Category: Krimi

Giulio Leoni, Crusade of Darkness (2007). 

Good Reads meta-data is 560 pages, rated 2.84 by 87 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Period (Medieval).

DNA: Italian.

Verdict: Suffocating detail. 

Tagline:  Spoiler: she Pope.  

October 1301 the Florentine Council sends Dante (Durante) Alighieri to Rome to assess and, if possible, negotiate with Pope Boniface, who was busy redefining papal corruption.  An uneasy peace exits in Florence between the Little-enders and the Big-enders, while Rome is seething.  While he waits for an audience Dante falls into company of an affable, wealthy Senator with a comely daughter.  Dante often has trouble keeping it in his robe.

In this heady atmosphere, strange things emerge.  Very strange.  That a representative of the Inquisition wants to hush things up, stimulates Dante to find out more with a great deal of to’ing and fro’ing in ruined Rome. Much. Too much. 

A fantastic plot is slowly revealed.  

This is the third and final instalment of the English translation of this series.  There remain several untranslated titles in the original Italian.

I delitti della Medusa (Book 1)

The Mosaic Crimes (or I delitti del mosaico) (Book 2)

The Kingdom of Light (or Los crímenes de la luz) (Book 3)

La Crociata delle Tenebre (or La croisade des ténèbres) (Book 4)

La regola delle ombre (Book 5)

L’ultimo segreto di Dante (Book 8)

Good Reads meta-data is 321 pages, rated 2.82 by 800 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Historical period.

DNA: Italian; Florentine.

Verdict:  Nicely done.

Tagline:  Hell is right here, right now. 

June in the year of 1300, Durante Alighieri, who prefers to be known as Dante, is one of the six Priors who serve a two-month term of office, rather like a city council with executive powers.  He is pleased with this preferment until the chief of the guard, whom he regards as a dolt (and who regards him as a puffed up popinjay) asks him to attend a crime scene in a long-abandoned church.  As he picks his way through the rubble in the city streets left by the latest battle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante ponders on the cesspool that Florence is sliding into.  

At the church he finds a talented mosaic artist who has been murdered and mutilated.  He is tempted to let the Guard deal with the crime the way he usually does: arrest the nearest beggar and torture him into confessing: Case closed. Policing has never changed it seems. But there are intellectual puzzles in this case and Dante pursues them.

Then there is a strange conclave in a sleazy tavern of men who claim to be founding a studium in Florence, that is, a university.  Dante seeks their company and this accomplished poet is most welcome, but….  Is all as it seems? Or is it not.  Place your bets!

It is a time when failed crusades to the holy land have undermined many verities. Moreover, anyone who has been to the East is tainted. There is a prologue that provides that orientation.  

Then there are rumours that an heir to the Holy Roman emperor yet lives and that makes the ever so corrupt Pope worry.  Such an heir might threaten the Pope’s hold on the throne.  His reputation for incompetence was only bested by his reputation for greed, gluttony, and rapine.  Now who does that remind me of?  

Having only recently listened to Dante’s Inferno on my foot patrols I noticed many incidents in this novel that recall passages in it.  According to our author then, Dante found much of Hell on the streets and byways of Florence. Nicely done that. These references are codified in an afterword I discovered when I got there.   

I also savoured the portrayal of the other priors, who like the prestige of the assignment, but are loath to do any of the work that is supposed to go with it. I could not help but recall all those university colleagues who festooned their CVs with every committee assignment they ever had, and laboured to avoid doing any of the committee’s work, mainly by never attending meetings.

Good Reads meta-data is 398 pages, rated 2.85 by 220 litizens.

Genre: krimi; Species: medieval period.

DNA: Italian; Species: Firenze; Sub-species: Dante.

Verdict: Second time around.

Tagline: Stupidity is god’s will. (That explains a lot.)

It is a world where whatever happens is god’s will, and that is that.  Any further consideration is blasphemous. Faith not reason prevails…for most.  In this stifling and stultifying milieu Messer Durante is an exception, one of only a few, who looks beneath this sanctimonious carpet to the see the warp and weft that weave the  Church’s hypocrisy. According to Dante (1265-1321), god means for us men (but not women) to make full use of our abilities. But this makes him a non-Believer or worse in the eyes of most others. In short, it all has a contemporary resonance. 

