Category: Krimi

First things first, Agatha Christie is the Nile River of murder mysteries. Her flood of stories has enriched the soil for others, imitators, rivals, critics, competitors, parodists, and those who try their own hand. Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, and most of all, the one and the only Hercule Poirot.
Agatha Christie, who said the secret to getting ahead is getting started. Amen!
Poirot revivus! He died in ‘Curtin’ published in 1975 but written thirty (30) years earlier and cached.
The Christie family has guarded her heritage with care. No cheap knock-offs, no tee-shirts, or coffee mugs, no theme tours of St Mary Mead.
Only occasionally have the Christies permitted films based on the novels, and according to the scuttlebutt amongst us krimieologists, the family has not been pleased by some of the movies. Ergo the exacting standards the Christies asserted for the Davis Suchet television series, and we viewers are grateful for the meticulous attention to every last detail, which is just what Poirot himself would do. As he says in this tribute volume, no detail is too small to be important. Only when seen in the proper context can the importance of a detail be determined. Order and method, that is the Poirot way.
This title is a Christie-inheritors approved work that is set in the London of 1928. There is neither war nor depression, yet. Money flow freely.

This Poirot is certainly Poirot. He is meticulous, scrupulous, fastidious, observant, perspecatious, easily irked and rather irksome himself. The little mustachios seem to twitch at times. The grey cells are evoked. But more important is the inner man who is compassionate and who detests the evil we do to each other without quite detesting the evildoer, or at least not in all cases.
Each character is well etched and distinguished, though I missed Captain Hastings, here replaced by a fledging police officer name Catchpool. Fee in the coffee shop is a winner and I am sure most readers want to hear more from her. Even Poirot is moved to remark on both her powers of observation and grasp of context, if lacking his unrivalled mastery, as he avers.
There is much to like in the book. If I have to make a criticism I would say that I found the repetitive dialogue as each character tells the story, and some of them tell it twice, and Poirot re-tells it again and again, tedious. We need more movement and activity. The author seems, however, to prefer talk, talk, talk, and more talk. All too much like a David Mamet play where the characters talk each other to distraction and the audience to sleep.
The plot, of course, is convoluted but that is to be expected, though why anyone would try to outsmart Hercule defies belief. Does not everyone know by now that he is world’s greatest detective and is never ever wrong! He certainly does his part to spread the word. However, the plot did not quite deliver the goods. There was a lot more trip than arrival, despite the many repetitions. Perhaps that is a quibble. But the monogram seems to have been there just to confuse things at the beginning, and some of Poirot’s revelations would have been trumped by police post-mortems if the wet-behind-the-ears Catchpool had followed procedure as per many other Agatha Christie stories.
Blue herrings there were a few, and some were never resolved on my reading. Rafal and that laundry cart in the front lobby is made much of when it occurs and referred to again at least once as a lead, and then never mentioned again though Rafal reappears. What did I miss? The hotel manager is such a larger than life character for the first half of the book and then all but disappears. When a character is given so much attention, the reader concludes that the character figures in the plot and is not just wallpaper.
There is an accompanying web site with some mini-videos of the books characters and episodes. Although the ones I watched did not jibe with the novel, so I stopped.
Overall, it is very good to see that Hercule Poirot is back among the crimefighters. Thanks to all involved in the resuscitation.
Sophie Hannah
Sophie Hannah has a long list of titles and I will certainly make a note to try one of them.

Maigret did not leap full grown from Simenon’s brow, as Athena did from Zeus. No, he developed overtime. This is one of the early titles.
It is high summer and Maigret wanders around, seemingly with few responsibilities. Madame (Louise) Maigret has gone away for the summer to visit her sister in Alsace, and in her absence he haunts restaurants and bars, and falls in with the crowd at the ‘Two-Penny Bar’ along the Seine in the Ile de France. When a crime occurs under his nose, he muses quite a bit and asks a few questions, but keeps drinking with the crowd, whose members do not seem to mind having a police officer in their midst.

His rapport with the English ex-patriot James is engaging. James keeps popping up and it is evident that he is part of the plot, despite his detached manner.

The sketches of summer heat and blinding light along the Seine make a reader feel warm.

