Category: Krimi

Moondogs (2011) by Alexander Yates

Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 3.68 by 424 litizens.

Genre: krimi; Species: Magic unrealism.  

DNA: Filipino.  

Verdict: I warmed to it, slowly.  

Tagline:  Can’t tell the players without a scorecard! 

Estranged son flies to Manila at the invitation of his father, who is absent when he arrives.  He falls in with some of his father’s drinking buddies. That is one thread.

We already know that father has been kidnapped by a pair of incompetent and spontaneous lowlifes with the aim of selling him to some mad and bad Muslims who specialise in decapitations.  Meanwhile, father is locked in a room. The Imam they approach tries to stop their crazy plot and reports them to the police. That is thread two.

Thread three is a Philippine Army solider with uncanny, preternatural marksmanship who is recruited by the Dirtiest Harry of them all for a special police coven consisting of bruhos, that is, witches, of which this soldier is one whether he knows it or not; hence his ability.  This is the magic part of the realism. 

Thread four is Monique at the American embassy who deals with Americans who get into trouble in the Philippines, and there are a lot of them:  drunks, pederasts, and kidnapees.  Her ‘trailing spouse’ (official Foreign Service terminology) hates Manila.  Her adopted children are rebellious.  She has somehow started an affair with Dirtiest Harry. To say the least, they are a mismatched couple even when they couple.  

It adds up to a lot characters to keep straight without a scorecard.

Cockfights, earth tremors, terrorist explosions, gold lined hotels with golden toilets, all add to the local colour. The combination of opulence and corruption would make The Felon in Chief feel right at home. 

All these threads, and perhaps some I have forgotten or missed among all the superfluous detail, come together with a boom and a high body count.  It did so with very little investment from me. 

Set out in that chopped up, asynchronous, billiard ball style favoured by thriller writers who prefer to leave connecting the plot dots to readers. With all the cutting back and forth through time and space, I lost track of, and for a time interest in, the characters who tumble out of the pages.  I stuck with it because of the exotic locale – The Philippines. It is richly textured of that place, sometimes too much for my taste, e.g., the details of slaughtering a pig…in a hotel room!    

Pedants note: On the front cover the title has a hyphen as ‘Moon-Dogs,’ while on the spine (and in the text) it is ‘Moondogs.’  

Moondogs are those brights spots around the moon or a blurred halo behind it, also called paraselenae for those who must know and are too lazy to consult Wikipedia. The term is used only once in the book, that I noticed, and then is in no way significant.

The Informers (2004) by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Good Reads meta-data is 333 pages, rated 3/39 by 246 litizens.

DNA: Colombia.

Genre: Novel.

Verdict: Meh.

Tagline: Everyone did it.  

In 1990 Gabriel remembers with a lifelong family friend, Sara, a Jewish refugee, the death of his father Gabriel Senior  In flashbacks we learn something of her flight from Germany in 1935 as a tweenager, and then Gabriel Senior’s troubled life during La Violencia of the 1950s in which 180,000 died when zealots on both sides thought murdering children was the best longterm strategy to defeat their opponents.  

In the late 1930s there were resident Germans in Colombia, among them many enthusiastic Nazis, then came a small influx of refugees, mostly German Jews, and after the war a few more Germans, including fervent Nazis.  During World War II many of the Germans, both residents and recent immigrants, were sequestered together – Jews, Nazis, and neither, usually in hotels or resorts and they lost many of their assets. Colombia had been quicker than many Latin American countries to join the Allies.  (Some of the resident Germans ran or flew in local airlines and were perceived to be a threat to shipping in the Caribbean Sea and the Panama Canal, either a directly or as a source of intelligence, though that is not mentioned in this novel.)  Colombia was also quick to join the United Nations in the Korean War.  

