travelling is to see how unlikely it is.  If Don Carlos was buying all those train tickets someone would have noticed, or if not, why all the indirection.  Then there are all the disruptions to railroads at the time by striking workers and union busters that would have frightened her to death.  It seems to me just as likely that she would take a little money and run.  It seems to me also that she would have been even less likely to realise what she had mistakenly been allowed to see.  

This title is the first in a series.  I could not find a picture of the author. It put me in mind of a far more subtle series set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War: Rebecca Pawel’s study of Guardia Civil Carlos Tejada, starting with The Law of the Return (2005).      

Deadly Lies (2017) by Chris Collett 

GoodReads meta-data is 348 pages, rated  4.2 by 2881 citizens

Gerne: krimi

Verdict: Procedural 

A journalist is found dead in his Spartan home in Birmingham, the second largest city in England these days. Local plod writes it down as suicide and prepares to leave, but by chance DI Mariner is nearby, attracted by the flashing lights of the panda car; he takes a closer look.  It is enough to make a citizen lose faith in Plods.  He finds obvious signs it is a murder and also a witness hiding under the stairs which the local plod had missed.  

The witness is of little use for though he is twenty-nine years old he is on the far end of the autism spectrum. That malady, its effects on families, its care and treatment, the cocktail of guilt and wishful thinking it triggers, the charlatans that comes out to feed on it, these are all central to the plot.  I found out more about autism than I liked, truth to tell, but it did develop the plot, including the description of the home as spare, sparse, and Spartan.   

The deceased was the sole-carer of this autistic man, his brother, and had devoted most of life in recent years to that.  Now that he is dead, their reluctant sister has to prise herself away from her high-powered job to take over.  One day she is soaring with corporate eagles, and next day cleaning up the living room after this unhouse trained man-child brother has….   While she has been well paid, and her brother left a sizeable estate, the cost of residential professional care for the autistic brother is cosmic, far beyond ‘well paid’ and ‘sizeable,’  more in the income range of an Oil Sheik, a Latin American dictator, or the President in Thief. In any event the deceased estate will be tied up for at least a year, and she will not be well paid if she has to care for the brother full-time. The problem for her is N-O-W.  One place she turns for help is the kindly old family doctor.  

Meanwhile, Mariner noses around. He is especially motivated to stick his oar in the water because by sheerest chance (maybe a little bit too sheer for some readers, like this one) he realised he had seen the deceased outside a pub earlier that very evening as the victim was getting into a distinctive, if old, Stuttgartmobile.   

Thereafter the herrings are diverse and red.  Mariner’s fallibility is nicely handled as he goes from dead ends to false trails and back. The moral growth of the sister as she copes with her unwanted brother, and in so doing begins to see the world in a different light is credible.  

According to the formula the least likely person is the villain and that applies here with a deus ex machina revelation, although it leaves many, many loose ends. We may infer that low bid contractors for the Bleachers did it and they remain untouched, yet they killed four people on someone’s orders. What were those symbols that were mentioned several times early and then dropped?  Did I flick a page too fast and miss the point?  Perhaps later titles in the series dot a few of these i’s, and I might find out. 

There is much to’ing and fro’ing in Birmingham, including Bournville which we visited on the utopia trail in 2004, and many of the city’s canals.  When planning a trip occasionally I consult Trip Fiction for novels set in the destination, click on https://www.tripfiction.com. Anticipating a trip to Birmingham late in 2020 I went looking and found this title.  

[Trumptets bare.] The 2019 Jackson award for the Best New Series of Krimis read in 2019 goes to …. Mamur Zapt (1988+) by Michael Pearce.

Political and police machinations in Cairo prior to 1914. It is a lost world brought to life.

The Empty Mirror (2008) by J. Sydney Jones.

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.4/5.0 by 351 by litizens.

Genre: krimi, period.

Verdict:  serious and intense.

Vienna: In 1888 Gustav Klimt is arrested on suspicion of murder when one of his models is found dead!  Klimt is an uncouth giant from whose hand comes those ethereal paintings.  That was a striking contrast.

His friend and commercial lawyer Karl Werthen promises to help him.  To Klimt it is all some kind of joke and he treats his incarceration as a research trip.  But the murder was the fourth in a series and the Pox News clamour to scapegoat Hillary is loud, though an advisor to the police minister tells Werthen that Klimt is not the guilty one but public opinion demands a scapegoat, and well…..Hillary is not available so it might just have to be the big guy.     

