Category: Krimi

Treachery (2014) by S. J. Parris

GoodReads meta-data is 540 pages rated 4.21 by 3,566 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Period.

DNA: Old Blighty.

Verdict: Ugh!

Tagline: Wheels within wheels.

The perennial exile Giordano Bruno is on the case again, accompanying Sir Phillip Sidney to Plymouth in the year of 1585.  

There they meet Sir Francis Drake, and a great many other old and new salts.  A death occurs on Drake’s ship while at anchor in port.  Was it suicide or murder?  He wants to find out before setting out to kill more Spaniards.

Sidney pushes Bruno into investigating as a favour to Drake.  

As if murder is not enough to motivate Bruno, there is also a missing book of the New Testament, an old nemesis, and assorted other villains.

I needed a scorecard to keep track of the red herrings, and just about everyone is a crook of one kind or another, including our hero.  As usual the forlorn Bruno is dead sexy to a beautiful woman in the usual way.  Murder and mayhem ensues.  

There is a perplexing cast of character submerged into elaborately described detail of the time and place: sights and smells, hygiene (lack of) and disease (much of), and so on, and on, and on, and on. And on. It seems the author strove for 600-pages but succumbed to exhaustion. I know I did.The detail is piled high mistaking altitude for entertainment.

S. J. Parris, Alchemy (2023) 

GoodReads Meta-data is 473 pages rated 4.47 by 337 litizens

Genre: Krimi: Species: Period.

Verdict: intense

Tagline: Fear the book!  

It is the winter of 1588 along the River Vltava in Prague as Dr Giordano Bruno arrived, ingenue assistant in tow, sent by Francis Walsingham, English Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, to make contact with his agent-in-place John Dee.  No sooner did Bruno cross the stone bridge than he was set upon that very dark and dreary night by two Spanish thugs. No Pilsner for him.

Prague was then a polyglot crossroads where the Holy Roman Emperor, having vacated Vienna for a quieter life in rustic Prague, shut himself up in the castle on the hill. This hermit is Rudolph II (1552-1612) whose interests are so otherworldly that he allowed religious freedom within the city.  The result was that Catholics hate him for tolerating Protestants who in turn hated him for tolerating Catholics, and the two only combine to hate Jews, who know a good thing cannot last.  

Rudolph, barely five feet tall in pumps, is fragile but determined. Most of that determination is devoted to his scientific and meta-scientific interest in this, that, and everything from automatons to Harry Potter’s philosopher’s stone. His patronage has attracted to Prague scientist, alchemists, astronomers, occultists, mediums, seers, and charlatans who speak a babel of tongues.  

The Papal nuncio plots his downfall with the ready assistance of the Spanish ambassador, while Protestants undermine Rudolph’s tolerant Catholic chief minister. In between the Jewish community knows that whoever prevails will come after it next and so makes campaign contributions to both parties.    

There are so many wheels within wheels that it takes quick-witted Bruno an interminably long time to sort them out.  The open-faced and friendly librarian is stealing books from the Imperial Library. The honest and steadfast book dealer is corrupt.  The dying old man is a knife murderer from his own deathbed. His pregnant daughter carts away the bodies for later mutilation.  The respect-inspiring patriarch is double-dealing. The girlish countess is a poisoner. The Spanish thugs are, well, thugs. A Spanish Inquisitor on holiday in Prague admits he misses breaking people’s fingers in the name of god. Whew!  What a cast.  What’s worse than all that however is Rudolph’s secret grand plan …[which will remain secret].

Some of this mischief stretches credibility but so be it. The plotting is – see above – complicated but all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place by the end. That in itself is a wonder.  

By the way, Rudolph paralleled Queen Elizabeth of England in remaining unmarried. He realised that unwed, he was a prize for matrimony. He encouraged many such prospects to keep royals, nobles, aristocrats, and other chancers catering to him and seeking his favour in the hope or marrying a daughter to him. No fool he.  

