I feel a bit scatterbrained these days. I am hyperaware of the sentences bemoaning how technology and screens have reduced our ability to concentrate to 40 seconds. I was left unable to finish a recent piece in The New York Times about the happiness enjoyed by those who detach themselves from the universe of smartphones and migrate to flip phones. It was a journey I had told myself I would make a number of years ago when my own smartphone broke, but was too weak to actually undertake. “Make me chaste, oh Lord, but not yet.” Reading the NYT story reminded me of a Ted Chiang piece (in Exhalation?) about a device that lets us communicate with not-quite parallel universes where slightly different choices were made in the recent-enough past that we can still effectively communicate with one another about what is or might have been. The specter of flip phone me was blurry in the extreme but I feared that reading to the end would induce some sort of clear vision that would haunt me forever – a me that is content in a way I am not, and perhaps cannot (can never?) be with the smartphone. A me whose resulting centeredness led to clearer thinking and reasoning, which led to worldly success as well as, if not spiritual enlightenment, then at least less unenlightenment. Buddhahood is beyond my attainment, but flip phone me is a bodhisattva, at least, as opposed to whatever I am now. C, who consistently (and correctly) needles me for my lack of adherence to ‘no phone Friday’ is herself making plans to push more of her friends and family to call us on our landline (in reality VoIP, I have no idea how to even find out if the copper landline still exists). She took herself off of social media a number of weeks ago and feels much the better for it. This is a victory, but it does take away one of my soapboxes and level the playing field – always a dangerous change in a marriage! I don’t know if I truly believe in a coming wave of ‘desmartphonification’. If I do, I suspect that – sadly – it will take place among the meritocratic masses who actually staff the companies that push this technology onto us. AI refuses to leave the headlines, and I still have yet to see a really exciting use for it that doesn’t come with some kind of equivalent downside. At the very least generative AI will worsen, not improve, what LeFevre terms a ‘non-information overload’ (am I attributing the right person?). It’s not that the world seems smaller, it’s that you have to sift through some much more extra shit to be able to see it. And once you do see it, what then? Are you meant to report back to someone? To better delve into your own inner space that maps, somehow, onto this real world outside?

Alexei Navalny is dead. I feel as though I’ve been reading about him for two decades, perpetually locked up or about to be so. Doubtless there will be lengthy, informative obituaries in the coming days and weeks, mourning the symbolic death of Russia’s democratic urges. The strange part for me was how quickly I moved past the headline. Navalny was ‘important’ in the global sphere of public affairs, a serious subject amid lighter coverage of ‘prominent’ people about whom we have endless filler (filler being the main course for some). He was also always potentially portentous, like Aung San Suu Kyi was for so many years, as opposed to the many movers and shakers who cycle and recycle back into view having accomplished what appears to be nothing. Now a martyr to democracy, I suppose he is at least beyond a place where he could have a Suu Kyi-like fall from grace. The story of his death (no details to read other than the press release from Russia) got about 30 seconds of my time and then it was on to the next one. A few minutes later I felt obscurely ashamed laughing at some meaningless video, the contents of which I have already forgotten. The ugly old truth rearing its head again, life moves on unending. There is no pause. Maybe not so much an ugly truth as a bracing one, but sometimes that cold, bracing shock burns a raw nerve. Navalny’s name goes into the history books, but part of me is

Disinflation and deflation. I have seen a frankly concerning number of articles in reputable sources with headlines essentially reading “Why haven’t prices gone back down?”. Outlets whose readers are supposed to be among the discerning elite have to explain that deflation is bad, and that most corporations are not going to simply cut prices back to an arbitrary, pre-pandemic level. How was this even a question? I would be curious, however, to do a line-by-line review of all the CPI components and see if any of the categories the BEA tracks have in fact experienced (unusual) deflation rather than disinflation. An item for the ‘to-do’ list.

Cost-of-living crises are in vogue right now, speaking of disinflation. Endless headlines about housing affordability. Poking and prodding a variety of statistics (focused mostly on per capita measures) led me to some of the recent population projections from the UN. The 21st century will be peak humanity, their central tendency predicts – hitting about 10 billion humans in the late 2080s before declining. Given my mild pessimism I am more interested in the deterministic lower bound, which moves the birth rate down by 0.5 and so peaks in the 2050s just shy of 9 billion humans. The former scenario is just possibly in my lifetime, the latter is – I hope – almost certainly in it. Fewer people sounds really good.

After a long stretch away from mysteries – I suppose I’m at a moment in life where I am looking for more certainty, not less – I recently read Edward Grierson’s The Second Man, the winner of the 1956 Gold Dagger.

A trial novel, it felt somewhat distant to me given both the time period and my lack of familiarity with how the English court system works. Barristers, solicitors, chambers, the Temple. All words I’ve seen in passing but that lack the depth that could, perhaps, have pulled me a bit deeper into the plot. The narration already lent a certain distance that I found unusual in a court drama. Our protagonist, Mr. Irvine, is a “lawyer” (I’ll use my American terms, thank you) who acts as a host to a new, female (!) lawyer who has joined his chambers in Yorkshire and works with her on her first big case. Irvine himself is thinly sketched, and acts as a stand-in for the reader. While he, perhaps unsurprisingly, develops feelings for his new partner – alluded to deftly but, by modern standards, rather shallowly – and greatly admires her legal work, the trial lacked the oomph that we might expect from the sub-genre some seven decades later.

To be fair to Mr. Grierson, he has all the building blocks that his descendants in the trial drama still use to this day, and he deserves praise for his foundational work. We have the witnesses, the lies, the police, the character of opposing council and judges, the client whose guilt the reader first doubts, then believes, then doubts all over again in a pleasing if rather simple cycle of tension and release.

And yet, it isn’t really enough. Without spoiling too much, the client – a ne’er do well nephew accused of murdering his aunt – is something of a caricature, deeply unlikeable, and more to the point perhaps unbelievable in his course of actions. He seems to exist to create work and dilemmas for his lawyers rather than as a sympathetic character or symbol driven by rational (if not transparent) emotions. As Irvine himself is a pair of eyes for us to gaze through, that leaves Marrion, the new female lawyer, to carry the weight. This being 1956, her sex and Irvine’s reflection upon it takes up a fair amount of space. There’s nothing unexpected here, and indeed I would be inclined to view Mr. Grierson (or at least his characters) as quite progressive for the era, but in 2022 it doesn’t do much. The pacing is, at least, brisk enough that while there are times we feel like the novel is dragging its feet, it moves quickly enough to be an easy read. Quite unremarkable, would be my overall judgement.

With the exception of the fact that Mr. Grierson has some very nice lines. His strongest moments are, in fact, when he allows Irvine to gaze inwards. “I have always been susceptible to the feel of past events.” “We are deeply faithful to our prejudices too.” “How greatly our own discomforts outweigh the tragedies of others!” The simple but beautifully polished prose reminded me of how I admired Ross MacDonad’s prose in The Far Side of the Dollar, even if, like The Second Man the actual plotting was lackluster. I suspect that certain lines and sentiments of Mr. Grierson will long outlast my memory of the plot of this particular novel – still a victory for the book, no doubt, simply not the sort of victory we expect the author to be aiming for when we pick it up.

Overall, The Second Man is thoroughly in the middle of the pack. I suspect, had Mr. Grierson been born two or three decades later his work would be much closer to the top, but 70 years and the comparatively shallow bones of the book compared to the modern trial drama make it difficult to put on a pedestal today. I will note that, even as I peruse the list of novels ranked below the top ten, I have mostly impressions as opposed to detailed memories, and so much of this is going my feel as much as anything else.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Peter Temple – The Broken Shore
3. John le Carre – The Honourable Schoolboy
4. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
5. James Lee Burke – Sunset Limited
6. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
7. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
8. Jose Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
9. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
10. Winston Graham – Bridge to Vengeance (The Little Walls)
11. Sara Paretsky – Blacklist
12. Edward Grierson – The Second Man
13. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
14. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
15. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
16. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
17. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
18. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
19. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
20. James McClure – Steam Pig
21. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
22. Emma Lathen – Murder Against the Grain
23. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
24. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
25. Barbara Vine – A Fatal Inversion
26. John Hutton – Accidental Crimes
27. H.R.F. Keating – The Perfect Murder
28. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Not ranked (in chronological order):

1963 – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carre – familiar with the work already from the film and le Carre’s general notoriety.

1988 – Ratking, Michael Dibdin – I love the Aurelio Zen TV films so much I suspect I have seen them at least three times by now, so the book would hold no surprises for me.

2001 – Sidetracked, Henning Mankell – Wallander was and is gateway drug to all Nordic noir. I’ve seen the Swedish series several times and the (inferior) British one once, so alas this one would also be too predictable.