Werthen is ill equipped to investigate a murder but his old friend from Graz (been there) Dr. Hans Gross is an accomplished criminologist, as he says repeatedly.  Gross is passing through the capital of the Empire en route to the University in Bukovina to take up the Chair of Pompous Pontificating in that remote corner of the Austrian Empire. To extend his stay in Vienna Gross is ready to lend a hand.

While Werthen is strait-laced, upright, and uptight, Gross is ready to get down and dirty, crawling around the crime scene with a magnifying glass or probing a corpse in the mortuary.   Werthen finds all that distressing, disturbing, and distasteful, but Gross’s effort does turn up clues missed by the plodders.  

Gross concludes that the murders have been calculated to implicate Jews.  About halfway through (per the Kindle measure) someone observes Gross and Werthen. Ominous. Is this the perpetrator watching those who seek him. His perspective recurs now and again thereafter.  

The conceit is that Gross has written several textbooks on criminal investigation which have been read by Arthur Conan Doyle who then used the techniques therein revealed to create Sherlock Holmes.  Gross assumes everything stems from sex and cites Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to that effect. To avoid censure Krafft-Ebing wrote his book in Latin – Psychopathia Sexualis.  (We passed Krafft-Ebing’s mansion a few week ago when traversing Vienna.) They seek out a young Sigmund Freud for advice but he is out of town for the moment.  

The malevolent observer arranges for a red herring, and muses on his duties.  Gulp!  

Then the story seems to end half way through and there is a romantic interlude in which Werthen gets married to live happily ever after.  As if!

Then the krimi resumes.  Odd construction.  What would Aristotle make of this disunity? Same as me.  Annoying is what I made of it.  One character mentioned the sewers (shades of The Third Man) in passing and leaves it at that.  The mention alerted this reader but nothing came of it.  False alarm.  

The story starts again, and includes a stay to the Lower Belvedere which we visited in September 2019.  The plot goes around and around and includes the much exploited events at Mayerling and even Sissi with a head of hair to make Farrah Fawcett cringe.  In the end our heroes prevail, but only just. 

There are many nice touches.  Foremost is the study in corruption of the prince who masterminded the whole thing in the name of saving the Austrian Empire, chiefly from those Magyars.  Franz Ferdinand is also a nice portrait of nobody’s fool.  Then there is the Emperor whose sole concession to modernity is to make himself available to receive petitions from citizens twice a week for an hour.  Otherwise, Austria in 1898-1899 as portrayed in this novel clings to the past.  Motor cars are discouraged.  Electricity, despite the role of one of its citizens —  Nicoli Tesla — in it development, is not used by the government for illumination. All the sixty Austrian generals based in Vienna are seventy or more years old. The body politic was a gerontocracy with sclerosis, lacking a mirror of self-knowledge.  

Jones has a compère in fin de siecle Wien and that is Frank Tallis whose books include Vienna Blood, Death in Vienna, Vienna Woods, and Fatal Lies discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Having just spent a week in Vienna I recalled many of the streets and byways that figure in this book.

An Author Bites the Dust (1948) by Arthur Upfield

Genre: krimi

GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.93/5.00 by 228 litizens.

Verdict: Parody plus

In the Yarra River valley the self-appointed, self-satisfied gatekeepers of Australian literature gather at the home of Mervyn and Janet Blake, having removed themselves from Melbourne to concentrate on their labours refined and many.  He has published several novels but recently has concentrated on devastating critiques of the works of others, while she publishes short stories. They are much celebrated in the tiny world of the antipodean literati, almost as much as they celebrate themselves – legends in their own minds.  

There are frequent gatherings of their acolytes at this quaint country retreat.  Among the number are Martinus Lubers, Arvin Wilcannia-Smythe, Twyford Arundal, and others.  As fine a pencil-necked crew of four-eyed paper-shufflers as Upfield could imagine.  Of course these aristos do not mix with local hoi polli, but are much observed by the locals, including Mr Pickwick, a neighbouring cat.

This smug world shatters when Mervyn is found dead one morning in his study.  There is no discernible cause of death.  Inspector Cardboard from Melbourne Criminal Investigation Bureau arrives to muddy the waters and does so energetically, concluding there is no crime to investigate. He congratulates himself on his perspicacity and returns to Melbourne.    

