Category: Krimi

The Dying Detective (2010) by Leif Persson

GoodReads meta-data is 548 pages, rated 3.96 by 1,923 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Superb.

While recovering from a heart attack, retired head of the National Crime Command in Sweden, one Lars Johanssen takes an interest in a cold case. It is a tired cliché brought to life by a master story teller.  Lars spends most of the pages lying on the sofa at home as he recruits the home help, his brother’s factotum, his wife (and her brother), and another retired curmudgeon to scratch the itch.  

Whenever his officers used complain at the impossible missions he assigned them, he always said, ‘Make the most of what you have.’  Now his physiotherapist says exactly that to him as he comes to terms with his new limitations, a dead right arm, poor coordination, recurrent headaches, and dizzy episodes.  He didn’t realise how irritating and annoying that remark was until someone else said it to him!

His wife is a bank director and she can ferret out financial information from rabbit holes and her brother is a retired tax accountant who understands it. Curmudgeon has access to the police warehouse where the paper files from the case are stored through a nephew in uniform.  (Good thing, too, that the paper is there because a computer disk crack destroyed the digital files, which to cut costs were not backed-up.) The home help is whip smart, and the factotum is a body builder who learned to survive the hard way.  As Lars says, it is one of the best investigative teams he ever had, apart from the lack of badges and uniforms.  

While the statute of limitations has expired on the cold case, surely the perpetrator did not stop at one.  But who is he?  Yes, it had to be a he.  (Figure it out.)  

It all turns on a fibre that should not have been there.  But the puzzle has many pieces.

Along the way, Lars learns to accept his frailty and comes to like the home help despite the tattoos and studs, and swallows his ingrained hatred of Russians (the body builder).  He still has time and room to grow, if reluctantly.  Pia, his wife, quietly observes his changes.    

I got to know and like Lars in Death of Pilgrim, reviewed elsewhere on this blog, and went looking for other books featuring his investigations. Solid gold, this one.  (Regrettably I did not like the second one I read, Falling Freely, as If in a Dream (2007), finding it disjointed and indulgent.) 

A couple of niggles.  I cannot quite see how the original investigation did not turn up the nephew-in-law.  I also wondered early on why the father’s paramour from the hospital was not interrogated either in the original investigation or much sooner by Lars. See, I was paying attention.  

Swiss Vendetta (2017) by Tracee de Hahn

GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages rated 3.62 by 584 litizens.  

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Brrrr. 

Detective Agnes Luthi transfers from financial crimes where she read spreadsheets to homicide in a career move up the pay-grade and at the end of the very day she gets the promotion prepares to drive home near Geneva (Switzerland, not Nebraska) when the winter storm of the century sets in. Just before she gets going a call comes in from Otranto Manor near Lac Leman. A corpse has been found and, as the phone masts go dark, she is the only investigator that the dispatcher can contact. With a big swallow off she goes on her first murder investigation on day one, alone in a white-out blizzard.  She has not even yet met your new boss who is now incommunicado. 

The weather sweeps in at 100 kilometres an hour closing roads, bringing down power lines, drivers abandon cars on the highway, trucks have jackknifed across traffic lanes, Luthi creeps along, missing the exit, and gingerly working her way back. The Manor is down the steep slope on the lake shore and in this weather it is virtually inaccessible, but needs must, and by baby steps and grasping branches and a few falls, Luthi makes her way down, even as the weather increases in intensity.  The wind howls, trees crack and fall, sheets of water lifted by the wind off the lake freeze in the air and strike like shrapnel, flashlight beams are blinding in the swirls of snow, it is only by dumb luck that she comes upon the body where she finds the local plod who arrived before the worst of the storm set in, but his falls en route have deprived him of his torch (lost) and cell phone (crushed). The flares he set out to mark the spot are either blown out or away by the winds. Everything is getting brittle in the Arctic temperature driven by Antarctic winds, including bones.  

Plod is totally preoccupied by his wife whom he was told just before his phone perished had gone into premature labour with their first child. He is frantic to turn the investigation over to the homicide squad, having done his job with the flares, and go to the hospital.  But there is no squad only Luthi who will not release him, and in any event, he cannot now ascend the slope in the dark night of this perfect storm.  

The blizzard is a magnificent character in the early going. There is no need for the characters to go on about being cold, the reader feels it through the prose. But it is soon superseded by the Manor itself, a millennium old castle (aka Old Dark House) with secret passages, hidden stairways, rooms concealed in the fifteen-foot thick walls, a dungeon, and in this storm none of the mod cons like electricity, gas, or telephone work. It is cold, dark, and silent.   

What follows is a police procedural as the members of the resident Addams Family are questioned and efforts are made in the isolated circumstances to examine the crime scene and the corpse. As if. 

