Category: Krimi

Genre? Novel. Style? Northern Gothic, certainly. Magic Realism, maybe. Rating? * * * *
What happens in it? It is a circus of characters and incident. Part satire and part hyperrealism.

In her one-woman struggle to free Québec from the evil Anglos young Marie inadvertently blows up her maternal grandfather who becomes a spectral observer thereafter.
The Francophone police officer shown is trying to defuse an FLQ bomb. It blew up and left him maimed and crippled.
Her feckless twin brother Jean-Baptiste is irritated that with his own name in Montréal he cannot read French. The crow that Aline keeps in the kitchen attacks Grandfather. Tabernac! The FLQ consists mostly of spies in the pay of the Gendarmarie Royal.

Grandfather before and after losing the eye pursues his profession with father. They are grave robbers and Mont Royal is their hunting, well, digging, ground. They are accustomed to finding others, living there and work around them. But once the ground freezes in November, they have to wait…or do they?
In a ramshackle, decaying house three or is it four generations of Desouches live. Grandfather, father, and uncle, as our narrator terms them, shun the company of neighbours. This is another uncle apart from the one who was passing the letter box when Marie’s bomb went off, heralding a new era of freedom for Québecois. Then there is mother and Aline. I found it hard to keep the family straight. I started to make a score card, but that slowed down the reading, so I stopped. Pace is everything in these pages.
Father does not join the grave robbers, preferring instead to do nothing at all. He is surprisingly energetic in this pursuit.
Basilières includes the FLQ Crisis and the War Measures Act with René Lévesque’s manslaughter, the murder of Pierre La Porte with his own crucifix. Salutary reminders for those who find Canadian politics boring that boring is good compared to the alternative. The Montréal Basilières’s conjures from his keyboard lacks only voodoo and Spanish moss to be a cold version of mysterious and eerie New Orleans found so often in the popular culture in Southern gothic novels.

The Christmas gifts Jean Bapiste and Marie exchange in their mutual incomprehension are treasures. He only knows and relates to books but he is dimly aware of Marie’s activities. Ergo he gives her a copy of Carlos Marighella’s 1969 ‘Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.’ She supposes he means it as a condemnation of her feeble efforts, and flies into a rage. But not before she gives him a blank book to show her contempt for his reading and writing, and he takes it to mean she wants him to write in the book and he immediately sets to to work to do it and indeed does. (It is a blank note book bound to look like a book. Their misunderstanding is complete and to the core.)

The subsequent account of the performance of the play that emerges from the blank book is a wonderful satire on everything it touches from the producer-director to the audiences. Nothing is sacred. Calice!
Fact is one thing and fiction is another and this is fiction: This is a Montréal populated by grave robbers who siphon off the neighbour’s natural gas to heat their ark but cannot control it so that house is an oven during the coldest winter, a Montréal where Felquiste and Pequiste hate each other and no one but them cares one whit and that drives each of them to new heights of frustration, a Montréal where a glass eye offers better sight that the real thing, a Montréal where the timeline of history bends….
It is no accident that the family physician is named Dr. Hyde who is a famous surgeon and yet is ready and willing to make house-calls to the Desouches (because they supply what he demands – see above). The good doctor does his most important work alone at night, and has some unexpected success.
Michel Basilieres
Marie becomes an avenging angel and single-handedly kidnaps the British Trade Commissioner and later she strangles him to death with his own rosary chain. It is Rated-R and rather gruesome, and she, of course, finds it difficult to do and to live with, but…. Then there is that lousy gas connections, and boom, many problems are obliterated. Marie, in another time and place, would have been a postulant in a convent such as imagined in Ron Hansen’s fine novel ‘Mariette in Ecstasy’ (1991), reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
One of the most exhilarating novels I have read. I came across it in a Montréal bookstore while walking some of the streets described in it and that added a frisson the first time I read it in in 2009. It came to mind recently as I read a few things about Canada and Québec so I sat down with it again. Great fun. Gabrielle Roy chronicled Montréal life in a series of wonderful novels in the 1940s and 1950s. Wry, gentle, bemused and serious, they are. In this book, by contrast, nothing is serious nor sacred. Though it is deeply ‘de vieille souche’ as they used to say on that island in the fleuve St Laurent, it was written in English. Those among the Québeceratti who take themselves ever so seriously avoided any mention of the book. The contemporary reviews I found were all in English in English-language publications. One of which chides the author for mashing together the FLQ crisis and the PQ government and confusing Pierre LaPorte with James Cross. Not everyone gets the point, it seems.