Madame Maigret is, as ever, patient, and long-suffering in silence.
The published title in 1932 as ‘La Guinguette à deux sous’, it was translated into an English edition years ago as ‘The Bar on the Seine.’ A ‘guinguette’ is a small, rustic bar with music and dancing, often to be found in the countryside. Perhaps the equivalent English term is a tavern – nothing fancy and not much in the way of food. ‘Roadhouse’ might also apply.

In the French ‘deux sous’: one ‘sou’ + one ‘sou’ = two sous.’ There were 100 ‘sous’ in a franc in those days. A ‘sou’ bought very little, even in 1932. Hence the idiom, not worth a sou (‘ne vault pas un sou’).

For reasons best known to the translator, and I suspect even better known to the publisher, it has been rendered as ‘two-penny.’ Yet later we read of francs. How many pennies to a franc, one wonders.

‘Two-penny’ is not an English idiom, per my web investigation. It seems to be idiosyncratic, fabricated for this title. That is bound to communicate to the reader, eh!

Why do I emphasise this usage by devoting space to it? Because the justification proudly displayed on the Penguin web site for these new translations of the Maigret books that it is marketing is to offer more literal, more authentic translations closer to the original. We can be pretty sure no one along the Seine in 1932 was paying with pennies. One may also wonder about the business sense of deprecating one’s own previous products, too, because after all Penguin editors commissioned and published those earlier translations. If they were as bad as now claimed, does that not undermine confidence in the present crop? Well it does when pennies go into francs. What will future editors at Penguin say about these translations?

I am equally dubious about the woman’s bathing suit that graces the cover of the copy I have. I rather doubt it was worn in 1932. Most swim-ware at the time would have been made of wool, I suspect, and have likely been more modest than the red number on the cover. ‘Fuzzylizzie swimwear’ confirms my hunch.

A krimie set in the heart of Vichy administration in February 1943, a bitter winter in a France without coal, food, oil, wool, or much else. Having just read Robert Paxton’s study ‘Vichy France 1940-1944’ I thought to re-read this title which features some of the historical characters mixed with imagination.

