Category: Krimi

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!  

GoodReads meta-data is 230 pages rated 3.62 by 1,690 litizens

Genre: krimi

Verdict: An Old Master. 

A committee of scholars – art historians – is charged with preparing the definitive catalogue raisonné of the works of Tiziano Vecellio (1488-1576), that is Titian to you and TV to me from now on. Since he did not report to a Scholarly Output Index managed by McKinsey acolytes, TV did not keepT 4 track of his works, nor sign all of them to get credit on his CV for his next application to use the toilet. He just took the money.  

Naive readers might think the members of this committee would examine the paintings, drawings, frescoes, sketches, notebook that might be by TV, magnifying glass in hand and even subject them to scientific tests and such. Ah! Such methods are always intrusive and sometimes destructive. Moreover, the owners of the works may not wish to have the painting, say, shipped to a laboratory elsewhere for such a six-month examination. Such a process is not only slow, it is expensive and not conclusive every time. Owners may also prefer to believe the work genuine and not risk the analysis to produce a negative result. Instead this panel of experts foregathers annually in Venice to evaluate another group of Titian works based on the library research they have done back home supplemented by the archives in Venice. This has been going on for years with very little to show for the collective effort (and expense), though each scholar has broadcast membership on the committee on the CV.  

The members include an American, a Brit, a German, another American, a third American, a Hollander, and, oh, a token Italian or two.  Like any good panel of experts this one is riven by dissension, envy, insecurity, sexual blackmail, rivalries, and its members are professionally committed to disagreeing about almost everything. The one thing lacking is a Post-Modernist who would dispute the existence of the man called Titian and/or declare that all the masterpieces attributed to him were done by his wife, Cecilia, although the fact that she had died by the time most of the work was done would only slow not stop the attribution.

Yet the pressure is now on from the funding agency to get some results. Back in Rome someone has noticed this drain on finance. The founding chairman resigned in frustration, having been skilfully undermined by his replacement who then launches a charm offensive with many expensive dinners, amid the bickering and backbiting, to wear down if not win over the recalcitrant colleagues – to no avail.  The harder he tries the more obstructive they become, biting ever harder the feeding hand. Then, well, one of them is murdered, and briefly the other members are subdued albeit only briefly.  Indeed, most soon regard the murder of one of their number as just the kind of publicity stunt the victim would pull to distract them! In no time they are back at each others’ metaphorical throats, until that becomes literal and another one is murdered! 

To this reader the explanation was obvious. The chair of the committee was killing off the members of the committee to get a consensus from the survivors.  It was also obvious that it would never work, of course, no academic has enough imagination to suppose they will be the next to be murdered, still less an aptitude for compromise even at the expense of survival. (I saw more than a few examples of this lack of imagination and aptitude as director of an institute, associate dean of a faculty, and head of a department. I learned that reasoning with scholars was pointless.) 

But no, the plot twists away from this obvious explanation. Still, it set me thinking.

Iain Pears wrote seven of these art history mysteries featuring the hapless ex-patriate Jonathan Argyll, resident in Rome as the purchasing agent for a British antique dealer, and his on-again off-again girlfriend Flavia di Stefano who works for the national art crime squad. If Jonathan is vague, she is decisive. If he is confused, she is certain. If he dresses like the down at the heel scholar he is, she sports the latest Milano elegance. If he picks at his food, she devours all creatures great and small. He meanders, she dives straight in. And so on. They make an odd couple.  Villains underestimate each of them.  Him because he has the air of an absentminded professor and her because she is a woman. I wish there were more of their stories for I have read all seven, more than once.  

They are backed by General Bottando who is head of the Art Squad, long time master of the intrigues of bureaucracy and proven survivor of budget cutters, turf war rivals, McKinsey re-organisers, and even the Mafia on one occasion. He has planted so many seeds of doubt about his numerous enemies and rivals in officialdom, in the media, in the world of high finance, and in that of low life, so he has but to harvest the crop occasionally to secure his department. If only I had learned from such a master tactician.  He is, by the way, a general because among the seven branches of Italian police the art squad is, for reasons long lost in the mists of time, an off-shoot of the military police.  ‘Something to do with looted treasures after the last war,’ he once explained to Jonathan.  There is no doubt that the very large Bottando is an imposing figure. Having taken care over the years for intermediaries to recommend him for many medals, he almost jingles when he strides in full dress uniform, worn only to intimidate lesser beings.  In his more paternalistic moments, when not decapitating a bureaucratic rival, he sees himself as a matchmaker between Jonathan and Flavia.    