After reading Benjamin Black’s continuation of this title in ‘The Black-eyed Blonde’ this old favourite was on my mind when I saw it on the shelf of the Megalong Bookstore in Leura.
This is Chandler’s last complete novel and it is twice as long as any of his previous ones. Indeed it was very long for the genre when it was published. I thought I would read a chapter or two before bed the other night and found myself on page 100 at midnight, such was the flow of characters and events. Another four nights and I was done. Of course, I had read it before and then Black’s book had refreshed some of the characters for me.
Beginners can start here. Philipp Marlowe meets an odd character, one Terry Lennox, whom he gets to like and sees now and then over several months. Very early one morning Lennox appears and asks Marlowe to drive him to Mexico, no questions asked. Marlowe agrees, opening the can of worms that wriggle out over the next 400+ pages.

Once again Chandler proves expert at pace and development. It moves but the reader can follow, and as it moves the characters and situations are fleshed out. If he describes the clothing a character wears it is because it reveals a social situation, an attitude, the money, something about the person that comes into the story. No description is an end-in-itself in Chandler; it serves a larger purpose, or it is omitted. Scores of contemporary writers should learn that lesson.
And he differentiates characters one from the other, even if the appearance is fleeting. The jailer who opens the door to the cell where Marlowe will sit and ponder friendship for three nights says nothing, but he is etched in his posture, his walk, his silent appraisal of Marlowe. Nothing is said between them but they understand one another: Marlowe will make no trouble and the jailer will leave him alone. The tough talking newspaper man is a stock character, yes, but this one is just a little bit different, an individual, neither a stereotype nor a plot device. The cab driver who declines the tip has his reasons. The several police officers are each individuals, some very unpleasant, some vacuous, and some well-meaning but exhausted, all different one from the others. Then there is the New York publisher who tries to do the right thing but cannot quite see what that is.
Another lesson for today. Too many, far too many krimies that I try to read now present a parade of characters who all effect the same speech patterns even when they ostensibly represent a variety of backgrounds because, I guess, the authors cannot control the language, or worse, do not perceive the similarities. Neither is a recommendation.
Bogart reading Chandler on the set of The Big Sleep, as a publicity shot.
Then of course there is Eillen Wade, or as Marlowe calls her: The Dream. The page crackles when she walks in. That one man in the room does not look at her is a sure sign to Marlowe that he is up to something.
In the six Marlowe titles we learn almost nothing about Marlowe but here, when quizzed, he says a few things about himself: born Santa Rosa, parents dead, only child, played football once…to explain some crooked teeth. So much for the backstory in a half a dozen lines. Chandler’s focus is always on the here and now. This focus keeps the story moving and also preserves Marlowe’s mystique. Contrast this spare account with the verbose backstories that derail the action, if there is any, in so many contemporary krimies. I read one recently that interrupted the action with a 100-page backstory about the protagonist, at which point I quit reading it. (No this back story did not tie into the story, of that I am sure.) It was like listening to the drunk in a bar who wants to tell whoever is there his own fascinating life story. No thanks.
If Chandler’s prose is economical, decisive, and penetrating, the dialogue is even better. Chandler had an ear for the spoken word. If the descriptions single out individuals, their talk clinches it. Superb.
One obituary of Raymond Chandler.
I have read this novel at least once, perhaps twice before, and I had a very strong recollection of one of the minor characters, Earl Wild, at the ranch. I anticipated his appearance and he did not let me down, but I was surprised, given the memory I had of him, how brief is his appearance on the page. Very brief. Likewise, I remembered though not as vividly the T. S. Eliot quoting chauffeur Amos in the last few pages, Chandler’s riff on pretentious literature.
The central character in the book is Chandler’s alter ego Roger Wade who, like Chandler, is a genre writer whose work sells, for reasons he cannot fathom, but that wins him no respect as an author. When Wade hits the bottom of the bottle, a frequent occurrence, he spouts self-indulgent nonsense and feels sorry for himself with great eloquence and energy. Wade is Chandler in all respects.