Still suspicions remain because there is no discernible cause of death and Bony is summoned from far Queensland, being the only sensible detective in the wide brown land, and he is seconded to the case.  He sets about learning the ways and wherefores of the village and its villagers.  

It has all the Upfield features:

A careful and respectful description of the locale and locals.

A stalwart local plod stymied by the aforementioned Inspector Cardboard.

Grizzling about government while relying on it. 

Bony reading footprints on cement sidewalks, well, almost.

His many annoying habits, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking many cups of tea with exaggerated courtesy.

A school of red herrings among the cast.  

A crime within a crime to roil the depths.

An off-stage persona who was there all the time.

A beautiful woman to admire Bony.

Published in 1948 and set immediately after World War II there are may references to shortages of goods except for tea, which occasions the ritualistic grizzles about the GOVERNMENT, but nary a mention of the war itself, still less of its toll on the village – yet local men must have been in the army in Singapore, New Guinea, or Egypt.  

Most of all it offers a window on haute literature versus commercial fiction as the acolytes circle each other.  Bony finds a cicerone to this new world in a commercial author, one Clarence Bagshott (aka Arthur Upfield) who explains to him that writers may be either storytellers or wordsmiths or both.  (It takes pages and pages to make this simple point, I am afraid.) The best writers are both.  A story teller may be a good writer but not always, though a wordsmith with nothing to say does not make the cut. 

Commercial fiction places a premium on storytelling because that is what buyers want to read.* (Amen, to that Brother Arthur!)  Litterateurs write only words.  [Snort!]  They turn inward and haughtily disdain commercial fiction as beneath their rarefied vocabulary.  Does this explain Dan Brown’s success?  

Upfield must have had a lot of fun characterising these wordsmiths from their frilly clothes, poncy hairstyles, sneering lips, pinched features, skimpy moustaches, watery eyes, reedy voices, skinny arms, and ridiculous names.  There is not a manly man among them, to be sure, and the ladies fair little better but he spends fewer words deprecating them.  

By convulsions many, the plot involves a commercial writer, I. R. Watts, whom Bony tracks down.  Watts is pseudonym and neither the publisher nor Australia Post is very cooperative in penetrating the disguise. However, Bony has his ways, he asked the Tax Office which happily reveals all. Yep.  Damn GOVERNMENT!

Spoiler ahead.

Here is where it gets complicated and interesting.  Yes, of course, this storyteller of commercial fiction is the pseudonym of one of the very same literary snobs, but which one and why?

Turns out Janet Blake is I. R. Watts, whose commercial success might rival that of Upfield himself.  She is a story teller par excellence.  Having read one of the Watts books while on the trail, Bony attests to that with the assurance and confidence of a man who has read little.  Here is where the flour is stirred in to thicken the plot, for she has long kept this secret pseudonym from her husband Mervyn Blake who is so self-centred he did not notice either her industry nor the income that resulted from it.  I can believe that when I reflect on some of the cases of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) with whom I have worked. This disorder is a pattern of self-centred, arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. [Fill in the blank for the names of those near by. Continue on a separate page.]

Her earnings as I. R. Watts maintained their lives while he scorned all others in his literary criticism.  The commercially successful novels of Watts would have been beneath his contempt.  His own career as a novelist has ended and in truth it never quite started it seems, since his early novels were rejected by British and even, shock, Australian publishers until Janet Blake made suggestions, changes, and so on, and when they were then emended and published she allowed him full credit.  Rather than embracing that productive partnership, Mervyn (because of his narcissism) rejected her further contributions, and though he wrote many other novels, none were published. Into that lacunae grew his bile and his criticism of others. Sounds like a good case for tenure. 

In short, she did him in, though quite why I never did get, apart from the fact that he was an insufferable dolt, but then look around, no shortage of those, and few of them are murdered. The how is made of hardened air inside pingpong balls.  

Thanks to the scavenging of Mr Pickwick, Bony works it all out and arrives at the herring de jour.  

You say ‘Boney’ and I say ‘Bony,’ because Upfield wrote it as ‘Bony.’  When some of the stories were filmed for television it the 1970s the name was changed to ‘Boney’ for reasons only known to those who made the change. That in turn has influenced some of the re-issues of the books.  The stupid lead the blind as usual. That television series is discussed in connection with comments on another Upfield title to be found elsewhere on this blog. 

