Category: Krimi

Recommended for krimieologists.
This title is the first in a continuing series featuring Chief Inspector David Brock and Sergeant Kathy Kolla. It is assured and has a light touch though the subject is murder.

The sisters are indeed distant relatives of Eleanor Marx (wife of Karl) and that figures in the plot in several ways.
There are many blue herrings, as Hercule Poirot says when the English idiom fails him, from a son eager for an inheritance, a developer who wants to build a giant building, an angry neighbor. Perhaps the dominant character is a place, Jerusalem Lane where the sisters live. It is marvelously invoked, though my London A to Z does not list it, more’s the pity.
The police make mistakes and pursue some of those blue herrings. Even the inscrutable Brock sometimes blunders. Fallibility appeals to me.
There is a delicious portrait of a solipsistic and unscrupulous scholar who reminded me of some I have known.
This first volume in the series is mercifully free of Kolla’s endless capacity for self-pity that I find distasteful in the latter volumes, though the seeds are there. Too often Kolla’s main interest is Kolla. No doubt some readers find her incessant self-doubts and uncertainties attractive but they are too narcissistic for this reader.
For more information go to:
http://www.barrymaitland.com/index.html
Personal note. Like many others, when I first used the Reading Room at the British Museum I sat in the seat Karl Marx habitually used.

I enjoyed the portrayal and factions, bureaucratic turf wars, national animosities, divisions within divisions within the micro-state of Vatican City, only made sovereign by the Lateran Treaty with Italy (Mussolini) in 1929. The Vatican police force is divided into three, the neutral, the fascist, and the anti-fascist. The Swiss Guards have real uniforms and weapons. The Vatican police and Vatican’s Swiss Guards are two separate groups and not friends. Most of the Swiss are Sweizcher Deutsch who look down on the Italians in the police. The police are called gendarmes for some reason. Our hero interacts with the gendarmes inside the Vatican, while the Swiss Guards patrol the line of demarcation.

The book offers an explanation of Pope Pius XII’s quiescence in 1943 anyway. By then there were 5000 Jews, downed Allied airmen, anti-fascist Italians, salted away in Vatican City and in Vatican properties (part the Vatican’s sovereign soil by the Treaty) elsewhere in Rome. The Pope’s vast summer palace in the hills outside Rome was home to another 15,000 refugees. Silence might be the best way to avoid interesting the Germans in them.
Moreover, with Mussolini reduced to a puppet up North and only the most extreme Italian fascist left in Rome along with the occupying Germans, there was the danger that the Germans might decide to take the Pope north for his own safety on the pretext of Allied bombing, exposing not only the refugees in the Vatican but also its many treasures and destroying its studied neutrality. A low profile might be best so as not to give a pretext. Hmm, but if the Germans had a mind to do that, a pretext could be conjured as it was many times before.
Also liked the tension on the white painted line of demarcation in the square in front of the Vatican that still marks off the sovereignty of the Vatican, but in these days it was patrolled by the Swiss Guards on one side and the German army on the other. I liked the geography of the buildings and gardens in the Vatican, including the Vatican radio.
The evils of the Gestapo and SS were old news. Our intrepid hero was cardboard as were most of the other characters. Though there were a variety of characters and they did differ, I admit. I liked the way some of them reacted to being trapped in the gilded cage of the Vatican when the war cut them off, like the American diplomat who disappeared into the brandy bottle.
Some interesting characters appeared but not enough was made of the artful scrounger, the butler John May, Detective Cipriano of the Vatican police, or Abe the pilot lock-picker.
Not sure what to make of the good German, Remke and his team. Doomed, of course. The Italian OVRA sadist was a drooling stereotype as was the evil Croatian bishop.
The villain was hard to credit.
Billy tried too hard to be a reverse snob. Most of his wisecracks were tired sixty years ago. As is usually the case his backstory was simply a distracting filler.
Many of the events take place in the German College in the Vatican but no ever connects this with the Germans outside and there seem to be no Germans in the Vatican. No German cardinal or archbishops or bishop.
Nothing about the Italian day workers who come to work every day.
The prose is workmanlike.
The Billy Boyle books each have different setting so that is goodbye to the Vatican. But I will try searching for Vatican krimies.