2006 – Raven Black, Ann Cleeves – The Shetland series made by ITV struck an interesting note for me – the mysteries themselves were perfectly enjoyable but the landscape and unique prospect of the Shetland Islands is what made it stand out. Having re-watched it a few times, Raven Black is a familiar friend, and so holds no mysteries for me.

Re-watched The Smartest Guys in the Room this morning for the first time in probably 10+ years.  It becomes more flabbergasting with time, not so much because of the fraud itself (I’d argue the collective conscious has become more willing to believe big lies in the ensuring 20 years) but because of all the institutions that were involved in supporting it.  So many people who could and should have blown the whistle but didn’t.  These days it seems like it’s the private firms rather than the public ones that are “Enroning” – more concentrated investors, less inclined to ask questions because it’s not really their money on the line.  Their asset gathering business gives them the management fee regardless once that capital has been called.  In a battle to be credulous, the Enrons of today die slow, down-round, more-layoffs deaths rather than testifying-before-Congress, trial-for-fraud deaths.  The gulf between public and private has gotten wider and wider, with more rigorous rules and more expensive compliance that make staying private compelling, especially with trillions of dollars of dry powder waiting around to be deployed.  How are the Kynikoses of the world supposed to make money when the new smartest guys in the room are private? The world’s smallest violin plays for the Jim Chanos who will remain unborn.

What do you do when you’re luckier than you are good?  A detail I hadn’t picked up the first time I read the Enron story was Lou Pai.  A lieutenant to Jeff Skilling, sounds like he was a smart guy who was put in charge of a business that, like everything Enron-related, might have had some fundamental value over time but became an accounting-driven blob that was too big to succeed.  More interestingly, he was a recluse who almost no one ever saw, but notoriously spent big on strippers (using the corporate card, no less).  When he got his stripper mistress pregnant in the late 90s, he had to divorce his wife and so cashed out his options for the settlement.  He made $200+ million, the most of any Enron executive, because of his penchant for strippers!  Kept himself out of the ensuing litigation and appears to have become (along with his former mistress, now wife) part of the equestrian set, having bought one of the largest ranches in Colorado, sold it for 2x more than he bought it for 15 years later in the 2000s, and decamped for Florida.  

What has Lou done with himself for the past 20 years, I wonder?  Does he spend much time considering his luck?  Knowing all the details, does he attribute less to luck than skill – I suspect the few sentences that cover his lack of involvement in the criminal charges at Enron and the settling of other items with the government for 8-figure sums conceals an immense amount of skilled lawyering and other facts.  All these grumblings aside, a quick internet search reveals that his daughter (born 1997, so presumably the product of the affair that sparked the divorce) is now a champion equestrian!  Another generation or two, and one presumes the Pais will be a well-known name in the horsey set, an institution all their own.  Seeing how the sausage is made sparks my outrage, but I’m a victim of my temporal circumstances.  The present owner of the giant ranch Pai sold 15 years ago now belongs (several changes of ownership later) to a 30-something billionaire from Texas, a third-generation oil scion surnamed Harrison who paid $105M+ for it.  This guy did nothing but be born to earn his money – at least Pai showed up to work for several decades before he bought (perhaps we should say sold) his lottery ticket.  If we had a There Will be Blood style novel or movie about how the Texas oilmen of the early 20^th century did what they did (I can find nothing or Harrison or his partner Abercrombie in the index of Yergman’s The Prize) would there be similar griping?  A combination of skill, ruthlessness, and luck that brought about lucre?  Harrison Sr., the founder of the dynasty, died in 1974.  What little I can find on him beyond oil mentions the fact that he was a Regent at the University of Texas when the University president, Homer Rainey, was fired.  Rainey is now seen as an important figure in academic freedom – he appears (Wikipedia is no doubt a simplifying source) to have been fired because he added a John Dos Passos book to the curriculum that some regents objected to as being “subversive and perverted”.  Sounds familiar. I have not read Big Money but if the summary “Those characters who pursue ‘the big money’ without scruple succeed, but are dehumanized by success. Others are destroyed, crushed by capitalism, and ground underfoot” is correct, then it appears we’ve come full circle after all. 

I wonder if Lou has read Dos Passos?  He appears to have his fingers in the midstream energy pie, but I can’t find any solid mention of commercial activities since 2013.  As Lou was at that point about 65 years old, perhaps he retired.  I can’t wait for the memoir. 

A mid-list crisis struck some time ago, and I necessarily turned my eyes away from the Gold Dagger winners to replenish my reading needs from a fresh watering hole. As I returned to the list, I struck a deal with myself – after reading several dozen mysteries, I am granting myself the ability to simply skip those books that so quickly become deplorable, unremarkable, or simply mediocre such that they cannot sustain my attention for more than the first few pages. I hoped not to need it, but…

The Perfect Murder. 1964’s winner, and with a name like that surely we are setting ourselves up for intricately plotted, ingenious crime the likes of which had never been seen until the year it won. Possibly it hasn’t aged well, but nonetheless, having won only a year before one of the best reads to date – Ross Macdonald’s The Far Side of the Dollar – we can have high hopes indeed.

No.

My hopes were extinguished by the end of the first page. The novel takes place (so far as I could tell) in India. In what might otherwise have been a refreshing move, the protagonist appeared to be a native, which would make for our first non-British or American. But the language so quickly made me wince, the characters so quickly felt like a caricature (Apu from The Simpsons turned into a detective) that I could barely turn the page. “Sahib” abounds, and when the heavy-set Indian merchant complains about his wife and his Westernized son, lapsing into the third person at times, I clenched my lips together, suspecting the end was nigh. But I read not a single sentence further than when the protagonist (whose name I cannot even recall) revealed that the already-mentioned “perfect murder” referred to the victim – a Persian secretary by the name of Mr. Perfect.

No thank you. It may well be the case if I had persevered I would have been rewarded, but I simply could not find a reason to do so.

And then I moved on to John le Carre. His winner from 1963, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was one of the books I omitted to buy because I was already familiar with the plot. Similarly, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Night Manager meant I was quite familiar with his work, but I had never read any of the books (shame on me). I approached 1977’s winner, The Honourable Schoolboy, with cautious enthusiasm, knowing I was expecting some sort of X factor but being more than slightly suspicious that the ability to extract a good screenplay was no guarantee on the quality of the book. How pleased I am my suspicions were wrong and that I at last met Mr. le Carre face to face.

Wonderful! He really was a genius prose writer. Immense style, and while some of the 70s attitudes and terminology (particularly those of the hard-drinking newsmen covering the wars of Southeast Asia) feel if not stale that much older than the rest of the book, I’m certainly willing to put that down to an accurate portrait that simply aged particularly quickly. There are notes of O’Brian here, in that le Carre has captured a cross section of a certain lifestyle at a certain point in time and geography, and has it inhabited so fully it is almost overwhelming in detail. To be sure, the fact that he is dealing with spies means he has leeway that we mere civilians will never be able to check – le Carre loves to throw us asides, tiredly knowing, about the jargon of the spy trade – but the depth he goes to blows most other writers on this list out of the water, even if his power is in his explicit descriptions rather than interior landscapes.

The plotting is Byzantine but somehow comes off feeling light and streamlined. Without reaching anything like the breakneck plotting of contemporary novels, le Carre manages to keep his many characters moving along briskly as we happily follow along in their wake. The more action-oriented scenes of Southeast Asia needn’t take extra weight from the scenes in London, where George Smiley and his helpers work constantly to unravel the secrets and discern the course of the whole novel. Indeed, I found the descriptions of Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis to be the most enjoyable of the novel – just the sort of brilliant eccentrics we want to believe are at work in the intelligence services, but with enough esoteric knowledge and legwork that they feel like more than window dressing. From Vientiane to Tuscany, Hong Kong to London, le Carre manages to invert the world we think we know and builds out the infrastructure of the world of spies in a way that beguiles the reader and makes the entire exercise feel conspiratorial, almost as though we were reading the file of the Dolphin case ourselves in the immediate aftermath of events. Delicate use of temporal omniscience primes us for what is to come, knowing that “afterwards” or “later” or “never again” judgements and actions would befall characters who still have many twists and turns left to navigate.