Upfield published at least thirty-seven Bony titles; he addition he published two dozen short stories, and a great deal of non-fiction in newspaper articles about the outback, aboriginals, and life in the scrub. He served in the Australian Army in World War I and upon return to Australia lived as a jackaroo for years. He was an active member of the Australian Geographical Society and participated in many of its expeditions.

* To Bagshott’s literary dichotomy I would add a third category today: Prize fiction. The books that are entered for literary prizes today are not written for readers of either stories or words.  They are written to arrest the attention of the overwhelmed and jaded hacks who serve as jurors on selection panels for literary prizes who must pick winners out of the hundreds of titles submitted. The weird, the strange, the incomprehensible, the attenuated, the dead boring, the unreliable narrators, the omission of punctuation, these are all devices to make a book standout of a pile of ninety volumes on the desk.  I have spoken! Did I say ninety, one such hack has since told me that he had one hundred-and-fifty the last time he did one of these duties.

Café Europa (2015) by Ed Ifkovic.

GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages, rated  3.68/5.00 by 28 litizens.

Genre: period krimi

Verdict: Nifty.  

Edna Ferber (1885-1958) and firebrand, fictional suffragette Winifred Moss are travelling in Budapest in 1914.  The trip is R and R for Suffragette after a gruelling period of arrest and torture in London, while Edna is escaping her cloying mother, ensconced in Berlin. From Kalamazoo, Ferber’s parents were Jewish, one Hungarian and one German, thus she travels with the languages for Mitteleuropa.  

With its hotel upstairs featuring English plumbing the threadbare but comfortable Café Europa is favoured by English-speaking travellers.  It is likewise convenient to the sights and sites of Buda (though few figure in this story apart from the Chain Bridge and the Castle).   

In act one The Travellers observe the betrothal of a young American heiress to a sclerotic Austrian count.  She previously had been courted by a dashing Hungarian, a scion of a porcelain fortune, but her parents arranged a marriage to the count, who is supremely indifferent to the whole matter, but his mother is the match-maker on that side.  The American parents want the marriage to get the lustre of aristocracy, while the mother wants the gelt. The girl does not seem to mind but acts like the spoiled child she is. It is all very Edith Wharton [without her subtlety], until…..  

The bratty heiress is murdered in the garden at midnight!  Who dun it?  

Act two opens with the local plod Hovarth investigating only to be pushed aside by a bumptious, idiot from Vienna who must arrest someone to satisfy aristocratic pressure.  Neither the parents nor the match-making mother seem to care about the dead girl, but both parties are embarrassed by her murder.  Talk about blame the victim.  

Act three sees the murder of another American tourist:  Buzzing around from the beginning is an annoying Hearst journalist named Harold.  He goes here and there stirring and sewing sensationalism, malice, and half-truths. Think Pox News with energy and there it is. Harold differs from Pox journalism in having a certain puppy charm. Then Harold is shot dead in the street.  

Act four:  Meanwhile, Edna and Suffragette fall in with some local artists, reluctantly.   

After much to’ing and fro’ing the cast gathers, ostensibly, in a wake, but we know the denouement is coming at 90% on the Kindle. We know this because, deus ex machina, while falling sleep the night before Edna and says to herself and the inevitable portrait of Emperor Franz Jozef on the wall in her hotel room:  ‘That’s it!’   

Act five offers an explanation of sorts:  It turns out the murder….. Whoops, Spoiler ahead, take warning!  Everything is political. Brat’s father is not only rich, stupid, and vain, he is also the owner of Colt Firearms and a matrimonial union with the Austrian Empire would feed the weapons to its army. Yes, it is a long bow, but there you have it.  The best way to scuttle the union is to murder her.  Sure makes sense.  But then, maybe that sort of thing does to some tiny minds.  

Harold of Hearst had begun to figure it out, and so he also had to go.  Bang!  

Spoiler. In keeping with the great tradition of krimis the murderer is the least likely, the seemingly gawky busboy, who is in fact a thespian terrorist.  Another long bow.  

The hindsight is thick throughout, everyone knows war is coming, quite how they could be so sure is left to one’s imagination when so many others, including many of the decision-makers, were taken by surprise. It was made fact by repetition. There had many conflicts in the Balkans already and another was perhaps inevitable, but the prescience in these pages anticipates the Great War not another armed border dispute.

