Category: Krimi

Deadly Safari (1991) by Karin McQuillan

Good Reads meta-data is rated 3.69 by 158 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

Verdict: A Start

Deep in the bush of Kenya our heroine leads a group of snappers among the game, big and little.  She spends a lot of time feeling sorry for herself, i.e., backstory.  The compensation for that dreary indulgence is the setting which is very well realised: the heat, humidity, smells, noise of birds, insects, grunts of lions, and so on, though sometimes it seems forced into the story, contributing neither to character, plot, or ambience.  

It is a small group of eight Safarians (plus attendants) and as the guests start dying, the plot thickens, following the rulebook: the obnoxious boor dies (because no one could stand him for many more pages) and it seems a heart attack triggered by his constant bad temper combined with a surprise tumble. No one seems to care or miss him, though he dominated the first chapters, least of all his wife. When a second member is speared in her sleep, not even the rulebook deniers can deny it is foul play. Well it turns out later they can deny the reality. 

For as convention has it, one member of the party is a Republican and denies reality vigorously while loudly proclaiming his law and order credentials and obstructing the police investigation in every way possible and some impossible for no other reason than to inject some tension into the story. Quite how anyone could think not investigating two murders made sense is never explained but that’s fiction.    

The Kenyan detective who descends on the camp is a marvellous character as is his taciturn sergeant. Their approach to investigation is not from the manual of krimi conventions, and very refreshing for that.  Among the noteworthy scenes is a visit to a Masai village which I found intriguing and informative.  

There is also some self-deprecating humour.  When asked how she suspected the least likely person to be the murderer, our heroine said, ‘When she pulled a gun and threatened to kill me, then I knew.’  Not before.  Nice. 

Yes, much of the book is David Attenborough about the plants, the animals, and the peoples of Kenya but I found that tolerable.  What I found less tolerable was the Elle fashion commentary of everyone’s clothes in each scene.  Still less the Gourmet Traveller menus for each meal. None of the clothing or food contributed to the plot but taken as a whole it went on for pages.  Likewise I found some of the dialogue attenuated to spin out the length. Grumble, grumble, grumble.  

First in a series and perhaps in later titles the author relaxes a little and lets the time and place carry the reader along without the fashion shows or gourmet meals.  Maybe our heroine will spend less time thinking about herself in later titles. Or perhaps the success of this one has encouraged the writer to pad the next title even more with irrelevant details and victimology.       

The title reminded me of a restaurant by that name – The Safari – on King Street at the corner of Queen Street that opened early at 5 pm and so I had meals there often before evening classes in the middle of the 1970s. Despite the name and the mosquito netting suspended from the ceiling, it was a continental menu leaning to Italian (pasta and scaloppine) but it was run by a couple from Germany.  Since I was early, alone, and regular I got to know them.  I did once ask about the name and all I can remember now (nearly fifty years later) is that the business had that name when they took over.  Perhaps there was more to it but that is now lost to time. 

On one occasion I was in a hurry and to accommodate my need for speed Heinz (though I do not remember his name) put the water for the spaghetti through the espresso machine to get it to boiling temperature in no time at all. That was my most memorable meal, I ordered as I walked in and by the time I sat down and drew out the papers to review before class, the plate arrived!   

When the German couple left about 1980 the new proprietors changed the cuisine to Indonesian but retained the name.  In the next decade organised labour put that incarnation out of business, protecting workers rights so well that none them any longer had a job, and since then it has been a vegetarian butcher (you read that right) per the signs in the window, a tattoo parlour, and it is currently….?  I haven’t been that way in a while and don’t know. 

GoodReads meta-data is 560 pages rated 4.22 by 1,303 litizens. 

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Incomprehensible. (OK with me.)

Contemporary Beijing detective Chopsticks has been exiled to remote Tibet for prying too deeply into corruption in the northern capital.  He rather likes the sparse vastness on the roof of the world after the polluted morass of Beijing.  By the invisible and mystical communication (is it those singing bowls?) he is summoned somehow by someone to an even more isolated area where orphan children have been murdered. After a while it diverts into Indiana Jones country without either the wit or humour of that adventurer, and becomes the quest for the jade basket. NBA?  

The book begins on the quest and makes few concessions to the reader. If you don’t know what a ‘knob’ is, or a ‘boot squad,’ you’ll get no help from the author.  The author’s hand is leaden in describing the havoc wrecked on this ancient land and people by the Chinese. Bad Chinese!  They have dug wells, paved roads, installed generators!  What’s worse is that they sleep on beds!  The Buddhist lamas who sleep on the ground know that the earth does like this interference. Reveal! The lamas are greener than thou; they are Super-Duper Greenies!  

