Re-reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar in the name of escapism. Astonishing how far away it feels with all the pre-Euro currencies in Europe, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Ceylon, and so on. One passage caught my eye, it feels like a metaphor worth seizing on for the immediate future. This takes place as he observes Sri Lanka go by from a train to Colombo from Galle.

“The rain let up, and in the villages of grass huts with steeply pitched roofs the lime kilns were sending clouds of smoke into the palm groves. It was another example of Ceylonese improvidence. They dynamite coral from reefs and burn it to make lime. But the broken reef lets in the sea to erode the shore. The government had begun a program to cement the reefs, but the paradox is that cement is made with lime, and, as no cement can be imported, the reefs that are dynamited for the lime to mend others must themselves be replaced. The call it the cement industry; it is an industry that is entirely self-consuming: nothing is achieved.”

Amid the ongoing repetitions of “Not this shit again!” as news about the incoming president’s plans trickles out, Twain’s old saw is lurking in the background. Looking for the small escapes as well as trying to figure out how to push ahead, I was reading a collection of Joan Didion’s essays. Didion has been one of my many blind spots over the years. I nod sagely when her name is mentioned, frantically scrabbling around in my mind to see if I have even the thinnest base of knowledge for my sagacity. As usual, I do not. So, working through her essay “Miami” I am at last coming to be better acquainted.

Didion’s prose does not set me on fire, but I very much like her structure and approach to detail. Miami in the 1980s (the essay was published in 1987) is a topic that, retrospectively, offers fertile ground for any kind of talented writer, fiction or nonfiction. Nonetheless, it feels as though Didion executed superb judgement in the threads she chose to weave together, and the image that appears as she weaves is a portrait with depth and breadth while still remaining nimble and digestible. I have yet to finish it, but already I – someone whose primary exposure to Florida, other than two brief trips as a teenager, is through popular culture – feel as though I can draw connections and divisions between Didion’s “real” Miami and the more familiar version of it from Miami Vice, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and the novels of Carl Hiaasen. This almost certainly isn’t true, but the fact that it feels so is a credit to Didion.

1987, coming at the tail end of the Reagan years, is also – at time of writing – just about spot on for the birth year of the median American. These years just before our birth, when the stage hands were setting up the scenery that would – up curtain! – quicken alongside us feel alternately inevitable, unbelievable, and mystical. One of the joys of aging is unearthing the truths about what came before, and then realizing, as you turn to shout your outrage to your contemporaries, that many of them are simply doing the same old shit. Hats off to Mr. Twain. But to return to the Reagan years. The Reagan administration’s status as the pre-dawn or origin administration for most millennials, along with the almost mythical status conferred onto Reagan by the Republican party (I cannot think of a comparable figure for the Democrats, save perhaps Jimmy Carter, whose status is more dependent on his longevity and post-White House good works than his policy accomplishments) makes it a much larger signpost, or even a genesis, for our current age. What makes Miami such an astonishing read today is seeing how possible it was for things to be different, how inevitable today feels in response to the decisions of yesterday, and how frustratingly impossible it feels to prevent the pendulum from swinging back to where we were back then. I had to look up from reading this multiple times, to see if someone was playing a joke on me or if Didion’s ghost would be standing by, shaking her head (or fist or both) in frustration.

This is a multi-page excerpt, consisting of most of Part 3, Chapter 14:

When I think now about mirror tricks and what might or might not be built into them, about the ways in which frustrations can be kindled and furies unloosed, I think of Guillermo Novo, called Bill Novo. Guillermo Nova was known to FBI agents and federal prosecutors and the various personnel who make up ” terrorist task forces” on the eastern seaboard of the United States as one of the Novo brothers, Ignacio and Guillermo, two exiles who first came to national attention in 1964, when they fired a dud bazooka shell at the United Nations during a speech by Che Guevara. There were certain farcical elements here (the embattled brothers bobbing in a small boat, the shell plopping harmlessly into the East River), and, in a period when Hispanics were seen by many Americans as intrinsically funny, an accent joke, this incident was generally treated tolerantly, a comic footnote to the news. As time went by, however, the names of the Novo brothers began turning up in less comic footnotes…

Guillermo Novo himself was among those convicted, in a 1979 trial which rested on the demonstration of connections between the Cuban defendants and DINA, the Chilean secret police, of the assassination in Washington of the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and of the Institute for Policy Studies researcher who happened to be with him when his car blew up, Ronni Moffitt. This conviction was overturned on appeal (the appellate court ruled that the testimony of two jailhouse informants had been improperly admitted), and in a 1981 retrial, after the federal prosecutors turned down a deal in which the defense offered a plea of guilty on the lesser charge of conspiracy, plus what Guillermo Novo’s attorney called “a sweetener,” a “guarantee” by Guillermo Novo “quote “to stop all violence by Cuban exiles in the United States,” Guillermo Novo was acquitted.