This is the an entry in a long running series featuring Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté Nationale and Hermann Köhler of the Geheime Staatspolizei, Gestapo. This odd couple are assigned the most sensitive investigations by either German Occupation or Vichy authorities throughout France after the Defeat (16 June 1940).
It was a France dismembered and divided. Germany annexed Alsace and made Lorraine a special administrative unit an inch short of annexation. The coal and steel producing Nord around Lille was administered from Brussels by Germans. Italians occupied Nice, Corsica, and the Savoy. Finally there was Zone Occupée, the north and west coasts defined as operational areas. Each one of these divisions and dismemberments produced a boundary with checkpoints and rules of exclusion.
That occupation broke the chain of command that had held previously in nearly all of its far-flung colonies and throughout much of the French armed forces, but when the Germans disarmed and dismissed Vichy’s Armistice Army in November 1942, the chain of command broke for military men, too. Many of them now felt free to follow their personal convictions and joined France Libre, especially those in North Africa who had ready access.
To illustrate the internal border controls mentioned above, only 250 letters a day were allowed to pass from the Zone Libre (Vichy) to the Zone Occupée. That is a post of 250 between 40 million people! So strictly was the border between Vichy and Occupied France imposed that even Maréchel Pétain was not permitted to cross it to enter Paris for years. No mail at all was allowed to some amputated parts like Alsace.
By February 1943 the Vichy Regime no longer had a purpose, at least not a French purpose. The Germans continued the fiction because even this hand-puppet government retained enough legitimacy to keep some of the population quiet.
The Vichy establishment had until that November been a Ruritania amid the luxury hotels, the Majestic, Palais, Grand, Prince, and d’Enghien. School desks were set up in the hallways for clerks. Ministerial offices were in suites. Down stairs the thugs from the Garde Mobile provided security, many of them released from pre-war penal sentences.
Prime Minister Laval, the dark prince of Vichy, and President Phillipe Pétain, the figurehead, hated one another. Laval thought Pétain a relic, paralysed by the past, and more interested in breakfast than high politics. Pétain called Laval a peasant, one who blew cigar smoke in his face time and again, preferring as prime minister the austere Darlan or toadying Flandin. Pétain and Laval each plotted the other’s downfall. Laval had traversed the Third Republic, from a Socialist, to a Radical, had been foreign minister, had been prime minister, and came from the Auvergne (Vichy) where he owned a newspaper and radio station. Laval’s powers of self-delusion were so great that he continued to believe in the final victory of German even late in 1944 when most of France had been liberated by the Allies.
It is this same Laval who asks for the service of St-Cyr and Köhler when a young woman is found stabbed to death in the foyer of the long-closed Hall des Sources, the hot springs. This sybarite kingdom was closed in June 1940 and stayed closed since. When St-Cy and Köhler arrive, at 2 a.m., having been summoned from elsewhere, the heat has been off in the Hall for two years and it is freezing outside, yet the hot springs beneath impart warmth to parts of the building, steam vents from pipes broken and not repaired, wherein there is no electricity. As they move about with lanterns, the building seems to breath and even move when images are reflected in the many mirrors , frosted windows, and dull but polished surfaces. Very nicely done.
One such spa
St-Cyr has an empathy that allows him nearly to communicate with the dead. He studies the corpse, ear rings, clothing, shoes, feet, hands trying to infer the events the that brought the victim through the snow outside to her death in the locked and abandoned building. Köhler takes a more empirical approach, looking for a lost earring, a boot mark on the base of a counter, recent chip in a beveled edge. The two detectives combine the metaphysical and physical worlds.
Each man served in World War I at Verdun where each was wounded. Both now in the 50s both are too old for military service. Each has been a policing since 1919, and they first met at a police congress in Vienna twenty plus years before. When Köhler was made a one-man flying squad for France, he asked for a French offsider and asked for St-Cyr by name. St-Cyr learned German with his Alsatian relatives, while Köhler learned French in a prisoner of war camp.
Köhler is not a loyal Nazi, still less now that both his sons were killed on the Russian front and his wife left him in the aftermath. St-Cyr sees in Vichy elite many of the embezzlers, opportunists, thugs, and chancers he used to jail. That he works with the Germans, makes him a collabo to many Frenchmen. His wife and child were killed in a bomb blast perhaps meant for him by one of the many factions of the Resistance. ‘Collabo’ is collaborator.
The most venomous French collaborators were the intellectuals in Paris, not the officials and bureaucrats in Vichy, apart from the very top ranks. The collabo Parisienne intellectuals, journalists, academics poured venom on Vichy for its trepidation, its hesitations, its half-hearted pursuit of Jews, its failure to seek out spies in its midst, and so on and on. No exaggeration was enough. No cause too trivial to unleash a torrent of bile. Whoops! Starting to sound like Fox News or The Australian newspaper.
What does the title ‘Flykiller’ mean? Good question! Go to the head of the class. That very question is asked in the book, but not answered. ‘Tue-mouches’ is a code name used by Prime Minister Pierre Laval. In an end note it seems ‘Tue-mouches’ was the code name for Jean Schellnenberger, arrested, tortured, and shot by the Milice in Dijon in 1942.
It is a complicated story with wheels within wheels and more, but finally satisfying. Many blue herrings are followed. A gallery of innocent and guilty ones are reviewed to find the culprit, the Flykiller. The period and place details is credible as is the language. But having said that Jane taxes the reader a lot by seldom clearly signaling who is speaking. Worse since much is thought and not said, in this time when words killed, it is sometimes not clear whose thoughts are on the page. I do wish he learned it write ‘St-Cyr thought’ or ‘Hermann said.’ It would speed my reading and comprehension.
J. Robert Janes
There are a dozen more titles in the series.
Warning! Tangent ahead:
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s (1907-1977) film ‘Le Corbeau’ (1942) is a subtle critique of life in Vichy France made for the German film company Continental in France, and passed by both the German and Vichy censors for national distribution.
Lobby card when the film was re-discovered
The ironies of life are these. In the early 1930s Clouzot worked in Germany for Continental making French version of German films. He was dismissed because he mixed with Jews and spoke against their exclusion from the film industry. He went back to France where he found getting work hard because he was perceived to be a friend of Germany. During the Occupation he found work again with the French branch of Continental making ‘Le Corbeau’ which caused him to be banned from film work from 1945-1947 because the film vilified the French. Upon release the film had been denounced by Vichy reviewers, by reviewers in Resistance newspapers, and by German reviewers, who had it withdrawn.