Because of that, wherever he goes the locals — Tibetans, Kazakhs, Uyghurs — recoil from him – he is Chopsticks after all.  China pays little lip service to multiculturalism, and these people are largely non-people to quote the Great Helmsman.  The rapine, murder, and disappearances are many, but cloaked in a care-speak mimicked from the McKinsey-speak of the West.  Children are enrolled in residential schools, not stolen from their parents. They are taught life-skills, not forbidden to speak their ethnic language. Shepherds become shareholders in a company, not have their sheep confiscated. Nomadic herdsmen are given houses, not denied the right of movement to follow the seasons with their herds. As to their herds, see the preceding example of sheep. It is ageless tyranny cloaked in managementese. 

While wandering around for hundreds of pages with no apparent effect, Chopsticks encounters a screenwriter’s collection of oddbods, a couple of Americans who say ‘Howdy’ on cue, a Kazakh warrior, a comely native woman who is part Tibetan, a mad man, a smuggler, a monk in disguise, some secret archeologists, a mystic, some rogue Chinese soldiers, assorted outlaws, a camel with more personality than some of the aforementioned characters, and so on, and on without ever quite getting to the point while collecting this cast from a Fellini movie.  Pitted against the characters are the Public Security Forces of the PRC, the PLA of the PRC, and the local contractors with their managementese.  Go on, figure that out, because I cannot.  

I kept flipping the pages with less and less interest and enthusiasm, but having sunk costs, continued to the (welcome) end. It felt good when I quit. Conclusion: Chinese bad, very bad, and then worse. Tibetans victims.  But then so is everyone else.  

I chose it for the exotic locale and it has that aplenty.  Disappointed that there are no monks chanting. We heard some of that in Darwin a decade ago and I found it quite….  Well, I found time passed without me being aware of it.  

GoodReads meta-data is 299 pages rated 3.75 by 1,829 litizens. 

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Chapeaux! 

After a small private late evening reception at Windsor Castle, duties done, Her Majesty the Queen (HMQ) retired for the night only to discover next morning that one of her nocturnal guests has croaked in a castle bedroom … by accident. Bad. (Was the food that bad?) The police arrive and see suicide. Worse. (Was the room so depressing?) The coroner has a look: murder. Worst. (Who dun it?) 

Thames Valley plod, the Life Guards, the Security Service, Special Branch, the Met, MI6, and other Secret Squirrels descend on the stately pile tripping over each other in the rush to investigate while decorously not disturbing HMQ, and spend most of their time, as observed by HMQ, disputing the turf. Needless to say, per the McKinsey management manual there is no sharing of information among these game cocks.  

HMQ concludes most of these investigators are more interested in claiming the turf with the accompanying prestige and an enlarged budget and promotions to go with it, than with a speedy resolution that would reveal how, why, and who. If justice is to be done, well, the monarch will have to see to it, while these investigators have their pissing contests.  One must do what one must do.  

There are many etched scenes, as when HMQ summons the Assistant Private Secretary (APS), a woman newly hired, and makes a point of by-passing the long-standing Principal Private Secretary (PPS) who is so correct that he squeaks like a robot when he walks. The APS wonders why she has been selected, and, slowly, she finds out. HMQ says to the APS, ‘I want you to do something for me,’ followed by a long pause. So long is the pause that the APS thinks before she replies, realising that it is ‘for me,’ Elizabeth, and not for the sovereign.  This assignment will not go into the duty diary. Indeed, much of the fun and drama in the book lies in what it is not said. That will put off most of the GoodReads crowd. 

HMQ proceeds, softly, softly by indirection and implication to find out quite a lot, while the police sort out their turf wars.  

There was a big hole in the plot:  I could not fathom how the singer had become a trained assassin, and then a victim all in an instant. The resolution was by smoke and mirrors, despite all the foregoing procedural.  

I particularly liked the characterisation of the much-maligned Prince Phillip, who in these pages is a thick-skinned, affable, and garrulous man who treats HMQ like a person, not an icon. He is so direct that it is a refreshing change from the ever so subdued approach of any and everyone else. He alone does not cosset her, knowing she is smart, tough, and game.   

While I was surprised that there was no demonstration of tying a necktie with a Windsor knot, or at least a school-boy half-Windsor, I pressed on, though I did, and still do, wonder why the knot is called that.  Wonders never cease!  

GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.80 by 2,759 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Trinity!