Smiley, at the center of it all, I found easy to love but hard to like. As a well-known counterpoint to James Bond, Smiley’s quiet, composed air, encyclopedic knowledge, and feeling of being three steps ahead makes him an enigma whose every move we want to watch in case it gives away something of what might be going on inside. The fact that this creature is in an overweight shell with thick glasses on just adds to the layers to unpeel. This remoteness can make Smiley hard to root for on a personal level, however, and while he acts as the figurehead for the Circus and therefore “the good guys,” I couldn’t help but feel unmoved by the few scenes we got a more human picture, most of which seemed to involve his unfaithful wife Ann. This detail is perhaps a humanizing note that should make Smiley more than a dull civil servant with a particularly unusual brief, but I wonder if le Carre revealed his real attitude about this when he had Smiley reminisce about the funeral of Control, Smiley’s old boss. Control’s late wife had thought he worked for the Coal Board, and a mistress goes so far as to ask Smiley if Control is truly dead, or if he has gone back to his wife. Smiley answers the question, but is the point that he tells the truth? Or that, if he isn’t, it all attaches to the greater question of the purpose of all these clandestine exercises? The personal lives of the characters are petty and, if they have moments of romance (or at least of a romantic flavor), mostly unimpressive and even sad. All serving at the whims of parliamentary masters whose own goals are as difficult to divine as Smiley’s doings, the intricacy of the plot stands against a whispered background of “so what,” emphasized in this book perhaps by the background of failure in Tinker, Tailor and the happenstance that the person of interest in this book is in Hong Kong – the last island of British influence in Asia, which is otherwise firmly in the grasp of the Americans. Vanishing influence, changing times, but still the conviction that something must be done adds to the atmosphere of the book and makes it that much more than a mere intellectual exercise or masterclass in plotting. I will make it a point to avoid le Carre’s Wikipedia page for the next few years – hopefully my memory will begin to fail such that I can read his other works with fresh eyes down the line.

On a final note, I am going to add to the rankings not just the two books mentioned here, but for completeness’ sake all those I will not be reading along with my rationale. Accounting for those, I believe we are approaching halfway done, although it feels like we are farther along than that.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Peter Temple – The Broken Shore
3. John le Carre – The Honourable Schoolboy
4. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
5. James Lee Burke – Sunset Limited
6. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
7. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
8. Jose Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
9. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
10. Winston Graham – Bridge to Vengeance (The Little Walls)
11. Sara Paretsky – Blacklist
12. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
13. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
14. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
15. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
16. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
17. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
18. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
19. James McClure – Steam Pig
20. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
21. Emma Lathen – Murder Against the Grain
22. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
23. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
24. Barbara Vine – A Fatal Inversion
25. John Hutton – Accidental Crimes
26. H.R.F. Keating – The Perfect Murder
27. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Not ranked (in chronological order):

1963 – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carre – familiar with the work already from the film and le Carre’s general notoriety.

1988 – Ratking, Michael Dibdin – I love the Aurelio Zen TV films so much I suspect I have seen them at least three times by now, so the book would hold no surprises for me.

2001 – Sidetracked, Henning Mankell – Wallander was and is gateway drug to all Nordic noir. I’ve seen the Swedish series several times and the (inferior) British one once, so alas this one would also be too predictable.

2006 – Raven Black, Ann Cleeves – The Shetland series made by ITV struck an interesting note for me – the mysteries themselves were perfectly enjoyable but the landscape and unique prospect of the Shetland Islands is what made it stand out. Having re-watched it a few times, Raven Black is a familiar friend, and so holds no mysteries for me.

My string of good luck continues with the next two pulls – Bridge to Vengeance and Sunset Limited, the winners of 1955 (the inaugural year!) and 1998, respectively.

Just looking at these two books speaks to the difference in time. Bridge to Vengeance comes in a soft green cover barely thicker than the paper within it, a price of $0.35 prominently placed to show the value of this book. The blurb, from the New York Times, has all the earnest reserve on might expect of a 50s book review – “…a superior suspense item.” Sunset Limited by contrast has the densely packed cover of late 90s airport fiction – the author’s name is larger than the title, but fights for space with “NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER”, the name of several other books written by the author, an evocative picture of the Louisiana bayou where the book is set, notice that this is a “Dave Robicheaux novel”, and finally a seriously amped up blurb – “Splendidly atmospheric…with dialogue so sharp you can shave with it.” (The blurb was in all caps just so you felt as if someone was shouting at you to read it.) Never mind the source of the blurb is People magazine. Bridge to Vengeance is a slim 129 pages while Sunset Limited comes in at the 387 pages necessary for the full long haul flight. And yet, separated by time as they are, I thoroughly enjoyed both! Moreover, both might be consummate examples of crime fiction in their era, and the reader should find it all the more reassuring that novels like this prove the timeless appeal of the genre.

Walter Graham’s name was familiar to me for reasons I could not recall, and so only a few pages into Bridge to Vengeance, I did a quick check and discovered he is best known as the author of the Poldark series of novels, none of which of I have read, but several of whose adapted television episodes I have seen. Working on the faulty assumption that some of the DNA of the books made it into the television series, I at once felt a strong similarity. Graham has that ability, so much more common decades ago than today, it seems, to put enormous emotional density into a few phrases, and even more so in the silence around those phrases. His ability to make dialogue that would otherwise seem terse project great emotional depth is wonderful, and as his cast expands the brief interactions we have with some of the minor players still give us a sense of a three-dimensional world, albeit a curtailed one, like a watercolor depicting a fogged landscape. But I get ahead of myself. The plot of the book is straightforward enough: Philip Turner arrives home in England a few weeks after his brother commits suicide in Amsterdam. Unwilling to believe his brother would kill himself, and confused at the few details provided to him by officials, he travels to Amsterdam to pursue his own investigation. A straightforward enough set up, but one briskly put into motion by Graham, who also supplies us with nice background details to make us feel like this is more than a Quixotic adventure. Gathering up an interesting traveling companion along the way, the plot moves peripatetically between Amsterdam, England, and Italy for the remainder of the novel (with epistolary asides about Indonesia) in a way that still works to evoke the intrigue and beauty of far-off places the reader has never been to even today, and must have been equally if not more effective in the 50s.

The book’s era did have me bracing myself for some outmoded language and thought, and while overall I was pleasantly surprised, it has to be said this comes in part because the characters of the book are part of the upper class milieu that means they have very little to say about the everyday world. It’s hard to condone such escapism in a genre novel like this, but we can at least acknowledge that some otherwise painful descriptions are saved by the fact that they don’t appear at all. And there are, to be sure, weaknesses. The beautiful young woman who appears halfway through the plot is clearly intelligent, but cannot but be dominated by an emotional tug-of-war between the male protagonist and antagonist. The Indonesian assistant to Philip’s late brother writes him a letter of condolence in which, despite the fact that he assistant is clearly an educated man (titled “Dr.” in the text) he addresses Philip in a subservient manner with all the conventional grammatical quirks one would find when a South Asian clerk address a British officer in a work by Rudyard Kipling. The agency, and indeed well-being, of a prostitute in Amsterdam’s red-light district is given short shrift in a way that, to be fair, seems more realistic than the romanticized “Pretty Woman” treatment today’s readers might be used too, as well as less fatalistic than “The Wire” or other contemporary crime depictions.

These objections were much smaller than I expected for a book from 1955, and Graham’s style and characterizations make moving quickly through them easy, if not always pleasurable. But what I really did not expect was the strength of his plotting! Philip’s hunt for the truth eventually leads him on to attempt to track down a single person, and the way in which the identity is revealed stands up to anything from the 2020s. It’s a wonderful twist, and all the more powerful because it happens perhaps two-thirds of the way through the novel, which leads to an altogether unexpected continuation of the story. Conventionally, we expect when the guilty part is revealed, they get their comeuppance (or not) and things quickly wind down. In Bridge of Vengeance, the revelation is only the start of a crescendo that continues until the last page of the book. Graham pivots by making the book more than a vengeance plot, and plants his feet squarely on making it a character study and evaluation of values and emotional growth. By the time we reach the end, not only have we gotten two very well executed twists on identity and the truth on the brother’s suicide, but an ending that waves off the standard wrap up to make it something that stands out from pack. I am not surprised this book won the inaugural Gold Dagger award, and frankly amazed that the ending did not inspire more writers over the years. Or perhaps it has, and I’ll need to go back and re-read to see how this excellent book has influenced all the winners that have come after!

I did not want to like Sunset Limited. The author cannot help the chronology of a reader’s past consumption – if reading the greatest influences upon and students of an author’s work before the work itself leaves us underwhelmed, such is the Bloomian chaos of reading. While the setting of the novel – Louisiana and its bayous – was fresh and interesting, I could not help but be skeptical of the familiarity of the other pieces. A good guy, family man cop; a small town he does his best to keep clean; a cast of local characters; a new arrival that sets an incredibly elaborate (and unlikely) chain of events into motion. Looking at other Gold Dagger winners already reviewed, this had all the ingredients of the modern crime series. (It is, as the cover reminds us, a Dave Robicheaux novel, specifically the 10th in what currently stands as a 23 book series.) This isn’t inherently bad, but on balance it is usually not good, at least to me. Only Ian Rankin manages to stand out as having written great fiction that is also clearly within the borders of the conventional modern crime series. Paretsky, Cornwell, Lathen, and Cavanagh are the other contestants on the list, and none of them impressed me, while a few actively depressed.