I happened to meet Guillermo Novo in 1985, one Monday morning when I was waiting for someone in the reception room at WRHC-Cadena Azul, Miami, a station the call letters of which stood for Radio Havana Cuba. There was about this meeting nothing of either moment or consequence. A man who introduced himself as “Bill Novo” just appeared beside me, and we exchanged minor biography for a few minutes. He said that he had noticed me reading a letter framed on the wall of the reception room. He said that he was the sales manager for WRHC, and had lived in Miami only three years. He said that he had however lived in the United States since 1954, mostly in New York and New Jersey. He was a small sharp-featured man in a white tropical suit, who in fact spoke English with an accent which suggested New Jersey, and he had a way of materializing and dematerializing sideways, of appearing from and then sidling back into an inner office, which was where he retreated after he gave me his business card, the exchange of cards remaining a more or less fixed ritual in Cuban Miami. GUILLERMO NOVO SAMPOL, the card read. Gerente de Ventas, WRHC-Cadena Azul

That it was possible on a Monday morning in Miami to have so desultory an encounter with one of the Novo brothers seemed to me, perhaps because I was not yet accustomed to a rhythm in which dealings with DINA and unsupported allegations about Dallas motel rooms could be incorporated into the American business day, remarkable, and later that week I asked an exile acquaintance who was familiar with WRHC if the Guillermo Novo who was the sales manager there was in fact the Guillermo Novo who had been tried in the Letelier assassination. There had been, my acquaintance demurred, “a final acquittal on the Letelier count.” But it was, I persisted, the same man. My acquaintance had shrugged impatiently, not as if he thought it was best not mentioned, but as if he did not quite see the interest. “Bill Novo has been a man of action,” he said. “Yes. Of course.”

To be a man of action in Miami was to receive encouragement from many quarters. On the wall of the reception room at WRHC-Cadena Azul, Miami, where the sales manager was Guillermo Novo and an occasional commenter was Fidel and Raul Castro’s estranged sister Juanita and the host of the most popular talk show was Felipe Rivero, whose family had from 1832 until 1960 published the powerful Diario de la Marina in Havana and who would in 1986, after a controversy fueled by his insistence that the Holocaust had not occurred but had been fabricated “to defame and divide the German people” moved from WRHC to WOCN, there hung in 1985 a framed letter, the letter Guillermo Novo had mentioned when he first materialized that Monday morning. This letter, which was dated October 1983 and signed by the President of the United States, read:

“I learned from Becky Dunlop [presumably Becky Norton Dunlop, a White House aide who later followed Edwin Meese to the Justice Department] about the outstanding work being done at WRHC. Many of your listeners have also been in touch, praising your news coverage and your editorials. Your talented staff deserves special commendation for keeping your listeners well-informed.

I’ve been particularly pleased, of course, that you have been translating and airing a Spanish version of my weekly talks. This is important because your signal reaches the people of Cuba, whose rigidly controlled government media suppress any news Castro and his communist henchmen do not want them to know. WRHC is performing a great service for all its listeners. Keep up the good work, and God bless you.

Signed Ronald Reagan”

At the time I first noticed it on the WRHC wall, and attracted Guillermo Novo’s attention by reading it, this letter interested me because I had the week before been looking back through the administration’s arguments for Radio Marti [a government-sponsored, Spanish-language propaganda station aimed at Cuba], none of which, built as they were on the figure of beaming light into utter darkness, had alluded to these weekly talks which the people of Cuba appeared to be getting on WRHC-Cadena Azul, Miami. Later the letter interested me because I had begun reading back through the weekly radio talk themselves, and had come across one from 1978 in which Ronald Reagan, not yet president, had expressed his doubt that either the Pinochet government or the indicted “Cuban anti-Castro exiles”, one of whom had been Guillermo Novo, had anything to do with the Letelier assassination.

