Category: Krimi

Goodreads meta-data 320 pages rated 4.04 by 23 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict:  Agent 001 at work. 

In 1947 Hero has returned from the war to a life of privilege at an Oxford college, where he mopes and feels sorry for himself.  He is an archeologist who specialises in the Middle East of, well, not pre-history but 4000 years ago is getting close.  A friend of a friend puts moper in contact with a Foreign Office (FO) toff who has a Sumerian doodad from those ancient days. ‘Meh’ is Hero’s reaction. But wait, there is more, this FO toff is also getting threatening messages in Sumerien cuneiform that seem to be relate to that doodad. Did it take the Royal Mail 4000 years to deliver them?  This conundrum briefly arouses moper from his melancholy self-absorption at least to footnote the texts from which the threats emanate. Scholars must always footnote.

Then the FO toff gets crushed (yes, crushed) on top of a Sumerien statue (one of the colossi) at midnight in the British Museum (BM). This wakes up moper.  (That reference to the BM is what got my click for Kindle. Be warned there is very little of it.)

At the same time the Irgun tries to assassinate the British Foreign Minister on the street, perhaps having mistaken him for the Archduke Ferdinand.  The Foreign Minister wants Hero to protect him since he has mistaken the Scots accent of his security detail for Sumerien. Can the plot get any thicker?  

Yes, it can because while escorting the FM moper meets the sister of his lost love.  You see, Lost Love thought he was already dead and so jumped to her own death, aided by the S.O.E. Code names Romeo and Juliet. (If you don’t know what the S.O.E. was, keep it that way.) He wonders ever so politely what his chances now are with sister. We all know where that is going to lead, even if he doesn’t.  

There are so many back and side stories and lengthy expositions on everything from the naming of ships to the location of hotels of the ‘Did you know?’ variety.  Did you know that seven kinds of wood were used for the paneling on the luxury ocean liner? There follows a list of each, its qualities, and application on the ship.  This is one of many such trivial pursuit sidebars that slow the pace, distract the attention, blur the focus, and weary the reader.  Our author obviously did an enormous amount of research into the period and was determined to put it all on the page. Gracious, get on with it.  

Hero is a man of endless talents. He leaps from tall buildings, outwits all manner of thugs, repairs ships at sea, and I am sure he can fly – with or without – a plane in the next chapter.  All of these accomplishments he owes to his S.O.E. training. Sure. Truth is S.O.E.’s real expertise was in getting its agents killed and its managers knighthoods.  

On the bright side, the ambience is brought to life, the characters are differentiated, the two story arcs (Sumerien and Irgun) are tantalising, Hero – on the rare occasions when he is not introspecting – is credible. There are some really arresting moments, say when a dead boring academic lecture, goes all spooky.  (I wish I had been able to do that!)  Too often there is the trivia quiz about extraneous and irrelevant details.

Loose ends there are a few.  At the end I still did not know how or why the first victim got on top the colossus in the British Museum, i.e., mechanically how did he get put there. Where was gravity when all that happened? Did it take the night off? As to why, well it did not matter in the end. The dwarf loomed large and then vanished.  Is that what dwarves do?  The origins of Mr Smith are unknown.  Was he victim of a gassing in the trenches of World War I? How did this freak hide on the Queen Mary? Buy clothes?  Use face recognition on the smart phone? Although it is the centrepiece of the beginning of the book there is never an explanation of the artefact’s theft from the lecture hall.   

Crutches there are a few.  I lost track of the number of times when Hero is contemplating the woodwork for the next trivia round, when a voice at his side interrupts his reverie.  Gosh, he seems to have no instinct to warn of these impending intrusions, and would hence never survive as a quarterback. Yet later we learn that he can sense the presence of invisible enemies, and he can see in the dark.  It’s the daylight, then, that blinds him.  

In an afterword the author links many of the events to historical reality, too many for this reader to digest.  The author seems to have been born with a keyboard on each hand because he has hundreds of writing credits in all manner of genres. This one is part of series.  