Recommended for the Melbournoisie out there. But they have all probably read it. Not a krimie, worse luck.
A two-hour diversion into the drug addled mind of ole whashisname, Cookie, Carl the cook, or is that Charles. Sometimes not even he is sure.
Cruel but insightful and amusing caricatures of the feminist wife, the Irish mother, the Greek club owner…..and Carl himself.

His movie review fits most of the trash on the wide screen today: deafening, gory, brain deadening, blinding… Get the result same from a finger in a power outlet!
‘They went into the theatre. it was a maelstrom of noise. The film had started….. The screen was awash with meaningless images and the soundtrack was a … frightening roar…. Creatures from his worst alcoholic nightmare, groped and slithered across the screen.’ That’s entertainment! That describes ‘Star Trek: Into the Darkness’ very well.
Quite fitting that Shane Mahoney wrote the intro. They have the same ink in their veins. Though Mahoney’s effort to compare this book to Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ falls flat.
A google search does not return any other novels from Oxlade. A one book writer and even that book is now overshadowed by the movie in the publisher’s blurb on the back of the book has more enthusiasm for the film than the book.

Recommended with qualifications as below.
It has an exotic setting, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The Canadian Prairies in January and February no less. Dry frozen.

The protagonist is a part-lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan who seems to find plenty of trouble and whose work at the University does not seem to figure largely in her day. Might be the University of Sydney that. She is a widow with two adolescent children. But we do not get bogged down in domesticity.
The good: the provincial art world is a good context, there is none of the padded descriptions I find in many alleged krimies, the characters are differentiated though not always credible (like Nina the villain). For the most part the weather is presented realistically. Sally, the artist, is well drawn, way too smart and a very charming and talented user, but first last and always a user of other people. She reminded of some people I have known.
At one point a character says: ‘In art men look for statements and women look for relations.’ Nice.
The bad: it takes 60 pages of background to get going and the reader has no clue about why to read this and what to take from it. Yes some relevant things from this opening stretch are there at the end but not 60 pages worth. While the weather is there, it does not stop people from hanging clothes on the line and our protagonist gets by for a month without a car which is impossible in such a city because there is no public transport to speak of and few taxis. I also found the dirty secret not to be so dirty though perhaps in Saskatchewan it would be hard to live down. Stuart is also less than believable and after centring on him he then disappears toward the end. A blue herring. The fresco of penises was adolescent.

Recommended for Krimieologists (readers of crime novels). Set in the Soviet Union of 1936.
A lot of period details are easily integrated into the plot. Though it reads like ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ I don’t know whether that is because ‘Nineteen Eight-Four’ was very accurate to the Soviet Union or because the author has been influenced by it and so ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ has shaped the telling, or is it that I am superimposing ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ onto it?

Korolov, the protagonist, is a loyal Soviet citizen yet he remains a believer (religious in secret) so there is a gap in his commitment to communism. 1936 is a tough year. Food is scarce, the rhetoric of paranoia is high, the winter is biting in Moscow, the zealots are zealous, and most people are struggling to survive while mouthing the requIred slogans. Only the great helmsman is above suspicion. For everyone else the goal posts constantly change and the marbles underfoot are ever-present. Not for everyone but for those in the police, the army, the party, the government, the collectives, there is a premium on denouncing someone, quotas for subversives to be jailed, disappearances, changes of portraits on the wall signal another wave of purges. But wait, there is more.
The person who is the least suspicious is suspect because a spy would not seem suspicious goes the prevailing logic. That and large measures of guilt by association, objective guilt, nets nearly everyone. No one is safe in this world.
No doubt there are parallels with North Korea today, yet I also thought there are also parallels with the green dream of telling everyone else what to do, when to do it, and how to do it on the grounds of the peril at the gate. Priests do like preaching even to a captive audience. The permanent crisis and the unscrupulousness of many supposed enemies of the Soviet Union requires endless vigilance. What reminded me most of green dreaming was the constant emphasis on the right nomenclature, and the least slip of the tongue, like gasping out ‘oh my God’ in surprise, is evidence of religious backsliding.
Now to the cavils, I thought Korolov got two tickets to the big game but he took four people in all without any trouble. Plus at a time of famine there were meat pies aplenty for sale at the game. Though Jack looked askance at the meat pie we never find out why. For a guy who is hard up Korolov takes a readily available taxi from the game. And he also has money for bribes, for smokes, and for meat pies for four.
This novel compares favorably to Sam Eastland, ‘The Eye of the Red Tsar’ which is set in 1924 in the Soviet Union. For this reader ‘The Holy Thief’ was better. This novel has less clutter, more insights into events, and complexity without confusion. Much less of an overblown backstory for our protagonist to interfere with the momentum. We learn about Korolov through his acts, words, and thoughts, and not by the exposition of a punctuated recitation of a contrived backstory in a curriculum vitae to make him sympathetic.