The multiple-sclerosis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is well done.  Everywhere is the picture of Franz Jozef, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other constituent polities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once President of the German Confederation, yet the regime is comatose. He leads his peoples in clinging to the past.  He will not promote to general a soldier less than seventy years old, only if all eight grandparents were themselves nobility may one enter the court circle at the Hofburg, telephones are forbidden in imperial buildings, he has never ridden in an automobile, though aged he ascends six flights of stairs each night to his army cot rather than have a new-fangled elevator installed. Electricity is banned from official buildings. He favours only those who do the same.  

Yet in Paris, in London, in Berlin modernity is bursting out in all forms, electricity, automobiles, telephones, jazz, dance, short skirts, women smoking – none of these practices are permitted in the K and K (for King and Emperor) lands.  French, English, and German armies are promoting young officers with technical educations and embracing new weapons and tactics, while in K and K the cavalry sabre remains the ultimate weapon.

The descriptions of the modern art as a revolution itself, destroying the old order, are very well done and quite arresting.  Even the Hearst hack is conscious of something in the art he sees, though he cannot articulate it and it does not delay him long from the spoor of cheap sensationalism.  

While thinking Edna and Suffragette drink Bulls Blood wine.  During our recent visit to Budapest, I asked about this very wine, recalling its role in completing the PhD dissertation long ago.  The vintner said it was an export label first applied to vast quantities of red wine Hungary traded to the Soviet Union in return for oil in the 1960s.  It would seem that the Soviets then bottled it and traded it to Canada for wheat.  In turn I traded it for words at the typewriter. Yes, I know, there are extensive entries for it on the web but if read closely, they do not contradict the essence of the intel above.  

Edna Ferber had a long and distinguished career as a writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist.  This is the sixth in a series featuring her.  

———

Dark Winter (2002) by William Dietrich

Good Reads mea-data is 480 pages, rated 3.46/5.00 by 197 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Brrr!

The set up:  Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station where all directions are north. This is the most extreme version of the Castle at Otranto yet.  

For four months of the year this base is accessible by air.  For the remaining eight months it is sealed off by the weather which at times also precludes all radio and electronic communication. During this winter, overland travel is suicide, and where would one go?  The nearest habitat is the Russian Vostock Station 800 long kilometres away, well beyond the range of the ground vehicles in good weather.  In the winter, in the open nothing works very well.  The metal of machines is so brittle it snaps.  GPS devices burst if taken in hand to look at them. Cabin heaters cannot match the -99 Fahrenheit temperatures with a wind of two hundred miles an hour.   

Add to all that the drying air and the two mile elevation that produces altitude sickness and dehydration without exertion. Though they sit on enough ice-locked water to double the fresh water on earth, they are always thirsty and there is never enough water to drink. To melt the ice takes a lot of avgas and that is husbanded because it powers the generators that keep them alive.  Did Virgil take Dante on a tour of this locale for the Inferno?  

Over winter a party of forty scientists and technicians remain to continue research and recording conditions until the warmer weather returns. Into this mix two new comers arrive on the last flight before close-down: Protagonist and Dr Bob.  Pro is hangdog from the start, there in desperation it seems.  The money is not great but since none is spent in the eight months, it accumulates.  Truth to tell I was never quite sure why he was there.  On the other hand Dr Bob exudes the confidence of a dean, unable to distinguish sociology from psychology. Yep, the two are used interchangeably in the book.  Shudder.

No sooner do they and the bad weather arrive than the plot thickens.  Bossman has a secret for Pro, a meteor found at the bottom of one of the core sample pits.  By prose convulsion we are given to understand this rock might be ejecta from Moon or even Mars.  (New Jersey was ruled out as the rock is too clean.) If it is, it has enormous scientific and commercial value.  Ssssh.  

In this small town there are no secrets, and though Bossman pledges Pro to secrecy, he finds soon enough that everyone from the cook to the femmes knows the secret already.  Bossman is the only one who does not know that the the secret is not secret. That does not matter much since he is the first kill, down the bottom of one such pit.  Accident? Suicide? or Murder?  Well, we all know the answer to that.  More little Indians follow.

As the body count increases the survivors desperately want the deaths to be unassociated accidents or even suicides, anything to blame the victims.  If that is so, then they do not feel threatened.  But this ante is soon upped.  They are all threatened.  What the meteor has to do with all this is lost in the shuffle as far as this reader could tell, though it reappears near the end. 