Goodreads meta-data is 447 (very long) pages, rated 4.47 by 136 litizens.  

Genre: Thriller.

Verdict: Ugh.

There is a world of difference between a thriller and a krimi, and this is a thriller, well, a wannabe thriller.  What it is largely is an exposition of the facts and figures about Switzerland in 1939.  A crashing bore, you might think, and you’d be right.  It is opened by a chapter about a German tank unit during the invasion of France in 1940, and I am now at 54% in Switzerland in early 1939 with no connection to that first chapter.  No, I am not on the edge of my seat, rather slumped in the chair in frustration and boredom.  (P.S. I flipped to the end and found a squib of an explanation of the tank unit opening.  Too little, too later for this impatient reader.)

One major theme is the extensive arms production in Switzerland. They were busy selling to all sides. That is played up so much I began to think that the way to avoid war was to put the Swiss out of business as the merchants of death.

As I was skimming through the pages of stilted, meandering prose I wondered why I had elected to read it. What prompted me to take up this stew.  I flicked the pages on the Kindle faster and faster and then…

Our hero secret agent Müller is impressed by the banker he meets, the more so since she is a woman, because she knows a lot about Switzerland that he, native though he is, does not know.  One of the unknowns for him is where Basel is. Yep.  It seems to be news to him that it is on the German border with that most peculiar train station. (Psst. There must have been a reference to this station in the blurb and that is why I selected it.)  

One of the three Basel train stations is very peculiar.  The Basel Badischer Bahnhof was known from 1933 to 1945 as the Basel Deutsche Reichsbahn.  See the difference?  No, well, check those dates and think again. Historically a rail company from Baden built the track and the station in the 19th Century and arranged by treaty – when Baden was an independent duchy before German unification – with Switzerland (in effect with canton of Basel) to operate the station which is on Swiss territory. This arrangement rolled over when Germany absorbed Baden.  The track and the platform are by treaty German, but the station building is Swiss.  De facto the border runs through the station between the platforms and the station hall. This was a legal fiction until 1933 with advent of Nazism made it a grim reality.  

Think of a train station as three components to get the picture: the tracks, the platforms, and the hall.  In this station the tracks and trains on them along with the platforms to enter and leave the trains were in Germany, while the hall that travellers passed through was in Switzerland.  That division, by the way, is easily to visualise in Sydney Central Station for intercity travel with the ticket barrier and its scanners as the border.   

On the other side of the hall there are platforms and rails serving Switzerland (like the suburban platforms at Sydney Central). I know that I saw this station when in Switzerland (1983) because I remember asking someone about the Badischer in the name and getting fobbed by an interlocutor who either didn’t know or didn’t care or both.

Today this kind of arrangement can be found elsewhere.  In both Vancouver and Toronto airports (and perhaps elsewhere, too) USA customs and immigration is accommodated in the Canadian airports on Canadian territory. To leave Toronto one passes through Canadian officials and then US ones to get to an aircraft going to the USA. In that zone the US authorities are sovereign by treaty like an embassy.

Back to Basel, from 1933 this division of the station made it a tempting conduit for some fleeing Nazi Germany, and knowing that fact, Nazi agents manned the checkpoint from the platform to the station with vigilance and plainclothes Gestapo agents roamed the hall in Swiss territory intimidating and on occasion kidnapping travellers. That latter was illegal but the neutral Swiss seldom complained, preferring to go along to get along with the bigger and meaner neighbour as long as the victims were not Swiss.   

I can find almost nothing about this anomalous station. I went looking for history on the Swiss Federal Railways web site to no avail.  That is, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, Chemins de der fédéraux suisses, Ferrovie federali svizzere, and Viafiers federalas svizras, whew! No wonder it has more than 30,000 employees!  Visiting archives, I once travelled on SFR from Zurich to Geneva to Neuchâtel, and back.  

Is this station another missed opportunity for Hollywood to muddle history ‘based on a true story?’  Dibs!  I can imagine the clichés punctuated with childish CGI for by the prepubescent boy directors and audience.  

All of this is more interesting than the tome at hand. Read it and decide for yourself.  