This is the seventh in a continuing series of Bruno’s adventures before the Florida Inquisition got him.  Years ago I read the first, Heresy (2010) which was set in Oxford at New College (where I once bunked for a conference) a long time ago. I found that the plumbing hadn’t changed since Bruno’s visit.) It was well done but the atmosphere, as in this one, was suffocating and I did not follow Bruno’s trail. In a way that means it was too well done for my feeble tastes.  

We visited Prague not so long ago and we traipsed through Prague Castle, from whence all of his treasures had long since been looted or destroyed by one conquering army or another. The weather was benign during our visit and after I completed my duties at Charles University we wandered about and crossed that very same bridge a number of times.  Then I read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Princes and Artists (1976) which included but did not concentrate on Rudy, leaving me with the desire to learn more about him. Hence I started this book.

Congo Venus (1950)

Good Reads meta-data is 220 pages rated 3.79 by 19 literatizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Slowly dried the paint.

Tagline: Yakkity yak.

Dateline: Léopoldville, Belgian Congo, 1947.

Gofer has returned to the Belgian Congo with another aide project, this one run by the United Nations. To meet the needs of the plot, the implacable, the unflappable Dr Finney arrives, and Gofer spends page after page telling her what has been happening in the metropolis of Léopoldville with its European population of a couple of thousands and native population many times that but never counted.

After some tooth-grinding banter, Gofer gets to the big news. The reigning beauty queen of the Europeans died of malaria.  Long zig-zag account of her beauty and more on what a nice and innocent woman she was. Once dead, rumours began, as they often do, with a denial, i.e., ‘it can’t be true that…’ and ‘I refuse to believe that…’. The hot air roots spread the gossip.  That is a clever technique on both levels, reality and fiction.

One rumour is that the doctor who treated Beauty was incompetent and caused her death by prescribing Coca Cola to treat her malaria when it should have been Pepsi Cola. In fact that doctor wrote to the peripatetic Finney to ask her to come to the big city to do a post hoc medical audit of this treatment to save his reputation. No autopsy was done, because in equatorial Africa the cremation was on the day of her death.  All Finney has are Doctor’s notes and his records of the drugs dispensed. We get to know and like the alcoholic stereotype Doctor who paints. 

Seeing nothing that would precipitate death in a healthy and vigorous young woman, Finney sets out to investigate by talking everyone to tedium. We meet the cipher husband and – insert drumroll here! – his sister-in-law from his first wife who died in a crash years ago. Sis-in-law has been living chastely with Cipher since to raise a niece and housekeep for him, but hopes for further developments. Sis has the vanity of scholar who published a book…large. She presents herself as a grande dame in this wilderness. She is a interesting character at first but soon becomes another cardboard cutout.

Finney figures it all out. Sis descends into madness.  The end.

The author’s biography says he did work in Africa. So be it but the locale in these pages is nothing more than a painted backdrop encyclopaedia-article deep. The natives are servants. There is no hint of the egregious and merciless cruelty Belgian colonialism visited upon the region. Nor of its wilful determination to hang onto this colony, from which all that gold in Brussels had been extracted in human flesh, during the opening act of decolonisation in the immediate post war period, leading to a petulant, overnight withdrawal in 1960. It seemed fitting that the Belgians left like thieves in the night only later to return to the scene of their crimes.

There are a couple more Finney books because she got around to Portuguese Africa, too, in that encyclopaedia. Language is no barrier for her. She has yet to run into the United Nations’ man in Africa, the remarkable Ralph Bunch, Cal basketball player and tireless diplomat, a man President Kennedy wanted in the State Department but who declined, preferring to stay at the U.N.  Imagine Strom Thurmond  giving advice and consent to that nomination.  Don’t know Strom? Keep it that way. Bunche you should know. 

A Body in My Office (2017) by Glen Ebisch

Good Reads meta-data is 300 pages rated 4.21 by 90 literatizens 

Genre: krimi; Species: academic.

Verdict: he writes whereof he knows.

Tag line: keeping busy in retirement.

