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