Category: Krimi

Maigret and the Coroner (1949) by Georges Simenon.  

GoodReads metadata is 176 pages, rated 3.61 by 544 litizens.  

Genus: krimi; species Maigret.

Verdict: Fresh though #32 in the series.

While on a busman’s holiday travelling the United States to observe policing, Detective Chief Inspector Maigret finds himself in Tucson (Arizona). Wherever he has gone on this study tour a local law enforcement officer has been assigned to squire him around. While each officer does the duty, none particularly wants to be a tour guide, nor did Maigret himself welcome that task when Inspector Pike from Scotland Yard came calling. Sympathising with his host(s), he tries to be agreeable.  

In Tucson the FBI agent who picks him from the train station soon parks him in a coroner’s court to observe the American way, while the agent goes back to work. In his European suit and necktie with pipe Maigret is one conspicuous fish out of water. As he watches and listens, he finds it difficult not to interrupt with his own questions.  He knows enough English to follow the testimony but, well, he probably could not formulate his questions properly anyway.  

The first half or more of the book is the parade of witnesses giving contradictory statements related to the night Bessie Mitchell died, mangled by a railway train out in the desert. Was her death suicide, accident, manslaughter, or murder? That is the question.

The inquest continues and Maigret is soon hooked, and that pleases his host.  At night in his hotel room Maigret writes summaries of the day’s testimony for review, a task usually left to Lucas back in the office on the Île de la cité.  Even so there remain questions that have not yet been asked.  

Maigret observes the natives with an anthropological eye: they are clean, polite, addicted to Coca Cola, and there is the racial variety of white, black, red, and yellow among the jurors, witnesses, and audience. He is also painfully aware that others are observing him, too. But he simply cannot appear in a courtroom without a necktie and coat!  Despite the 45C temperature which has killed the AC. (At least he is not wearing the sweater Madame Maigret insisted he take.)

Five young air force men were with Bessie at one time or another during the night she died, and they are much in evidence with their shaved heads and stiff posture. Maigret is surprised that the inquiry does not focus directly on them, but every now and then he senses an underlying pattern in the interrogations that reassures him that there is purpose within the apparently haphazard proceedings. 

His efforts to strike up conversations during recesses with others in the audience do not take, and he mutters to himself. The usual masterful Maigret is treading water.  

The end is ambiguous and this reader felt that a number of the threads, like the dented car, were not resolved. Yet the trip was so much fun for being different that there are no complaints.   

Simenon spent months in Arizona where he lived in a rented house and typed his Maigret stories more than once. Perhaps while there in residence he did attend a coroner’s court.  It is certainly a change of pace for both Maigret (and Simenon) to observe, comment on, and participate in American life.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.6 by 74 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Convoluted.

Between assignments, Maigret is on a busman’s holiday staying in Cannes at a de luxe hotel by the invitation of its manager, an old friend from Paris, and while there….!  A cadaver appears in elderly M. Owens’s bathtub in room 412 and Owens is nowhere to be found. The deceased is a young man, while the missing Owens is an aged cripple. The local inspector barges in and throws his bantam intellectual weight around, seizing on the obvious, overlooking the subtle, while the bemused Maigret looks on.

There is a wanna-be starlet throwing herself and francs around, a sinister-looking doctor who is impossibly handsome, a demure nurse to M. Owens, a blind masseuse, an oily art dealer, and more. The ingredients are many and spicy.   

Of course, as viewers realised long before the local plod, it was Owens in the tub. The Marcel Proust rugged-up invalid-look was a disguise for a young art forger whose value seems to have been eroded by his drug addiction, and his accomplices doubted his continued silence, so they ensured it.  The nurse was not as she seemed, as the blindman told Maigret, her perfume is that of a rich woman, not a servant. Her transformation from dowdy to chic is good but not as convincing as a Cinderella turn by Isabelle Adjani. (I don’t remember which of her films but it was remarkable.)   

Then there is the dog.  

The plot is so complicated it required a lengthy expository scene at the end and I still didn’t get it. There is a neat scene midway through where Maigret overhears a private conversation through the air conditioning ducts, but nothing is made of it later. 

This story derives from a Simenon short story which I found online and read. It differs from the screenplay.  Much simpler, though still cryptic.  The film is full of gratuitous red herrings, a veritable school of them, absent from the story. The blind man, the starlet, the art dealer, and more are not in the story but added in the screenplay.  They certainly colour the tableaux, but I found the plot incomprehensible even after the explanation. Of the additions, the blind masseuse is the most interesting, while straining credulity.   

I rather think the production company hastily beefed up the short story to do a second film while on seaside location for Maigret and the Liberty Bar, a superior film.   

Goodreads meta-data is 244 pages rated 3.97 by 252 litizens.  

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Tenderfoot badge.

Second outing for Archer. 

Trying too hard.  Every page has another etched metaphor in the description. Seems more intellect went into those metaphors than into the characters who seem lifeless stereotypes, and this is from a reader who greatly admires RM. This volume has a nice introduction by John Banville, himself a kriminologist of note.    