Henri-Georges Clouzot
He managed to offend everyone in this simple story. Doh! Clouzot’s had tuberculous and, perhaps, had not the strength to explain or defend himself, nor perhaps the inclination. When the ban was lifted he made some memorable films like ‘Quai des Orfèvres’ (1947), ‘Le salaire de peur’ (1953), ‘Les Diaboliques’ (1955). and ‘La Vérité (1960). None of these films fits neatly into a category and so he again irritated reviewers one and all. ‘Quai des Orfèvres’ is a police procedural which is also a study of life in a broken and impoverished France. It does not glorify the police officer nor condemn the villains but treats each as a fact of nature like a thunderstorm. ‘Le salaire de peur’ is an exposition of the nihilism of existential philosophy at a time when most film reviewers were in love with it. ‘Les Diaboliques’, well, these were liberated women without the rhetoric. ‘La Vérité’ is a critique of social hypocrisy among the very people who attend such films. Then there was ‘L’Enfer’, unfinished, a study of obsession though there is a documentary film about it called ‘Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “l’Enfer.”‘ Another Vichy film is ‘L’assassin habit au 21’ (1942) which reduces Vichy to a single rooming house in which one resident is a murderer but which one? It is played as a parody of the murder mystery and so was passed by censors but it irritated reviewers for its failure to conform to stereotypes.

A fine krimie by an Australian writer, this and his other books too long out of print.  This one was originally published in London as ‘Gently dust the corpse.’ Why it was changed from ‘Gently’ to ‘Softly’ is anyone’s guess.

It offers the classic setup of an group people isolated from the outside world with tensions among them, in this case at Tyson’s Bend on the Old(est) Hume Highway between Melbourne and Sydney near Mildura in the 1950s. The tensions spring from a missing lottery ticket worth £100,000. So far so ordinary.

Tyson’s Bend has a petrol pump, a general store, a pub, a school, and perhaps a population of 200.

What sets this work apart is the additional character of the dust storm that cuts cuts off Tyson’s Bend from the outside world, making driving impossible and bringing down telephone wires. While most of the townfolk shelter at home about a dozen take refuge in the pub where, thanks to a generator, the beer remains cold. These people are the syndicate that bought the lottery ticket which has won, but before they can collect the dust storm hits, hits hard, and keeps hitting.

The wind howls and cracks, the dust is invidious and insidious, getting through every crack, slit, hole, and into everything from eyes to drinks.  It just goes on and on, shaking the roof, ripping doors open, cracking windows, overturning cars, blowing detritus with force, making a walk from one house to another as dangerous and difficult as such a walk in an Antarctic winter. Even in the pub, dust swirls in the air and coats and re-coats every surface. Makeshift face masks and dark glasses are essential to venturing outside and they add to the mystery.

The dust of the Red Centre

The dust clogs and carpets everything from eye brows to clothing.  There is no escape and no relief from it. It is like a bombardment without end. The setting is marvellous and far more dramatic than comparable efforts by the dean of Australian krimie writers, Arthur Upfield. The storm is a malevolent force even greater than the murderer within the ranks, and far more destructive.

A dust storms envelops Melbourne

The characters are well defined; The nervous school teacher, the bullying policeman and his subdued wife, the simple store owner whose clever wife runs most things in town, the barman who plays the clown, the jackaroo who keeps to himself, and the two city lawyers who are trapped there.  It seems one member of the syndicate is determined to murder the other members to get the lottery ticket!

I learned a new word ‘bombilation’ (p. 180) which is very old and means to buzz. Here it refers to the incessant noise of the storm.

S. H. Courtier, school teacher by day

I read several other of Sidney Courtier’s books in the 1970s and liked them.  There a great many others, though out of print, and so not easy to come by. There is a good entry for Sidney Hobson COURTIER at AustcrimeFiction.org

This is the third entry in this long running krimie series set in contemporary Turkey. The title refers to a style of popular music that seems to parallel country and western music, and not the elaborate decorative style known as arabesque. There are fifteen novels in all and I have read four or five others.

The protagonist is Inspector Çetin Ikman and his homicide team in Istanbul. In this entry the earth moves, more than once, but only in slight tremors as Europe and Asia once again collide at the Bosporous, as one of the characters observes.
Some of the cleavages of Turkish society are mirrored in the story, West (urban, rich, and European) vs. East (rural, poor, Asian), religious (Muslim, Jew, Yezidi, Christian), social (wealthy and servant), and ethnic, too, Turks, Ottomans, Kurds, and an expatriate. The distinction between Turk and Ottoman has to do with social status but their is also an ethnic patina to it, it seems, the Ottomans are taller, lighter of skin, etc. than the Turks. The expatriate is a half-Irish doctor who likes the life in Turkey but not the way women are treated, and that is another cleavage in the story. Men go out and about, and women stay home in the kitchen.