But dammit, Burke got me. Part of it had to be the setting and the unique world that came along with it, but more than anything else it was his dialogue and unique style. It pains me to agree with People magazine, yet I suppose it demonstrates the power of the dialogue when even People can pick up how unique and powerful it is. Burke drops in just the right amount of slang and phonetic spelling of the local tongue to make us feel immersed, but not so much that we have to pause to make sure we know what someone is saying. His insults and dismissive one-liners are superb, and while the descriptions of his characters sometimes make the reader feel we are holding the text-only version of a graphic novel (how many people have heads that are shaped like triangles?), it somehow only makes them feel more vivid and lifelike. He also has a particular way of shifting between first and third person omniscient narration that I have not encountered before, at least not in the way that blurs the lines between the two. Most of the novel is told in the first person, from the perspective of protagonist Dave Robicheaux, a part-time cop, part-time bait shop owner in New Iberia, Louisiana. As Dave rolls around his parish, he encounters (more than) his fair share of crime. Rather than having the reader piece together a picture of what has happened from Dave’s own interviews with eyewitnesses, we usually get a throwaway line to the effect of “I heard this story” or “and so it went down like this, as I would later learn.” We then get a break into a new section, with the entire crime (or most of it, with a few details carefully left out) presented to us by an omniscient narrator. Another break, and we are back with Dave. We never actually get the dialogue that would allow Dave, or anyone else, to fully piece together the information presented to us. It’s a strange and potent ingredient, as these asides are some of the most tense or hilarious moments in the book. At times, Dave will ask a question referencing information we picked up only from the aside, making it unclear how much more we know than Dave, or vice versa. This allows Burke to play with information asymmetry in an unusual way – it’s not the full Colombo, where we know what happened and simply wait for the detective to catch up to us – nor is it the “offscreen” mysteries that sometimes add to the reader’s confusion without a clear indication of the information’s value. Particularly as so much of the knowledge in Sunset Limit is institutional – the unusual, close-knit community has a collective memory and understanding of who people are, how things are done, and the destined outcome of almost every life and crime – the reader is left with a shifting mix of certainty and wonder. At time we know more than Dave, it seems, and yet penetrating into what Dave knows seems impossible at times. This is all the more impressive given Burke’s excellent descriptive capabilities – he uses all five senses with unusual deftness, but he writes about smell with particular descriptive power. At times, the purple prose can get away from him, but in general each scene feels tightly constructed and intensely vivid. They might not survive longer treatments, but that’s quite alright as Burke keeps us moving along briskly, rotating us efficiently between Dave’s introspection and the antics and attitudes of his friends, family, partners, and criminal clientele. There must be a dozen secondary characters in the book, and it must be said that some of them – particularly those inherited from earlier books in the series but who have nothing to do here – are thinly and plainly sketched. But an equal number punch above their weight, and the criminals in particular make for delightful reading. I remember I once heard an author advise that frequently, first-time writers make their bad guys more interesting and compelling than their protagonists. Burke’s book should be guilty of this given Dave’s rather conventional, if well-constructed, background and outlook – he is far and away the most cautious and plodding character in the book. The villains, meanwhile, range from the strange to the creepy to the evil, all of them compelling in their own way. And yet, Burke manages to make Dave the sun around which all these other characters orbit, in a way so effective (if not entirely logical) that we are happy to stick with our protagonist even if he isn’t the most dynamic person in the book. The weakest part of the book is, in fact, the plot. The book opens with a half-hearted mention of a crime committed 40 years ago, and while that crime ostensibly remains the prime mover of the ensuing events, in reality the plot feels more like a ride-along with Dave as a variety of subplots unwind and – of course – come together. In most other books this would be a debilitating weakness, but such is the strength and enjoyment provided by Burke’s characters that the reader probably won’t mind. I do worry that repeated exposure to Burke’s writing, if this defect is systemic rather than episodic, will make his style wear quickly. But the fact that Sunset Limited makes me want to find out if that’s the case speaks for itself – Dave Robicheaux’s world, if not Dave himself, has a pull that will bring this reader back for more.

Overall, two enjoyable if disparate books. Graham is clearly the more literary, polished, and effective. He also manages to surprise this reader not just with his twists, but by his ability to break with convention, even with a seven decade handicap. Burke’s is more fun, off-the-cuff, and vivid, albeit likely with less staying power, but the unique language and style make it stand out from the many competitors in contemporary crime fiction. Readers today will be on the lookout for a novel like Burke’s, but I suspect that another hundred years hence, it is Graham’s book that will truly have stood the test of time.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Peter Temple – The Broken Shore
3. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
4. James Lee Burke – Sunset Limited
5. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
6. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
7. Jose Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
8. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
9. Winston Graham – Bridge to Vengeance (The Little Walls)
10. Sara Paretsky – Blacklist
11. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
12. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
13. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
14. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
15. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
16. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
17. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
18. James McClure – Steam Pig
19. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
20. Emma Lathen – Murder Against the Grain
21. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
22. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
23. Barbara Vine – A Fatal Inversion
24. John Hutton – Accidental Crimes
25. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

After taking a breather to read something other than crime fiction, back to work! Next up: The Broken Shore and Blacklist, from 2007 and 2004, respectively.

I returned to the stack of crime novels feeling wary – almost two dozen books in, I have been somewhat discouraged by the number of award-winning books that felt like a chore to consume. To be fair, I forced this diet upon myself, and most people would start to find anything bland after so many repeated servings, but I do think that even with the distance of time I will look back on most of these books – I was going to say with disappointment, but more likely I won’t remember much at all. How fortunate for me, then, that the book I pulled from the Cabinet of Mysteries (where all these books are being stored) was The Broken Shore.

Australia. Is it simply the logical resolution of the British left alone in a hot, isolated climate for two hundred years? Are they simply Americans with funny accents and backwards seasons? The dearth of cultural exports matches up with the fact that the country might be big, but is mostly empty. Beyond a few movie stars and iconic animals, Australia seems to be the isolated non-state that consumes American cultural without giving us much in return except for iron ore. And yet I was amazed to discover I knew Peter Temple’s work, albeit slightly – the Jack Irish novels that are his best-known work were turned into a series starring Guy Pierce. I remember I watched that series. That’s all I remember. As always, I’m willing to believe the books are better than the filmed version, but knowing this fact I was prepared to be underwhelmed by The Broken Shore. But I wasn’t – in fact, this is one of the best crime novels I have read to date. The crime itself – the murder of a local bigwig in a fairly isolated part of Australia – is itself a set-up we have seen infinite times before. Found dead, injuries suspicious, some minor things in the house slightly off in a hard-to-pinpoint way. What clues we have send us off in one direction that we know is unlikely to prove fruitful, if not entirely a red herring, but that’s besides the point because by the time we are that far into the novel we are so thoroughly immersed in the character and the world. Nor is this a novel that uses fast-paced plotting or dramatic twists to elide over bare spots, inconsistencies, or just plain bad writing. Indeed, the first chapter makes immediately clear that while the ‘crime’ part of the equation will be (compellingly) presented in due course, the ‘novel’ part comes first. Temple’s language is spare without shrinking down to the dehydrated proportions of Cormac McCarthy, and beautifully lyrical throughout. I was not surprised to learn, upon finishing this book and further researching Temple’s work, that another crime novel published a few years after The Broken Shore won the Miles Franklin Award, a major Australian literary prize that up to that point had never gone to a book in this genre. Even to the unfamiliar American, his ear for conversation is superb – the publisher is kind enough to include a glossary of Australian terms in the book, but meanings and tone were conveyed so clearly that I never once used it (not least because it would also have meant pausing in reading the book). Temple conveys more in a short conversation than many writers can achieve in a paragraph of exposition – not just information, but attitude, context, and atmosphere. The whole feeling of the book is, that old Hemingway saw, that we are seeing the five percent of an iceberg above the surface, but that between the lines is ninety-five percent more we cannot see despite our desperate desire to do so. So rich was this world, that I was convinced (as I was with the current #1 ranked book, Whip Hand) this was not our main character, Joe Cashin’s, first outing. The complex web of relationships in his personal and professional life, the cogs we see churning in the background, surely cannot have been set going simply for this novel. And yet, that is the case. Disappointment wars with awe – the former at being unable to spend more time with Cashin, the latter that the author can make such a complete portrait from nothing. Cashin himself, much like the crime he finds himself investigating, is not unfamiliar, but brought to such a peak of descriptive force that he leaps off the page – all the more impressive given he is very much an introvert going fairly stolidly about the job. The tone of the book is muted much of the time. The dead bigwig is an old man, the last of his line in a part of Australia where not much happens. Cashin’s home is partially ruined, inherited from a great grandfather whose reach exceeded his grasp. Cashin’s past as a high-flying detective in the city is alluded to, his old boss visited in the nursing home that age and ill-health have confined him to. Things have not so much fallen apart as simply been worn down until they reached their present level of degradation; any outrage felt by any of the characters as this development is similarly tempered. This makes the jet of emotion, when it does come, all the more effective. The usual thoughts on (social) justice that can appear in a novel where the wrongly accused are (surprise, surprise) part of a disenfranchised group; anguish on the thoughts of relationships and children, remembering the few truly happy moments that have survived a difficult life and career; allowing oneself to be hopeful, and being vulnerable enough to let others see it, after a lifetime of disappointments and time spent around predators. None of these are new, but the way Temple arranges them and plays them out through Cashin’s experience is astoundingly rendered. And so is the setting – despite the spare prose, I was convinced that most of the cities and geographies mentioned had to be real. Only upon searching for some of the larger towns mentioned in the novel did I realize they, too, were part of Temple’s masterful fictional tapestry. Finally, not to forget the core element here, Temple’s approach to the crime and its eventual solution fits neatly into the same categorization. He gives us enough signposts and guns on mantels to see where we are going, plays the information out at judiciously measured intervals, and throws in enough small twists and reveals to let us put all the information together that it all comes together in an entirely satisfactory manner. The fact that the crime is the last thing I talk about in this review, however, emphasizes why Temple’s book will rank so highly on the list – this is a novel that embraces all the challenges of the genre and conquers them with stylistic panache and makes a permanent mark on the reader. I’m only sorry that, beyond Jack Irish, there are so few other books of his to read.