Goodreads meta-data is 329 pages rated 3.7 by 323 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Many trees, little forest. 

Welcome to the back office of a very large and expensive hotel far away from the glitz and glamour of the lobby and the guest rooms. In back the floors are concrete, the paint is peeling, and the staff are treated like slaves. No it is not quite that bad, but the contrast between the front of the house and back is nonetheless stark. The laundry, the stains, the effort to please those paying a thousand dollars a night, the demands of the head of an association who brings its annual conference with hundreds of expense-account guests each year, the thefts, the health inspections, the demarcation disputes among the staff, the ego war in the kitchens, the indifference of the McKinsey-schooled managers to anything that does ring the cash register, they are all in a day and night at the Hotel California, which I identified with that rambling structure the Hotel del Coronado with its paper thin walls in San Diego where I once had a conference.  

Our hapless protagonist has been passed over for promotion to manager more than once. Is that the cause or the effect of his increasingly cynicism?  The incumbent manager, ever faithful to the book of McKinsey of delegating responsibility downward to maintain deniability, seems to take delight in heaping ever more duties on him, perhaps to drive him out.  Well our hero is made of stronger stuff and will not buckle…yet.  

With housing for nearly a thousand guests across several buildings and an endless stream of comings and goings it is a small town, and lots of shenanigans from mischief to murder, with a suicide in-between not to mention the nocturnal tepee creeping. (The description reminded me of the Hilton Village in Waikiki.) The police have learned to use the deliveries entrance. None of these events are good for business and the sooner swept under the carpet the better.  Woe betide the housekeeping staff who lift that carpet.    

There is slow build after an initial explosion of violence in a guest room, and much exposition of hotel mechanics along with a survey of the staff. That may sound laboured, however, it is well integrated into the unfolding of the narrative. Note, it is merciful shorn of IKEA descriptions of furnishings or Elle clothing fashions.  Indeed I have no idea what the protagonist looks like.

However, yes there is a ‘but’ coming. The exposition does become forced when every room, every employee, every incident has a nickname or code name in hotelese which is explained. The tide of information is relentless. Time after time, page after page.  It gets to be mechanical, Robbie.  It became like following a jaded tour guide reciting facts and figures to no end.  None of that exposition fed into the plot. 

There are clever set-ups like the Bob Johnsons Convention which was a completely new idea to me, and it made a screwball comedy sort of Kurt Vonnegut sense. The solution wrapped-up just about everything, but not everything. Bob ‘Bull’ Johnson must still be roaming the hallways.   

Oversold re laugh out loud but dryly amusing page-by-page.  But perfect for bedside table reading matter. 

Goodreads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.56 by 258 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Meh. 

I have read at least a dozen of these Charles Paris krimis and enjoyed the plotting and the theatrical ambience which is so lovingly detailed. This book is the sixteenth in the sequence.  Surprising then, I could not finish this one but stopped at 48% on the Kindle meter. It seemed to be going nowhere. Instead there were endless discussions about the nature and meaning of the play to be performed – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – that went on and on in every chapter.  

The only crimes were artistic, punctuated with Charles’s usual alcoholism and colossal blunders in relating to his Penelope, who has wisely divorced him but still – for reasons of the plot – puts up with him, and diamond hard cynicism.  Not a stiff in sight.   

I signed out in favour of another title by another author.  Have I become an impatient reader? Guess so. Because of my affection for the other titles by this writer and appreciating how hard it must be to sustain such a series, I hesitated for some time about posting this remark, but well, the truth will out. I don’t suppose my comments will damage the sales of this title or any other.

The Fat Detective (2018) by Christopher Hayes

GoodReads meta-data is 161 pages, rated 3.59 by 593 litizens.  

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Offbeat, very.

Morbidly obese, incompetent accountant Eugene daydreams about escaping the rut of an hour-long commute on the crowded, dirty, smelly, and unreliable Tube where people sneeze on him to work, a cold sandwich downed at his hot desk in an open-plan zoo between associates struggling not to bump into his ungainly bulk.  That bulk may well be the only reason he hasn’t been fired, the firm fearing some kind of law suit for discrimination against the fat. 