Ronald Reagan had wondered instead (“I don’t know the answer, but it is a question worth asking.. “) if Orlando Letelier’s “connections with Marxists and far-left causes” might not have set him up for assassination, caused him to be, as the script for this talk put it, “murdered by his own masters.” Here was the scenario: “Alive,” Ronald Reagan had reasoned in 1978, “Orlando Letelier could be compromised; dead he could become a martyr. And the left didn’t lose a minute in making him one.” Actually this version of the Letelier assassination had first been advanced by Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who had advised his colleagues on the Senate floor that it was not “plausible” to suspect the Pinochet government in the Letelier case, because terrorism was “most often an organized tool of the left,” but the Reagan reworking was interesting on its own, a way of speaking, later to become familiar, in which events could be revised as they happened into illustrations of ideology.

“There was no blacklist of Hollywood,” Ronald Reagan told Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times during the 1980 campaign. ” The blacklist in Hollywood, if there was one, was provided by the communists.” “I’m going to voice a suspicion now that I’ve never said aloud before,” Ronald Reagan told thirty-sex high school students in Washington in 1983 about death squads in El Salvador. ” I wonder if all of this is right wing, or if those guerilla forces have not realized that by infiltrating into the city of San Salvador and places like that, they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring down the government, and the right wing will be blamed for it.” “New intelligence shows,” Ronald Reagan told his Saturday radio listeners in March of 1986, by way of explaining why he was asking Congress to provide “the Nicaraguan freedom fighters” with what he called “the means to fight back,” that Tomas Borge, the communist interior minister, is engaging in a brutal campaign to bring the freedom fighters into discredit. You see, Borge’s communist operatives dress in freedom fighter uniforms, go into the countryside and murder and mutilate ordinary Nicaraguans.”

Such stories were what David Gergen, when he was the White House communications director, had once called “a folk art,” the President’s way of “trying to tell us how society works.” Other members of the White House staff had characterized these stories as the president’s “notions,” casting them in the genial framework of random avuncular musings, but they were something more than that. In the first place they were never random, but systematic, and rather energetically so. The stories were told to a single point. The language in which the stories were told was not that of political argument but of advertising (“New intelligence shows… ” and ” Now it has been learned..” and, a construction that got my attention in a 1984 address to the National Religious Broadcasters, ” Medical Science doctors confirm.. “, of the sales pitch.

This was not just a vulgarity of diction. When someone speaks of Orlando Letelier as “murdered by his own masters,” or of the WRHC signal reaching a people denied information by “Castro and his communist henchmen,” or of the “freedom fighter uniforms” in which the “communist operatives” of the “communist interior minister” disguise themselves, that person is not arguing a case, but counting instead on the willingness of the listener to enter what Hannah Arendt called, in a discussion of propaganda, “the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world.” On the morning I met Guillermo Novo in the reception room at WRHC-Cadena Azul I copied the framed commendation from the White House into my notebook, and later typed it out and pinned it to my own office wall, an aide-memoire to the distance between what is said in the high ether of Washington, which is about the making of those gestures and the sending of those messages and the drafting of those positions which will serve to maintain that imaginary world, about two-track strategies and alternative avenues and Special Groups (Augmented), about “not breaking faith” and “making it clear,” and what is heard on the ground in Miami, which is about consequences

The parallels are so strong, the frustration so great, it’s more enervating than anything. The “notions”, the vulgar diction, the subjugation of facts to barren ideological landscapes. The fleeting glimpses of the characters like Meese and Helms who helped build the foundations for this whole regime. The slow-moving historical forces that would reverse and reverse again, doubling back like a river whose new course eventually cuts back through the old. The emptiness of the rhetoric and its consequences in the real world.

If nothing else, this is a lesson that yearnings for the ‘good old days’ or ‘how it used to be’ are fatuous, and the roots of today’s quandaries are worth searching for in those same times. You cannot go back, but nor should you. Only forward.

Yesterday I was an election worker in a blueish precinct in a purple county in Pennsylvania, the king of all swing states. The previous evening, I had spent an hour or so perusing data from earlier presidential cycles and live mail-in ballot data, trying to determine how many in-person votes the Harris campaign would need in my precinct such that I could confidently extrapolate they would carry the day in PA. Without going into my assumptions and the math, I was fairly confident that number was about 70% of in person votes. More than 1% above that threshold (or at it, with increased turnout) Kamala was a sure thing, below it she was toast. So when, after 17 hours of work, I watched the tabulation machine print out its results tape with its breakdown of votes by race, my first words were “oh no”. Kamala got 61% of the vote.

It wasn’t even close.

I was working with more information than most – as an election worker I knew the precise number of mail-in ballots our precinct received, though not the breakdown of those votes – and I could see the wariness in some colleagues I chatted about this with. I knew how they felt. A symptom, perhaps, of the horserace treatment politics now gets. Odds, percentages, shifts in participation, assumptions that can swing numbers, it feels like handicapping something abstract and therefore reducible to math. When of course, it isn’t.