After a grim meeting with the Dean who is manoeuvring him into (in)voluntary retirement, Charles returned to his office only to find his successor already ensconced. Charles is taken aback and finds his successor to be vain, arrogant, supercilious, and belittling. Charles stumbles out in a daze.  After some fresh air he returns to the office to collect his personal belongings only to find said successor lying there dead with his head smashed from a meeting with the crime writer’s best friend the blunt object.  

Successor just got off the plane, while there was no doubting his ability to anger people, did he have time to move someone to murderous rage so quickly? Did his murderer follow him from England? Or was it a nearsighted murderer who thought Successor was Charles?  But who would want to kill blameless Charles? 

Successor was a species of academic well known: arrogant, conceited, and solipsistic. On bad days he is even worse.  His approach to literature is consistent with his personality. It is barely worth his precious time to consider it. He speaks but Po-Mo in which both the book and the author disappear in a fog of neologisms. 

The smarmy Dean was wonderful in his instantaneous volte face as the wind changed. One minute he is your BFF and the next he doesn’t see you.  Even better was the slippery way he pushed Charles into retirement by assigning him to teach nothing but Freshman Composition for the rest of his days, because of his unique abilities. He dangled a financial carrot as an incentive to retire but as soon as Charles signed the carrot disappeared never to be mentioned again.

By the way the two semesters of FComp I did were among the most valuable things I ever did, and I hated it at and for the time, 3 pm to 5 pm every second Friday. It was valuable because I learned to write on demand. Application was the engine not inspiration. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Dean is abetted by an eagerly compliant Head of Department, who is a Russian emigré with a limited grasp of English but whose response to authority is obedience.  His litany of mangled idioms are a treat to read but would be exhausting and distracting to hear.  None of that disqualifies him from teaching AmLit.  Since few students stick to his courses, he has plenty of time and publishes a lot…in Russian 

Then there is Freud the lab rat, an innocent bystander, who is well integrated into the story. His associate Jung sat this one out. Maybe next time. 

Loved the way widower Charles was manoeuvred into a double date without ever quite agreeing. That lioness of the Serengeti brought him low without breaking stride. 

Spoilers dead ahead, me hearties.

I thought of middle names long before anyone did. It is prepared in text in that Charles uses his middle name, but he fails to suppose another might do the same. Likely or unlikely? You decide.

I guessed right for the villain but there were so many, easy opportunities it made me wonder why the wait, except to fill the pages. Mind you I enjoyed most of the fill. 

How Successor got appointed remains a mystery.  He may have had reason to leaving Old Blighty but how did he tumble onto an endowed chair in a minor Yankee college? Further, a chair that required the Dean to upend expectations and engender a feud with the scientists. It seems like a lot of bother with little gain for the Dean. In addition, it would be clear to anyone in five minutes that Successor was going to be high maintenance. A relentless calculator of decanal self interest would surely prefer to manage something easier and less taxing. 

There are (too) many typos that slow reading and distract attention. Many are dropped letters at the start or end of word, ‘son’ becomes ‘on.’ Others are spell checker bites with ‘breaks’ instead ‘brakes’ on the car. Incidental I know but annoying.  

The Devil in the Bush (1945) by Mathew Head

Goodreads meta-data is 180 pages rated 3.52 by 27 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Unusual.

It is the Belgian Congo 1943 where a team from the US Department of Agricultural has been dispatched to assess and assist in the cultivation of important herbs for medicines in the war effort. The Belgian colonial authorities gladly cooperate now that the home country has been occupied by Nazi Germany. One member of the U.S. team who speaks schoolboy French is alone, touring remote plantations and we follow his progress through equatorial Africa until he arrives Ruzi station which is little more than a ghost town with half a dozen Francophones going through the motions.  Our man quickly realises nothing can be done here but he too goes through the motions of an assessment. Nothing he can suggest and no supplies or equipment could restore the plantation to productivity after what must have been years of neglect.  

Ruzi station is the castle at Otranto, with a small group of people isolated from the outside by distance, bad roads, seasonal floods, unreliable vehicles, killer heat, enervating humidity, and restive natives and most of by lethargy, then one of them dies a natural death, but being in this book, we know it is murder by some means foul. There is skulduggery in the night and sexual tensions this way and that. The plot thickens quick smart. 