The characterisations of eight or so principals is well done.  They differ from one another.  Sounds simple but it is not.  In too many of the escapist novels I sample all the characters, after their clothing is laborious described, sound alike, us the same speech patterns and vocabulary.  

The atmosphere in the Otranto Station is superbly realised.  The descriptions of the weather are integrated into the story and make fascinating reading.  

That the South Pole is the end of the world is clear, but it is also the beginning of outer space and much of the work done at it underwrites space exploration research.  In the middle of vast Antarctic continent there is nothing but the weather.  Penguins are a thousand miles away on the coasts where the weather is better.  There is nothing there and no reason to be there, except that it is there.   

Having visited the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, where this story starts, and the Antarctic displays at the Maritime Museum in Hobart, I find all of this fascinating.  It is the dark side of the Moon at the South Pole.  

Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (2001) by Michael Pearce 

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.58/5.00 by 200 litizens. 

Genre: krimi, period

Verdict: Intriguing

Cairo, 1906 (or so).  The Brits have run the sand show for thirty years on the pretext of safeguarding the Suez Canal. The Kheve likes having the Brits to blame everything on and to use against the many enemies of his rule. Cairo is polyglot: Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, Nubians, Copts, and others jostle along.  The Greek Coptic Christians offer essential services as the educated professional class but are despised by many Moslems as infidels.  These Copts by the way are the attenuated descendants of the Ptolemaic Macedonians from the time of Alexander the Great.  

The fiction at the time was that Egypt was a province of the Ottoman Empire with the Kheve as the governor delegating for the Sultan in Constantinople. Fiction.  

Our hero is the Mamur Zapt.  Huh?  That is a position. The incumbent is a Welsh captain whose name I have briefly forgotten.  He makes too much of being somehow an outsider for being Welsh.  

Why that position and most of the others are given Arabic names by the author is anyone’s guess.  It is certainly distracting and confusing, so if that is the purpose, then it works.  But to get back to MZ, that is, the political intelligence officer.  While the Egyptian police look after the camel traffic, and the local Prosecutor deals with crime against persons and property, the MZ takes care of political liaison. The main political issue is Egyptian nationalism of one kind or another.

A hapless sap takes a shot at a local politico and the Prosecutor and the MZ join forces to figure it out.  Clearly the shooter was a pawn, so who moved him, and why?  They go hither and thither in colourful Cairo and gradually learn to trust each other as they piece together the intel.  It a nice travelogue.  

Eventually they figure it out and the MZ finds a way to use the knowledge as a prism to split the nationalists into another set of factions, more interested in undermining each other than the British.  Kind of like the US Democratic Party, more interested in purity than winning.    

The carpet does not fly but rather is a ceremonial festival.  That was a let down. 

It is a police procedural set in exotic Cairo.  One of the strong points is the interrogations.  These are very well done. Continued questioning, urging the interlocutor to be precise and to describe everything is very effective in bringing out details.  Also I rather liked the MZ’s deft hand in meting out kinds of justice to the several offenders, particularly including sending the sneering Turkish counsel back to the Sultana’s embrace.  Although packing one youthful idealist off to study law at Sorbonne did seem excessive punishment for his crime: the hard, kindergarten-size benches, begrimed, and draughty rooms, the boring drone from the front of the room, the BO of other students. Ugh! 

Enjoyed the setting and have already started and finished the second in the series which has many titles. 

Michael Pearce has another series, too: see A Deadman in Trieste discussed elsewhere on this blog. To this reader the Cairo titles in hand are more assured than the Trieste one. 

Marriage Can Be Murder (2014) by Emma Jameson

GoodReads meta-data is pages, rated 4.04 by 2028 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict:  Slow and sure. 

It is October 1939 and the war is on. Handsome young London doctor Ben Bones has been assigned to Midsomer in anticipation of casualties from bombing nearby Plymouth.  Off he goes with his gorgeous wife Penny who is angry about this move, and blames him for it.  It seems she grew up in these environs and has no wish to return.  Having escaped Midsomer alive, who would want to return?  No one. Indeed she blames him for almost everything including the war and they are talking about separation and divorce through gritted teeth, when they speak, which is seldom.  

As these Bickersons arrive at the village of Midsomer Birdswing darkness has fallen and the blackout combine to make it inky. Mindful, too, of petrol rationing they park the car and walk to find their accommodation.   