When Chandler wrote this book, we now know, his own wife was dying of cancer and he spent many nights and days with her at the hospital, and turned to the typewriter to escape that reality. One biographer speculates that the book is as long as it is because its composition coincided with her agonising death. A morbid thought, but it explains the mood swings and oscillating character of Roger who is also bearing a different kind of burden from his wife, she being The Dream, as above, or as Linda Loring calls her, ‘the Golden Icicle.’
No review is complete without a barb. Chandler does not manage quite as well with the rich and obnoxious characters, like Harlan Potter or Dr. Edward Loring in this book. Both are at the cardboard end of the continuum. There to be hissed at and booed. Nor is Linda Loring quite right, either, though for different reasons. I never did form a clear impression of her. The backstory of Lennox, Mendy Menendez, and Randy Starr just does not compute.
The book has a foreword, well I guess it is that, but the publisher coyly does not call it that, instead titling it ‘Jeffrey Deaver on “The Long Good-bye”.’ The real mystery is why the publisher bothered to include it. Is the hope that Deaver’s readers will, Pavlov-like, follow him to purchase and read Chandler, or simply to squeeze some more work out of Deaver’s contract? If the former, it is a well-kept secret since it is not trumpeted on the cover (see above) to lure in those Pavlovian readers. If it is the latter, it is a wash-out. Deaver’s remarks are few, banal, and trivial, as well as factually incorrect when he writes that the story takes Marlowe to Mexico. Not so. Marlowe goes no further than Dr Verringer’s ranch in Los Angeles county. Deaver’s main reference to the text is the opening lines, perhaps he got no further. He also says Chandler’s prose is like Hemingway’s. Yes, he does! Staccato. That is Hemingway. Short and sharp. To the point. One point is one sentence. Subject, verb, and object. End. If it has to be said, Chandler’s prose is not like Hemingway’s. Really, Jeffrey!
In 1954 the ‘New York Times’ reviewer, Anthony Boucher, said it was the best of the best, and Chandler’s peers voted it an Edgar award. Boucher also remarks that this novel has a strong theme of social criticism about the society and situation that produces these crimes with less of the sardonic resignation of some of the earlier Marlowe novels.
It took Hollywood twenty years to get around to it, and then to make a hash of it. Nuf said on that subject.
This publisher changed Chandler’s ‘tires’ to ‘tyres’ but stuck with ‘z’ in ‘organize’ and ‘finalize.‘ At least once a ‘he’ appears where it should be a ‘she’ and elsewhere we have ‘ice’ for ‘eyes.’
One question I always ask the inner Elmore Leonard at the end of a novel is, ‘Could I edit it down in length?’ In this case, if I worked at it I would cut and shorten a few scenes and reduce by, say, half-a-page. It all adds up, even Roger’s drunken ravings, tedious though they are to read.

I came across Jacques Barzun’s ‘Catalogue of Crime’ (1989) and spent several evenings flipping through it, reading the 50-100 word reviews, each a model of composition, trenchant, clear, and definitive. I searched for reviews praising unfamiliar writers to broaden my horizons,  but also came across golden oldies like Raymond Chandler. Of Chandler’s ‘The Lady in the Lake,’ Barzun wrote…..
‘The exposition of the situation and character is done with remarkable pace and skill, even for Chandler. This superb  tale moves through a maze of puzzles and disclosures to its perfect conclusion. Marlowe makes a greater use of physical clues and ratiocination in this exploit than in any other. It is Chandler’s masterpiece.’
High praise indeed, the more so considering the source. If you don’t know Jack, it is time you did. Try Wikipedia for a start.
After reading the ‘Black-Eyed Blonde,’ reviewed elsewhere on this blog, I recalled this praise and decided to re-new acquaintance with it. I tried to find it as an audio book while travelling, but that did not work out, and that, too, is explained in another post. When I got back to the Ack-Comedy, while shelving the 18 kilograms of travel reading I came across the very book: ‘The Lady in the Lake’ in a 1971 printing from Canada which I must have purchased for .95 cents in graduate school penury. The back cover is long gone and the front cover is torn, but all the pages are still there with all the words.

