Harlan Ellison, Web of the City, 1958

Rumble was Ellison’s first novel which, after he was drafted and underwent Ranger training, he says was mostly written while sitting on the john with his typewriter on his knees. He drew on his experiences (call that ‘research’) with teenage gang culture in New York, and it’s quite apparent from just the well-written first chapter that Ellison had a way with both atmosphere and plotting: you immediately get on-side with Rusty Santoro, a teenage Puerto Rican street thug who wants to make good on the streets of Brooklyn, yet constantly gets dragged back into the gang and the gutter to settle one more score, and big scores they are too. How has the novel fared after more than fifty years? Now back under it’s original intended title Web of the City, it’s still very readable and maintains a believable level of authenticity, though with the higher tolerance for violence we have today it may now work better as a rather informative and cautionary Y/A novel than an adult read. The recent 2013 Hard Case Crime edition also comes with three of Ellison’s short stories from the same period that paint the same kind of picture; I have no great admiration for Ellison’s writing throughout his career (and I’ve read a great deal of it), but Web of the City doesn’t hurt his reputation as the enfant terrible of his era and still commands the customary grudging respect. As is so often the case.  PY

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Roger Zelazny, The Dead Man’s Brother, 2009

Written circa 1970 and only discovered long after Zelazny’s passing, this mainstream novel remained unpublished until Hard Case Crime were offered the manuscript, at which point it was snapped up and released as the mass-market paperback it could have been at the time it was written. Ovid Wiley is an art dealer with a shady past, and when a dead body turns up at his office he’s offered a kind of amnesty in return for a small favour to the CIA. Except that that favour leads him where he doesn’t expect, first via the Vatican to gather information on a heist, then on further to a dangerous adventure in Brazil’s Amazon jungle. If I was offered a blind ‘taste test’ of which genre author had written this I’d have probably gone for Zelazny, such is his way with language in general and dialogue in particular. That the subject matter is so unlike what we normally associate with Zelazny is one of the fascinating aspects of the novel, others being how Zelazny allows Wiley to be a far more reliable narrator than he perhaps deserves to be, and the structure to the novel that allows the reader to rethink what has gone before in pursuit of some questions that remain unanswered by the end, more or less putting the reader in the same position as Wiley himself.  PY

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Anne Zouroudi, The Messenger of Athens, 2007

Set on the fictional Greek island of Thiminos, after just thirty pages this present-day murder mystery involving an illicit love affair becomes quietly compelling, probably because Zouroudi’s attention to the detail of the landscape is what gives this book its delicate atmosphere. Then there are the people, with their everyday Greek tragedies in which superstition and gender roles are entrenched and emotionally suffocating. Zouroudi’s characterisation is also good, particularly in the clear depiction of the mannerisms of the investigator Hermes Diaktoros and how they contrast with his mysterious and unexplained background (he is in fact the book’s biggest mystery), always hinting at a ‘higher power’, which may account for the way he gets people to just open up to him with the truth. At times it feels like this debut novel may be heading into Paulo Coelho territory, but it’s reassuringly far more down to Earth than that. Recommended.  PY

MORE ON ANNE ZOUROUDI : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Siriworn Kaewkan, The Murder Case of Tok Imam Storpa Karde, 2006

There are very few novels that explore the separatist terrorism affecting the three small Thai provinces that border Malaysia, and this one, shortlisted for the 2006 SEA Write Award, quickly became required reading that year with an English translation following four years later. So who killed the much-loved imam in the small village of Tanyong Baru, right outside his own mosque? Terrorists or State officials? Soldiers or police? Is there a suspicious connection with a neighbouring Buddhist village? And why are the villagers closing their doors to an actual investigation? The reader’s guess is as good as anyone elses, which indicates the clever structure of this tale of deflections and half-truths that inevitably views the subject from an outsider’s perpective yet at the same time lets the story’s participants speak (seemingly, often less than thruthfully) for themselves. Kaewkan simply provides the necessary pieces to the jigsaw then lets the readers assemble it in a way that indicates there’s an inevitable collective madness going on here. There are a number of possible courses of events discernable if this short novel is read closely, which is easily done in one sitting – just don’t expect a straightforward whodunnit.

Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print.  PY

MORE ON HARRY HARRISON : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Jacques Chessex, The Vampire of Ropraz, 2007

Chessex was the only non-French author to have received the Prix Goncourt by 1973 (he won another, for poetry, in 2004), and despite a large body of work there’s still little by him that’s available in English. This is a fictionalised account of a ghoulish but unsolved true mystery regarding necrophilia and the desecration of young women’s graves in Switzerland’s Jura mountains at the turn of the twentieth century. It starts out lucidly and almost frighteningly atmospheric, with the mountainous landscape harbouring isolated villages rife with superstition and Calvinist doctrine, and when a possible suspect is found the rule of law comes a poor second to the prejudices of the local people and the courts. Chessex’s writing grabs the reader from page one: it’s unflinchingly spare and direct and gets straight to the point, but although much of this story is based on real events he perhaps added a little too much gratuitous detail, even though this just adds to the sense of how much remains unknown. The twist at the end seems almost too extraordinary to be true and would be incredible if it were, but even so it’s still a very good allegory for buried secrets. A brief but memorable novella.  PY

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Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005

Out-of-his-depth Llewelyn Moss stumbles across a drugs deal gone horribly wrong, makes off with a case containing $2.4 million and engages the relentless pursuit of the toweringly bad Anton Chigurh. This is not a book that’s especially complex with its plot, and McCarthy makes it a relentless ride because it feels so completely testosterone-driven. It might be trite to say that his idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation is what carried this story for me: commas only when absolutely necessary, no quote marks, in fact nothing that detracts from the punch of his storytelling. McCarthy has his own way with written English; and why not, for him it’s a toolkit, he uses it as he wants but with precision.