Dante is a Prior for a two-month term of office.  Six priors comprise the executive of the city-state government of Florence, and during their two-month terms, they live in the office dormitory. The short term is to discourage strong government by promoting rotation of the office, and the residency requirement makes it a full time job: Those are the fictions. This duty is unwelcome to those with a business to manage, a farm to tend, a sick wife to mind, or travel to do and they try to avoid the call to duty. Ergo, often the incumbents are layabouts with none of those concerns. The priors are nominees of the guilds that dominate local commerce and that commerce dominates the secular city. The historic Dante was a prior from the apothecary guild.  He had qualified for this guild because it was relatively easy, he had an interested in science, and it afforded prestige for which he was hungry from go-to-whoa. But no, he was not a drug dealer.  

In this story most of the priors are timeservers, some reluctant, others more willing, but Dante takes it very seriously when the dead start to pile up in the strangest places and in the strangest ways.  Those who answer god’s telephone tell him to back off, but he keeps going through the murk of Guelph, Ghibelline, greed, graft, and grievance.  

Confession.  I never did understand how the woman in the box worked or what the eight-sided hall of mirrors had to do with anything.  Maybe you do.  Inform me at your leisure. 

***

I have read this before but was moved to do it again after reading a biography of the poet discussed elsewhere on this blog because now I thought I now know him better. 

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.33 by 823 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Kabakon.

Verdict: Oh hum.

Tagline: The coconuts did it.

Setting – German New Guinea in 1906, where a retired Brit has gone to hide from his troubles, but mercifully we are spared his backstory. 

Sweltering in the heat and humidity, swatting a long list of insects, Brit ponders the fate that brought him to this malarial shore, when a local German colonial official pays him a call.  Oh, oh, has Official come about the creative writing he did on his residency application. No, but on that self-same application Brit said he had served as a military police officer in the Red Coats. That fact was not one of his lies.  Official would like Brit to investigate, unofficially, a recent death on the island of Kabakon.  

After the de rigueur hesitations, Brit complies to set off in the company of a liberated woman travel writer, and a minor colonial administrator along as his minder.  Delicacy is required because the island is owned by a wealthy woman, a planter, who bought it outright from the German authorities long ago, and so is private property.  Ergo the Brit is a surrogate for the Germans. The European residents who live on it pay her a rent and mind their own business. It is one of them who has died in circumstances that are cloudy.

Once enisled things get even more delicate because the islanders are vegetarians and nudists. Most are German but not all. Brit sees much sunburn some of it where the sun does not usually shine and forests of mosquito bite pustules on their bare flesh. The manly features of several of the men are fully described though these details are unlikely to figure in the plot. The women are not scrutinised to the same detail by our shy narrator. Yet he had to be told of the drastic steps two of the men have taken to leave behind the temptations of the flesh. Maybe he needs new glasses.  

The dozen or so Kabakons are sun worshippers who live on hot air and coconuts with the occasional banana. They be heliotarians, fruitarians, and breatharians.  What a trifecta.  They also endure the sledge hammer sun, the monsoon rains, and the devouring disease-carrying insects. Sado-masocists in short. 

There is a lot of manners and mores between the clothed and the unclothed, Germans and Brits but little detecting.  The few natives mentioned are ciphers. Indeed, there is so little detecting I was left unsure what there might have been to detect.  

There is an abrupt change of narrator in last chapter or two that confused me. 

***

I chose it for the exotic context of German colonialism.  In the Pacific this empire included:  German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Nauru, the Mariana and Caroline Islands, and Samoa as well as concessions extorted from China, and some other rocks in the sea.  (There were also more extensive holdings in Africa.) Kabakon is so singular it does not shed any ambient light on the other colonies.   

I listened to it from Audible, which was sometimes inaudible on the street.  

Kerry Greenwood, Castlemaine Murders (2003)

Good Reads meta-data is 263 pages, rated 4.06 by 5,039 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Strine.

Verdict: She’ll always be Essie to me.  

Tagline:  The Honourable is at it again.  