Forced together this mix of Germans was volatile, but the novel makes little use of that obvious fact.  But it does emphasise the mutual denunciations by informers.  Instead the villains are the blacklists that were used to identify enemy aliens.  The logic is convoluted to this reader 

Yet somehow Gabriel Senior survived La Violencia, though maimed, and rose to eminence as a jurist and spawned a son, Junior, though there was little affection between them.  The aforementioned Junior, a journalist, convinced Sara to allow him to write her biography.  When it was published it all but disappeared until Senior, that very distinguished jurist, published a poisonous review of it.  That made it an object of curiosity and sales increased.  That also meant they no longer spoke to each other.  

The puzzle for Junior is why his father, who only read classics from the Ancient World, bothered to weigh in on his little book. But that emerges with persistence and patience, not my best qualities.  There are occasional references to events in Colombia’s recent history that mean nothing to me, but would to a Colombian no doubt. 

The style is vague, elliptic, dense, and asynchronous. The author is unfamiliar with the concept of a topic sentence.  Paragraphs run on and on combining description, dialogue, several points of view, many subjects, and then end, and another starts. The sort of obscure prose that appeals to jaded literary awards panelists. I found it hard to follow and even harder to care about this array of narcissists.   

Tony Bellotto, ed., Rio Noir (2016).

Good Reads meta-data is 245 pages, rated 3.56 by 75 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Brazil.

Verdict: dégustation. 

Tagline: Varied in 14 stories, some 3 pages, others 30.    

An ageing beauty convinces a gigolo to murder her husband.  He does, turns out the victim is not her husband, but the man who tortured and killed her husband thirty years ago when the generals ruled.  Oops.  Now professional honour requires that the deceased’s body guards have to settle the score. 

By chance a small time business man takes shelter from the rain in the foyer of a dilapidated office building where he sees a notice for a tarot reader.  To pass the time during the storm he decides to do it.  He does…. and finds out more than he wanted to know, because the mystic is….  All very Twilight Zone.

Then there is a Hannibal Lector, a teenage drug lord in the City of God on the hillside, and more.  Some of the stories are distasteful to my taste but they live up to the cover blurb’s promise of the dark side of the white sands, Sugar Loaf, and beachside high rises.  In some stories there is much to’ing and fro’ing and there is a rudimentary map to indicate the geography of this sprawling metropolis wedged between mountains and the sea.

***

There is certainly irony, as indicated above, but I am not sure the word ‘noir’ applies to any of the stories.  Many end without a resolution, and none comply with the Knox Decalogue.  

Of the fifteen authors, two are women.  One of each gender are expatriates.  The majority are journalists associated with O Globo, the newspaper of record, it says of itself, in Rio de Janeiro. Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is included and I have read with interest three of his Inspector Espinosa series. Despite the puff I have neither knowledge of or interest in the editor.  Aside: to my untrained eye the same translator for all the stories rendered them uniform: Word choice, idiom translations were the same for all the characters, it seemed. 

Part of a series that includes scores of such other titles as Haiti Noir, Hong Kong Noir.  Stories stand alone but can be used to identify authors to check out for more if so inclined. 

What Time the Sexton’s Spade doth Rust (2024) by Alan Bradley. 

Good Reads meta-data is 298 pages, rated 4.14 by 4,212 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Little England. 

Verdict: Go girl!  

Tagline: She’s back!  

Tweenage Flavia de Luce is irrepressible and her even younger cousin Undine is worse in 1952.  When a longtime but secretive resident of the local village is found dead, it’s murder!  

It gets worse. The harmless part-time cook, Mrs Mullet, of Buckshaw, Flavia’s home, is blamed for the death!  The only question for plod is whether it was intentional or accidental.  Yes, mushrooms.

That double whammy propels Flavia on to Gladys, her bicycle, to put things to rights! Again. Good. Hooray! She is aided and abetted by the ever so correct butler cum handyman, Dogger, when he is not suffering a recurrent bout of survivor guilt because of his three years on the Burma railroad.  

This is number eleven in the series after a five year hiatus. Any reader is advised to read them in sequence. An unexpected and most welcome return.  But no, I cannot explain the title, and I wonder if the author can.  

