Category: Krimi

Genre: Krimi
GoodReads meta-data is 334 pages rated 3.9/5 by 539 litizens.
Verdict: Compelling.

January 1947, Hamburg Germany is city in ruins and a city of paradox. It is depopulated and overpopulated. Depopulated by the war, by the bombing, by the deprivations….tens of thousands died, many who could left. Overpopulated by Displaced Persons – millions of them roaming Europe at the time, camp internees, returning German POWs, German refugees from the East, Russian deserters, and more.

Because it was a major seaport on a major transport waterway, the Elbe, because most of the U-boats were built there, because it lay within range of the RAF, Hamburg was subjected to constant air attack for five plus years. From July 1943 the air raids were obliteration bombing aimed at the industrial and attendant working class areas of Hamburg. Because precision bombing was then, as now, largely a fiction for popular consumption, the bombs fell where they may.
What became the British Army of the Rhine occupies Hamburg and environs with an experienced colonial hand.
Then came the hard winter in which the story is set. Both the roads and railroads were badly damaged by bombing, and now the weather has rendered them useless. The trains cannot run. The roads are impassable. The Baltic winds drive the -25C temperature into the bone. It has been much too cold to snow for weeks. In this weather the Brits mostly stay indoors, near the heat. They have plenty of everything, and stealing from them is crucial to the blackmarket.

Much of the population is homeless, living in basement ruins, lean-tos, or cobbled together Nissan huts surplused by the Brits. Most are dressed in the rags, clothes they have had on since 1944. Most wear all their clothes at once for warmth, but also to keep others from stealing them.
In the last years every tree has been cut for fire wood. Coal is unknown. Medicine is beyond price. With the closure of transport for weeks, neither wood nor coal can be trucked in. Food is vanishing. Everyday people die in the street of starvation, malnutrition, exposure, disease and simply freeze to death.
Death in the streets. Starvation, malnutrition, and disease.
The Third Man would find this all familiar territory.
DeNazification has gone full tilt. Expelling Naziis from the police, courts, law, hospitals and so on. Necessary but disruptive to the workings of the city. Expatriate Germans who got out are returning to this new world, but many are out of depth in this situation. False identity papers are a thriving black market. Since few paper records have survived the firestorms of the bombings, claiming identity is common.
Could things be any worse? This nightmare world is far more disturbing and disjointed than any dystopia conjured in the Sy Fy films treated on this blog. This environ and the city of Hamburg itself is the major actor in the novel.
Then it gets worse when a murder victim is found, naked and frozen into the surface in a bombed ruin. Then another, and another. Can it get any worse? Yes. The first victim was a young woman. The second an elderly man. The third a child. The fourth, an older woman. Each garrotted, a method much favoured by Naziis as degrading and economical.
Inspector Frank Stave with a stiff leg that kept him out of the Wehrmacht and much baggage is landed with the investigation, aided by a British liaison officer, and a new vice detective. His loyal office assistant does what she can. There are wheels within wheels in this circle.
The strength of the book is the context. The ice freezing on the windows of unheated bedrooms. The flapping of roof tiles in the Arctic gusts. The odors which penetrate even the sub-zero temperatures. The desolation of the streets. The exhaustion of the people. The flow of humanity in the Displaced Persons of every nation, race, and creed. Everyone is suspicious and fearful of everyone else pace Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature. The desperate efforts of Jews to get to Palestine. Ominous rumbling about what the malevolent god in the Kremlin might do next.
The author is no apologist for the Reich.
Cay Rademacher
The Hunger Winter of 1946-1947 was bad all over Northern Europe, made worse by the destruction visited by the Naziis in Norway, Denmark, Poland, Netherlands, and France. As Stave muses, we brought this on ourselves and now we have to endure it.
On the terrible conditions in Germany read Stig Dagerman’s ‘The German Autumn’ (1947), though when I read this years ago while travelling in Sweden I found it to be an apology for the Reich.

Back to the book in hand, in contrast to the environment, the characterisations are not particularly compelling, and as is usual there is far too much sympathy-jerking backstory for Stave. This volume is the first of a series and I will certainly try another.
I quibbled about some of the terminology. Those who informed on others were styled by several characters as ‘grasses’ a British term of the 1960s. Would a German have used that expression in 1947. There were other instances of the same sort that distracted this reader.