Wow! What a trip. What an arrival. I was pretty sure I remembered the plot, and who done it, but even so there were twists and turns that surprised me. In fact, at one point toward the end I began to doubt my recollection. It did not seem to be developing as I remembered…. But then it did, after another turn and twist or two.
And what a cast of characters: Almore, the needle doctor; the icy Miss Fromsett; laconic Jim Patton who saves Marlowe’s bacon; Lavary, the oily lady’s man one time too many; huffing and puffing Kingsley; and Lieutenant Degarmo, who, in the end, was a cop; demoralized Captain Webber; malevolent Mildred; the hollowed out Graysons; the illusive Mrs Fallbrook; Bill Chess, the crippled war veteran; and more.
The strength of this title is that cast of characters. As in a Frank Capra movie, all the supporting actors are given their due. Each gets camera time; none is reduced to plot device, not even the very dim Bay City patrolmen. No two sound alike. The voices are all distinct. Although there are descriptive passages, they are largely just that without the sardonic metaphors, similes, and comparisons that Chandler could do like no one else.
I stress that ‘no two sounded alike’ because in more than one krimie an ostensibly diverse set of characters all use the same speech mannerisms, idioms, and syntax. When this happens the characters blend and I suspect that the author is unaware that these are distinctive mannerisms, idioms, and syntax. I refrain from mentioning the names of offenders. It is on par with those very tired clichės about ‘climbing’ into bed. The last bed I climbed into was a upper bunk bed on a sleepover as a child. No bed since then has needed climbing either into or out of. Yes, this is another pet peeve.
There is a 1947 film, starring Robert Montgomery as Marlowe. It takes far too many liberties with the novel, but evidently with Chandler’s approval.
Back to the ‘The Lady in the Lake,’ I have to admit that there were some dead spots. The most significant is the motivation of Mildred in the first murder of Mrs. Florence Almore. I never did quite get that. Moreover, it made no sense to me that Talley was there at the time to steal the shoe. But once done that set the ball rolling. There were a few passages that fell flat and some references that went over my head, e.g., ‘cheese glasses’ (p. 30), as in drinking glasses; ‘This is dum if I know whether I could or not’ (p.61); ‘those moustaches that get stuck under your fingernail’ (p. 187); and, the decor was ‘ashes of roses’ (p. 192). What colour is that? Cheese glasses? A moustache under a fingernail? Dum? You lost me, Ray.

Good Reads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.51 by 3,483 litizens.

Genre: Krimi: Species: Sunshine Noir.

Verdict: Brilliant, in a word. * * * * More, please!

Never thought I would say that a Chandler imitator bettered the master, but here it is. This is Philip Marlowe in the California sunshine of 1947 and he is in top form! This novel might as well be a lost manuscript of Chandler’s come to light, such a ring of the master does it have.

Every page crackles with sharp asides, deadpan dialogue, and show stopping imagery. Here is a sampler.

‘The telephone on the desk has the air of something that knows it is being watched.’

‘I was about to use my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me, I’m-a-private-detective voice’ but she didn’t wait for it.

‘…there was someone else, and now I knew who it was. I’d known for some time, I suppose, but you can know something and at the same time, not know it. It’s one of the things that help us put up with our lot life…’

‘That’s a possibility I’d rather not have entertained. But once you think a thing, it stays thought.’

He had such an easy charm ‘you’d find yourself inquiring if he was all right and saying you hoped he hadn’t strained his wrist by having to keep that heavy-looking gun trained on you…’

‘The mist clung to my face like a wet scarf.’

‘My eyes felt like they had been lightly roasted in front of an open fire.’

‘I saw him walking down the street the other day and he didn’t look dead at all.’

‘I’m the hired help, but you’re talking to me like someone you’ve known all your life, or someone you’d like to know for the rest it. What gives?’

‘I stand at the window a lot contemplating the world and its ways.’

‘I don’t know your name,’ I said. ‘No you don’t…do you,’ she replied.