Sins for Father Knox (1973) by Josef Škvorecký

Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages rated 3.56 by 124 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Czech (via exile in Canada)

Verdict: A puzzler, indeed.  

Tagline line:  Who dunnit? How d’ya know? 

Accomplished Czech crime writer Škvorecký offers ten short mystery stories after a foreword about Ronald Knox’s decalogue.  In anticipation of this volume, there is an earlier post setting forth Knox’s ten commandments. That is the homework.

Each of these stories illustrates the contravention of one of these ten commandments.  That is, each story shows the importance of each commandment by its absence, so that when it is violated the story is less than satisfactory.

About 80% through each story there is a pause to allow the reader to infer who did it and how and ponder on which commandment has been compromised. 

The stories are amusing, though contrived for didactic purposes, and, sorry to say, they become repetitive because the recurrent character is described every time in some detail: her alluring scent, her plunging décolletage, her blonde hair, her hourglass figure, her shapely legs revealed by a maximum mini skirt, and so on, again and again.  Likewise, her repeated and successful efforts at repelling boarders from the barflies that are drawn to her as per the previous description.  

Some readers may be interested to know that one story offers a mathematical proof to identify the murderer. Sort of.   

The sequence is not in numerical order of the decalogue, nor otherwise ordered by difficulty, or length. This reader discerned no order at all.  

Only one of the stories is set in Czechoslovakia as it was then.  Some are in Sweden and most in the USA as our heroine is a traveling artiste singing in nightclubs. Škvorecký’s Lieutenant Boruvka does make an appearance in the last story along with the songbird whose feminine attributes are once again detailed.  

Frontera Dreams (1990) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Good Reads meta-data is 120 pages, rated 3.65 b 274 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Mexico.

Verdict:  Self-indulgent. 

Tagline:  World Weary. 

Along its 3000 kilometres that frontier of dreams between the United States and Mexico is a land of magic realism where strange things may happen then as now.  Tec is retained to find a Mexican soap opera actress, his high school squeeze, who has gone missing. Last seen in Baja (California).  So Tec takes to the road to track her down and find why she ran away.  The trail takes him back and forth across northern most Mexico in the hazy twilight of dreams. 

Did I mention it? No? The detective is named Shayne like that wisecracking Irishman.  Too exhausted by life, he does not crack wise.  Along the border legends still live of Pancho Villa, the times of Juarez, Zapata, and the lost Mexican lands to the north. There is also the cruel reality of the narcotraficantes, then as now meeting American demand.

Did she flee from an ardent suitor?  Was Harvey Weinstein involved?  Or is it all a plot device to allow the author to pontificate on the state and fate of his country in that Northern shadow?  You be the judge!  

***

Known by his initials as PIT, there are ten novels in this Shayne sequence.  Over the years I have read some others: An Easy Thing, Return to the Same City, and Shadow of a Shadow. Not sure if I have read all these titles, though they are in my data base, since I do not find them congenial in the elliptical style that seems lazy to me, the absence of a plot, and transparent characterisations.  In fact, I am not sure I have read them since I have notes only for one.  Strange.

The Day of the Owl (1961) by Leonardo Sciascia

Good Reads meta-data is 136 pages, rated 3.73 by 15,672 litizens.  

DNA: Italy; Species: Sicily.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Mafia.

Verdict: Lean and mean. 

Tagline: It starts with a bang. Well, two bangs.  

A man in a business suit waiting to board a bus in a village outside Palermo is shot dead.  The bus load of witnesses disappear even as he fell to the ground.  When the carabinieri arrive no one saw anything, indeed, there is no one there to see or be seen. Captain Bellodi investigates out of curiosity, not because he thinks he will accomplish anything. As he does, others observe and comment.  

The result is a travelogue of 1950’s Sicily, its dialect which sometimes mystifies Bellodi (from Parma), its poverty makes cigarette smuggling attractive, its distance from Rome measured in lightyears, its many divisions between christians, socialists, communists, villages, clans, and most of all, outsiders, its mafia or is that just a figment of overwrought journalism.  All done in a spare prose.  