Goodreads meta-data is 200 pages, over-rated 3.74 by 226 litizens.
Genre: krimi, police procedural.

Verdict: a curiosity of the place and time. A forced march to finish it.
Set in the Swiss alps in the early 1930s when radio was a novelty. A local is found dead. Was it suicide or murder? Everyone speaks Schweizerdeutsch in which ‘Chabis’ is an oath.

Not to be confused with Chablis.
Into this isolated mountain top community comes Detective Sergeant Studer from the distant Canton to find out which is which. He takes up residence and observes the locals. The bar owner. The nursery man and his staff. The family of the deceased. Creditors. Trees. Swains. Rivals. That is something like the Maigret approach but the hands of this cuckoo clock are heavier by far. As far as this reader can report no thumbprint figures in the story.
Masochists can find out more than they should know by reading the thirty reviews on GoodReads.
Friedrich Glauser (1896-1938) was diagnosed schizophrenic, addicted to morphine, dabbled with heroin, and was intoxicated when he could not get drugs. He spent most of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums, and prisons. That experience makes him well qualified, ahem, as well qualified, as most journalists, to comment on the human condition.
There are two or three other titles with Studer. They are unlikely to be disturbed by this reader.

GoodReads meta-data is 267 pages, rated by 3.87 by 1375 litizens.
Genre: thriller

Verdict: Unusual in the telling.
It is deep in the heart of the Cold War of 1959 and the Russkies have their eyes on East Africa. Spy and counter-spy vie to manipulate the natives. It centers around a group from a UN agency housed in Geneva which includes a Yankee doodle, a Polack, a Magyar, a Sudanese princeling, a MI6er, and others who embark on a drive from Geneva to Khartoum. Sure.

While the journey is as fantastic as anything Jules Verne conjured, the characterisations are nicely done. No one is quite whom they seem to be, and yet perhaps they are. Even at the end, it is not at all clear to this reader whether Miernik was a villain, though he certainly was a victim.
What is unusual is in the telling. It reads like a dossier that collects and combines testimony, written reports by observers, diary entries from protagonists, archival material about them, analysis by Langley desk jockeys, wiretap transcriptions, post hoc interviews, radio intercepts, case officer cables, opened mail, entries from the CIA Fact Book, field briefings, and such. While there is a master narrative with an arc, it is by no means told as a story. Though in its own way it is, and the story unfolds in these several different registers. The ending is open, but not empty.
Charles McCarry
This is the first title in a long series featuring Yankee Doodle, namely Paul Christopher. Alan Furst ranks it highly and that persuaded me to give it a try. Not sure, but inclined to try another.

Goodreads meta-data is 4.2/5 by 2745 litizens.
Genre: Thriller diller.
Verdict: The study in organisational pathologies continues.