Eugene lives with his grandmother to save money, so poorly paid is he. His co-workers shun him, and it is easy to see why. He is painfully inept, tongue-tied, sloppy, and, well, not very bright. The tomato sauce stains on his shirt are ever present. ‘I’m a Loser’ is his theme song.  

Into this downward spiralling life comes a wind, well, a breeze, of change.  After work one day, during a cloud burst he ducks into a bookstore where he comes across a krimi he read years ago when he was a student, and thumbs through it, recalling something of the story and savouring the recollection of his youth when he read it.  The rain stops, and as he heads toward the dreaded Tube, and because he went into the bookstore he walks along a street he usually does not, passing an Op Shop which has a men’s trench coat in a window display. More rain is in the offing and he is surprised to find that the coat encompasses his XXXXL+ girth.  ‘Sold!’ and as he walks along he feels a surge of energy – a new experience for him.  

Strange.  Remember Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo [2002]? Not quite as powerful as all that but a surge nonetheless.

Moping in his room, as he does every night, stuffing his face with greasy food and slurping gigantic sugar-laced sodas, trawling the web, when nearly unconsciously he types an advert onto an internet market place as a PI.  

Imagine his surprise when a few nights later, surrounded by pizza boxes and double whopper colas, he gets an imperious response to this notice, instructing him to arrive at an address at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning…alone.  Taking time off work, sure that no one will miss him, he meets Melissa who sets him to find her missing husband, a highly paid and successful surgeon, who has been gone for weeks.  Did I mention that Eugene is also a virgin and naive to boot. He will do anything she says if he can fathom it.  

Trouble is that Eugene has no idea what to do, desperately trying to remember the detective books and films he has read and seen for inspiration. He is not very good at that either: Mumbling, stumbling, scratching. It does eventually occur to him to ask around among husband’s colleagues. However, his near total lack of personality means most ignore him even though with his size he is hard to miss.   

He is altogether a loser, but somehow….  Yes, he has the luck of the stupid, and by chaotic shambling he uncovers the plot, and it is resolved with very little help from him.  There is an adage in sports that a better opponent brings out one’s own best game. One plays up, or tries to do so, to the competition.  Eugene does something like that.  

It is unusual and unexpected and diverting. It includes a novel within the novel, namely that 1940’s noir he found in the bookstore in a tour de force. I did read it all and that in itself is a recommendation from this impatient reader.  There is a sequel but I have not bit yet.  Perhaps I will.  

[A week later.] I did, very similar to the above but with unexpected touches like the cab stand at Russell Square, at which I remember once waiting far too long before dawn on a wet day for a ride to Heathrow.  

GoodReads meta-data is 201 pages, rated 3.75 by 16 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: By the numbers.

It is 1990 in the People’s Republic of China following the Tiananmen Square massacre.  Inspector Bao goes to see an opera. On his police officer’s salary his ticket puts him in the cheapest of cheap seats.  As the luck of crime writing would have it, another patron nearby is murdered in his seat, and, well, a fictional dick has got to do what a fictional dick has got to do and he investigates.

Of course, he is warned off by overlings and that threat causes him to redouble his efforts, and so on.  It is an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion and that is among the coppers. 

There is much locale and atmosphere of contemporary China and that kept me flipping Kindle pages as the genre clichés piled up.    

Two straw horses dominate Bao’s tedious efforts at social criticism: first, is the corruption of the Communist Party which has become even more strident and hypocritical post-Tiananmen and, second, evil capitalism (which is simply equated to money) corrupting the comrades. It is a world of blacks and whites. Reminded me of that Danish kiminiologist who equates anyone with a few Euros to Hitler – Jussi Adler-Olsen.  

Mostly Bao, like so many other fictional detectives, is more interested in his own introspection and self-absorption than anything else. ‘I am so fascinating’ would a truthful subtitle for many krimi heroes.   