Nadel’s krimies are guide books to Turkish society with a plot that brings together the individuals who embody these lines of demarcation. To say it that way makes them sound didactic and that is not the case. The books are lively and walks through the streets are vibrant, exotic, and sometimes frightening.
Always in the background for young men of draft age is Turkey’s continuous conflicts along the Iraq and Syrian borders and in Cyprus. These conflicts may be low level but conscripts get killed in them every day. Everyone knows this happens but the Turkish news media seldom reports these events.

In this entry Ikman is on sick leave but sitting at home doing nothing is depressing so he gradually insinuates himself into an investigation led by his subordinate, the tall, urbane, handsome, Ottoman, Mehmet Süleyman. In contrast, Ikman is short and dark, and very Turkish. Worse, Ikman is half-Albanian, a cross that he never escapes.
Barbara Nadel
Sometimes the stew is too rich for this reader. No doubt the names are all authentic but, as in those 19th Century Russian novels where everyone has three names, I found it hard to distinguish and remember all the names that come up in the early chapters. The references to the different quarters of Istanbul mean nothing to me, but I should have the wit to find a map to follow the action. Everyone smokes, more or less continuously.
Arabesque evolved, says fount Wikipedia, to interest the eye while not depicting human or animal forms, respecting Allah’s power of creation and destruction of these beings.

Baton Rouge, 1935. More Huey Long. And when he fades from the scene the lightbulb dims considerably.
When I read Wiliam Hair’s biography of Huey, reviewed elsewhere on this blog, I came across other titles related to Huey including this work of fiction. The premiss is that Huey, well aware of the Neanderthal character of many around him, and venality of others, wanted an outsider he can trust next to him. This is Nathan Heller, Chicago P.I. whom Huey earlier met on tour. The money takes Nathan to NOLA where he discovers it is NOT the Big Easy.
Collins does a good job in bringing to life an array of distinctive characters, of course, most of all Huey P. Long at the height of his ambitions and national acclaim with eyes firmly set on the 1940 presidential election. Note that year, 1935; it is the year Huey was murdered. When that happens about halfway through the novel, the energy on the page dissipates.

The first half is a ride on the Huey Long circus, as one of the bit players terms it, and the second half is Nate Heller’s succession of interviews with witnesses and retainers, which are in comparison lifeless, repetitive, and — sin for a krimie writer — boring.
By the way, there is a lot to like about the Huey shown here. His energy. His wit. His absolute rejection of anti-semitism. His spurning of the appurtenances of fascism. There is also a lot to dislike, to be sure. Domineering. Crude. Tyrannical. Careless.
There has never been a satisfactory explanation of what happened when Long was murdered, still less why it happened. The hangers-on were quick to bury him and blame the lone assassin, Dr Weiss. END OF STORY. No Warren Commission here to air everything twice over and give the conspiracy theorists fuel. But then they spontaneously combust without need of fuel. The speculation has since been continuous. Something of the range is indicated in this list.
1.Sic semper tyrannis. Dr Weiss was a public spirited citizen who had had enough.
2.Weiss had a personal motive because his father-in-law was about to be made victim by Long,
3.Weiss had a personal motive because Long was about smear the whole family with the greatest Southern curse, Negro blood somewhere up the family tree.
4.Weiss had a personal motive because Long had violated Weiss’s wife.
5.Weiss missed when he shot but the fusillade fired by Long’s simian bodyguards hit and killed Huey either directly or by ricochet.
6.There was a second gunman in the crowd who took advantage of the ruckus that Weiss made when he confronted Long to kill Huey. See (2)-(4) above.
7.Huey had crossed organised crime once too often, in his quest to finance a national campaign, and he was hit.
8.Huey had infuriated Standard Oil once too often and it acted.
The list goes on. Most accept Weiss as the agent, if not firing the fatal bullet. What Aristotle called the ‘proximate cause; but not necessarily the ‘final cause.’ (Now I know why I wrote that paper on Aristotle’s Four Causes in graduate school!)
Collins’s imagination puts a new spin on this well trodden list. Hooray!
SPOILER ALERT. Despite Long’s ambitions, there were those about him who supposed he would never make it to the White House in D.C. and his ambitions for it were undermining the flow of graft in Louisiana. The Long Machine, now well established, would work better without Long. Ergo, one of his closest, and most venal, lieutenants did it to take over the Machine and keep it focussed on graft, not on an empty national, political ambition.
This is one of a long series of krimies featuring Nathan Heller. I will read more in due course.
It is well researched to be sure, but I still wondered if car radios were as common in 1935 as implied in the text, and I wondered how one went about renting a car in New Orleans in that year.

Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa as the back notes proudly proclaim. Take that Bill ‘Cheap-Shot’ Bryson. Muscatine is near Davenport on the Father of Waters for those who know Iowa. Collins must be chained to a keyboard there, given the long list of titles on Amazon.

This is the first Maigret story published in book-form as ‘Monsieur Gallet, décédé,’ or ‘Monsieur Gallet, deceased.’ It has been published in an English translation as ‘Maigret Stonewalled,’ no doubt a marketing decision to make clear it is a Maigret title, and there is a stonewall of importance in the story.

Simenon published eleven (11), yes eleven Maigret titles in 1931! Quite extraordinary was his prolific output. He had been publishing Maigret stories for some time and some of these novels had already been published as serials in magazines and newspapers, which came together into this first tranche of Maigret novels. It did not stop there. In all there were seventy (70) plus novels and still other short stories, and there were also some Maigret novels that he published anonymously or under other names, which, by the way, have never been translated into English. Point made. He was fecund.
Georges Simenon in 1931 without a pipe!
In this story Maigret wears a bowler hat and is overweight and generally so unfit that a short run leaves him breathless and sweating for the rest of the day. His age is 45, and half of his life has been in policing. In the later novels very little is said about Maigret himself. It takes a lot of reading to find his first name. Madame Maigret appears in this title only at the end to welcome him home. It takes even more reading to unearth her first name.
He travels to Nevers and elsewhere, making several train trips back and forth, because he is a member of the Flying Squad, based in Paris, which deals with serious crimes throughout the provinces of France. It is high summer with oppressive heat. The setting is contemporary and in this 1931 France there is casual anti-Semitism, when someone is characterized as a Jew by racial qualities. The reference is casual and transitory but nonetheless there.
The novel shows Maigret’s compassion in his stubborn determination to understand Gallet. When Maigret meets Gallet he is already dead hence the title ‘Monsieur Gallet, Décédé’ as one might introduce a person,’ Mr. Smith, plumber’ or ‘Ms. Jones, judge.’ The title I thought was a play on that convention of introductions that seems to have escaped most publishers.
Maigret then sets out to find out about Gallet. What kind of man was he? What did he do? Why did he do it? How did that lead to his death? Maigret plods along, first interviewing the widow and son. If the heat is oppressive, the atmosphere created by Madame Gallet and the son is even more suffocating. They represent, in their own minds, a bygone nobility that ought not to have to speak to the likes of Maigret, and only do so to be rid of him. This is an attitude, Maigret suspects, that they extended to the deceased husband and father, who was, after all, a lowly door-to-door salesman, … or was he? That is the mystery that is slowing unwound.
Who was Émile Gallet? That proves to be the decisive question. There is a great irony in the answer that, to my mind, Simenon does not quite nail.
The provincial hotels that Maigret visits while retracing Gallet’s last days are well drawn, with their staff, attendants, and the inevitable bar and tabac, and the blinding sunshine and stifling weather of high summer. If these are the agreeable features of the novel, there are some that are less agreeable.
I found the plot contrived and unbelievable. The explanation of Monsieur Gallet’s death is so complicated and incredible as to be irrelevant to the story. Equally, boring is the convoluted explanation in the last chapters of the swap of identities. At the end the blackmail angle was left hanging, yet it had driven much of the earlier action. I was never sure if I had it right about who was doing it and why. It, too, it is not nailed. Then there is that whiff of anti-semitism.

At the outset I referred, carefully, to this as the first published book length Maigret. In the order of publication by Fayard that is clear. But other Maigret titles were written earlier, and were published in serials earlier, notably ‘Pietr-le-Letton’ or ‘Peter the Lett,’ as in from Lithuania. It all gets confusing and rests of definitions of ‘first.’
Penguin has commissioned new translation of the Maigret stories, as a means to reinvigorate the brand for a new generation of readers. So be it.