‘I was thinking about this and that, this being Clare Cavendish, and that being Clare Cavendish too.’

‘Of course I’d come. I would have gone to her if she had been calling from the dark side of the moon.’ [Amen!]

In context, each of these passages hits the mark! Marlowe smokes too much, drinks too much, pays too little attention to money, and hangs on like a bulldog. It just does not add up, so he keeps going until it does, add up.

The ride includes a coshing or two, a pistol whipping, rape, torture, four murders, and a suicide. Though most of the mayhem occurs off camera, Midsomer’s got nothing on this body count.

The femme fatale is very femme and very fatale, spy beautiful, as Chandler wrote of another of her kind. But also, at times, blushing and shy. Marlowe has a hard time squaring that circle. At the end, so does the reader.

Her mother steals the show at one point, she a self-made woman in the perfume business and mother of this Aphrodite is not at all what Marlowe expected when summoned. No airs, no graces, no manners, and no nonsense!
Though Marlowe is unaccountably slow witted about finding the missing man’s sister. In fact she finds him. He asked doormen, gardeners, and drivers about the missing man but not the sister. Go figure. Maybe it is a ploy; play hard to get she’ll come to you.

The gimlet was a give away to the cognoscenti.
Benjamin Black (John Banville)

Not at all sure why anything would be called Liberace in 1947. The man took that name in 1950 and was by no means well known at the time. The casual reference to a Rolex watch jarred in 1947, long before it became a status symbol for the idle rich. Marlowe is surprisingly incurious about the femme fatale’s brother. Ditto a reference to Air Canada flying direct LA to Toronto, Wikipedia says Trans-Canada Airlines took the name Air Canada only in 1965. That part was easy to check. More than 2,000 miles for a 1947 aircraft. OK the date is not specified.

By the way that title has been used before with a different meaning.

A Canadian krimie from the Sunshine coast of British Columbia on the eastern shore of the Strait of Georgia and just northwest of Vancouver, though populous and favoured by tourists, it can only be reached by ferry. Ergo it is somewhat remote.

Because of the mild climate, it is also favoured by retirees. In this story two brothers-in-law figure, both in their 80s. After a lifetime of putting up with each other, one kills the other. Ah, all those family Thanksgivings and Christmases are enough to drive anyone to extremes. Though here the palette is darker still. The deed is done.
The perpetrator prepares to face the police, but when the Mounties come to get their man, they ignore this frail old man in favour of suspicious types who may have been seen around. That is a nice set up. Once he has been passed over, the perpetrator decides to let it be. He does not blurt out the confession he had rehearsed but goes coy and vague. That of course, in time, makes the Mountie, Karl Alberg, who sticks with the case, suspicious.
Alberg finds the time to romance the local librarian, Cassandra, but neither of them seems very good at romance. The villain is a library user and their paths cross.
Along the way we find out more about the Mountie, who never wears the uniform, and the librarian, and Gibsons, the town. There is much gardening, I suppose because it rains so much there, as in Rain City, Vancouver.
I am not whether this is part of series. Nothing is said on the cover.
L. R. Wright
L.R. Wright has a number of titles, and perhaps I will try another.

While travelling I went looking for Chandler’s ‘The Lady in the Lake’ on Audible to test Jacques Barzun contention that it is the best of Chandler’s many good novels, but all I could find was a cut down dramatised version. I did listen to that and it had the essence of the plot but not enough of the prose. I also noticed ‘The Killer in the Rain’ and took it, too. This was a reading not an enactment.
‘The Killer in the Rain’ is a collection of early short stories by Chandler which, in this version, includes:
‘Killer in the Rain’
‘Goldfish’
‘Finger Man’
‘The Curtain’
Having read the complete Chandler oeuvre, I have read these stories but have not thought of them for years. Time to re-new our acquaintance.