Miss Phryne Fisher puts the 1929 world to rights after an unpleasant discovery at a St Kilda funfair.  Eventually, the piste leads her to the titular town. There is a great deal of preliminary padding of time and place and couture with many side- and backstories and little momentum through the three-quarter point but it does accelerate when finally she gets to Castlemaine.  

She makes an inauspicious arrival bound and gagged in a flour sack.  While thus restrained she concludes it took three men to kidnap her, the two who accosted her on the dark streets of Melbourne and another waiting in the the car to make the getaway.  So the odds are three men to one against her. ‘About even then,’ she concludes and in due course she proves to be right. These men, stupid as they are, failed to remove the pistol from her silk-stocking holster, the knife concealed in her handmade shoe, or the sap in her hidden pocket. Such carelessness will have its reward.  

By the time constabulary belatedly arrives she has overcome the villains, having coshed one, stabbed another, and drawn a bead on the third, or something like that.  

We spent a day in Castlemaine a few years ago and found much to like in it, including das KaffeeHaus, the Buda Historic Home, and the regional Art Museum.  I also bought some fine Murray Cod for dinner from ‘She Sells Sea Shells.’  

These comments derive from listening to the Audible reading while on my Newtown patrols, morn and eve.  At times the traffic, air, foot, and wheel, drowned out the sound, adding to the mystery.  

Good Reads meta data is 320 pages, 3.35 rated by 342 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Yankee.

Verdict: ‘Looking, Garv.’

Tagline: the squirrel did it!

Taxidermy is a dangerous trade, but Garv was not warned of this peril when he learned the business.  Now he knows.  He survives the mobsters, psychopaths, MAGAs, and more through the combined efforts of (Y)Angie his de facto wife who is an inveterate love tackler; Otto the Russian imp who honed his survival skills in the Gulag whom they shelter from ICE, his criminal brother who is less of crook than the police and lawyers after them.  Oh, and the sacrifice of Fred, the tame, because stuffed lion, in the living room.  Fortunately, it turns out the venom in a dead snake’s fangs is still toxic. Who knew.  

This is a re-read.  

Japanese anime (1978-9) 52 half-hour TV episodes rated 7.9 by 1,700 cineastes.  These were also screened throughout Europe at the time, as witnessed by the German and Spanish reviews on the IMDb.  

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: Japan.

Verdict: More, please.

Tagline: Holy Jupiter!

Between 1940 and 1951 Captain Future policed the nine planets in radio plays, pulp magazines, and even pulpier paperback books in the United States. There were further adaptations, like the Japanese series noted above.  

Seventeen of his 45-minute adventures were available from Radio Archives the last time I looked. Recommended to all SyFy nerdlngs.  These radio plays were written by Edmond Hamilton and voiced by Milton Bagby who does a marvellous job.  

Captain Future is Curtis Newton who is the most scientific of all scientists in the Solar System, where all nine planets, some moons, and a few asteroids and a comet or two are inhabited, and even some pinheads, mostly by humanoids, along with the required monsters for Curtis to tame, bamboozle, trap, or slay.

In his mission of mayhem he is aided by a living brain in a self-propelled glass box with waldos, being the last of Dr Simon Wright whose science is second only to that of Curtis; Grag the giant metal manling; Otho the rubber android, and assorted others.  See the Wikipedia entry for details.  

Nothing stops Captain Future: when villains maroon him on an uninhabited asteroid in a space suit with two hours of air, using the metals of the asteroid and his handy sonic screwdriver borrowed from Dr Who, he promptly builds a nuclear reactor to turn the rock itself into a space ship. Likewise the dreaded demons who dwell in the Great Red Fire Sea on Jupiter are no match for this wizard of science.

Sorting out the Solar System is a big job, to be sure, but Curt is an even bigger sort-outer than that, and in the later stories he extends his crusade against wrongdoers to time travel as well as interstellar and intermolecular space. This crusader needs no cape when he has science on his side.  

I heard some of these stories as a child, syndicated to a local radio station, and now I listen to them on my daily walks as a holiday from the unrelieved idiocy of contemporary events. 

Good Reads meta-data is 203 pages, rated 4.22 by 2403 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi; Species: Holmes.  

DNA: Edwardian England.

Verdict:  Poof!  

Tagline: Now you see him, now you don’t.