The man with no name owns a failing bookstore called ‘No Alibis’ in contemporary Belfast of Northern Ireland.

He happily buries himself in 1940 film noir, lines from which pepper the little conversation he has, and the murder mystery books that line the shelves. He is introverted, self-obsessed, hypochondriac who has every kind of phobia. He lives at home with his mother. He has no friends, never been kissed, completely inept, and frightening intense. Altogether a total loser who is going no where, very slowly. In other words, it is easy to identify with him.

Then Alison starts working in the jewellery store across the street. Using a large pair of binoculars he perves at her from this shop with what he thinks is great subtlety. In this surveillance he identifies with all those detectives on the shelves around him. 
The inquiry agent next door disappears, leaving many clients who come to the bookstore looking for him. The man with no name is drawn into some of their cases. He is a whiz at finding things through the internet and rather persuasive on the telephone where he almost seems normal.  Moreover, he has a network of subscribers to his ‘No Alibis’ e-newsletter with an array of talents, resources, and access that they can contribute to his quests. He picks some low-hanging fruit, and is quite proud of himself. Alison comes into the store, and they get acquainted. He brags to her of his detection.
It starts out as harmless fun, that is, until the first murder, then the second….  The bodies keep falling. The plot thickens. He goes into hysterical overdrive, flying off in many wrong directions at once. Alison wants to be his sidekick but he wants to quit! Murder, no way! 
A great setup and wonderful execution.  It is high octane once the action starts. The energy and irreverence rattles along with great pace.  I hope the others in the series keep it up.
This title looks self-published and it proves that such books can be very good indeed.
Colin Bateman
Bateman seems to write a book a week. He has several other serieses and stand-alone titles. I shall read on.

The sixth adventure of Ruso and Tilla, he a Roman soldier and she a native; man and wife are they. Ruso is a medical doctor with the Roman Legion in Britain, and she a midwife. Ruso continues to be puzzled by the success of his friend Valens, who is bone-idle, no better medic than Ruso, and yet always gets the best posting, the fattest contract, the richest private patients. Tilla longs to reconnect with her family, most of whom died when she was a baby. In truth, they were killed in an uprising against the Romans.

Tilla tries, not very hard, to fit in as an army wife. Ruso tries, very hard, to accept her distant relatives. Despite all good intentions, each fails and the confusion, chaos, mayhem, ensues.
Ruth Downie
The setting is the far north east of England along Hadrian’s Wall, the construction of which occupies every waking minute of the garrison that Ruso attends north of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Rumors that a murder victim’s corpse has been put into the wall spook everyone, Britons and Romans. The commanding officer’s only hope of promotion out of the bog – it rains sideways and every other way for months on end – is to meet the quota for his section of wall. He will not delay the work one hour, still less tear down what has been built to look for a body that may not be there. However, one legionnaire is missing, presumed AWOL.
Map of Hadrian’s Wall
It gets worse. A native child goes missing. The only way to quell the rumors is to find the child and account for every man woman and child in the area. Moved to action, the Roman garrison searches in the way it knows how, with whip and torch.

The locals, including Tilla’s relatives, retaliate. The spiral begins anew. Wiser heads pause to find common ground, after all it is one each: a Roman soldier and a British boy.

Though Ruso is terrified of becoming involved, because of the boy, the Britons will skin him alive or because of the body in the wall, the Legate of the garrison will crucify him, forbidding as these prospects are, he fears more Tilla’s reaction if he refuses to help her relatives, find the boy, trace the AWOL soldier or capture his murderer, and not disrupt the wall-building schedule in the rain, rain, rain. Neither the Legate, nor the mob of Britons can match Tilla for inducing action in Ruso.

At the end, the Legate is impressed by Ruso, both as a medicus and a soldier, and offers him a private contract to accompany him to Rome. A private contract is real money, not the army wage! Rome! Where the sun shines. Where the food is…not British. Where the wine is not made from… Rome where there are galleries, theatres, … Tilla hates the idea for those reasons. She prefers the rain, singing to trees, eating roots, all of which she avers are good for Ruso. Somewhere along the way they seem to have lost a horse and acquired a new born baby. We will see.