Next, I jumped into Sara Paretsky’s Blacklist, whose cover has a certain something that screamed to me “airport fiction” – not in a bad way, just that the author’s brand (judging by the size of the font) was more important than the name of the book in terms of telling the reader what they were about to receive. And indeed, I discover shortly after opening it that our protagonist, V.I. Warshawski, has been in some dozen books before this Gold Dagger winning entry in the series (and another dozen since). The “V” stands for Victoria, and immediately I was conscience that this was only the third book I have yet read whose central character is a woman, the others being Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Scarpetta and Minette Walter’s core cast in The Scold’s Bridle (which one could arguably discount given it is more of an ensemble-based, roving point of view). And she is great! It’s hard to imagine that a dozen novels worth of backstory hurt, but Vic is fully fleshed out. She has a childhood, a varied professional resume, strong opinions on a variety of political and non-political subjects, food preferences, neighbors, dogs, the works. Professionally, she picks locks, carries a gun (and shoots it), does serious legwork, and in general doesn’t give up. The character (and author) is presented as specializing in the world of finance, but in this novel that is not on display – rather, we are given a storm of coincidences that must, of course, be linked, and so we follow Vic’s attempts to unravel the complex web of clue and relationships. The plotting is nicely handled given the multiple threads Paretsky has to balance – we move ahead smoothly without ever leaving any one character or crime too far behind. That being said, I did find one particular clue a tad too obvious, even adjusting for the fact I have been reading entirely too much crime fiction. I think I can say without giving too much away that when we are presented with an elderly man, in possession of critical secrets of the past but also gripped by Alzheimer’s disease, repeatedly shouting the name of someone, we know that someone will be important in unraveling said secrets. As such, the author should take particular caution in how that name is presented to make it tractable to the reader without being a dead giveaway. This, alas, was a dead giveaway. Nonetheless, as Vic races around Chicago in the face of resistance from the rich and powerful as well as the law enforcement arms of various local, state, and federal entities, she encounters a well-wrought range of characters pleasant and unpleasant. Many of them are fairly shallow (the au pair with predictably broken English, the Latino neighbor with the machismo and endearments, the spoiled rich kid) but the complexity of the crime itself is sufficient to carry us through without it getting to tiresome. As an aside, Vic herself is tough as nails, as Paretsky spends enough time describing one particular injured shoulder muscle that the book starts to feel more like Gray’s Anatomy – we get it, she is fighting through pain, but the scales were too heavily inclined to “tell” here rather than “show”. The real ingredient here is Paretsky’s progressivism. The novels secrets are wound up in the HUAC era of Communist-seeking witch hunts, as well as the (then) contemporary issues with civil liberties in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. It’s not Paretsky’s fault that the latter feel stale – she wrote the book to be published when those were real issues – but the former is also rendered in a way that is difficult to feel excited about. Vic herself is clearly liberal, and her devotion to the liberal causes and characters in the book bring some life to the fictional struggles the McCarthy-era personalities encountered, but it’s a lot of empathy to try to juggle. The government’s pursuit of an Egyptian dishwasher seems particularly one-dimensional and designed to make us feel outraged, but then again more depth and complexity there would possibly have sunk the plotting of the book. The characters are fun, Vic’s tenacity wins our admiration, and the eventual ambiguous outcome is praiseworthy given the ever-present temptation to wrap things up perfectly, but the biggest fault in this book might be that I read it after The Broken Shore! Joe Cashin felt and feels more real to me than V.I. Warshawski, despite the fact that the latter has had twelve books to mature and a far more developed (or at least a far more clearly conveyed) history. Similarly, Blacklist‘s crime don’t ever grip the reader – it is essentially the tale of melodramatic histories of wealthy families (who cares) set against the backdrop of government overreach (deplorable but unfixable by a private investigator). Broken Shore, by contrast, at least presents us with a deeper (if still conventional) exploration of what the wealthy and powerful can accomplish from their privileged seats while simultaneously giving us a far more powerful relationship with the protagonist, precisely because it embraces the ambiguity and difficulty of the everyday, whereas Vic is essentially a mundane superhero whose unwavering convictions make doubt one emotion that never appears.

Overall, two solid mysteries, but with one clear winner. Hopefully we can continue on similarly strong notes!

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Peter Temple – The Broken Shore
3. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
4. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
5. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
6. Jose Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
7. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
8. Sara Paretsky – Blacklist
9. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
10. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
11. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
12. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
13. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
14. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
15. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
16. James McClure – Steam Pig
17. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
18. Emma Lathen – Murder Against the Grain
19. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
20. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
21. Barbara Vine – A Fatal Inversion
22. John Hutton – Accidental Crimes
23. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Three reviews this time (or more properly two and a half) to make up for the single entry last time. We have Emma Lathen’s Murder Against the Grain, John Hutton’s Accidental Crimes, and Jose Carlos Somoza’s The Athenian Murders, the winner of 1967, 1983, and 2002, respectively.

I have to start with a mea cupla. I don’t know if it’s the amount of reading of crime novels, or simply a run of books that I simply don’t connect with, but I didn’t truly finish two of these three books – I got halfway through and then turned to the last 10 pages for the reveal. In neither case did I do this in a fever to solve the ingenious crime. The one that I did read, however, restored some faith that I am not rapidly losing my ability to enjoy a good book.

I started with Murder Against The Grain quite willing to be pleased. I have a secret persuasion that financial crime is one of the more underexploited angles of the crime novel ecosystem, so when I discovered that this book was one of a series staring a Wall Street banker as a detective, I was torn between thinking I had been beaten to the punch (by half a century!) or that the novel simply wouldn’t have aged well. It turned out, to me both glee and disappointment, to be the latter. The banker, John Putnam Thatcher (points for the name), is very much of his era – that is, the 60s. He is a distant ancestor of today’s banker, and possibly a different species entirely. Propriety and understatement seem to be his two primary virtues, and to today’s reader he comes off more as a particularly old-school tax attorney than the most mentally and physically active member of a world-bestriding bank. His bank, Sloan Guaranty Trust (annoyingly referred to as “the Sloan” by one and all) is robbed of almost $1 million ($8 million in 2021 terms) through the forgery of a Soviet bill of lading. The world, and the financial sector, was a smaller place then, and one of the difficulties of the novel is the lack of any sort of tension about the crime. There was no violence, only the discreet cashing of a check that will cause a blow to the balance sheet of a gigantic, impersonal institution (and while we do meet a number of Thatcher’s colleagues, the Sloan is left as an almost characterless place, whose well-being the reader is hard-pressed to take an interest in). Perhaps in 1967, the Soviet angle would have created more play – the stolen money was supposed to pay for American grain that is being sent to the USSR as part of a diplomatic deal. But from the distance of five decades, the Soviets seem like familiar caricatures, from oily ambassadors to loud, hard-drinking sailors, and Thatcher’s various trips to meet such kooky characters struggle to hold our interest. Thatcher himself seems inwardly impatient, and never endears himself to us as anything other than a shoulder to perch on a we wonder through the plot. At a certain point, I simply couldn’t take it any more. Unending side trips, guns put on mantels that failed to go off for chapters at a time, it was simply too much. I skipped to the end. Emma Lathen (a pen name of two people working together to write the books) is perfectly readable, and works with a larger cast of characters than many authors would dare attempt. I sense the ability to evoke humor, and an excellent grasp of detail. But the material is – the stumbling block of all attempt to write about financial crime – too dry, and the distance of time only makes it harder to swallow. And yet the fact that this book won the Gold Dagger gives me a message of hope, that the financial crime novel may one day rise again! This book falls towards the middle of the bottom of the pack, but retains a special place in my heart for the hope it gives me.