I did think Luthi constant self-absorption with her own personal situation was egotistical and less justified than Plod’s worry about his wife.  Her problems are in the past. Why do krimi writers add backstory problems, isn’t a solo murder investigation in the situation hard enough?  Indeed this preoccupation is compounded throughout so as to lead to reader indigestion from over plotting.  I’ll say that again: it is over plotted.  There are so many plot lines that I got confused trying to keep track of them.  

But the locale, the situation, the Old Dark House, the cast of characters are well drawn, and maybe the overlarding can be calmed in the next outing, for I assume this is the start of series.  

The only other Swiss krimis I recall are the 1970s grim psychological tales of Friedrich Dürrenmatt usually involving unindicted war criminals and the fascist wanna be Friedrich Glauser’s 1930s books set in xenophobic Alpine villages. 

Sherlock and the Time Machine (2020) by C.J. Luton

GoodReads meta-data is pages (not stated) rated 4.22 by 9 litizens.  

Genre: Sherlockiana.

Verdict: intriguing, but….  

It starts as charming pastiche when a young and uncertain H.G. Wells (who surely was never uncertain) with an even younger Albert Einstein in tow arrive at 221B Baker Street with the news that ‘The Time Machine’ (1895) was fact not fiction.  Einstein explains the space-time continuum with a rubber band and a handkerchief (but not to me).  

There follows one of the most convoluted plots I have ever encountered. I got lost, stayed lost, and gave up hope, and after Wells and Einstein dropped out of the frame all too soon, I also lost a great deal of interest.  In the end, either I did not get the resolution or there wasn’t one. Yes, I know the villain was thwarted and slain but what his purpose was and what did the time machine have to do with any of it?  Unknown to this reader.  

Whatever the point was it escaped this reader.  

On some websites it is listed as the second and in others the fourth in a series. 

Over to you.  

The Rock (2016) by Robert Daws 

GoodReads meta-data is 196 pages, rated 3.82 by 1,670 litizens. 

Genre: krimi

Verdict:  Rhyme and reason take a holiday in the sun.  

When errant police officers from the London Metropolitan Force are sent to Siberia to avoid smelling the place up it usually means an indefinite secondment to the Orkney or Shetland Islands, but when those billets are already filled with losers by other krimi writers, the alternative is Gibraltar. Hence our heroine finds herself on the Rock.   

It is by the numbers, an odd couple of police officers, he older and grumpier, she the youthful secondee who remains ambitious despite the blotted copybook, cross-cut with contemporary and historical events in such a profusion this reader got lost in the first twenty pages. There is a chase at the outset, an accidental death, another accidental death, an ostensible suicide (but we know better), a murder forty years ago, ….. [stay tuned because there is more crammed into fewer than 200 pages.]  No wonder travel insurance for Gibraltar is so expensive.  

The saving grace is the locale, and for that I persisted.  They say see Gibraltar … before lunch and leave; it doesn’t take long.  

What with all the cross-cuts, there is no narrative, but lots of whoosh of speeding motor bikes, running feet, hurtling cars which betrays the aspiration to a screenplay.  Good luck on that.   

Credit where it is due: the supervisor is not a cardboard character for once.  

First of the series and the last for me. 

The Red Telephone Box (2015) by P F. Ford

GoodReads meta-data is 258 pages, rated by 4.26 by 480 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: STFU, Dave!

It seems someone has set fire to Dave’s partner’s digs while said partner has disappeared into the night. What follows is a police procedural, an approach I usually like.  

In this instance the police procedure is overshadowed by Slater’s constant, petulant sulking about everything from a lumpy mattress to a parking place.  His knickers are constantly knotted and he lets everyone know it far and wide.  Within the first five pages he has antagonised everyone he encounters (including this reader), and it gets worse after that. He is such a spoiled brat it is hard to take him seriously as a mid-thirties career copper in his fifth outing on the page. What a piece of work is this man!  

How could any responsible manager (let alone author) turn this immature self-indulgent paranoid loose on the public became my question. He is credited with a good clear-up rate but I suspected the missing partner might have fiddled the books and then done a bunk with he caught wind of an audit. Think about it and it adds up.    

On the other hand Dave’s constant whining allows his supervisor to tear strips off him and that is fun.  When Slater is not breaking the china and blaming everyone else for his clumsy ineptitude there is some nice police procedure using CCTV technology and shoe leather to find eye witnesses to fill in the blanks and blurs of the film. But in the end all of this is undermined, and proven irrelevant.  What a let down that is. The interest readers invested in the procedure was wasted and with it vanishes trust in the author.  Surprise, Reader, there was no point to it. And here I thought contempt for readers was the preserve of Post Modernism.  

There is a neat but totally irrelevant interlude with a Serbian arsonist that occupies the foreground for a quarter of the book and then — poof! — is gone.  Not what one might call an integrated plot.  