We used to teach something call Org Theory which bore little relation to Org Practice. This book does. Anyone who works in a large organisation will recognise the pathologies exhibited by many of the characters.
The set-up? Two of the Slough House crew are seconded by James Webb, known as Spider, to provide purely nominal security for a visiting Russian tycoon. Why two slow horses for the job, oh, because there is flap on at the Park. Something about office furniture. As always there is never any paperwork to justify the assignment. No paper trail for the FOI rats to find.
Why did I find it credible that a mighty organisation like the Secret Squirrels of MI5 might grind to a halt while an argument with accountants about office furniture takes precedence. Goal displacement comes in many forms. Of course, the furniture is only a means. The end is for two ambitious opponents to fight for supremacy within the organisation. The battle ground? An Eames chair.
Both of the slows, Min and Louise, hope this assignment might restore them to the shining light of the Park, ending their tedious exile to the outer darkness of Slough House, which per the earlier review on this blog is neither in Slough nor a house.
Webb is counting on that motivation to preclude them asking too many questions about this verbal secondment. In meeting them directly he bypasses the supremo of Slough House, Lamb.
There are so many wheels within wheels that my head got in a spin. Rather try to unravel that I offer a few remarks. Nit picking perhaps.
One of the salutary lessons is how easy it is to be fooled if one wants to fooled. Webb’s bit on the bait after reading all about the Russian on the Russkie’s web site. He found there flattering portraits from the ‘Financial Times,’ interviews in ‘Der Spiegel,’ and testimonials from here and there. He looked no further. It was not until Tech Boy Rod cross-checked these excerpts on the Russian’s blog with the original sources that Webb learned, much too late, that they were fake news. There were no laudatory accounts on the pink pages of the ‘Financial Times’ nor in the Gothic script headlines of ‘Der Spiegel.’
What have teachers said since Odysseus returned? Check the original to see if there really was a horse.
Webb did not verify anything because he dearly loved the idea of doing a favour for major player in Russia, a favour that could be cashed later. Ergo, he saw what he wanted to see and nothing more. In his case a successful deal would lead to a promotion up the greasy org pole. Once promoted he would move on away from any fallout anyway.
That is the other lesson. Later when asked who set up the contact, Webb tried to make it sound like his initiative. It wasn’t but he wanted the credit for spotting the possibility of indebting this fellow. When finally he later reluctantly admits that the Russian contacted him first, the tale takes on a different light. It seems it was Webb who was being reeled in and not the Russkie.
The London sky line these days.
Back to those nits, I found it hard to believe that Dickie would spot the hood quite that easily after all those years. Equally hard to believe was that Dickie did not wonder why it was so easy. Likewise that hood’s boss had lived quietly in England for nearly twenty years seemed a stretch, and in two different places. Even more so the villain’s faith in the dead lions, of whom in the end we learn nothing.
There a few more quibbles but that is what they are quibbles.
Less and less in writing is one legacy of Prime Minister Tony Blair, or so I have been told by a one-time inmate of Number Ten. In that administration, verbal communication became the order of the day to avoid written records. Freedom of Information applies only to what is in writing, after all.

Genre: Thriller. Goodreads meta-data: 3.84 / 5 by 4852 litizens.
Verdict: 5, a classic of its kind.