The first third of the book is told from the point of view of the agricultural agent whose flat feet and bad eyesight have kept him out of the army.  It is his first time out of the States and he seems to know little about the Congo until he gets there.  Indeed the setting is only lightly drawn (from the pages of library encyclopaedias one might guess).  The line between Belgian and France, always much more important to the former than the latter, is blurred. Attitudes to the distant war in Europe are muted.  

When Dr. Mary Finney, medical missionary, arrives the energy level goes up considerably.  She is well aware of the tensions between the brothers who own and operate the plantation, between the wife of one and her paramour, the budding sexuality of the teenage daughter of the plantation manager, and she is respected by the natives around the station for good works with them.  She soon solves the puzzle using the agriculturalist as a gofer, who never does quite see what is going on. (Moi non plus.)  

When I came across it, I gave in to temptation because of the exotic setting.  But that has virtually nothing to do with the story.  By the way, we know in hindsight that one of the reasons the Congo was important at the time was as a source of uranium, but that would not have been common knowledge at the time it was published in January 1945.  

There are other Miss Finney titles that I might investigate, since I like her straight from the shoulder manner, and inferential reasoning.  And that she has no tedious backstory to bore me. I could not a photograph.

Brazzaville Beach (1990) is also set in the Congo, and makes much more and better use of the locale.  There are comments about it on the blog.  Click away. 

How many krimis set in the Belgian Congo are there?  Reply below. 

Where God Does Not Walk (2021) by Luke McCallin.

Good Reads meta-data is 583 pages rated 4.32 by 313 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi; Species: period; Sub-species: war.

Verdict: intriguing.

July 1918 on the Western Front all is not quiet.  While training his company of stormtroopers a young German Lieutenant (YL) finds one of the men accused of fragging a group of officers. While the line officers involved try to intervene, they are brushed aside by staff officers who execute summary (in)justice. 

Not satisfied with this rush to the firing squad, three line officers —the lieutenant, his captain, and the colonel commanding the trench regiment, each in a different ways question the result. The regiment’s colonel obliquely encourages YL to dig up facts, while – when he steps on toes – Captain shields him as best he can. 

The unofficial and secret investigation is delayed and then advanced by a raid on a French strongpoint. The description of the combat is gruelling, and the outcome quite unexpected.  

The machinations are many, the red herrings travel is schools, the descriptions of trench warfare are exhausting, depressing, and harrowing. The body count is large. The characters are varied, as always it is the least likely that become the most likely. Guess that is a spoiler. Rewind and delete.

More importantly I found the plot too deep and dark. The omniscient conspiracy is a tired cliché and it creaks on these pages. What’s worse is that there were two or was it three conspiracies tripping over each other. I needed a scorecard to keep track. Further it seems quite surplus to explain the villainy. 

Yet without a doubt it is compelling to read.

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The Basel Killings (2021) by Hansjörg Schneider. 

Good Reads meta-data is 212 pages, rated 3.42 by 189 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Foggy. Very.

On a cold and foggy night in Basel Switzerland Inspector Hunk chances on an habitué of the local bars sitting on a bench in the square. He has exchanged pleasantries with this man before and having nothing better to do, Hunk sits down next to him for a quiet word or two as he lights a fag. The two of them sit in companionable silence for a time as the snow begins to fall, and a tram rolls by.  

This opening is neatly done. 

The more so when Hunk realises his unresponsive seat mate is not snoozing off the beer, but dead.  Murdered. 

It’s the best part of the book. After that the krimi tropes come one after the other

• the obstructive superior officer
• the incompetent peer officer
• the difficult girlfriend
• the school of (obvious) red herrings
• closed-mouthed witnesses
• the sympathetic prostitute 
• Hunk’s repeated complaints about getting old 
•                           “

The geography of Basel drew my interest as the city itself borders both Germany and France. A passport is needed to go to work or to dinner. The city tram lines run to the border. Directions are given by reference to the borders. Then there is the weather. With the Rhine nearby there is recurrent fog, especially on a winter night.  (Oh, and yes, I have been there, briefly. Two days and one night.)