There is much of China, as indicated above, the division between city slickers who breathe smog and country bumpkins who breathe methane, dutiful northerners and slack southerners, real Chinese versus Hong Kongers, and the spectral shadow of Mao and the Cultural Revolution hang over all like a miasma.  (Aside, it seemed to this cynical observer that the Trump era bore many similarities to the Cultural Revolution with its celebration of ignorance.) 

Some time ago I came across an explanation for the two names Beijing used to bear when transliterated to English: Peping and Peking.  One means northern city and other northern capital but I forgot which way around they go.  

GoodReads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.74 by 98 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: More!

The ten nations bordering the Baltic Sea come together to enhance shipping along its waters and create an international organisation – Baltic Area Development Agency (BADA) – to superintend those efforts by dredging harbours, widening channels, improving port machinery, enhancing computer technology, buying time on satellites. For these purposes BADA busies itself with fund raising.  Enter the Sloan Guarantee Trust of New York in the person of the redoubtable and imperturbable John Putnam Thatcher in his twenty-fourth outing; the first was in 1961. Age has not wearied him.    

As with all of the previous titles there is much office politics and BADA is a mare’s nest held together only by the iron will and rapier flexibility of its Swedish Director Annemarie Nordstrom and the technical wizardry of her number two, Stefan Zabriski of Poland. She has larger political ambitions and he loves the boy toys that BADA offers him. The Kiel Canal comes into the spotlight when on a windswept night of ice fog a collision involving several ships occurs and creates a Baltic traffic jam and crisis with a tailback from Kiel to Tallinn, while Thatcher just happened to be on hand in discussions of an infrastructure loan with his irascible off-sider Everett Gabler whose lust for spreadsheets is obscene.  

Just when the traffic jam seems to be under control, a storm in a BADA tea cup spills over, and Zabriski is corpse number jeden.  Who dun it? The Dane, the Swede, the Estonian, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, the Russian, the German, the Finn, the Norwegian, or …. all of the above? Then there are all the lobbyists and hangers-on that gather around BADA. And why?  Had the deceased discovered something among his computer datasets?  Did he himself do wrong?  

Much atmosphere around Kiel and the BADA HQ in Gdansk are retailed. Many shenanigans in high finance occur.  Zabriski (was that point named for him?) is by far the most interesting character. Too bad he left the scene so early. Also well drawn is his surviving (but not for long) assistant who knows more than she realises. The plot thickens, rather like my waist line.    

There is much to’ing and fro’ing from a horse auction to a state funeral and rather little character development or unravelling of the plot. Lots of light and sound, but not much upon which to chew, but still fun. Gabler’s puritanical nature is put to the test when he sees how Poles do business.  Much as he treasures the paper trail he also likes to see things for himself!  

I thought I had read all of the John Thatcher mysteries and then I discovered I had not.  Whoopee! I have sung the praises of the Lathen partnership in earlier posts and will not repeat that tune here. Click the link below for enlightenment. 

Books read in 2019 awards continues!

Each of these Kindle reissues is accompanied by a long, self-indulgent, and tedious ego trip by Deaver Brown for reasons known only to him. It adds nothing and consumes about half the sample, serving as an example of how not to market a book.  It is repeated in every one of the preceding re-printed twenty-four Lanthen titles.    

Goodreads meta-data is 227 pages, rated 3.81 by 26 members of the extended family. 

Genre is krimi.

Verdict is not for me. 

While I found the context and circumstances intriguing with a sub rosa secret service and the research into the period details is noteworthy that was all that kept me flicking the Kindle pages.

The protagonist is so inept it is hard to believe he made it that far alive, given what an imbecile he is. He takes as many pratfalls as a slapstick performer in a burlesque without the timing.  Nor are any of the supporting players better delineated.  The obnoxious superior officer is cardboard, as is the seductive (hardly) empress, while Hero’s notional superior is almost as inept as he is.  No wonder the Empire fell if likes of these two were charged to hold it up.  Hmm, may be I should have read it as a satire.

None of that is eased by the laboured prose and typos that keep the reader guessing. There are several volumes in this series. Decide for yourself.   