Erik Weisz (1874-1926) of Appleton Wisconsin is wrongly accused of murder, melée, and mayhem but Sherlock comes to the rescue as only he can, his Boswell at hand. You know Erik, that is, Harry Houdini stunt performer, illusionist, and escapologist extraordinaire. 

With a few of the tricks of his trade, Houdini assists Sherlock in identifying and apprehending the villain.  Most amusing is Watson’s first airplane ride. Indeed.  Of course there is no end to Sherlock’s wiles and the conclusion is foregone, though there are some nice and neat twists and turns along the way that confirm his nostrum: when all possibilities have been eliminated the impossible remains, or something like that.  

No trade secrets are revealed and I never did find out how Harry  got through that wall. 

***

The lengthy entry on Erik in Wikipedia makes for good reading.  There I note that after World War I he devoted a great deal of his time, effort, and reputation to debunking fraudulent spiritualists. He became a member of the editorial board of the Scientific American as a result.

This is a title in the series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which books, mostly reprints, are by a different authors.  In this one there are several typos, e.g., ‘wanned’ for ‘warmed’ and some formatting errors.  I expect the text was converted to digital for the Kindle by an A.I. that couldn’t read.  

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 4.08 by 695 litizens.  

Genre: krimi; Species: Holmes.

Verdict: Stilted. 

Tagline: Bully!  

What chance do villains have when a young Sherlock Holmes is on the case? Even less when he is abetted and assisted by a young Theodore Roosevelt.  

Holmes is in a company of British actors touring the USA so he can learn the tricks of the thespian trade: make-up, disguise, voice changes, posture, accents, and costumery.  A brash Roosevelt had written him a fan letter after reading one of his early monographs on ash or something and they meet in New York City.  No sooner than they do, than a man is shot and off they go in pursuit, this dynamic duo.  

To the police this is a mugging gone wrong, but in it Holmes sees an ocean or more exactly a political assassination in the making.  

Thanks to the intervention of Holmes, President Rutherford Hayes is not assassinated.  His one-time Democratic rival Samuel Tilden figures in the investigation, as does a later Vice-President, Chester Arthur, and an elusive Charles Guiteau. A student of US presidential history will see in this list a connect the dots picture.  In a corrupt election Hayes defeated Tilden, who, to his credit, accepted the result for the sake and peace and quiet.  Later, Guiteau shot President Garfield, while proclaiming he was a Stalwart, the name of a political sect. The result was that Arthur, likewise a Stalwart, became president.  Hmmm.  The rug of history has been pulled over this for centuries.  

Until the current incumbent caused the question of corruption to be reopened, historians had regarded Arthur to be the most venal president. He will now have to cede that title to the Felon-in-Chief. 

Footnote: Guiteau had a brush with utopianism in that he joined Noyes’s Oneida Community for several years, but was banished.  The details are salacious. The brief biography of his miserable specimen reminded me of many holders of high office in the news today.

I said ‘stilted’ above because it is written as if it were from Roosevelt’s diary and so imitates his laboured styled.  And I guess it is successful in that imitation because it certainly is laboured.  

***

Stimulated by this reading I once again sought a biography of Tilden.  No recent one exists, as I discovered the last time I tried to find one about ten years ago.  There is a gap in the literature then, but this time I did find one published in 1939 and will acquire and read that as the world turns.  

I formed a very high opinion of Theodore Roosevelt in reading Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of the man some years ago. Highly recommend to biographistas.  

This book is a volume in the series of more than thirty reprints as ‘The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’ I have read several others, each by a different author.  

Good Reads meta-data is 262 pages, rated 3.89 by 815 litizens.

Genre: Krimi, Species: Sherlock. 

DNA:  Holmes.

Verdict: More please. 

Tagline:  The impossible takes a little longer.

By hook and crook, Holmes and Watson find themselves in Egypt pursuing a wayward Duke at the behest of Mrs Duke.  Much colourful to’ing and fro’ing in 1904 Egypt in company of Howard Carter follows. Yes, that Howard Carter.  

No adventure in Egypt is completed without a sandstorm and so…. Then there is the Valley of the Kings….   Oops don’t forget the bent pyramid.  We also have the relief of the Nile, and a luxury hotel.  

In short, it is a gripping ripping yarn.