MI5 agent Cartwright fails a training exercise and is exiled to the outer darkness of Slough House, which like all that follows is not what it seems. It is neither in Slough nor is it a house. In this world nothing is as it seems. Nothing and no one.
Cartwright, a grandson of Callan who is an MI5 legend, and much of that organisation’s purpose now is terrorism of one kind of another, but when all the hedges are said and done, the Islamic kind. Though the office politics uses the dead language of McKinsey speak that is but a screen for a far more primitive and brutal kind of competition for status, turf, and career, which is waged more seriously than that against terrorism.
Spoiler alert. It is beyond me to describe the book without giving away the plot. Read no further if apt to read the book. STOP.
Cartwright finds there at the remote station in the outer darkness of London other MI5 rejects who are assigned meaningless work to keep them busy and to encourage them to resign from the Service. They number about a dozen under the sleepy gaze of Lamb upstairs. Unkept, unshaven, unwashed, untidy Lamb dozes the day away and drinks the night away. His supervision seems to be part of the punishment. This set-up does sound like the McKinsey seminar on managing-out the KPI failures, by sending them to the circles of Dante’s Hell otherwise known as training seminars and workshops until they crack. This method is necessary since it is no longer possible to dismiss someone for incompetence. Discrimination against the incompetent is verboten. Incompetence is a syndrome for which the society is responsible, not the individual, their barristers will argue. Amen.
The twist in the tale is that whitebread anti-terrorist vigilantes decide to up the ante by kidnapping a London schoolboy of Pakistani derivation and decapitate him on an internet feed. The three villains are as nasty and stupid as the target demographic of 7Mate. In hindsight there are several false notes. The kidnapping is too smooth for these bumblers to have managed. Moreover, the internet feed is technologically several miles above their ability with light switches. Still it gets things rolling.
In reaction there are wheels within wheels within wheels where some of the senior people in the Service use this event for career purposes, and worse. When things go wrong, as inevitably they must to make it a thriller, the best way to conceal those careerist manipulations is to blame the whole mess on the expendable denizens of Slough House. This turn of events rouses the sleeping lion that is Lamb to action and he motivates (most of) his crew to defend themselves from their own. This brief transformation occurs when he points out their likely fate if they wait for the blame bat to splatter them across the floor of a secret and illegal prison in Bulgaria which does not exist, officially.
‘Most’ not all, because three of the crew are only too ready to perjure and prostitute themselves to sell out Lamb and the others for the promise of a promotion. That corporate immorality certainly sounds plausible in any large organisation where backstabbing is the way ahead and scruples are not quantified among the KPIs. It is comforting to know that this is a general phenomenon.
Motivated by survival, the remainder of the crew takes action. Most of it is an internal conflict among factions in MI5 which has burgeoned with a budget swollen to match the anti-terrorism rhetoric of the age. And with a political class that does not want to know unpleasant things but wants them to go away. On the penchant for ‘smooth things’ see Isaiah 30:10.
Other characters include a rabid journalist whose extremism has gone even beyond the Fox News pale, if that is possible. That seemed another false note. There is no line of decency that Faux News will not cross, lemmings in tow. In turn, this journo has contacts in the respectable right of the Conservative Party in the person of an aspiring Leader who has verisimilitude.
It is a thriller and there is an axe, a ticking package, and a pistol, and the body count is three, but most of the decisive events occur in offices, albeit once after a beating, and the files do yield the ore of truth. Well, the body count comes to four, because by the sheerest of coincidences after the journo threatens the leadership aspirant he meets an untimely end a few days later on a zebra crossing. That problem went away.
The kidnap victim proves equal to the circumstance in unexpected ways that are yet plausible. Ditto the other characters.
That is the achievement of Herron to vivify a gallery of diverse and credible characters. The telling is that truncated and cross-cut style of the thriller that I dislike but in this instance it works, and I swallowed my objection as I turned the pages. At the start my aim to satisfy the recommendation of a friend, but soon I was reading under my own power.
It sounds like John Le Carré’s Cold War spy novels and it is. When the Cold War ended Le Carré tried other settings and the ones I read did not hit the mark for me. Without Smiley and Karla, well it all seemed like dog paddling in the shallow end.
Herron brings that grey world of spy and counterspy to the War on Terror with great panache and insight. Alec Leamas would fit in at Slough House. Indeed he might be the model for Lamb. However, reflection on the Cold War versions, not forgetting Len Deighton, brings to light a new element and that is the pathological dysfunction of the organisation. In Smiley’s world there were traitors like Bill Hayden, and hellbent careerists like Saul Enderby, too, but they were not yet ready to eat their own for new office furniture. They were many things but not the vampires, cannibals, and zombies that comprise MI5 in these pages.
The book offers a primer in the tradecraft of MI5, London Rules, joes, achievers, dogs, suits, black files, street walkers, grey books, and the like. I am sucker for that stuff and ate it with a spoon.
Mick Herron
‘The List’ is a novella that I read it about an hour and a half. It is cut from the same cloth as above, but the ambit is much smaller. My reading was slowed by guffaws and snorts at the characterisations and descriptions. Herron can turn a phrase, pin a butterfly to a board, nail a metaphor, all with the mordant wit of a bored viper.
In this brief tale, Five outsmarts itself in an exercise of double and triple duplicity. Lamb smells it but keeps silent for his own reasons, letting fools (who think they are so smart and so cynical) rush in. They do.

This is the first in a series of nine book-length titles (and one short story) recounting the many adventures of Flavia de Luce, aged eleven and a half, in Bishop’s Lacey of rural England of 1950-1951. ‘Flavia’ is pronounced, she has more than one occasion to say, to rhyme with bravia as in bravo.