Inspired by listening to a BBC Radio 4 episode of ‘Great Lives’ on Hadrian I thought to read Marguerite Yourcenar’s biographical novel on the Roman Emperor, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). (By the way her full name is Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour. She shortened that to Marguerite Yourcenar.) I read her novel Coup de Grâce (1939) about star-crossed lovers in Latvia long ago. Sorry to say Memoirs of Hadrian is not available for the Kindle, and so I eschewed it. I did click the button to request it become available on Kindle, a new feature to me. 

In the course of consulting Amazon about it, several other titles concerning Hadrian were proffered and I took this one, proving my humanity because I erred.

Goodreads meta-data is 278 pages, rated 3.94 by 30,070 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: [Yawn.]

I chose it for the location and there is plenty of that but I gave up at 48% on the Kindle-o-meter. So many back and sides stories, descriptions of clothes and furnishings to numb the interest. Reader, if you like that sort of thing, this is a book for you, but not me.

There is an all-enveloping corporate conspiracy with corrupt government officials to build a pipeline with would deliver cheap energy to thousands of people – those bastards! – but they – I suppose in the end – are no match for Joe Pickett, game warden extraordinaire. 

The inclusion of small children is unusual and they are very well done and integrated into events. Full marks plus for that.  But that is not sufficient to overcome the meandering flow of description. 

I have become an impatient and merciless reader: if it doesn’t hold my interest, I stop.  

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages and rated 3.97 by 6972 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Gripping.  

In 1956 two airliners in the wild blue yonder ran into each other over the Colorado River and bodies, luggage, and debris rained down into the Grand Canyon.  A hundred seventy passengers on the two flights were killed along with the planes’ crews.  It took weeks to recover the body (parts) and the larger pieces debris. But not everything was found. This did indeed happen as per the link below. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Grand_Canyon_mid-air_collision

Thirty years later and a legal dispute about inheritance from one of those killed is reaching a Jarndyce and Jarndyce conclusion.  Not only was this man carrying an attaché case full of diamonds to New York City, he was also the last scion of a wealthy father, the kind of family that owns cases full of diamonds. A shady lawyer has been exploiting the inheritance while the judicial wheels ground but there is a claimant who hopes to use DNA to prove her assertion by finding the body of her putative father, the courier with the diamonds, who was also the heir to a fortune since directed to the foundation the lawyer controls to his own satisfaction. This lawyer hires an unscrupulous investigator to go the Grand Canyon country and head off the claimant’s efforts by any means. 

None of that is very interesting.  What is interesting the geomorphology of the Grand Canyon which becomes a moving force in this story, along with the Hopi Indians who live along the banks of the Little Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  One of the Hopis is the Skeleton Man (or so I thought).  

The plot has more convolutions than I needed and the backstories to thirty years before were confusing to this casual reader at bedtime, but Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito carry the story when Jim’s friend and law enforcement colleague Cowboy Dashee asks for his help in tracking down an errant relative.  It is all done with such delicacy. Dashee does not ask Jim for help but explains what he is going (to have to do) to find this cousin of his who has done something stupid. It is dangerous and not really a search one man alone can effect, but… well, he has to try.  Jim realises this explanation is an appeal for help, though the task will be arduous and there is some danger (less if the two work together), Dashee has done him many good turns in the past, so he volunteers, and, of course, where he goes Bernie has to follow, wanted or not.

So the three of them descend into the Grand Canyon’s where they meet its inhabitants and also some interlopers after both the diamonds and the DNA specimen represented by the bones they may find.  They have some clues that have recently come to light that lead them to a location….  In the end despite the bad will and guns of the villains, the Grand Canyon prevails and washes away the human stain.  

I grew unsure about who the titular Skeleton Man was at the end.  There are three possibilities: the elderly Hopi shaman, the courier whose ulna remains, or the male villain. Reader let me know what you conclude.

This is the 17th title in the series, believe it or not, and it glows with Hillerman’s skill in place, character, and plot. It all done to Indian-time, no one is in a hurry but it all gets done.