March 1945 in the high desert of New Mexico near Santa Fé: Get it?  A security officer has been murdered and his mutilated body was found miles away, well outside the perimeter of that strange town on the mesa, and I don’t mean Santa Fé.  Get it?  Nothing must delay the work in the town and a special investigator arrives to put a lid on speculation while getting to the bottom of the crime. Get it? 

Welcome to Atomic City at Los Alamos, along the dried up Alameda River, near Alamogordo and Trinity. Get it? Little Boy and Fat Man are aborning. Inside two layers of barbered wire, patrolled by armed guards and dogs, illuminated at night, observed from watch towers, beyond innumerable checkpoints, all monitored by aerial reconnaissance 5,000 people live and work, many with German, Italian, Polish, and Slavic names, each with a pointy head. Among them are immature college boys and all of them are A-class nerds with no interest in the manly arts of pissing contests. In addition there are several thousand guards and construction workers, some of whom regard these alien pin heads with contempt, which is reciprocated by the some of the boys. It is many worlds in one.   

Into this mix is thrown our hero, sent from furtherest D.C. to see what he can see about the death of the security officer forty miles off base.  Hero is empowered to do what he thinks fit, provided it in no way slows, hampers, or distracts from the project to make the gadget work. Gadget?  

Secrecy means no one talks to anyone else, and it also means only one man knows everything, and it is not the commanding General Leslie Groves, but the brainiac of brains, Robert Oppenheimer. Both members of this odd couple — Groves and Oppenheimer —are portrayed with a deft touch in these pages. Groves wants the job done the army way, yet he knows that is not possible, and Oppenheimer wants it done any way it can be done, but he is not sure that it is possible. The friction is between these two ways. They are united on one thing: no delays!  To illustrate the tension: for Oppenheimer free discussion will speed progress, but to Groves it will breach security.  

There are so many backstories that they get in the way, but the descriptions of the countryside, and the odd assortment of characters are good.  And especially good is the implicit parallel between the Thirteenth Century abandoned Anasazi city and Atomic City. 

See this article in the Smithsonian Magazine for some tantalising details ruins. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/

The conclusion therein is that the Anasazi destroyed themselves, like the GOP. 

I read what purported to be a biography of Oppenheimer a couple of years ago, as linked below. It offered more hagiography than analysis, and the title in hand is a good antidote to that.

‘109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos’ (2006) by Jennet Conant.

Most of the action is a police procedural with the constant raking over the facts. The characters are well drawn, including the supporting players like the local sheriff who has learned not to ask too many questions about the Hill (the Mesa). That said, I did find much of the exposition in wordy dialogues a drag that descended to verbal sparring – too many words with too little meaning. In a screen play with actors’ gestures, intonations, facial expression that can work with snappy delivery, but on the page it is deadweight. Still the insights into motivation are the payoff, and they are credible.  I wondered also about balance. Much of the early going was leisurely, but the end was rushed, excused by Trinity, but why?  That was not the end but a new beginning.  In addition, I thought there was too much prescience – hindsight – at the end.  Quibble, quibble, quibble….the trouble with quibbles.  I am already checking out the author’s other titles.  

As usual, many of the thumbnails of the GoodReads comments are about the reviewer and not the book.  ‘Me’ seems to be favourite subject of many keyboardians.  

The Barbarous Coast (1956) by Ross Macdonald

Goodreads meta-data is 240 pages rated 3.86 by 1,196 litizens.

Genre: PI.

Lew Archer agrees to find a run-away wife so that her husband can talk to her. He seems harmless; she isn’t.  It is sixth entry in Macdonald’s sunshine noir oeuvre, featuring Lew.  

The wife has latched onto a film contract, or to be more exact, a film mogul has latched onto her with the contract bait. Who will land whom? Who is the more unscrupulous and devious?  It’s neck-and-neck on those criteria. The backdrop of Archer’s weary and gruelling investigation is So Cal Babylon:

“Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people’s heads, spread across the landscape, and solidified: North and south along the coast, east across the desert, across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It has become the nightmare that we lived in.” He is reacting to the people from across the country who come to Hollywood to live in that dream, and fail. 

The dream went sour but we are stuck with it. ‘Huh?’ you may well say, but it is striking prose all the same. The Studios will do anything – yes, anything, including eating their own – to preserve the dream because that is where the money is.  The title should refer to cannibalism.   