Slater is as annoying as the Bulgarian discussed an earlier post, do pay attention: inept, self-indulgent, slow witted, and clumsy. 

This is the fifth instalment of Detective Sergeant Dave Slater series, but the first and last for this reader.

Checkmate to Murder (1948) by Edith Lorac

GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages rated 4.09 by 152 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: mannered.

On a dismal foggy night five artistic types gather in an open-plan artist’s studio, while two play a serious game of chess at one end and two others are painter and subject at work on a portrait at the other end with the fifth – a woman – who prepares a meagre dinner for them in a blackout during the Blitz in 1940.  The painter is temperamental but his sister – the cook – abides him, while the portrait subject is supercilious, and the two chess players are upright civil servants.  Quite how these five came together is one mystery that goes unsolved.  Yes, I know an explanation of sorts is offered but did it compute, I ask?  

While the five are at it in the ramshackle studio cum residence for the siblings, in the landlord’s hovel next door the old miser is shot dead!  

A bumptious Special happens on the scene (or does he) and lands on the first person he sees, Miser’s nephew, as the guilty party, and makes a ruckus with the Studio Five,  though suspicion will fall on this special, readers know he is too stupid to have done anything that required forethought.  The nephew is young, clean-cut, and in uniform so he is innocent in this cosmos.

A literal-minded Scot from Scotland Yard begins inquiries and a nice police procedural follows as witnesses can be found even in a blackout.  Former tenants of the studio prove a rum lot.  The special may be dumb but…., as above.  Round and round we go.  

Until deux ex machina arrives and a simple but unbelievable solution is proffered. SPOILER.  The subject and painter conspired on the assumption that the chess players in full view would be so engrossed in the game that they would not notice if Subject left the room and went next door to do the deed, while squirrelling the loot away in a chimney (if I have understood the painfully detailed and nearly incomprehensible details), meanwhile the painter would continue to daub paint.  I never did fathom the so-called ‘lay figure’ that was crucial to the plot: I’m like that sometimes. 

The characterisations are distinct and credible while plod puzzles it all together.  The pace is glacial.  The author had dozens of these krimis and more besides.  Her characters are certainly of greater interest than some I have encountered lately, naming no names, but they know who they are those thin (wo)men.  

Harbour Master (2016) by Daniel Pembrey

GoodReads meta-data is 386 pages rated 3.48 by 1084 litizens.

Genre: krimi, thriller

Verdict: by the numbers.

A floater in Amsterdam harbour kicks off the book and there is much about the harbour which adds local colour, residential houseboats on canals, Eurocrats, and the Red Light District are all present and ticked off the list. About halfway through the book this victim is all but forgotten and I never did figure out what she had to do with the plot.  But then neither did our hero.

Yes, I am afraid I found it all pretty mechanical from the Handbook of How to Write an International Thriller. The publisher strives so hard for this market that the promotional material refers to Scandinavia fiction.  Get a map, Dude!  The Netherlands is not now nor has it ever been in Scandinavia.  While astride the high horse of pedantry, I also wondered about the protagonist’s penchant for referring to the country as Holland.  Would a Dutch public servant do that?  

Nearing retirement inspector Henk van der Pol cannot resist a little payback for some officers who have made his life a misery of late.  Well that seems to this reader a better summary than the official one which sees Henk as a paladin, the one just man, among all the corruption.  His Christ complex put me in mind of the last episodes of Foyle’s War when the protagonist carried the cross ever so manfully.  Henricus combines self-righteousness with a victim complex.    

The plot, as thriller plots evidently must be, is far-fetched and global from Ghana and back.  

There are some very nice parts but they are buried in the breathless complexity of implicating everyone else in evil.  Here’s an instance: When van der Pol realises one of the alleged victims simply could not have been assaulted in the locale reported, and that particular alleged victim’s plan to pay himself was ingenious to say the least, but all that seems attenuated and anti-climatic by the time we wade through Ukrainian gun slingers, Secret Service thugs, Belgium swat teams, and ….  Oh, I almost forgot to mention the vigilante murder of one villain.  Well, you get the picture.

It is volume one is a series.  All yours! 

The Cat of Baskervilles (2018) by Vicki Delany

GoodReads meta-data is 309 pages, rated 3.96 by 1395 litizens.  

Genre: VIG (Vogue + IKEAA + Gourmet) does not a krimi make.

Verdict:  Zzzzzzz

I took the plunge and persisted because of the cute title but found page after page of description of clothes, furniture, and food, giving up at 25% of the catalogue per the Kindle because little of interest had happened among all that padding. There was no development in the characters or the plot but the surface of Vogue + IKEAA + Gourmet.  Marching through an IKEA maze would be more challenging and interesting than reading on, so I quit.  Be warned.  