With pigtails flying, aside her faithful bicycle Gladys, Flavia goes where no plod ventures, under beds, into holes in the ground, inside ovens, over roof tops, through holes in the wall, diving in to muddy ponds, all the while musing on the wonders of chemistry.
It all began early one morning, very early, about 4 am, while she was waiting for an experiment to mature, Flavia discovers in the cucumber patch a dying man. ‘How interesting!’ is her reaction, as he breathes his last.
When plod, duly summoned, shows little interest in her or her observations (which are many) she resolves to get to the bottom of things before plod does. The race is on, but only one of the runners knows it: Flavia.
First stop, the local library, then the local gossips, as she mobilises village resources to identify the deceased and infer his purpose then to find his killer while plod follows police procedure, i.e., drinks tea, calls London, fills in forms, drinks tea, scratches ear, fills up tank of police car with petrol, rests, and goes home.
The cast of characters includes a largely silent Father, who occupies himself most hours behind closed doors with stamp albums. There is a bounded retainer, Dogger, whose emotional frailty is debilitating. Father and Dogger spent long years in Japanese prison camps, and in different ways have never recovered from it. Harriet, wife and mother, died just before the war, leaving a very large gap. Though gone for a decade she remains a presence in Buckshaw, the decaying family pile. At the mere mention of Harriet’s name, Father faints. Meanwhile, Dogger cowers in the greenhouse with his demons. Mrs Mullen does for them and provides a pipeline to the village and sanity.
Older sisters Ophelia, the narcissistic musician, and Daphne, the bespectacled reader, round out the ensemble cast. Rivalry among the three sisters has become Total Sibling War.
The Molochs of Inland Revenue undermine Buckshaw with questions, writs, and invoices. Harriet died without a will, leaving questions of property much vexed. Four years in a Japanese prison camp did not break Father, but Inland Revenue seems about to do so. He could satisfy these meat eaters by selling her jewels (valuable), books (rare), and automobile (handmade) but this he resolutely refuses to do, as if by keeping them he keeps her.
That Flavia is the very image of Harriet explains why Father can hardly look at her, though she does not understand this and feels slighted. Father and Harriet were cousin and he knew her at Flavia’s age.
I gulped down the nine books of the sequence, one-after-another, each a delight. Flavia does not always understand what she sees or hears or is said to her, and she makes mistakes. Nevertheless she has the optimism, audacity, energy, and determinism to overcome all obstacles, including those of her own making. When all else fails, when she is totally desperate, when there is no alternative, she will even tell the truth!
The plotting is neat, details play into the larger picture in due course. There are no superfluous asides and backstories. The characters are delightful, most of all the star of the show, Flavia, but also Dogger, Mrs Mullen, the Vicar, and the Weird Sisters, and more. While Flavia makes the snap judgements of youth, time and experience cause her to change her mind more than once. Call that growing up.
There is much chemistry. Like many a prepubescent girl, Flavia keeps scrap books. In her case they consist of newspaper and magazine cuttings of homicides by poisoning. She got kicked out of the Girl Guides when for a home science project she distilled arsenic from house cleaning products. On the wall of her room are autographed pictures of many chemists, particularly those whose work expanded knowledge of poisons. She has longterm plans for the Weird Sisters.
There are some false notes now and again, and the one book set in Canada at boarding school seemed somehow lesser, though it has some great moments, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Neither Amazon, Wikipedia, nor the author’s web page offers a simple chronological list of the titles in the series. Below is my effort to supply that list.
‘The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie’ (2009).
‘The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag’ (2010).
‘A Red Herring Without Mustard’ (2011).
‘I Am Half-Sick of Shadows’ (2011).
‘Speaking from Among the Bones’ (2013).
‘The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches’ (2014).
‘The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse’ (2014) (a short story).
‘As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust’ (2015).
‘Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d’ (2016).
‘A Grave’s a Fine and Private Place’ (2018).
Alan Bradley. Chapeux!
I first espied one of these titles (‘As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust’) in the English-Language section of a bookstore in Helsinki in 2016 and when I got back to it, I found it had predecessors so I started with the first, reading on the Kindle, and the banquet began. Now sad to say I have read them all, but fear not for I have returned to this, volume one, and started over. ‘As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust,’ by the way, was the one I saw in Helsinki and I am glad that I did not start there as I might have then stopped, this being the one set in Canada as referred to above.
Dare we readers hope Flavia will continue her chemical ways in adolescence and adulthood?