Accidental Crimes got off to a rocky start. The cover image and splash text on the back are lurid and have more than a whiff of the sex-drenched 80s about them. Somehow, when the reader gets into the actual text, things reverse without getting any better. The main character, Conrad Nield, is a horribly righteous, and horrible, instructor at a college for teachers. He drives around Yorkshire reflecting on the failings of most people and the state of society. Simultaneously, a series of murders happen in the area, and Conrad is a potential suspect. The setup is perfectly acceptable, but Conrad is such an unpleasant companion, and the actual murders such a minor plot point, that this reads less like a crime novel and more like an unpleasant psychological profile. We get into Conrad’s marriage, his job prospects, his views on society – none of which are pleasant – while the reality of the sex-drenched 80s description feels barely risque by today’s standards. In a dark twist, the reader becomes aware of the actual murderer quite early on, but while this adds a periodic frisson of tension is dissipates completely in the face of the volume of Conrad’s discontent. Once again, I got about halfway through – to the point where Conrad is taken up by the police as a possible suspect – saw which was the wind was blowing, and skipped ahead to the end. Without offering any spoilers, the wind up was entirely predictable, justice is done in both the murders and to the awful Conrad. It’s not a long novel, this, but getting through it was as unpleasant as its protagonist. It falls below even the much-loathed Fatal Inversion, because as much as I hated the conception of that book its level of writing was a cut above and at least offered a unique (if, to me, unpleasant) approach to the genre.

And last, but far from least, The Athenian Murders. Another novel that stands in a class of its own in terms of its conception and framing. Ostensibly a book that is itself a translation of an ancient Greek novel, with footnotes by the translation interspersed throughout, the reader follows an ancient detective’s attempt to unravel a murder in Athens (Plato himself appears as a minor character). As the translator offers commentary and interpretation, it starts to appear that somehow the events of the ancient crime are influencing the life of the translator in strangely coincidental ways. I am hard-pressed to think of another crime novel with footnotes, but surely there can be none with footnotes that discuss the interpretation of literature, the origins and meaning of Platonic philosophy, and the myths and society of ancient Greece. The pacing is just brisk enough to keep it from feeling weighted down by all this freight, and as the reader’s eyes flicker from text to footnotes it feels as though we are reading two different novels at once – something the author is well aware of and plays with very successfully. Indeed, the book is filled with playful and clever tricks, devices to entice, confuse, and ensnare. The reveals are satisfying, albeit (by the time we reach the end) perhaps not entirely surprising. As an exercise, however, the book is a marvelous success. I can offer few more comments without risking giving things away, but as a text-within-a-text (within a text?) the world of ancient Athens is beautifully is sparely sketched, the unnamed translator becomes increasingly compelling, and the twist at the end makes the reader smirk in acknowledgment of the feat, if not laugh with pleasure. I am, perhaps, reacting still to A Fatal Inversion – another novel driven primarily by concept – in my feeling that this book is hard to judge using the same criteria as many of the other crime novels I have reviewed here. The device and purpose are distinctly different, and yet I feel comfortable placing this in the top five of the books reviewed so far based purely on its difference and the success the author has in inviting us down the rabbit hole, only to have us end up in an entirely different, but extremely compelling, labyrinth.

21 down – 40-odd to go!

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Jose Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
6. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
7. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
8. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
9. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
10. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
11. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
12. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
13. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
14. James McClure – Steam Pig
15. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
16. Emma Lathen – Murder Against the Grain
17. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
18. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
19. Barbara Vine – A Fatal Inversion
20. John Hutton – Accidental Crimes
21. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Only one book this time, as it gave me the most visceral reaction I have yet had. A Fatal Inversion won the Gold Dagger in 1987. Barbara Vine, the purported author, is in fact a pen name of Ruth Rendell, whose 1976 winner, A Demon in My View, has already been reviewed, and whose 1986 winner Live Flesh is still on the “to read” list. As Barbara Vine, Rendell also won the 1991 Gold Dagger for King Solomon’s Carpet.

I only learned about the pen name after I finished the book, and at once I said “of course.” A Fatal Inversion is deeply psychological, more about people and their inner workings than crime itself. In A Demon in My View this was quite interesting because the psychopath was one of the killers. This time around, it doesn’t work – or rather, if it does work, who cares?

My problem with the book is its utter lack of potential payoff. Rendell’s strength to write multiple characters is on display again – here, she writes mostly from the points of view of Adam and Rufus, two men who, we come to learn, committed a serious crime ten years ago, the evidence of which is discovered in the book’s opening chapter. As work through the novel and Adam and Rufus recall and deal with the past in their own ways, we see again Ruth’s talent for seeing the same people and events from two perspectives – sometimes just the same, sometimes different, sometimes distorted as if through a funhouse mirror. The little details are expertly revealed, leading us away from the main narratives for a sentence or three before snapping back into place. The whirlwind of supporting cast members is also a cut above. The problem isn’t in the details, it’s in the whole construction of the book, and while I see why some people would give it praise (or even a Gold Dagger) I found it viscerally annoying to read.

Rendell structures the book with an elastic approach to chronology. We start in the “present” (i.e. 1986) but Adam and Rufus, as they are introduced, are continuously rubber-banding between their own daily routine and memories of ten years ago. Moreover, when we are in the present, Rendell has a habit of dropping references that the characters would clearly understand but that mean nothing to the reader. As one example, Adam and Rufus think of what happened as “Ecalpemos” but we know of no such place – it is only one-third of the way through the book that we learn what “Ecalpemos” is and how it maps onto our knowledge of other settings. Or an idle thought about how one characters hadn’t seen another one bleed, “not until she had taken the boy” and then we move on despite having no idea what that means until much later. The purpose, of course, is to make us want to know, to make us turn the page to connect the dots so we have, at last, a consistent internal geography. I admire the intellectual exercise here, but in practice I found it maddening. There are simply too many variables to have to juggle, and by the time they are all revealed…nothing! Imagine solving a jigsaw puzzle by looking only at the observe side of it and piecing all the cardboard colored rears together. At last, when you finish, you flip it over to see what the image looks like pieced together, and finding out it is simply a blank white canvas. That is the payoff to reading this book. When at last all was revealed (as usual, about 15 pages before the end of the book) I realized that…I didn’t care! The inevitable twist was less impactful than it might otherwise have been both because the manner in which it could occur was severely limited, and also because the characters were so fantastically unlikeable. Not a single person in the book came across as likeable, even the few that one could at least feel empathetic for. This is a remarkable achievement, all the more so in that I don’t know to what purpose!

Crime novels and morals have an uncomfortable relationship, in my mind. Being about crime, they are frequently either black and white (the bad guy gets what he deserves) or revel in the grey (is anyone to blame? Is it society’s fault? Was it destiny, tragedy, some series of butterfly effect chain of events that caused it all to go so wrong?). This book is gray without even the grayness, it is simply bleached of color. Rendell touches on entitlement, money, health care, racism, sexism, religion, mental health, family, children, and other topics I’m sure have slipped my mind. She clearly has points of view to get across beyond simply capturing a vivid setting in which to place her characters. And yet it’s hard to walk away feeling impacted by any semiotics because it’s such a dull exercise – watch two unlikeable, mildly successful men meander through their own memories about a morally outrageous episode in their past while they also meander through their morally unimpressive present. Hip hip hooray. There’s no justice in this book, and even the pursuit of justice feels rather uninteresting given we see it only through the paranoid minds of Adam and Rufus, who wonder if the police are on their trail. It seems fairly obvious, at least to me, that they are not. We have objectivity, albeit it for events we view through unreliable lenses, and the pursuit of justice ceases to be a possible path for the novel about three-quarters of the way in. All that’s left is the characters and that’s why this book felt like a complete slog.