For some time I did not bother to write notes about books I put aside, but then found I returned to them by mistake.  I might be tempted again by this cute title unless I remembered it (or had notes on it in the Book Collector app) so I started to write notes, and once written to post them.    

The Listening Wall (1959) by Margaret Millar

GoodReads meta-data is 236 pages rated 3.83 by 220 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: ingenious but talky.  

Setup: two mismatched women from San Francisco, one reticent and hesitant, the other assertive and aggressive, take a holiday together in Mexico City where one of them dies.  Well, yes, dies, but was it an accident, a suicide, or a murder. If the latter, who dun it?  If suicide, why dun it? If accident, how come? These are the questions around which the plot unwinds.   

The plot thickens when after this ordeal, the survivor returns home to San Francisco only to disappear almost immediately.  Her husband says she has gone east to recover from the trauma while he has to stay in Bay City to work.

Hmmm.  The missing woman’s brother never liked the husband and finds gaps in this story, hiring a gumshoe to investigate, who also finds gaps but is less inclined to leap to conclusions than the brother who by now has bought a gun.

It all started in the Mexico City hotel room and the action returns there in the end to a rather convoluted conclusion that is typical of the psychological interiors Millar so expertly explored. I did not find the villain entirely credible or even worth the bother, but it ties up the title nicely.  

Millar’s books won many awards, and it is easy to see why. The prose is effortless (and I can only guess how hard it is to achieve that) and the insights into the minds of the characters are surgically judicious. Even though I did not invest in any of the characters, they offer an array of different people and the motivations of each are, well, distinctive and credible.  Millar also has an eye for the telling detail to make Sherlock Holmes take note. Not a cardboard plot device among them.  Except possibly the villain, though much space is expended trying to round out the villain’s character without success for this reader.   

In 1965 Millar received the ‘Woman of the Year Silver Cup’ of the Los Angeles Times.  During its existence between 1950 and until the endowment ran out in 1977 the award was presented to almost 300 women to honour achievements in science, religion, the arts, education and government, community service, entertainment, sports, business, and industry.  Other recipients include Lily Tomlin, Irene Dunn, and Anäis Nin. 

GoodReads meta-data is 456 pages rated 4.08 by 40870!   

Genre: period Krimi.

Verdict:  Grim.

In 1535 King Henry VIII’s war with the Pope is in full swing.  Roman religious institutions are being investigated to ensure that they have converted to the New Way(s), their treasures registered, taxed, confiscated, and carted off. While a few monasteries were licensed to continue, most are being closed, putting monks, abbots, brothers into the cold of an English winter.  Ditto for nuns.

It is a world of informers where a loose word would reveal a residual Catholicism and be met with the axe. Priest holes are becoming a real estate feature.  Priest hunters are getting advanced degrees. It is all brutal, violent, and merciless in the name of the Lord.  Some things never change. 

Among the monasteries on the list is Scarnsea on the south coast. First minister Thomas Cromwell sent a commissioner to close it, and – gulp! – he is murdered. In the dark of night. Murdered, yes, but worse.  Decapitated!  The punishment for treason!  There is much discussion of this procedure which in the end — Spoiler — is undermined by the plot denouncement.   

In response Cromwell sends his number one trouble shooter, Matthew Shardlake to (1) to bring justice to the murderer and (2) to speed the dissolution of the monastery.  Shardlake may be the number one confidant, but even so Cromwell puts marbles under his feet to keep him uncertain.  

Added to that brew, Shardlake is a hunchback, an affliction many see as a sign of the Beast.  His career as a lawyer is owed entirely to Cromwell and he cannot risk failure in this assignment. He takes along an acolyte to do the stepping and fetching. Shardlake spends far too much time feeling sorry for himself in his back (!) story.   

The result is the monastery of Otranto with the residual population of monks, about thirty where once there were two hundred, and many servants who are ciphers, and unwanted guests who have taken shelter there.  It is all gloomy, claustrophobic, clinging, freezing, and stifling. And that is reiterated on nearly every page in case it was missed the first hundred times it was said. (Aside: people who live in cold climates do not spend so much time talking about it, but rather just get on with it.)  

The heavy hand of religious oppression hangs over everything.  Big Brother’s many little brothers are, indeed, watching everything, everywhere. It is all rather depressing to read.  While prepubescent film-makers over the years have been transfixed by Henry’s wives, most have overlooked the fact that his oppression of Catholics led to at least 50,000 executions and judicial murders, while encouraging vigilantes to do others: Thomas More was not alone. Yet Henry’s name has never become an adjective for violence and murder thanks to the marital distractions.      

There is far more description of rooms, clothing, odours, and weather than adds to either plot or character and must be called padding to get to the length for airport bookshelves for long haul flights.  

What I can say is that it reads easier, makes more sense, and more effectively conveys the time and place than the coterminous and vastly overrated Hilary Mantel novels.