Meta-data from GoodReads is 3.13/5 from 114 litizens.
Verdict: First in a series and last for me.
In these pages our heroine

– Learns conversational Portuguese in ten days
– Has hormone attacks at the appearance of any man with hair and teeth
– Starts with USD 2000 and all expenses paid and yet is broke on every page thereafter
– Trusts known criminals 
– Is too naive to have made it to 29 years of age
– Flies from SFO to Lisbon in 3 hours
– Repeats the same dialogue far too often
– Cracks a long established Lisbon crime syndicate in one afternoon
– Out muscles experienced villains
– Whose legendary knowledge of gemmology is never revealed or relevant
– Who talks her way past alert criminals
– Leaves her handbag in the villains lair and has to go back for it
– Passes off an offsider as blind on a guided tour
– Does IKEA in each room
– Does Vogue with the dress of each woman and GQ for most men
– Almost none of the detail that plumps out the pages adds to plot or character
– Characters who are emphasised disappear like the police sergeant who did not collect
And so on.
Rom-krimi or Krimi-Rom is this genre bender. One in a series of many titles. First and last for me.
I came across it looking for novels set in Portugal before travelling there. No more for this reader. Though it is claimed to be a best seller in a heavily qualified attribution, among self published mysteries on Tuesday.
The prose is fluent and confident but absent either plot or character. There is some travelogue in Portugal but it is obscured by the features listed above.

A krimi with energy, wit, chemistry, zest, and pigtails. It starts and ends with our heroine Flavia de Luce bound and gagged. As if that could stop this dynamo.

It is rural England of 1950. Flavia with her older sisters Ophelia and Daphne lives with Father in the crumbling estate of Buckshaw. Ophelia and her co-conspirator Daphne delight in tormenting Flavia who reciprocates with chemistry.
Unwisely stepping into this combat zone of sibling rivalry are a pair of villains who seek postage stamps. Yes, they want to send cards home to mum with Penny Blacks!
Father came back from the war a colonel with Dogger, the handy man, and both are largely silent. Dogger had been a POW on the Burma Railroad, and he goes blank now and again. The Colonel spent four years in Changi.
Father’s wife, mother of the girls, Harriet disappeared and then died. As the story opens Father spends most of his time with stamp albums.
Flavia does chemistry upstairs in a laboratory fitted out and left by a remote forbear. Daphne reads, often aloud, from the English classics lining the decrepit shelves, and Ophelia, the oldest at 17, preens constantly in the reflections of tea spoons, mirrors, water glasses, windows. She knows who is the fairest of them all and wants to know it constantly.
Then at 4 am one morning, while waiting for an experiment to percolate, Flavia comes across a dead man in the cucumber patch! Zounds! What to do? There are many house rules against ever intruding on Father and they would likely involve capital punishment at 4 am. Dogger, then. Yes, and for a man more of less comatose he proves very practiced at dealing with the dead. Flavia reflects on the fragments she has heard about him.
Plod arrives and dismisses the ‘little girl’ Flavia with a wave. Big mistake. That sets her off on her own mission. She tries to figure it out like a problem in chemistry: identify the interactions, resolve the components, assess the intensity, and so on. She interviews neighbours ever so subtly, researches in the county library, examines parish church tombstones, walks the woods for time and distances, talks to the old school tie, climbs on roofs, and more, all with the obsessiveness only a tweenager can muster. Meanwhile Dogger confesses to shield Father who confesses to shield Dogger, and Flavia, what else is a chemist to do to buy time for maturation, confesses to shield them both.
Then there is the itinerant architectural researcher tramping about. Is he really what he seems? Or did he come from Norway? Who ate the slice of cream pie? Why was the dead bird left on the back door step? Why is the county library closed just when essential information has to be found?
This title is the first in a series, and it is a delight. The erudition spills off the page with vitality. The learning is immense but the load is light as air. Flavia’s constant resort to chemistry provides the pole star. The plotting is meticulous and integrates everything. There is nothing superfluous. Every detail dovetails into the plot like Shaker furniture joined without a nail.
The denouement does drag on, but it works a delight when comes salvation in white. Loved the convoluted chain of reasoning that Flavia developed to arrive at Norway, matched to that of Plod who found it on a clothing tag.

Alan Bradley is a Canadian with many writing credits. There seem to be nine in this series to date.

Dublin in the early 1950s is a world unto itself turned inward. Dr Quirke is a pathologist who observes much and suspects more. When a road accident victim’s corpse is examined he finds a contusion on the temple that is inconsistent with the car crash. Musing follows. In time, he mentions his doubts to the Inspector Hackett of the Serious Crimes Squad who noses around and finds unpleasant emanations. This is the seventh entry in a series and it is tired, but perhaps complacent is the right word: ‘If I write it, the reviewers will praise it.’ He did and they did.