When someone recently mentioned krimi in an academic setting I thought of this amusing title. 

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 4.09 b7 727 litizens.  

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Good ingredients spoiled by the chef. 

This title offers an unusual locale: Aix-en Provence in high summer, with an unusual setting: a small, private museum of porcelain, and an unusual crime: the entire contents of the museum vanishes over an April weekend, leaving only the display cases anchored into the floor. Nor were there any signs of damage, no shards on the floor, nor of a break-in. The inadequate door locks were not forced, though a competent burglar would have made short work of them with a paperclip. The blinding sun and the burning heat slow everyone and everything down, except, it seems, the crims.

With such a good list of ingredients, I forgot my usual cautious Kindle sampling and bought it …. and found the execution of the recipe drained the ingredients of flavour.  The prose is laborious, the descriptions as endless as they are pointless, the passages are padded well beyond any meaning.  We are treated to detailed accounts of meals and also the deliberations in choosing the items to consume from the menu and every ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ that are uttered in a restaurant. Indeed there is far more of that than any account of the museum itself or its lost contents to the extent of my impatient reading.   

I persisted in the hope that the text would achieve momentum, but after 25% on the Kindle-o-meter I gave up. Every time the protagonist moves, there is a laboured description of what he sees and does, none of it advancing the plot: he pushes his chair back, it squeaks on the tile floor, he stands up, he drops his napkin on the table, he nods to André the waiter, he walks to the door….[see if you can guess what he does at the door.] I doubt we will ever see André again, but we have invested in his name nonetheless.  

For some reason reading this reminded me of a business lunch once that included heated avocado. There is a good reason why no recipes call for cooking avocado, and I was reminded of that at this lunch. When heat is applied, avocado turns a sick, mushy grey. A good ingredient ruined in the preparation.  Maybe that is the association.   

The author has a dozen books, and a career as a journalist and writing teacher. So there! What do I know. As usual, not much

GoodReads meta-data is 360 pages, Rated 4.11 by 3005 litizens 

Genus: krimi, species Sherlock, hybrid Mrs Holmes.

Mrs Sherlock Holmes (yes, you read that right) tackles vampires in this outing.  After a sojourn in Monaco (wherein Monte Carlo is a hill on which the richest live) the Holmeses have decamped to the Carpathian mountains in dark and mysterious Roumania. In fact, Sherl went alone earlier while Mrs was still settling Rivera hash, and then he returned to fetch her along for the ride. And not just the Carpathians, but, yes, Transylvania (and not the so-named county in Kentucky). Holmes learns Roumanian in a few hours. Well, he is Sherlock.   

The trolls have been posting threats against Queen M’s youngest daughter, and after consulting the shade of granny Vicky, Queenie enlists Sherl to square the deal. There be vampires!?  Well maybe, but more likely someone wants to create panic about such creatures to blame the Queen, using the same playbook found in D.C. of late: the bigger the lie, the better. Can the Moloch Media be far away?  

They are riding to the aid of one of Queen Victoria’s grand offspring, Marie of Roumania, Queen by a marriage to a German princeling who found himself on the Bucharest throne. Later the post-War communist regime devoted much energy to denigrating her, suggesting that she might have done good works. The king is an invalid and the crown Prince a wastrel who resents his mother’s efforts to rei(g)n him in while dad-king is too enervated to cope, leaving Marie the top dog.

Could the plot to discredit her be political?  Nationalists who reject a foreign queen?  Communists who see an opportunity with the king and eldest son useless?  Is it international with Hungary aiming to reclaim turf?  Is it about money?  Or….is the personal political and vice versa? 

The telling is superb though the villain was not altogether convincing but the trip through Transylvania was great fun.  Strange what one finds in castle walls. 