 
Two things emerged. First, I heard characters, incidents, events, situations that Chandler re-worked later in his novels. It was interesting to realise that good as the stories were, they were improved when he re-worked them into the novels. Though there also people and events in the stories that did not make it to the novels, some pretty arresting ones, especially those goldfish and the small woman with the big gun.
Second, Elliot Gould was all wrong for this assignment. He just does not sound like California. He lacks the laconic sunshine in his voice of, say, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, or Powers Boothe, all of whom have had a turn at Marlowe. Yes, I know Humphrey Bogart was also a New Yorker but he did not sound it the way Gould does.  Now perhaps it is because I know who Gould is that I say that.  But while I am saying it I will add that he sounds like a New Yorker.  
His diction is perfect; he does well in distinguishing the voices of all the characters, yet I quibble.  
There is more, perhaps I was also distracted because I know why he got the assignment.  He played Marlow in a Robert Altman film ‘The Long Goodbye’ in 1973 derived from Chandler’s novel of the same name. And that is my point, because that film was a parody of Marlowe. Its expressed purpose was to show how inept and unsuited such a figure as Marlowe was in the real word of crime and corruption.
To return to my theme. Gould’s claim to the job is that he was the anti-Marlowe. That niggled me, too. That made two strikes against it. I cringed at his New York voice and I just knew he had no sympathy for the character he was projecting. Had he any sympathy he would never have done the Altman film!
There are dozens of alternatives to listen to on my iPhone but I stuck out ‘The Killer in the Rain’ to the end. Why? Chandler’s prose.
Raymond Chandler
That man could turn a phrase, spin a metaphor, bite off a line, all in the warm California sunshine he could present a very dark, very black world.
The bad news is that Gould is the reader for most of the Chandler titles on Audible.
I discovered Audible Books with my first smartphone, a Samsung, and liked the idea. At that time I walked the honourable dog several mornings a week and sometimes in the afternoon, too. Kate and I were both working and we took turns.  When on dog walking duty I listened to talking books.
I was familiar with talking books on CDs and had listened to many on drives in the States, including much Marcel Proust. Those titles were all books that had been produced for voice. With Audible I also discovered books that were only Voice Books, just as there are books that are only Electronic books, v-books and e-books.  The first v-book I heard was a freebie from Audible, that must have been the business model to lure in customers, about letters to Sherlock Holmes’s address. It was a nice idea for a set up. I joined Audible and continue to subscribe.

A Swedish krimie in a series featuring the insightful Inspector Irene Huss. These are police procedurals of a high order. This is the second Huss novel I have read. Evidence is compiled and interpreted, witnesses are questioned repeatedly, and finally Huss sees something in it. The locale is well realised, as are the manners and morēs of contemporary Sweden in Göteborg, along with the weather.

This story revolves around arson and spans 15 years. Huss makes several mistakes but admits it and continues. She has grit, that is for sure. The Fire Dance of the title is very nicely done and makes sense. 
Huss, when not pursing murderers, copes with two teenage daughters who are fast outgrowing her influence. Her husband works as many nights as she does and that makes things difficult, despite the abundant good will of all parties. He is a chef in a restaurant.
That is the molasses, and here is the vinegar. 
There are far too many distractions, most of which do not develop either plot or character. There are repeated descriptions of rooms and clothes that contribute zero to the story. Yet in contrast, Angelika, a principal character, is left practically a cartoon figure there to be stupid, vain, and just get in the way, not a human being at all, but an annoying plot device.
In reality police work on many cases at once, true, but in this novel there is a second plot that occupies a quarter of the book and contributes nothing to the main story line. Art must reflect life, yes, but it need not repeat it word-for-word. 
If the superfluous description were substantially reduced and the secondary plot truncated to an aside the book would shed 100 pages, and increase the likelihood that a reader will finish it.  When an author spends so much space on descriptions and the secondary plot, readers begin to think that they somehow will play into the resolution.  That is the contract between krimie writers and krimie readers: If it is there, then it is relevant in the end.  Not so here. This contract goes double for procedurals which this title certainly is.
Huss’s home life is well handled but there is just too much of it. The husband’s collapse seems contrived and is wholly irrelevant. Yes, I know, life is like that, but this book is not life, it is art.
Finally, I just did not get the motivation of the villain.  It did not register, just voilà, he did it. Why? 
I felt very early that Huss jumped to the conclusion without any evidence that the victim had been held prisoner, when, especially given how strange the victim was, she just might have gone off on her own. Of course that is what happened but it seemed like Huss had read the book and knew the future! Equally, the initial description of the victim as icy and remote does not payoff. It is there, it seems significant, it is well written, and, it is irrelevant.