Wham!  

‘Wham’ is all Dr BB remembers when he regains consciousness again.  A truck ran them down and disappeared into the gloaming. Exeunt stage right feet first bad Penny very dead. BB has two broken legs and assorted bruises. One break is compound and he is at a low ebb, bunking upstairs at a pub. There were no witnesses and his memory is little. 

Penny, so conspicuous at the start, disappears.  How and where she is buried passes in silence.  If she had surviving family, this reader missed it.  Yet her history at Birdswing influences much of what follows.   

The more so when BB begins to suspect (thanks to anonymous note – where would writers be without anonymous notes?) the rundown was murder, not accident. This suspicion is far beyond the imagination of the local part-time plod who is officious, pompous, and incompetent.  (Definitely professorial material.)  

As BB slowly recovers he is integrated into the village, its ways, its gossip, its history, its hostility to Penny, its local gentry, and its characters.  He is swept up by the uncompromising amazon Lady Juliet who brooks no excuses and drives him to doctoring, first in a wheel chair, and then on crutches.  His London training and quick thinking saves a school girl from a deadly spider bite and puts him in good with the locals.  

The horsey Lady Juliet and the crippled Doctor Bones begin to investigate the death of Bad Penny, though with no great vigour.  Bones is distracted by the wiles of the school teacher who flatters no end.  However his attention is brought back to the death … by an apparition.  

This title is the first in a series and I will certainly read more.  Lady Juliet’s inner doubts combined with her bold as brass exterior is most engaging, while Dr Bones grits his teeth exercising his mending bones.  

There are some nits that need picking.  Did a 1939 English village (Pop. 200) have a traffic light?  This one does. For details about village life I thought of Margery Allingham’s Oaken Heart (1941), discussed elsewhere on this blog.  Get clicking.   

Was John Wayne a cultural token in rural England by October 1939, considering that his first major role in Stagecoach premiered in Los Angeles in March of that year, and screened in a few theatre in London in June 1939?   He is cited as such in these pages, but it strikes a dissonant cord with this reader.  

Fred Vargas, This Poison Will Remain (2017).

GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.04 by 2318 litizens.  

Genre: krimi

Verdict:  [Sigh]

The fog that is Chief Inspector Jean-Basptiste Adamsberg returns.  This time in pursuit of shy spiders.  José Garcia brought Adamsberg to life in a film years ago, and I still picture Garcia when I read these titles.   

A number of elderly men die from the bite of the so-called reclusive spider.  Oh hum.  Yet Adamsberg cannot stop thinking about it.  An  arachnidologist he consults assures him the bite of this spider is not fatal, yet there are the three deaths associated with bites from just such spiders. Others are content to conclude that their age led to death triggered by the spider bite. Now if Adamsberg had reacted against this ageism we might have had an interesting story, because throughout the ages of the victims is used to dampen, dismiss, or deter interest in the case(s), but no Adamsberg just has one of his ineffable hunches. Tant pis.

Of course, if his boss had been versed in McKinsey management KPIs Adamsberg would never have been permitted to pursue this obvious dead-end.  ‘Stick to the cases that can be cleared to make us look good,’ that would have been the direction.  

There is much to’ing and fro’ing here and there, and — as usual —there are ructions in the squad. Situation normal.  There are the Cartesian positivists who follow Adrien Danglard, the nominal number two in the unit versus the metaphysicians who follow Adamsberg. The computer nerd Froissy is there, along with the Amazon Violette Retancourt, sleepy Mordent, Mercadet, Voisenet, Noël with the short fuse, and Veyrenc with the strange head of hair, Estalère who worships Adamsberg, Justin who does not, Kernorkian, and Lamarre.  Let’s not forget Snowball on top of the photocopier.   

While I have enjoyed previous titles in this series I cannot be enthusiastic about this entry, which seems padded with pointless and repetitive dialogue and more repetitive and pointless dialogue while very little happens.  The evocation of place which was a highlight in earlier entries is absent here.  Nîmes is just a five-letter word here, not a place. Nor are there any surprising characters like the stableman or the sailor who figured in earlier novels.  Still less do the victims have any character.  Again unlike some earlier entries when the character of the victim was crucial. 

That the villain could fire that weapon with such deadly accuracy in all the circumstances is an assumption too far for even this indulgent reader.