Another Eleanor Jones krimie set in 1923 Melbourne during a police strike: Carolyn Morwood, Cyanide and Poppies (2012).

Eleanor is now a reviewer for ‘The Argus.’ Nicholas is still there; his wife is not. Andrew has returned from, of all places, Dimboola, but is as fragile as cracked crystal and less stable.
Slow and thoughtful. Eleanor is introspective but it never feels like superfluous padding as it so often does in many of the Chick-Krimies that I sample and reject. Morwood brings Melbourne of the age alive with gravity in contrast, say to Miss Fisher with her bold and brassy and superficial appurtenances like cars, clothes, etc. If Miss Fisher, god love her, is nearly a cartoon, Eleanor is nearly a tragic heroine the 19th Century. They are both treasures.
Eleanor is a very serious person who served as a nurse during World War I in Palestine and France. She has seen much death and more suffering and been unable to do anything much about either. Her fiancée and her older brother were both killed in France, and the younger brother Andrew, who also served in France, returned psyched out. Not much fun there.
Her childhood sweetheart Nicholas is married but his wife seems to be permanently away, perhaps never to return. No one knows, perhaps not even Nicholas. He helped Eleanor get the job at the newspapers and they spend time together wondering no doubt how what might have been or what might be….
Meanwhile the hoons feel licensed by absence of police, most of whom are on strike. Vigilantes organise in turn. Libertarian hoon versus self-righteous thug is the result.
Within this context it is an engrossing study of relationships distorted by the gravity of a murder. The victim is a nosy, unpleasant journalist, who was perhaps given to blackmail. Andrew’s girlfriend, not quite girlfriend but might be, is the suspect. It is Sister Jones to the rescue.
There is much about Eleanor managing Andrew, trying to do it without his awareness. Their rapprochement and cooperation is well done. Inspector Pearce is well meaning and competent but under much pressure because of the Police Strike. The tension between Eleanor and Nicholas Bird is unrelenting. His daughter Kate is instrumental in the denouement, at first reluctantly but then willingly. ‘Reluctantly’ because Kate sees Eleanor as a threat to her absent mother or Kate’s own monopoly of Nicholas. But Kate, too, wants to help the innocent Nadine, Andrew’s deuce girlfriend, so she joins the plot.
There is to’ing and fro’ing in Melbourne and out, namely a train ride to and from Dimboola.
Nice touches, how the same facts can be construed in different ways. I also liked the ambiguity of Nadine’s (the maybe girlfriend) claim to be a medium, though it was dropped completely after being such a big part of the buildup. Some kind of recognition, if not resolution, is needed on that, not just omission. Likewise the unresolved tension with the maid is magnified, and then not mentioned again.
Rachel, Nicholas’s absent wife, writes to ask for a divorce! I foresee much consternation ahead. Divorce might ruin him socially in Melbourne. Kate would react how? Would he then be free for Eleanor or would he be too injured and want to avoid contaminating her?
It was not hard to figure out the villain before Eleanor. The most sanctimonious ones are always at it in krimies, as often in life.