The Princess Ileana who figures in this story died in 1991 after years as the Mother Superior in a convent in Ohio. From Princess of the realm to negotiating the roster for cleaning the toilets is her story.  

Stallion Gate (1987) by Martin Cruz Smith

GoodReads meta data is 384 pages, rated 3.66 by 1652 litizens.   

Genre: thriller, krimi.

Verdict:  overweight. 

In arid New Mexico in early 1945 thousands toiled at a secret project.  One peon was a New Mexico National Guard sergeant named Joe, an Indian of some ilk. Naturally, others call him Chief (and he does strut around like one at times).  

The peons hate each others, GIs versus civilian contractors, white versus black, white versus red, Anglo versus European, residents versus interlopers, Yankee Doodles versus Red spies, pencil necks versus he-men, mathematicians versus physicists, Greasers versus Jews, everyone versus the local Indians, and on and on. There may be a war on with the prospect of a million more casualties to come, but these thousands have plenty of time for their endless, mutual animosities. True to life then. 

The title speaks to the author’s contrivances. The test site was called Trinity and the trinity mountain peaks are mentioned early on and then forgotten as our protagonist insists on calling it Stallion Gate, and though there are references to wild horses in the vicinity none put in an appearance.  

The author did a great deal of research and it is stuffed on the pages — about pottery, about Filipinos, about Indian spirits, about boxing, and about the physics, without any dramatic effect.  Alas, sorry to say that, but it is true for this reader.  Joe is a man among men, and among women who fall over themselves to get at him – every author’s wet dream.  He is a boxer, a (modest) war hero, a man of his people, a thinker, a man who never sleeps, and who roams around this top hush hush facility at will because he alone is trusted by one and all.  

His notional superior is a purebred cardboard.   

Am I jaded? Perhaps. I read recently a leaner version of very similar story in Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos (1998), which seemed much less padded, and less boy’s own.  It also offered a subtle account of the strange bedfellows General Grove and Dr Oppenheimer.  

Mind you, there are some fine moments in Stallion Gate in the description of a sunrise or the reaction to the conscience of the scientists versus those million soon to be casualties, or for that matter the 70,000 casualties that had already been suffered on Japanese soil at Okinawa in the typhoon of steel.  Had the Bomb been used earlier, many of those dead might have been spared along with the hundred thousand Japanese who died there.  

There is a distant personal connection through the New Mexico National Guard which was deployed to the Philippines in 1941 just before the Japanese invasion. One of my in-laws was in their ranks, and he was not as lucky as Joe. Who, by the way, seems strangely incurious about the Filipinos who saved him. He talks of them as though they were a mere plot contrivance.  Hmmm.   

Maigret and the Coroner (1949) by Georges Simenon.  

GoodReads metadata is 176 pages, rated 3.61 by 544 litizens.  

Genus: krimi; species Maigret.

Verdict: Fresh though #32 in the series.

While on a busman’s holiday travelling the United States to observe policing, Detective Chief Inspector Maigret finds himself in Tucson (Arizona). Wherever he has gone on this study tour a local law enforcement officer has been assigned to squire him around. While each officer does the duty, none particularly wants to be a tour guide, nor did Maigret himself welcome that task when Inspector Pike from Scotland Yard came calling. Sympathising with his host(s), he tries to be agreeable.  

In Tucson the FBI agent who picks him from the train station soon parks him in a coroner’s court to observe the American way, while the agent goes back to work. In his European suit and necktie with pipe Maigret is one conspicuous fish out of water. As he watches and listens, he finds it difficult not to interrupt with his own questions.  He knows enough English to follow the testimony but, well, he probably could not formulate his questions properly anyway.  

The first half or more of the book is the parade of witnesses giving contradictory statements related to the night Bessie Mitchell died, mangled by a railway train out in the desert. Was her death suicide, accident, manslaughter, or murder? That is the question.

The inquest continues and Maigret is soon hooked, and that pleases his host.  At night in his hotel room Maigret writes summaries of the day’s testimony for review, a task usually left to Lucas back in the office on the Île de la cité.  Even so there remain questions that have not yet been asked.  