Commissario Guido Brunetti remains in top form. Age has not wearied Donna Leon. The prose is crisp, the place evoked, the people differentiated, the ear for dialogue is pitch perfect, including that all important element of many conversations — what is not said. 

This adventure takes Brunetti into the world of rare books when thefts from a specialist library come to light. To understand better this strange new world he seeks advice from friends of friends and others among the many strata and castes of contemporary Venice. Though the impact of tourism is mentioned Leon does not, in this book, dwell on it, perhaps remembering that those tourist dollars keep Venice afloat on its lagoon, much more so that any support from the government in distant Rome. 
Brunetti’s home life is evident but treated with a light and sure touch. Though we learn about some of his meals, the pitiless descriptions that populate some, many tiresome krimies is avoided. Likewise she seldom if ever describes clothing or even people. The exceptions to this lack of description are well judged to bring out a person’s character, not an automatic gurgitation to fill space that is so common in lesser works.
Once again, as often the case, Signorina Elettra finds out anything and everything about others, and gives nothing away about herself. Her private networks are more extensive and efficient than the police files. In addition, her hobby seems to be computer hacking. Some receptionist, she. 
That is the molasses, now for a touch of vinegar. The book suffers from the Foyle Syndrome, though not so pronounced as in some of her other titles in the series. The Foyle Syndrome? It is so named for Christopher Foyle of the eponymous television series. Over the years the lazy script writers for Foyle relied on plots in which Foyle alone is virtuous, unsullied, uncompromised, the only, the last just man in a completely corrupt world. Regular as commercials on television and just as repetitive, Foyle would show in each episode that his superiors and associates were all villains themselves, along with the target villain. His superiors and associates lied, cheated, stole, blackmailed, murdered as much as the target villains. Whew! 
Lacking in imagination, the writers evidently could think of no other way to emphasise Foyle than to contrast his white purity with the black hearts of ALL those around him.  One day, no doubt the writers will turn on Sam, his loyal driver, and reveal….   Well, something bad.  
I stopped watching Foyle, as I do not find saints quite as interesting to watch as the scriptwriters find it easy to write them.  Foyle’s sermons at the end were just too much. Agatha Christie novels are much more subtle than this.
There is a touch of this syndrome in all of Leon’s books, but it does not distract here. Comments on the general greed, corruption, and incompetence of Italy and Italians are matter of fact, like comments on the weather. The proximate embodiments of all that are his superior Patta and Patta’s attack dog, Lieutenant Scarpa. These two are ciphers at best, more plot devices to inject some tension into the proceedings.
Donna Leon

The novel offers very good sense of place in India, namely Goa and some of Bombay, too, evidently before it became again Mumbai. The two protagonists are an Anglo-Indian lawyer and his de facto wife. an American working for the ‘Times of India.’ I found neither of interest on any level but not ciphers.

The novel is an unremitting tale of corruption. All India and all Indians are corrupt, and the foreigners who come to India are either fools or even bigger villains than the Indians. All rather one-note, repeated on nearly every second of the 400 pages.
Having said that, the characterisations are vivid and the plot is ingenious, if disgusting. Against impossible odds our heroes prevail by turning the villains against each other. 
Goa is circled in red.
That the molasses here is the vinegar.There is 100 pages too much description of what every character wore each time he or she is seen, what is eaten for each meal by our heroes. There are rich descriptions of street scenes, one after another, till they all blend. No doubt life is like that but reading about it should not be. A reader will suppose at the start that somehow it all contributes to the plot but quickly tires of following it all, and then one, well, this one, realised it is window dressing, like sprigs of curly parsley on the plate. Conclusion? Best to skim and turn the pages quickly.  
Second in a series but I see no reason to persevere. Too many other good books to read.
Inside this fat book of 400 pages an editor like Elmore Leonard or Stephem King could cut out a good 200 page book that would read itself.  
Machiavelli is mentioned. ‘As the philosopher Chanakya, adviser to Mauryan Kings, had declared two thousand years before Machiavelli, the exercise of morality and the exercise of statecraft were separate arts.’   This is a reminder of Richard Christie’s account of the development of MACH IV personality scale which has preoccupied me for some time.
Paul Mann

Set in that wine capital in the period May – September 1940 when the world fell in on France.