Though the spring weather is benign, the choking conformity of Maxima Catholic Dublin is inescapable. All in Dublin is more Catholic than the Pope. It is certainly more Catholic than the Rome of the time. The Bishop’s Palace is the seat of power in Dublin, not Tithe an Rialtais, the large Edwardian building enclosing a quadrangle on Merrion Street wherein dwells the Taoiseach by which we once walked.
There is only one escape permitted from this suffocating pall and that is alcohol. Frequently in Quirke stories, and no doubt in 1950s Dublin life, the pregnancy of unmarried women is paramount. Moreover, every thread, however long and ravelled, eventually traces back to the Catholic Church and its baleful tentacles.
These books are very well written and the picture of Irish life seen through Quirke’s eyes is to travel back in time. Yet in these books there is precious little detection, no police procedure despite Hackett’s occasional plod, and no mystery. Much is also predictable, as Quirke’s sexual conquests. As soon as a women is introduced into the story, we know she will soon succumb to his charms.
Instead we have Quirke, holder of a prestigious and authoritative position, a highly trained and accomplished medical doctor, a widower, father of a bright grown daughter, comfortable of income, handsome and attractive to women, who spends nearly every minute feeling sorry for himself in a self-imposed melancholia where he wallows for pages and pages, smoking cigarette after cigarette, drinking drink after drink. Evidently his pathologies did not involve lungs or livers.
Instead of detection we have meals, drinks, cigarettes, meals, drinks, cigarettes, meals….. On it goes. Yes, the prose is polished and the observations of life’s details exact, but repetitive and inert. There seems to be neither point nor purpose to the the prose. Some of the characterisations are profound, like Quirke’s terminally ill brother but have no place in the plot.

There is no doubt John Banville, Benjamin Black’s after ego, can write. The portrait of the victim’s father is striking and sympathetic. The contrast, however, is the government official whom Hackett interviews, who is little more than a cartoon character, flustered by the simplest question. Banville has respect for the father and none for government officials and it shows as he makes up the reader’s mind. Take that all those who work for the government, including those who uphold the intellectual property and copyright laws that secure Banville’s income. all those who regulate and maintain the internet services that provide a platform for his novels, all those who police crime and who had to deal with IRA on the border for a generation, all those who make difficult decisions about troop deployments on UN Peace Keeping missions, these are all clots!
I also found the reference to the Spanish Civil War confusing. The International Brigades were certainly there but the specifics mentioned in the story did not compute.

Our hero is a homicide detective in Budapest, being of Romani extraction makes him both a curiosity and an asset. He is an asset because some major criminals are likewise Romani. Adolf Eichmann did not get them all.

Budapest is awash with Middle East refugees making their way west to Utopia. Reluctantly, the Hungarian government slows the migration to retain good relations with Western nations, while most people in the government try to profit from human trafficking. There are many wheels within wheels. So many I lost count and interest. Focus is not a word that applies in this book. Suffice it to say that everyone but our hero is corrupt to the core.
There is precious little detecting, and no police procedure to be found. Instead there is a thinly disguised critique of the corruption of Hungarian society and politics. It is laid on with a sledgehammer. The fittings and furnishings of every room are detailed. The attire of each actor spelled out. In this combination of Vogue and IKEA, motivation, character, and plot dissolve. Then their situation is traced back to the dire situation of Hungary trapped between Communism and Capitalism. The level of analysis is that of the ‘National Inquirer.’
There is some Gypsy lore and that was interesting to this reader, but it was not integrated into the plot for the simple reason that there was no plot. Just a pastiche of attacks on Hungarian society and politics. Everyone is either corrupt or incompetent. Fortunately some are both and that leads to their downfall.
In its eagerness to peach the book reminded me of the latter volumes of the Martin Beck series from Sweden. This series started out as low key police procedurals through which a reader learned much of Sweden but the books slowly became sermons on the evils of Swedish capitalism, as if the genocide of the 1930s Socialist eugenics program was somehow the good old days.