In due course, despite the evidence, Bellodi is transferred and the case closed when an innocent man is framed for the deed in order to forestall investigation of this thing called the Mafia.   

All in all, it is a confirmation of the North/South divide that is still noteworthy in Italy.  

***

The best of his oeuvre, they say. Sciascia (1921-1989) was a man for many seasons: a novelist, essayist, playwright, and member of the chamber of deputies, and the European parliament as a communist.  Only a few of his many titles have been translated into English.  

On the Rocks (2013) by Sue Hallgarth

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 3.06 by 70 litizens. 

DNA: O’ Canada. 

Genre: Krimi. 

Verdict: Willa can do it!  

Tagline: Button, button, who’s lost a button.

It is the summer of 1929 and Pulitzer winning novelist Willa Cather and her paramour Edith Lewis escape New York City’s heat and humidity by retreating to a cottage they have built over the years on Ile de Grand Manan of New Brunswick (which has the distinction these days of being the only Canadian province that is legally bilingual). Others also flee summer heat to areas and islands in the vicinity like Campobello. (If you know, you know.) 

While the resident islanders (numbering about 3,000 per Wikipedia today) don’t always like these outsiders, their money is good and they don’t stay long.  Ergo there are accommodations and supplies for them.  Since most, if not all, the outsiders are women, many islanders resent them even more for having money, wearing trousers, drinking alcohol, building their own cottages, driving cars, smoking cigarettes, and breathing.  Still a truce obtains most summers.

That truce is strained when an American stranger just off the ferry falls to his death and the Republican rumour mill runs over time blaming his demise on the coven of witches that are everywhere, among them Cather and Lewis. ‘They caused his death, and that is murder,’ is the text. Not that any of these rumour-millers knew or cared about the victim, but his demise offers an excuse to vent their pent-up animosity.

The local plod is on his own and though level-headed he cannot do everything at once: keep the peace, investigate the death, fend off bootleggers, interview twenty of more people who may have seen the victim on the day, go over the ferry records of passengers, and more.  Yes, in 1929 exporting forbidden alcohol to the United States is big Canadian business. Fortunately, unbidden, he gets some help from the energetic Lewis and the insightful Cather.  

While I found the start slow with its perseverating asides on literature, social mores, and history tedious, even though I found most of them sympathetic, they were not why I was there, yet I stuck with it and was glad I did.  It had some very nice touches.

 Warning SPOILERS ahead: the surrender of the torch was one, another were the many loose shirt buttons.  There were also some nice images as in overhearing ‘a silent conversation.’  It makes sense in context. 

I bought this book at the Willa Cather Museum in Red Cloud (NB) nearly ten years ago and finally got around to reading it.  There is another novel featuring this duo by Hallgarth.  

By the way, I am sorry to say that on Hallgarth’s website Cather’s Red Cloud home is said to be in MN (Minnesota), whereas in fact it is in NB (Nebraska).  (Yes, I know, there is a Red Cloud in Minnesota, but that is not where she lived.)  

Murder in the Museum (1980) by Jo Frisbie and Gunnar Horn

Good Reads meta-data is 177 pages, rated by 0  litizens!   

DNA: Aksarben.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Slow and steady wins the race.  

Tagline:  Very slow.  

It was a strange museum display to begin with and it got stranger when a cadaver was slipped into it.  But if you can suspend that disbelief what follows is a small town (Red Cloud by another name) mystery.     

There is a lot of dithering, confusion, and some repetition but it is all credible, if annoying.  Life is like that. 

The county attorney and sheriff (both elected officials) combine and sometimes clash to sift the evidence as the plot is thickened with another corpse.  But I got confused because on page 95 some clues are spotted and bagged then twice later on pages 105 and 160 their existence is denied.  I must have missed something. Maybe I blinked. Ç’est la vie. 

The authors have combined on five other stories, one of which I read ages ago. They are hard to find so try Abe or Alibris. 

By the way, Murder in the Museum is a well used title.  I noticed at least a half-a-dozen other instances.