This is a superb series. Everything works. The setting is distinctive and brought to life. The characters are differentiated and substantial, none is a one-dimensional plot device. Though most of them live up to expectations, among them are some who can be surprising, as when the ramrod stiff Legate strips off his armor and kneels to talk to a decrepit old Briton man-to-man, not Roman conqueror to beaten subject. It takes Ruso longer than usual to realize what he has just seen, and even longer to figure why it happened.

There is enough medical detail to satisfy those interested but not too much to lose the momentum of the plot. A surfeit of ‘blue herrings’ (per Hercule Poirot) keeps the action going.

Best of all, though, is the marriage of Ruso and Tilla, so different and so complementary. She is quick and impetuous, he is slow and immobile. He plans ahead and she ricochets from one thing to another. She quivers with sympathy for slaves, waifs, suffering animals, trees, pregnant women, and he tries very hard not to get involved unless it is in the contract. He follows the Stoic way slowly and often silently; she laughs, cries, sings dances to the phases of the moon and whenever else the mood takes her.

She seldom lives up to her own high standards, because she cannot do everything. He seldom manages to stick to the contract. In those gaps, that is where the fun is.

This is a krimie set in Prague during the last days of the Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945. A terrible time in a terrible place, to be sure, but handled with dexterity by Pavel Kohout, a terrible time because of the death throes of the Nazi regime, and terrible place because of the coming Armageddon between that Nazi army of occupation in Czechoslovakia and the Red Army just over the hill. In addition, everyone assumes that when the Nazi grip further loosens there will be a Czech uprising.

In the midst of this Dantesque inferno a Czech police officer and a German homicide detective are assigned to apprehend a serial killer of widows. The Czech is very junior and gets the job because he speaks German, while the German is attached to the feared Gestapo though he never thinks of himself as ‘one of those beasts,’ but he finds it helpful to let others think he is. The German underestimates the Czech and the Czech misjudges the German.
There is a lot of Prague in it, and I got out our well-worn tourist map to follow some of the fro’ing-and-to’ing.
It runs to nearly 400 pages and I confess skipping yet another scene of chaos and confusion that did not seem to be moving the story along. The human dimension was of far greater interest as the two reluctant colleagues, each aware that in a few days they may be at war with each other, work together, come to trust one another, and guardedly confide in their common fears and hopes. While there are paeans to Czech nationalism, the Germans are not reduced to cardboard ‘beasts’ though some certainly were, as were some of the Czechs, including the perpetrator.
Pavel Kohout
It all makes sense in the story, and the odd couple reminded me Robert Janes’s mis-matched pair Jean-Louis St. Cyr and Hermann Kohler, the former a master of Cartesian rationality and the latter a mystic of sorts, who together police occupied Paris at about the same time but in less apocalyptic circumstances. Kohout has several other titles but I think I will move on to something else, namely a krimie set in the Belgium Congo and published in 1950.
My short lesson in Czech history while we were there in 2014 included this observation. When Woodrow Wilson created Czechoslovakia, the Czechs and Slovaks banded together to drive the Germans and Hungarians out of THEIR country. Then the Germans came back and drove out Jews, gypsies, and more, and in poured even more Germans. Then the Communists took over and drove out Germans again, along with 200,000 Czechs. Then the Red Regime decayed and the communists were driven out, though they had few places to go by then, some did go to Russia. Then the Slovaks and Czechs drove each other out of THEIR country, this, for the first time, was done peacefully. One can only wonder what the future will bring. Who next will be expelled, and how it will be done.
I have a few complaints about the translation that often renders ‘Reich’ as ‘Empire’ and refers to German military vehicles as jeeps (General Purpose, or GP, vehicles made by General Motors in Detroit) and now a closely guarded brand-name. ‘Reich’ refers to the nation, its people, its realm, its regime. The French speak of the Republic in the same way. But the curse of Naziism has rendered the ordinary use of the term ‘reich’ impossible today. Reich does not imply or entail an empire, however that is defined, any more than the French Republic does. Ergo it is mistaken hang the adjective ‘imperial’ on German functionaries in Prague, though that is done more than once. And no, the Germans did not have American jeeps nor did BMW or Mercedes make something comparable. If this is the writer’s error, it should nonetheless be corrected. This is a fine book, and such errors distract the attention of a reader.
My guess is that Picador, the English publisher, no longer employs sub-editors who might notice these things, preferring computer power to brain power.