The screenplay for the 1975 movie is far more coherent and creditable. Not often I admit that.  Plus the shift to NOLA adds immeasurably to the atmosphere, Copain. The bayous, the mist, that bridge to somewhere, the Cajun music (but no cuisine), the Spanish moss, the corruption, the magnolia trees….  Murray Hamilton made a larger than life villain in the film and not the cipher he is in the book.  This is krimi country that James Lee Burke now owns lock, stock, and many gun barrels.  

Footnote: Tenderfoot is the first of forty-seven boy scout merit badges. Impressive, huh? Just remember that one is for paper-making, and I don’t mean journalism.  

Goodreads meta-data is 209 pages, rated 3.83 by 24 litizens.  

Genre: krimi, historic

Verdict: Go, Leo!

During the brief hey-day of the Florentine Republic (1494-1512) Leo from the nearby village of Vinci is in town, having worn out his welcome in northern Milan. His arch-rival Loud and Lout Mike has just finished the anatomically detailed David to much acclaim. Basking in the limelight, Mike slangs off at Leo just for fun. This has nothing to do with the plot but enriches the ambience, or so the author must have supposed. Some may find it a distraction. ‘Some’ gets my vote.  Mike was a lout, to be sure, but who cares.  

Leo has signed a contract, another one, to devise, prepare, paint, and complete a wall size mural memorialising a great Florentine victory Battle of Anghiari (1440). Since there haven’t been many such victories the pictorial representation is all the more important. But it is like just about everything else Leo did, incomplete. While he is busy not finishing this public commission, a Florentine functionary puts him to work on a different job.

That minor official is in these pages a Big Man on the Campanile (BMOC), one Nick Machiavelli.  Turns out these two are old buddies and the next project is to divert the River Arno from tiresome Pisa so that the tower will fall over or something.  To calculate what has to be done and how, Leo overheats his slide rule.  

Then, as if that were not enough, a series of foreign merchants having come to Florence on business are found murdered.  More anatomical detail follows. A lot. Dead buyers are not good business, and something has to be done. Leo has to (1) finish the giant painting, (2) divert the Arno River, and (3) find the culprit. Would a genius really get in this situation?

Nick, too, decides to investigate, but not before much of his anatomical detail is set before the reader. Much. Too much.  

The conceit of this series is that Nick has an illegitimate daughter called Nicola who is an offsider of sorts for Leo when he dons the deerstalker.  Now we get a great detail of Machiavelli backstory as it concerns Nicola.  

Goodness me. It is all too much like a Hollywood film, ‘based on a true story.’  The Nick fiction follows. In these pages Nick is a force in Florence, he is rich, he is powerful, he may be no David but he has all the same gear which is displayed more than once for the edification of the reader.  The tiresome pedant in me requires that I say he was never any of those things. (Though of course I don’t know about the gear.) He served at the grace and favour of his betters.  He did not ascend the hierarchy in his fourteen years of dutiful service.  No promotion in a a decade and a half.  Not a stellar performance.  He was never rich by any stretch of the definition.  He was never so secure financially, socially, and politically to be the swagging BMOC he seems to be in these pages.  He prospered as the client of the patrons Piero Soderini and, to a less extent, the two Franciscos Vettori and Guicciardini.  When they could not or would not help him, he sank without a trace. That is when he took up the quill and quire.  

It is true that Machia must have met Leo at least once, since it was Machia who signed the contract for the Republic to commission the painting. It is possible, even likely, that Machia interested himself in the Arno project, too, though his status was too low to make him a driver of it.  Finally, they were both in the orbit of Cesare Borgia for a few months and likely met there, too.

Whew!  That said. this is a diverting work on fiction and the license to create is valid so I rolled with it. If I had tried to do something like this, well, it would have been a right mess, and quibble though I may there is a sure hand at work here on the keyboard.  I found it diverting but I got lost in the plotting of who dun’it at the end.  Apart from the liberties with Nick, the author is a master of the period detail and makes good use of it, though much of it is not to my taste.  Still it is well done.  

I paused when at one point when Machiavelli asked Leo for an itemised bill for his services.  Would that be written back to front with the left hand while munching a carrot?  Would Leo ever finish even this invoice?

Leo never finished anything, including his afterlife for he has also been busy in George Herman’s series which includes, A Comedy of Murders (1994), Tears of the Madonna (1996), Artists and Assassins (1998), The Florentine Mourners (1999), and more. Nick is around in these pages, too.  

However, Leo is not to be confused with the clichéd Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998+) from Vancouver. Nor did he have anything to do with that code.   

Goodreads meta-data is 134 pages rated 4.19 by 109 litizens.  

Genre: Holmesiana.

Verdict: Meh.

Much to’ing and fro’ing as Holmes and his daughter Lucy rescue her mother Zoe from the Black Hand with some carbolic soap.  Just kidding.  It is all rather a lot for barely more than a hundred pages.  It ends with a cliff hanger for the next volume in the series, but I fell off. 

If I am reading the information aright, this is book number 23 in this partnership on Holmes. While I am impressed by that productivity, I have to say that it shows. Tired and trite.  Maybe my Holmes addiction is in remission. 

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.