In April 1940 in far away Bordeaux everyone laughed at the Phoney War and by September 1940 Jews went into hiding, tobacco went into the black market, jackboots were heard everyday and night, and an air of foreboding enveloped one and all. The night creatures emerged, thugs, hooligans, bullies, chancers, and their ilk. Decent people hid away as much as possible.

Bordeaux was in Occupied France and as a sea port it was especially occupied to keep people in as much as out, but it was administered by the French government that took up residence in Vichy.
The longstanding practice of posting newly promoted police officers away from home, the better to ensure their impartiality, meant that the Police Judiciare in Bordeaux had Alsatians who are half-German and half-French. Aside: The movement of the border in Alsace meant that in World War I Robert Schumann, later a French foreign minister, was conscripted into the German army and in World War II the French army, experiences that made him a life long proponent of European union. Back to the story.
The Gendarmes find a mutilated body and Inspector Jean Lannes arrives to investigate. There are too few threads to follow, and then too many. Political interference adds to the complications. Those problems fade into insignificance with the Defeat and the Capitulation in June 1940 and the subsequent arrival of the Germans. Yet Lannes continues to probe and push. His offsider Moncerre is a pit-bull on a chain, and Lannes has to restrain him at time. ‘Not now, Mon Brave. Our time will come. Be patient.’
This is the first of a trilogy and the case remains open at the end. The book is well written and includes Lannes’s home life, his fears for his children, his wife’s perseverance in the face of the unknown, the mixed attitudes of the Alsatians, the plight of Jews, the Stoicism of many, and the naked opportunism of others .…. All rendered in clear prose.
Allan Massie
Though it perhaps lacks the stifling atmosphere, and mastery of period detail, that Robert Janes conjures in the same period, it is much easier to read and follow than Janes’s cryptic prose, fractured syntax, and loose grammar.
I particularly liked Lannes instinctive response when on an official visit to Vichy he saw Maréchal Pétain walking in a public garden: Verdun. Respect. Salute. One old soldier pays tribute to another. Lannes has no taste for collaboration and sees no honour in defeat, but Pétain has more claim to respect than so many others.
Pedant’s note. The Vichy regime had administrative responsibility for the whole of France including the Occupied Zone and Paris. The reality of that attenuated with time and tide, but in the first days it was real.
Hitler’s New Order of Europe and in parallel Pétain’s National Revolution seemed credible in that time and place. The war was all but over. England would either succumb or make peace to save itself now that it no longer had French allies to die for it. The Third Republic and the French Revolution that it embodied had failed miserably. Time to turn from the past to the future. The young men and women in Lannes’s social, family, and professional circles are confused, dazzled, repelled, and attracted by it all. Will they do something stupid? Dangerous? Almost certainly. But which is more stupid and more dangerous defying the new reality or complying with it?
While there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Bordeaux, street names, cafés, hotels, Spanish Republican refuges, French refuges who arrive just before the Wehrmacht, the two most noteworthy events to happen in Bordeaux in the period the book covers are passed in silence. The first is the Dunkirk evacuation and the second is the arrival of the French government of Paul Reynaud from Paris. Let me explain.
Though distant Dunkirk is mentioned nothing more is said. Yet of the 350,000 soldiers evacuated from the Pas de Calais more than 100,000 were French. The war was still on and upon arrival in England they were put on trains and transported to Bristol, Swansea, and other ports where they were shipped to Bordeaux, on the assumption that the war would go on. All of this was done in a few days. They had no gear or weapons and the chain of command was gone, but they were able-bodied young men with military discipline and combat experience. I am not sure what happened to them in Bordeaux. I expect the malaise of defeat made it impossible for anything constructive to be done. Still the influx of 100,000 men with no shelter, food, etc. would surely have been remarkable.
Second, the Reynaud government declared Paris an open city in the hope that the Germans would not then bomb or shell it. That worked. It went on the road and stopped once or twice along the way before arriving in Bordeaux where it held its last meetings before it dissipated.