But it wasn’t even close.

I suspected Trump would win from the moment I saw those results. I was asleep only a few hours later, and I could see he was well ahead everywhere; it would take an almost miraculous turnaround to deliver the race to Harris. The miracle did not happen. It doesn’t make me regret serving as an election worker in any way, but it does make me deeply confused. It is not yet clear if Trump will win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, the pattern that has characterized Republican presidents for the last two decades. If he wins the popular vote, I will have to double down on my flabbergastation (is there a noun for flabbergast?) but my fundamental problem remains – what is going on?

My thoughts were racing this morning as I tried to process it. I thought back to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. (RIP Alex Salmond.) Amid all the heightened rhetoric – clear even from overseas and presaging the joys of Brexit electioneering – I remember an article, I think in The Economist, that reviewed the polling data and determined the average Scottish voter needed about 1,000 GBP to be swayed either way. Approximately the value of the newest iPhone, at the time. A question as fundamental as independence, reducible to a value. Economics, indeed! It is all value, of course, whether tangible or intangible. If someone had asked American voters the same question over the past few months, I wonder what the required value would have been to push them either way. Is it money in the bank, a new phone in the hand? Or was it ideological? The former for voters that could be swayed, the latter for hardcore believers on both sides?

Now will come the tide of statistics to slice and dice what happened and start offering us stories. I don’t know what’s left, to be honest. In the 21st century we’ve seen urban/rural, educated/uneducated, white/non-white, male/female, religious/irreligious, young/old, rich/poor, and more. One of my favorites, of course, remains Gore Vidal’s point in the 1980s (?) about the two, roughly equally-sized parties in the United States being those who vote and those who do not. Educated/uneducated is striking a cord as well.

Faced with an unpleasant loss, the mind also turns to distractions, anything to avoid pouring over the results again and again, the almost hardwired refresh instinct driving the nails deeper in our skulls with every pageview. As I joked to C this morning, if I was 20 or 22, I might consider laying in 4 years worth of cannabis gummies and waking up in 2028 to see what’s next. Smaller escapisms loom more brightly. Things away from the news. Life will, itself, keep me busy. But turning away from the problem is immoral. More engagement with civic life will be necessary. I will start to forge a path forward, and I am at least lucky enough to live in a state with a Democratic governor (who today is doubtless thinking he is his party’s 2028 nominee) in a heavily Democratic township. I am not a young woman, minority, broke, or otherwise at risk to have my life imminently destroyed by capricious policy decisions, even if the climate change implications are terrifying.

Trying to deal with the other side will be tough. It’s a big party. There are lots of decent people who are wildly misinformed. Fox News did its generational damage in the same way as leaded gasoline. The demographics of yesterday’s results will be intriguing to me given the stereotype that younger voters are a budding blue wave that will eventually overcrest the Republicans. Every few years, the “Texas is a blue state” fantasy comes back into the press. Ted Cruz, about as loathsome an option as a Texan could have, won by more than 10% yesterday. The metaphor needs to be changed to a tsunami, perhaps. The blue tide has to pull out further and further before it rushes in and overtakes everything, but will those swimming in the sea have their morale break as they are swept out and lose sight of land…

Moving to the anger phase of mourning the election, it would be nice if Democrats could govern themselves, let alone the country. Obama is an nearly impossible act to follow, but Joe Biden was never a great candidate. Kamala brought the energy the party needed but her messaging wasn’t there. Why didn’t the party do more in the Obama years, when they managed to accomplish the American Care Act but little else? The obstructionism and idiocy of the Republicans is beyond the pale, of course, but the inability of the Democrats to do anything makes one despair as to what a victory would even deliver.

Falling asleep last night, a passage leapt out at me from Chronicles of the Black Company.

The Rebel tends to a streak of superstition. He loves prophets and prophecies and grand, dramatic foretellings of victories to come. It was pursuit of a prophecy which led him into the trap at Charm, nearly causing his extinction. He regained his balance afterward by convincing himself that he was the victim of false prophets and prophecies, laid upon him by villains trickier than he. In that conviction he could go on, and believe more impossible things.”

You can weaken the Rebel for a time, but it’s hard to defeat that mentality. Is it religion? Certainly. Populism? At times. Feels like spitting into the wind trying to overcome it, and going to a township budget meeting to ask about the projected rate of return on a police pension seems like a small and silly thing, but you have to start somewhere.

Onwards!

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)