Maigret observes the natives with an anthropological eye: they are clean, polite, addicted to Coca Cola, and there is the racial variety of white, black, red, and yellow among the jurors, witnesses, and audience. He is also painfully aware that others are observing him, too. But he simply cannot appear in a courtroom without a necktie and coat!  Despite the 45C temperature which has killed the AC. (At least he is not wearing the sweater Madame Maigret insisted he take.)

Five young air force men were with Bessie at one time or another during the night she died, and they are much in evidence with their shaved heads and stiff posture. Maigret is surprised that the inquiry does not focus directly on them, but every now and then he senses an underlying pattern in the interrogations that reassures him that there is purpose within the apparently haphazard proceedings. 

His efforts to strike up conversations during recesses with others in the audience do not take, and he mutters to himself. The usual masterful Maigret is treading water.  

The end is ambiguous and this reader felt that a number of the threads, like the dented car, were not resolved. Yet the trip was so much fun for being different that there are no complaints.   

Simenon spent months in Arizona where he lived in a rented house and typed his Maigret stories more than once. Perhaps while there in residence he did attend a coroner’s court.  It is certainly a change of pace for both Maigret (and Simenon) to observe, comment on, and participate in American life.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.6 by 74 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Convoluted.

Between assignments, Maigret is on a busman’s holiday staying in Cannes at a de luxe hotel by the invitation of its manager, an old friend from Paris, and while there….!  A cadaver appears in elderly M. Owens’s bathtub in room 412 and Owens is nowhere to be found. The deceased is a young man, while the missing Owens is an aged cripple. The local inspector barges in and throws his bantam intellectual weight around, seizing on the obvious, overlooking the subtle, while the bemused Maigret looks on.

There is a wanna-be starlet throwing herself and francs around, a sinister-looking doctor who is impossibly handsome, a demure nurse to M. Owens, a blind masseuse, an oily art dealer, and more. The ingredients are many and spicy.   

Of course, as viewers realised long before the local plod, it was Owens in the tub. The Marcel Proust rugged-up invalid-look was a disguise for a young art forger whose value seems to have been eroded by his drug addiction, and his accomplices doubted his continued silence, so they ensured it.  The nurse was not as she seemed, as the blindman told Maigret, her perfume is that of a rich woman, not a servant. Her transformation from dowdy to chic is good but not as convincing as a Cinderella turn by Isabelle Adjani. (I don’t remember which of her films but it was remarkable.)   

Then there is the dog.  

The plot is so complicated it required a lengthy expository scene at the end and I still didn’t get it. There is a neat scene midway through where Maigret overhears a private conversation through the air conditioning ducts, but nothing is made of it later. 

This story derives from a Simenon short story which I found online and read. It differs from the screenplay.  Much simpler, though still cryptic.  The film is full of gratuitous red herrings, a veritable school of them, absent from the story. The blind man, the starlet, the art dealer, and more are not in the story but added in the screenplay.  They certainly colour the tableaux, but I found the plot incomprehensible even after the explanation. Of the additions, the blind masseuse is the most interesting, while straining credulity.   

I rather think the production company hastily beefed up the short story to do a second film while on seaside location for Maigret and the Liberty Bar, a superior film.   

Goodreads meta-data is 244 pages rated 3.97 by 252 litizens.  

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Tenderfoot badge.

Second outing for Archer. 

Trying too hard.  Every page has another etched metaphor in the description. Seems more intellect went into those metaphors than into the characters who seem lifeless stereotypes, and this is from a reader who greatly admires RM. This volume has a nice introduction by John Banville, himself a kriminologist of note.    

The screenplay for the 1975 movie is far more coherent and creditable. Not often I admit that.  Plus the shift to NOLA adds immeasurably to the atmosphere, Copain. The bayous, the mist, that bridge to somewhere, the Cajun music (but no cuisine), the Spanish moss, the corruption, the magnolia trees….  Murray Hamilton made a larger than life villain in the film and not the cipher he is in the book.  This is krimi country that James Lee Burke now owns lock, stock, and many gun barrels.  

Footnote: Tenderfoot is the first of forty-seven boy scout merit badges. Impressive, huh? Just remember that one is for paper-making, and I don’t mean journalism.