If I had picked this up in a bookstore to read, after the first few pages I would have put it back. There’s no visceral thrill of the chase here – which is perfectly fine – but the exercise of oscillating through time as the characters slowly move forward through the narrative is exhausting. A Fatal Inversion is a clever name for the book given this central device and the importance of “Ecalpemos” (“someplace”, inverted – sorry for the spoiler, but don’t read the book, please) in it, but the cleverness itself feels more the central point than anything else. I am beginning to dread the next Rendell book, because while her style is certainly strong and I can see how her books would be quite groundbreaking at the time, the descendants they inspired make their freshness and perspicacity wane quickly.

A final complaint. The last chapter, which gathers up many threads lost earlier in the book and resolves them, annoyed me. It’s totally logical, and even plausible, but I think it’s supposed to serve as a last, definitive moral statement on the impact the crime had on everyone – the sort of clear statement lost elsewhere in the book’s complex chronology that is supposed to provide light by which all the other characters and their outcomes can be better measured. Bleh. Instead of nodding sagely I felt a knot of anger grow in my stomach.

I’ll save the updated rankings for the next review, but I expect that this book will be one of my biggest departures from common wisdom in that it will be near the very bottom of my list, even though A Fatal Inversion was nominated for the 2005 Dagger of Daggers Award to honor the best crime novel of the past 50 years. No, thank you.

For your consideration, 1994’s The Scold’s Bridle by Minette Walters, and 2005’s The Silence of the Grave by Ardnaldur Indrioason.

I can’t decide if I liked The Scold’s Bridle more, or hated it more, than its ranking below reflects. On the one hand, it is unusually character-focused for the genre. Half a dozen well-developed characters people the pages, with twice that many in supporting roles, and I am hard-pressed to think of another book that has such a quantity of paragraph-long soliloquies and speeches. Every character in this book seems to be extremely psychologically perceptive but also exquisitely patient in doling out their perceptions as well as (incidentally) the critical facts regarding the crime. The setup is simple but quite effective: a bitter old woman is found dead in her tub, wearing a scold’s bridle – a medieval device strapped to the head that forced a sharp piece of metal into the mouth to keep the wearer (usually a nagging woman, or scold) from talking. The bridle was a family heirloom, but the manner in which it is worn and the body is found casts some doubt on whether the crone’s death was suicide or murder. And off we go, with the victim’s GP as our central protagonist around whom all other characters begin to orbit as they are introduced.

The conceit is strong, but the execution can be maddening. The novel is incredibly psychological without, to me, becoming a psychological thriller in any way. And that’s perfectly fine – I applaud the attempt to break free from genre conventions – but the endless analysis of each character by the others becomes tedious in the first half of the novel, leaving the back half a slog. To be fair, the fact that the reader wants to trudge through the back half is a salute to Walters’ power of plotting. She is excellent as keeping multiple sources of uncertainty dangling at once, and the depth to which she plumbs the minds (and sometimes the history) of her characters means that many of her supporting protagonists are better sketched than the main protagonist of other books I have read. The quintessential English country village is drawn with fine detail, although the setting is essentially unimportant – the inner workings of all these people is the primary focus. Walters intersperses the chapters with short excerpts from the diaries of the dead matriarch, which serves to give us slowly revealed sources of truth amid all the speculation and uncertainty. As with the soliloquies by the living, however, these tend to become repetitive and after a certain number we know the direction they are headed. It’s not a very thick book, and the pacing is brisk enough, but I get the feeling it would have been equally good or better had it been twenty percent shorter.

The biggest problem, though, is Shakespeare. This is a book that will either make devotees simper in smug sympathy, or have the rest of us (including me) quickly tire of any mention of poor old William. The victim is described as being brilliant, but with no formal schooling, who fixated on Shakespeare, read him voraciously, and quoted him endlessly. She might be dead, but the quotes and parallels simply will not stop. Indeed, without giving too much away I can say that the examination of Hamlet and King Lear, both within the text and as paralleled in the plot developments, are at first a clever writing device but become enormously burdensome by the end. There is something self-congratulatory in all the Shakespeare quotes – Walters is not wearing her erudition lightly, and it makes reading the book less enjoyable. We are beaten over the head with endless quotes, and of course the long suffering policeman investigating the possible crime has to be walked through all the plots and semiotics and psychological analysis periodically (even though he is otherwise a PhD level psychologist who is able to brilliantly determine the inner workings of people based on a single meeting). If we aren’t being treated to characters haranguing one another – if two characters interact in this book, one of them is at least huffy, and usually flat out upset – then it’s back to Shakespeare. As the plot related to the actual death unfolds, it can be easy to lose the moments of intellectual satisfaction amid the sea of psycho-babble and the Bard. Indeed, by the end of the book, when all is revealed, the end result feels incredibly mundane and even cheap. Yes, Walters had given us the clues we needed, but she drowned them in such a volume of speeches and meaningless emotional back-and-forth that it doesn’t feel like much of a triumph. The characters arcs are more satisfying – unsurprising, given the volume of space devoted to them – but the whole construct feels like an elaborate wind-up doll who course is fascinating at first, but quickly becomes the same geometries repeated over and over.

Confused as I am by The Scold’s Bridle, the depth it shows in its characterization and plotting nevertheless put it in a fairly strong position. Walters will reappear with her 2003 Gold Dagger winner, and I’m curious if another decade of writing will place her next entry farther up or down the list.

And then we have Silence of the Grave. This is a novel that has two headwinds from my perspective – first, the fact that was an early book in the wider ‘Nordic noir’ (although this author and book are Icelandic) means that it is pigeonholed in a genre that has faded over the past several years. Secondly, even within that sub-genre, it is overshadowed by the paragons that are Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell. Indeed, one of the few Gold Dagger winners I am not reading is Mankell’s Sidetracked from 2001 because I have seen both the Swedish and British versions on television. Silence of the Grave feels rather perfunctory compared to the best-known Nordic noir books, almost an elaborate exercise in simplicity.

The plot is simple. A skeleton is found on a construction site, and is quickly determined to have been there for some 70 years or so. Meanwhile, we get a parallel narrative of an abused woman and her family, which we soon learn is intimately connected with the same site where the skeleton is being excavated. The police detective leading the case of the skeleton is, you guessed it, work obsessed, unhappy, and haunted by unspecified ghosts from his past. He waxes unlyrical about Iceland as he plods around Reykjavik, coming into contact with some of the seedier parts of the culture as he also tries to locate his estranged daughter.

The problem is that there isn’t much in the way of traditional crime novel plotting. Yes, there are detectives looking for evidence and interviewing people. Yes, the narrative of the abused woman adds a certain amount of suspense and anguish. But there is no “ah ha” moment, no evidence unraveled that propels us ahead. The author has the skeleton, once found, placed in the charge of an archeological team rather than CSIs, seemingly for no purpose other than to slow down the timeline and send the police ricocheting around the city. While transparent, this would be perfectly acceptable if he used that time for some twists and turns, or even characterization, but he doesn’t. It just feels…slow. The red herring subplot is clearly just that from the get go, and adds an additional stand of tedium. The greatest sin, however, is that by the time we reach the end, a character emerges in “present day” from the parallel, abused woman narrative, who clearly holds all the answers. The police had accomplished nothing other than ruling out some suspects, and then this deus ex machina parachutes in to deliver them the whole story (which we, of course, had been reading the whole time). When she arrives, the police still don’t wait around to listen, even! The author tries to force some last-minute twists in, but at that point it is simply too late and they lack any sort of punch. We have figured it out long ago.

Was the story really about all those “winter in the far north” themes? Of the horrible and desolate circumstances that go on behind closed doors? Of these well-off Nordic societies that, like any society, hide the things that fall between the cracks? About the past, and loss? Probably. But it just isn’t very effecting. No one in this book is likeable (with the exception, perhaps, of one of the detectives, but she is thinly drawn and gets very little time on the page) unless they are a victim, but even then victimhood is so clearly their foremost attribute they don’t even feel human anymore. Grim, sad, and slow, Silence of the Grave is almost a caricature of Nordic noir, and while the people of Iceland may very well have found it wonderfully accurate and thought-provoking, from the outside perspective it seems simply to be a forgettable example of a sub-genre of the crime novel.

Two remarkably different books for being written only a decade apart. One excessively wordy and so focused on the psychological that the crime portion, though actually quite strong, feels lost in the shuffle, the other so spare and with so little content that the psychological content, as minimal as it is, is all that the reader is left seeing in light of the complete lack of criminal drama. Though I place them only two places apart on my current ranking, The Scold’s Bridle is clearly in a different category than Silence of the Grave, and I suspect the gap between them will only widen as I continue to work my way through the catalog.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
6. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
7. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
8. Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
9. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
10. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
11. Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
12. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
13. James McClure – Steam Pig
14. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
15. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
16. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
17. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)

Two more entries: Michael Robotham’s Life and Death, and Lionel Davidson’s A Long Way to Shiloh, the winners in 2015 and 1966, respectively. I didn’t realize this was the case, as the edition of Shiloh I bought was a reissue by Faber & Faber with a very modern cover – I thought it was written in the 21st century until, a few pages in, the book clued me in to its era. Already I’m giving my assertion from the last review – that I would be unlikely to review two books with publishing years so far apart again – a run for the money, as this is only four years smaller a gap! However, unlike the previous review, these books share essentially nothing, and while Davidson’s style if not his subject matter make the five decade gap feel much smaller than it really is, they remain distant cousins in the greater crime novel family.