The author is more honest than many other Swiss writers to admit and make central to the plot the endemic racism in the country, the readiness to blame everything on incomers, the casual hypocrisy about drugs and prostitution as long as the taxes are paid, and the domination of the society by the banks. 

However, I found this novel hard to read and hard to follow.  Hunk seemed to be a pinball bouncing around with little forethought, as if he has never done before this.  When he did eventually try to investigate the backgrounds of some involved, he was inept. Certain files, when he finally got around to looking, were unavailable, and their records were marked ‘FA.’ What could FA possibly mean on a file? With his previous twenty plus years on the police force he could not figure this out.I got it long before he did: Federal Archive.  That made the file restricted, yet he got access to it easily by telephoning and asking.  So what is the big deal. Was it that hard for him to telephone?  

Moreover, I never quite got the villain’s motivation. Nor could I credit a Swiss police officer with no probable cause and no warrant breaking into an apartment to find evidence with a witness watching him all the while.  Any defence lawyer would win on that: Hunk broke in and planted the evidence in Marlowe’s fish bowl would be the assertion. 

Gypsies figure in the story but I could not fathom the relationship of these travellers to the 1% of the native Swiss population that speaks Romansh. That would have added interested.  Maybe I missed something.

While I liked the atmosphere of the cold, wet fog, it was over used. Sure, the weather can be like that, but repetition on the page drains the meaning from it. If the sun ever shines, the author will not be able to set a scene. Likewise some of mannerisms suffered overkill e.g., four different people flick dust off a shirt or jacket sleeve. Maybe more, if I lost count. Now just maybe that might happen but it does not make fiction.  

My major reaction however is that the villain appears in act III of a three act play after a whole cast of characters has been introduced, none of them are relevant to the plot. Oh. It seems I wasted my time trying to keep them straight.

While the book is touted as the first in a new series, a scratch reveals that it is the first to be translated from the Schweizerdeutsch, but the fifth in the original series.  Ergo the irritations and glitches that I noticed were not those of a novice.

Crocodile’s Kill (2022) by Chris McGillion.

Good Reads meta-data is 284 pages. rated 3.29 by 7 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Less of Timor might be more.  

The set-up:  Impetuous FBI agent is banished to distant East Timor (because no place in Mongolia was available) where she cannot do any harm and might do some good.

In Dili she is seconded to Interpol (yep, it still exists but Reinhard Heydrich is no longer the head) to investigate the systematic abduction of babies less than two years old along the Indonesian border. The scars – physical, social, and psychological – of the 1975 Indonesian invasion and occupation until 1999 of eastern Timor are still vivid there. Recent Timor history is sprinkled throughout to explain motivations and attitudes.

The local liaison officer is glad for any help, but, well, this one is high maintenance.  

The characters are differentiated and varied. A host of locals pass by as this odd couple investigates.  A third officer joins the pair as a translator, file clerk, driver….to earn her spurs in the field. 

By the way, the titular croc is …..  (Read it for yourself.) 

The book is free from the tropes that drag down many of the krimi samples I read. The action is not deferred for long and boring backstories. Too often these backstories are supposed to make the reader either identify with or feel sorry for the protagonist.  Further, the local does not pout about the FBI agent he has to be shepherd. Wise, since she might punch him out if he did. Nor is his superior officer obstructive and stupid, a tired device to create tension, as if the front story was not important enough to do that.  

There is no catalogue of descriptions of clothes and food.  When these are described it is brief and in context moving things along.  Nor are there tedious descriptions of the characters.  I am not sure what any of them looked like and willing to leave it at that. The movement in the interior along the border is purposeful, not a travelogue. I followed it on Google Earth until fiction replaced fact.  

Even better the characters are distinctive, one from another. They don’t sound the same or even similar, and not every nit is picked to death. More than once something comes up, and a character chooses to let a comment go through to the keeper. (That last phase from cricket has no exact analogue in baseball.)  Not every point gets argued to dust in lieu of doing anything, as is often the case in the krimi samples I read and decide not to continue to the full text because they are too talky.   