As always with Macdonald few words are wasted. When furniture in a room is described it adds weight to the ambience, if the colour of a car is noted it reflects the mood, if a man’s suit is mentioned the bulge in his coat conceals a gun, and so on.  There are no Vogue-Elle-IKEA descriptions as ends-in-themselves. Then there are the metaphors that sharpen the spikes.  Macdonald is surely the inheritor of Chandler. The vision is bleak in all that sunshine, in all that post war wealth, in all that easy living, but somehow uplifting in the end when all the pieces fall into place and the decent people get on with their lives. There is no happy ending but there is resolution of a kind. 

Spoiler: His standard plot devices are present. The villain, well the first villain since there are many, hired Archer as cover, there is a folie à deux in a middle-aged couple who ought to know better, there are unscrupulous fixers, crooked cops, wannabe starlets, honest working stiffs, innocent victims, sunshine grifters, musclemen, bathing beauties, in short, much of fictional So Cal.  

Those connoisseurs who chart these things regard it as the last book in the first phase of Archer’s three-part career.  Good as it is, the Archer books got better and better, it is true, and I thought there were times in these pages when Macdonald was trying too hard, or I simply missed the point, or a tangent contributed nothing.  For a tribute to Macdonald’s career click the embedded link below.

https://www.januarymagazine.com/crfiction/rossintro.html

Snowflake alert: the book reflects the time and place in this portrayal of blacks, hispanics, women, homosexuals though none of this is emphasised. That said, the only honest people Archer encounters are a black pool man, a Latino gateman, and the wife’s sister, all of whom are crucial to the plot.  

Borkmann’s Point (2007) by Håkan Nesser. 

GoodReads metadata is 336 pages rated 3.73 by 8,320 litizens.

Genre: Police procedural.

Verdict: Measured.  

Chief Inspector van Veeteren is dispatched to sleepy Kaalbringen (Pop. 45,000) to advise the local plod on the investigation of a gruesome murder. Most covers of this tome show a butcher’s ax. VV is reluctant to go but needs must, while the local plod, only too glad to have someone with whom to share the blame, welcomes him.  Had he looked for Kaalbringen on a map, he would have failed to locate it as it is fictional. While the author is Swedish the names of characters are a mix of Flemish, French, English, Polish, and Swedish – very Euro. Having said that, it is also true there are no Asians or dark skins around.  So it is only Euro. (Though by the way the currency is not the Euro but the guilder.)

The individual characters are well delineated from the ambitious female constable to her bumbling male partner, to the soon to retire local chief of police with whom VV plays chess (which is a metaphor for the plot but also a part of it), to the chief’s heir apparent who tensely strives not to put a foot wrong in front of VV and as a result barely moves.

Even as VV arrives another axed corpse is found and then a week later another, three in all: Chop, chop, and chop. The victims seem to have had nothing in common, and there are slight variations in the modus operandi, apart from the ax. The aresponsible media whips up public hysteria which drains police time and budget.  It seemed pretty obvious soon enough who the culprit was….but it was a nice trip. Likewise, how could so many people have read the Melnike Report and not notice the missing page with and without page numbers?  

The titular Borkmann was VV’s mentor long ago, and his point was that in an investigation there may come a time when gathering yet more information will cloud rather than clarify reality.  At the eponymous point there is enough information, enough pieces of the puzzle are there and it is time to put them together. All pieces are not necessary to get the outline. A skilled investigator learns to recognise that point and then see the whole picture. 

As in krimis, so it is in social science, far more information (data) is collected than is ever analysed.  It is a design-fault in the way we do social science because the career incentives lie in doing something new, not in raking over old ground for meaning. In most studies the data, whatever form it takes, is examined once for immediate purposes of a publication, and then shelved. Truth to be told, despite two generations of emphasis on methodology most studies are so idiosyncratic in conception that raking them again by another researcher is not possible. I’ll cite PhD completions where the uniqueness of the work is always the money shot. Ergo Borkman’s Point rang a bell for this reader.

This is the second in a long-running series. I read it years ago but retained nothing from it except that I liked it, so when I came across it recently I re-read it. I expect to meet VV again in another book.  

G.I. Confidential (2019) by Martin Limón

GoodReads meta-data is 198 pages, rated 4.04 by 52 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Rings true.

Another neat police procedural set in the jurisdiction of the US Eighth Army, 1970s South Korea.  Ironmen George Sueño and Ernie Bascom investigate GI black marketing (selling everything from tax-payer subsidised cigarettes to washing machines bought cheap at the camp PX to Koreans for profit), drug dealing, stolen weapons, bored and dallying army wives, and such like, until one day a splash in a Hong Kong rag sends them North to talk to a frontline commander at the DMZ who keeps ordering combat alerts within sight of NKs.  A quiet word off-line is what HQ wants, but where these two go thunder claps follow. ‘Quiet’ is not the word.