Life and Death is effective. It was clear to me only part way through the novel, and even more so by the end. Robotham has written a page-turner in the most literal sense, as I was unable to keep leafing through the book even when, with twenty percent still to go, the outcome was clear. His background as a journalist is clear in the book’s wonderfully clear, almost spare prose. Robotham is Australian; the book takes place (mostly) in Texas, with Texans as the primary characters; Robotham made it clear in an initial dedication that he owes much to Texan writers who came before him, and his attempts to get the flavor and speech patterns of Texas were a decent antipodean effort. However, Lonesome Dove this is not, and perhaps with the exception of scenes in which characters try to speak or understand Spanish – not so different from an Australian learning to speak Texan! – the setting feels fairly washed out. Robotham seems to have wanted Texas to be a background character, as the setting can be in so many great novels, but it never quite gets there. Rather, Robotham’s strength is his characters. He is particularly good with the small details and illustrations that create depth in even tertiary characters. His throw-away lines, suggestions, idle thoughts are excellent, and the actual dialogue almost as good (with the exception of his “Black convict” character, who feels much more two-dimensional than any other member of the supporting cast).

The problem, then, is the plot – which I have neglected to describe so far. And perhaps that’s because it’s the most dissatisfying part of the book, and what makes Life or Death merely good and not great. The pitch is high concept, indeed. Audie Palmer has been imprisoned for a decade, serving a sentence for an armored car robbery in which the millions of stolen dollars were never recovered. The day before he is due to be released, he escapes. Why? Well, the “why” is eventually revealed to us, but it is almost a MacGuffin, something that keeps all our characters in enjoyable motion even if their motives – in the retrospective light of full knowledge – do not quite hold up to scrutiny. A good jailbreak or heist novel is always appreciated, but that isn’t the point of Life or Death. We do have the traditional, dogged, “new to this case, let’s start from the beginning and put all the pieces together” lawman (in this case an FBI agent), the sidekick (the aforementioned Black convict), as well as the usual swirl of antagonists and fleeting acquaintances (oily businessman, corrupt lawman, estranged family, Good Samaritan stranger), but Life or Death is essentially a giant plot device. We start with Audie, having just escaped prison, on a kinetic journey forward physically – with all those characters in his wake – but on a backwards journey mentally. Every time Audie pauses for breath, or sleep, we get a flashback. As Audie nears his physical finish line, the mental journey catches him up nearly to when his time in prison began. The climax is of course Audie himself bridging the gap between the two, made to feel all the more extraordinary because of his flat refusal to discuss anything about the crime up to that point of the novel. It works! Robotham has cunningly embedded a love story to get the reader wholeheartedly on Audie’s side, and while it’s equally transparent as the other ridiculous happenstances that made Audie a Good Guy (135 IQ, hard worker, booted from college because of his criminal brother’s antics), the pace of the plot doesn’t give us much time to roll our eyes at the whole situation. Robotham subverts our expectations by turning what we thought was an escape novel or heist novel into a love story, and while it pulls this off successfully it makes for a rather less satisfying crime novel. If Life or Death is made into a movie, it will be more “The Notebook” and less “Ocean’s 11”. Given I was looking for the latter, there is only so far this book can climb in the rankings before it loses out to more conventional titles. I congratulate Mr. Robotham on his excellent craftmanship, however.

I have to throw in one other point of contention here, however. If I was the governor of a state, and a convict escaped from prison twelve hours before they were due to be released, would I really call in all the law enforcement capabilities at my disposal? How many millions of dollars would I waste on man hours searching for one person who escaped without harming anyone? Am I crazy for thinking I’d put a warrant out for him, shrug, and go about my business?

And then we have A Long Way to Shiloh. Reading this so soon after The Far Side of the Dollar has led me to believe that in the 1960s, people simply wrote better. The prose ages beautifully, and Davidson, while less poetic than Macdonald, manages to do so much more while making it feel light and breezy. Shiloh also grabbed my attention because it felt so familiar – any fan of Indiana Jones will wonder if this book was some sort of source material! An English professor of Semitics goes to Israel to investigate a scroll (what we now know as a Dead Sea Scroll) that purports to hint at the location of the Temple Menorah – that is, the original Menorah forged by the Jews in the desert, thought to have been taken by Titus in the sacking of Jerusalem in the first century AD. But what if Titus’ prize was a copy, and the original was buried in the desert for safekeeping? A few “find and replace” searches in that description, and you have Professor Indiana Jones fighting Nazis to recover the Ark of the Covenant! Davidson’s hero, Professor Laing, leans more into the intellectual side of things rather than the action. He also appears to have a drinking problem and is a well-established letch. Nonetheless, as he rolls through the recently established state of Israel (driven, inevitably, by a beautiful Israeli army officer) the intellectual puzzle remains fantastically engaging. Making ancient scrolls and Biblical goings-on a matter of heart-pumping urgency is no small feat, and Dan Brown surely owes something to Davidson’s ability to condense so much obscure information and make it a delectable mental meal for the reader. Throw in the intrigue of Syrian and Jordanian opposition, and you have a neat little novel. Unlike Life and Death, moreover, Davidson does a fantastic job at making Israel and her people a vivid and essential part of the novel. He deftly integrated descriptions of the far-flung masses – Englishmen, Germans, Moroccans, Yemenis – who have come together to make this new state. There are Arabs and Bedouins, rabbis and businessmen, ancient citadels and modern cities, somehow woven together into a new state that feels bursting with energy even as we explore its millennia old desert canyons and holy places. The cross-section we see feels particularly interesting given we know how eventful the next few decades will be for this young state, and that sense of destiny likely accrues to the novel’s benefit (had it been set in Hiroshima in 1943, for example, the atmosphere might feel different).

Professor Laing is not, however, a particularly enjoyable protagonist. His brain produces the necessary realizations at the critical moments, and he works through the action scenes adequately, but he is certainly no hero. This could have worked quite well – Indiana Jones as more of a mortal – but, alas, he is hard to admire beyond his academic knowledge. Whether it is drinking an entire bottle of whiskey when he goes out on patrol with the army, Uzzi in hand, or his unceasing pursuit of the army officer who drives him around the country (despite her being engaged, she of course eventually gives in to his “sophisticated” ways), Laing makes the reader want to shout “Stop, already!” quite a number of times. It feels less like a predecessor to the self-destructive anti-hero so popular today, and more like self-destruction, period. Laing is not a happy man, and although his detached inner voice has a pleasant sense of irony and dry humor, the intellectual puzzle, rather than the puzzle solvers, are the prime mover.

Alas, the puzzle itself runs out of steam in the final section of the novel. Davidson does an excellent job with the slow unraveling of the incomplete scroll’s meaning, the reversals, the coded language, the setbacks and advances as Laing closes in on things. The climatic scene in unlocking the location of the next scroll, witht he location of the Temple Menorah, is very well executed, and then…everything is wrapped up. It is almost as though the author ran out of creative energy, or ran headfirst into a rock solid deadline. The traditional twist regarding the location of the Menorah is satisfying enough, but the heart has gone out of the book at that point. The efforts of the characters feel half-hearted, and the result – while perhaps poetic – is not quite brought off well enough to leave the reader pleased. (I give nothing away when I say that the book morphs into “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” after starting more like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – this is quite a transformation to undertake decades before either film was written, and not surprising that carrying off such a difficult switch is not entirely successful.) With the plot losing pressure at the last moment, and in the absence of a strong protagonist to carry us the rest of the way, Shiloh‘s end feels like an otherwise wonderful vacation whose final few days were ruined by rain. A good trip, but we can’t help but wonder what might have been.

Even with their flaws, both of these books are very strong. I am unsurprised, and even excited, to learn that both Robotham and Davidson won the Gold Dagger more than once (twice and three times, respectively), and eager to see how their other works will compare. Both are certainly top quality, as reflected in the updated rankings, and without knowing their competition, I still understand why these are Gold Dagger winners.

Updated ranking:

1. Dick Francis – Whip Hand
2. Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
3. Mick Herron – Dead Lions
4. Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
5. Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
6. Michael Robotham – Life and Death
7. Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
8. Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
9. Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
10. Bill Beverly – Dodgers
11. James McClure – Steam Pig
12. Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
13. Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
14. Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
15. Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)