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:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Peter Temple – The Broken Shore
- 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
- Sara Paretsky – Blacklist
- 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 