This is the 14th instalment in the long running series and par for the course with one addition and two subtractions. The addition is a strong-willed, razor-sharp journalist who stays one step ahead our heroes all the way, and what’s more is a woman. By turns, she bamboozles them, beguiles them, threatens them, outsmarts them, stays two steps ahead of them, manipulates them far more effectively than their superiors and then briskly takes her leave, while our heroes stand around gaping. Atta girl! The subtractions are from the Ironman quotient. In previous titles George and Ernie have enough alcohol and sex to float the U.S. Seventh Fleet on one liquid or the other, but not this time.  Both are oddly dry on each front. Ernie’s zipper seems stuck for once, and George must be broke if he cannot drink dry every one of the many bars they enter.

As with every entry in the series, Límon’s knowledge, respect, and affection for Korea’s people, culture, history, and language shines through.  He was a GI Lifer and spent half of that time in Korea. It shows and glows. Equally usual is the far-fetched plot, though as strange Sergeant Strange says to George and Ernie at one point, ‘In Korea most things are possible.’

GoodReads meta-data is 192 pages rated 4.03 by 2,182 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Nada.  

Forget that title, down Mexico way our protagonist is an equal opportunity murderer without discrimination as to race, nation, gender, creed, orientation, height, age, colour, creed, or interest.  It is very noir because every character says f**k in every sentence.  Mongolia is as irrelevant as just about everything else in these pages. 

Protagonist is told to be discreet and that his quarry is not Chinese. He then goes to Chinatown and asks the Chinese he finds there direct questions about Chinese. This is his idea of discretion. He did not graduate at the top of the class in Thug School. It gets worse, far worse. I flipped the pages — seemed like more than 192 — in the hope of a taste of Mexico City, but there is very little after some street names. 

A long and didactic introduction by an enthusiast put me off lunch. Those who claim to know say this is the author’s masterpiece.  Amen to that. 

Death of a Ghost (1934) by Margery Allingham.

GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.92 by 2,292 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Smooth.  

A painter arranges for an elaborate posthumous deception/joke with his own work(s) without reckoning on the avarice of some later intermediaries. When the deaths begin, Albert Campion is there, but for once his motor-mouth is throttled; a mercy that is.  

There is a marvellous characterisation of the villain with an ingenious plot to match the painter’s set-up. Though I did wonder why the young artist’s works were disappearing and I don’t know that was ever explained. 

The best episode is the luxury dinner at which Campion is to be murdered!  He knows it, the villain knows it, readers know it, but needs must.   

Death in Malta (2000) by Rosanne Dingli

GoodReads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.88 by 98 litizens. 

Genre: suspense.

Verdict:  Nifty.

Set-up: Second-time Australian genre author goes to Malta to get away from it all and finish, well, start that second book, ostensibly planning to stay with his Maltese in-laws, but once there he has no wish to find the relatives of his seven-year estranged wife. In the Mediterranean heat and glare, he heads for hills to a remote village where he finds a farm house to rent that is dirt cheap but with most mod cons.  Excellent.  

The locals treat him with a friendly respect, some of whom have relatives in Australia, but he is nonetheless an object of curiosity for them.  The more so when they realise he is living in that house.  (Move over Stephen King….)  There is a reason why no else wants to live in it.

He begins to piece together what did and what might have happened years ago, and uses it as the plot for the second novel, but as he does so….  Well, is it imagination or reality?  A retired local doctor trembles whenever asked about the previous owners of the house. Protagonist hears stories of a lost boy, and sets out to put it altogether on paper, if not in flesh.  

Much to his own surprise he attracts a local squeeze and things seem to be going right.  He pounds the keyboard most nights as the story of the lost boy takes shape.  Squeeze enthusiastically assists in tracking down details while Doctor reluctantly pitches in.  Even the local plumber adds some intel about how the drain pipes in the village work.  

There is a resolution and a happy ending despite all the foreboding as he excavates drains, pipes, memories, cellars, wells, and much of the land of the house looking for clues, and irritates and alienates the neighbours by persisting in nosing around. It gets worse before it gets better.

Writer’s integration into village life is well told, and the locale is a major feature. I chose it for that locale as change from the run of Nordic reading I have been doing.  Plus who does not like Maltesers. He finds villagers speak three kinds of English, depending on age.  The oldest speak a slangy tar speech from the days when they learned from British sailors.  Then the post-war generation speaks a stilted school-book English, correct but devoid of idioms. Finally, the youngsters have a Euro-English derived from MTV and the like. 

The author has several other titles that seem to be similar.