In order to flavour the story Timorese there are continued and repetitive translations from the local languages and Portuguese that wear a reader down. I take the purpose to be context, but well I got abraded by it.  Reminded me of Alexander McCall Smith and that is no recommendation to my mind. Yes, I know this mislike puts me in (another) minority.  

The plot, though distasteful, is arresting and the situation is certainly new to me, despite my years of krimi reading.  

While there is much stress on the urgency of the investigation, there is plenty of time to describe the region’s recent, malign history.  And the region has far too much history for those who have had to live through it, from the Portuguese occupation for hundreds of years (which ended overnight) to the Japanese for a few, with some Dutch intrusion, and the commercial exploitation of late, including now Australian contractors who are expert at cutting corners.  Then there are those Indonesians whose map of Greater Indonesia greeted visitors to Jakarta airport for years; it included Timor, East and West, and all of New Guinea and Borneo all the way to the Solomon Islands.  Though that map is no longer displayed it likely remains in the minds of many people.

P.S. I came to wonder if the FBI agent assigned to East Timor would have done some homework before travelling to the island.  A few clicks on Wikipedia if nothing else.

Disclosure:  The author is a pal of mine. 

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers (1953).

Good Reads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.79 by 1474 litizens .

Genre: krimi; Species: PoMo.

 Verdict: Meh.

Spoiler: in which the detective accidentally kills the victim whose murder he has come to investigate. Or did he? Was it no accident, but perhaps a Deep State conspiracy all along?  We’ll never know….unless Hillary fesses up.

Detective Wallas comes to a dreary northern city to investigate the shooting of DuPont. We know Bonaventura planned the crime while his henchman Gatineau pulled the trigger. The story is pieced together from the points of view of these four and also Fabius, acting on the orders of the minister, who dispatched Wallas. There is the local copper, Laurent, who is only too glad to turn the inquiry over to him. A doctor, a constable, an innkeeper, and a talkative drunk. By the way, the victim DuPont has much to say, even when he was supposed to be dead. Then there are those erasers.

In his circular, repetitive perambulations around the scene of the crime and the city beyond, Wallas goes into this shop and that, one after another, where to conceal his purpose (gathering information) he buys an eraser for pencil marks. He has several les gommes in his pocket as a result. That quest embodies the story which is repeatedly rubbed out and then started again from a different perspective.  

Not much happens and the plot is paper thin but tantalising enough to allow for many speculations about a conspiracy so vast, dark, and deep that it cannot be named. If you have seen L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) that is Robbe-Grillet’s work, too. The film is style over substance as a critique of the vacuous lives of its characters, but it is gorgeous to watch and enveloping.  Not so these pages.

In 1953 the novel kickstarted Post-Modernism which, regrettably, continues to justify treating readers with derision and contempt.* In these pages everything is circular, not linear and heavy-handed clues to that are conspicuous in names and actions. There are those several narrators who offer different interpretations of the same facts, or different facts. Nor is it certain any of them is reliable. There is no closure at the end. Sounds like a classroom exercise in what not to do in a novel. I found no amusement in reading it but it is well enough written to sustain interest even as it goes around in circles.  

I did wonder if I should have read it as a palimpsest of his POW experience (see below) but I got no purchase on that. I tried to read one of his other novels years ago, and failed. This will be my last. He once said that a true writer has nothing to say and he proved it to me with this book.

Robbe-Grillet (1922 – 2008) was born to a comfortable bourgeois family in the provinces, educated and trained as an agricultural engineer and worked on the land for some years after World War II. He was a POW during the war and did slave labour in a German factory. Perhaps the agricultural life expiated those demons. He was not part of the Parisian set but burst onto the scene with this novel. He was soon inducted into the Beau Monde and became a gatekeeper for new writers as an acquisitions editor for a major publisher.  

*Has anyone yet coined the term ‘Post-Modernism Syndrome’ to refer to those readers who identify with and like the derision and contempt dished out to them by Po-Mo writers in pointless prose?  If not, I claim it now!