Category: Krimi

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.

Another fine instalment in this long-running series that has a little bit of everything, including the start of Pel’s devotion to Yorkshire Pudding. Pel is mainly puzzled by smoking a pipe, something he hoped would impress the widow Madame Geneviève Faivre-Perret, since he thinks it very English to smoke a pipe, and she, he is told, likes things English and smoking a pipe will not only impress her, it will cut down on the killer cigerettes he smokes. That is the theory; the practice is quite something else à la Monsieur Hulot.

What starts out as a traffic accident soon embroils Pel in art theft, murder, fraud, and espionage. He is shaken to realize Frenchmen are willing and able to sellout the country and, consequently, all the more determined to bang them into the slammer très vite, too, Mon Brave!
De Troq, not yet on the team, puts in a brief appearance. Misset as usual blows it. Judge Polovari saves Pel’s hide, while Judge Brisard nearly drives him bats.
The plot involves the Tour de France, and offers Pel many chances to comment on the idiocy of riding bicycles up mountains in the rain! It is an ingenious idea, by the way. Only Pel sees the bigger picture while each of his detectives, apart from Misset, sees only a portion. Misset sees nothing, par for the course.
Pel’s courtship of Madame Faivre-Perret remains in abeyance. She is away and he is uncertain. In fact, he almost approaches another women only to discover, well Sergeant Nosjean discovers it…. and not a moment too soon!

The first is a long running series set in the fictitious Wind River Reservation of Arapahos in Wyoming today, that is, the middle 1990s. The protagnoist is Father John O’Malley with able assistance from lawyer Vicky Holden as they discover an oil scandal which in turn is dwarfed by a corrupt land grab from the 19th century with contemporay implications.

The description of the Great Plains in high summer is on the money, as are the currents among the Indians and between them and the Europeans, red and white get along but apart. The idea that this isolated and unappealing post works for Father John because he is an alcoholic sort of makes sense, though as a member of the Red Sox Nation he is a long way from Fenway in voluntary exile. On the reservation among largely dry Indians he has not the temptations of a bar on every corner and the privacy of getting drunk in anonymity that Boston affords the Irish.
The secret lies, as it so often does, in the files, archives, records if one only knows where to look and what to look for there. I always like that idea but here it is blindingly obvious.
The characters are individual though the bad guys are on the cardboard end of the continuum, more plot devices than personalities. Ditto the star crossed young lovers is a well worn (out) motif. And the FBI agent is the old tired stereotype of a blundering, lazy fool, who evidently does nothing but interfere.
I also find the descriptions of chases and fights tedious. I want more detecting of the brain work type. By the way, the idea that Father John could do all he does with a separated shoulder – well it is not possible.
Still I will read another to see how the series develops.

Set in contemporary Amsterdam, on streets we walked along in our 2014 visit. Plenty of local colour, canals, bicycles, New Market stalls, the new city hall, Amstel River.

Told in four parts, (1) the protagonist, Peter Posthumous (yes, some name), (2) the Moroccans, some of whom are up to no good, (3) the security agents monitoring the Moroccans (some of whom are up to no good), and (4) the security boss who seems to be playing his own game. It switches back and forth frequently and at other times stays in one part/ voice for a while to develop a point.
Apart from the local colour, I also got a recipe which I will try out on the lab rats at home in due course. I found several recipes for the dish on Serious Eats.
This is the first of a trilogy so the story telling is attenuated, recipes, coffees, etc which slows the tempo.
As said, local colour, it starts with details about flushing the canals over night between midnight and 4 am and how that circulates the water.
Peter Posthumous is a city official who looks after the funerals of unclaimed bodies. He is an obsessive and can never let anything go and so makes mountains (or is it dragons, Don?) where there are none. As a result he has been moved from one job to another and may yet be moved again. That is a nice set-up and his concern to treat the unclaimed dead with respect is touching, though it seems more about him than them.
I bought at Waterstone in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam in June 2014.

Krimie, recommended.
A police procedural set in the United States Postal Service at its pinnacle in 1990s before email took over.  Though even at that time, the premium couriers like FedEx are cutting into its monopoly thanks to President Reagan. (I sent my first email in 1990 from Utah.)  I will certainly read more in this series concerning the adventures of Eamon Wearie.
Among the strong points of the novel are the details of how post works, particularly the legal responsibility for improperly addressed items, i.e., dead letters. I doubt FedEx and UPS are bound by the same code. Then there is the ridiculous military organization at the mail depot into color-coded teams with military ranks.

There are many personalities but the absolute standout is The Famous Barry, the medium to whom the dead speak. He surprised Eamon and he surprised me. This chapter alone makes the book worth reading. Likewise the FBI response to the medium surprised Eamon and it surprised me. Eamon’s partner Bunko is quite a guy, a good man to have at your back in a tough spot.
The contrast between the letter writer Netti, and Netti in person was another corker. It all made sense but nonetheless it took Eamon aback, and me, too. His need to find the writer of such beautiful letters was personal, but it intersected with the plot in an off-hand remark she made. Nice.
The description of small town Western Pennsylvania and inhabitants rang true, as did the descriptions of the inner harbour in Baltimore (where I went to a conference once).
On the other hand, Eamon’s capacity for feeling sorry for himself while fighting off the babes annoyed me as did the loving descriptions of Eamon’s numerous drunks.
The mystery of his boarder, Pinkus, is not resolved and seems to have been forgotten by the end.
Finally, the resolution is too quick as though the word count clicked, but I was dazed from a head cold at the time so may have missed some exposition to be sure.