The story itself is direct enough not to be bogged down with (or even need) much in the way of descriptive passages, although the rambling observations of Sheriff Bell on the decline of common decency gradually gain the upper hand in the reader’s mind over the the amoral violence of Chigurh, and you end up sympathising, if not completely then at least with a degree of respect for his outdated point of view. Bell may also be something of a Jubal Harshaw: McCarthy’s point seems to be that violence such as this needs to be considered minus its modern, fake, grafted-on glamour (à la Natural Born Killers) and seen once more in a properly moral context. In No Country For Old Men he embeds the men – and only the men – all at different levels in a culture of violence from the top to the bottom – the women, all but invisible in background supporting roles, can never upset the balance of machismo by getting in the way of the guys figuring it out for themselves, the hard way. A mostly excellent and memorable read despite its overtly masculine trajectory.  PY

MORE ON CORMAC McCARTHY :  THE CORMAC McCARTHY SOCIETY  |  WIKIPEDIA

China Miéville, The City & The City, 2009

One of Miéville’s starting points for The City & The City was a line from Bruno Schulz’s short story ‘The Cinnamon Shops’ (from his collection The Street of Crocodiles), about an imagined city, hidden and unseen, that occupies the same space as Poland’s Drogobych. Miéville seems to have simply taken this idea and expanded on it with considerable detail and a complete change of genre, instead producing a curious hybrid of Chandleresque crime with a slight twist in the nature of reality. In the contemporary Eastern European double city of Beszel/Ul Qoma a murder is committed in one city but can only be solved in the other. This presents some very interesting complications, not all of which Miéville surmounts completely, mostly because people of one city are forbidden from seeing the other city at all, even its inhabitants, and even while in the same street. How citizens avoid breaching this solid rule is done by ‘unseeing’ them, a kind of tuning out of the senses, and it sometimes felt as if, for this notion to work, Miéville had to constantly reinforce and shore up this taught and learned ability by showing increasingly difficult situations where people are challenged to ‘unsee’ what is clearly right in front of them. To walk around with so many blind spots peppering your vision and hearing must surely be debilitating beyond any ability to function properly, but everyone is adept at it and they seem to get by just fine without invoking the wrath of the authority that preserves this intimidating status quo, known as Breach. And then there is the notion of a mysterious and sinister third city, hidden again somewhere between the two, which Miéville uses to great imaginative effect in pulling the story forward.

It’s admirable that Miéville hasn’t copped out with any magical or paraphysical explanations for the two cities occupying the same space, and it must have been far more challenging to have written it this way without resorting to his considerable facility for fantasy. A fair amount of characterisation also seems to have been sacrificed in order to keep the pace up, but instead Beszel/Ul Qoma becomes a good addition to that list of imagined cities where Weird Shit happens – it’s more Hav than Bellona, but still different from either. Having said all that I still found this an engrossing read and have no objection at all to the way Miéville makes you work a double shift, both at getting your head around the nature of the cities themselves as well as keeping up with the slightly less trivial pursuit of figuring out the whodunnit. One of my favourite and certainly less easily categorised books of 2009.  PY


MORE ON CHINA MIÉVILLE :  PANMACMILLAN WRITER'S PROFILE  |  REJECTAMENTALIST MANIFESTO  |  WIKIPEDIA

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, 1938

Sometimes your most honest appraisal of a story can be found in the first words you say to yourself when you finish it: in this case mine were “That was, again, a fantastic book.” Greene doesn’t put a foot wrong in his story of the downfall of Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the streets of 1930s Brighton, after he commits one murder too many. Greene’s getting under the skin of Pinkie is a truly class act in characterisation, equally so his nemesis, the formidably convincing Ida Arnold, who gets to the root of things with the small help of a ouija board and plenty of female intuition. There’s something quintessentially British about it all, with everyone trapped in their own circumstantial worlds and their lives intersecting in ways that can’t help but point back to their own individual loneliness. How Greene does this I’m not so sure, and in fact to analyse that some more would take away much of the pleasure: Greene can dazzle you with his writing here, if you let him. Brighton Rock is also a very catholic novel about life, with Pinkie being a defiant exception to whatever rules life may have, his come-uppance conveyed in his refusal to countenance that ‘there’s always room between the stirrup and the ground’, even when time is at its most short. A benchmark of a novel in British literature, and one that can still make a particularly hard-hitting impression.  PY

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Derek Raymond, A State of Denmark, 1964

A pull-quote on the back cover of the most recent edition describes this as “alternative science fiction on the scale of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”, which is, frankly, rubbish: this doesn’t have the same imaginative scope, even remotely, though it is certainly a descendant of that more famous dystopia. A British socialist Prime Minister of the 1960s called Jobling reveals his true colours and quickly turns England into a relentless dictatorship, while Wales and Scotland secede from the United Kingdom and the Left just rolls over and dies. Set against Jobling is Richard Watt, a political journalist living under self-imposed exiled in Italy; this exotic and rather languorous setting for the first half of the book sets a pace that creaks along, but it’s there mostly to draw parallels with Mussolini. The second half is more descriptive of England under dictatorship and starts off far more boisterous, though endures to a downbeat finale of unceasing hopelessness. Serpent’s Tail reissued this pulp novel posthumously in 2007; it’s different from the usual English noir Robin Cook (as Derek Raymond) offered up but in places it’s plausible – a small warning that, actually, it could happen here if we let our guard down. Cautiously recommended, because in truth I suspect any aspiring British dictator would encounter far more resistance than is portrayed here.  PY

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Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog, 1931

Of the seventy-five 'Maigret' novels that Georges Simenon wrote between 1931 and 1972 this is the fourth. Commissaire Maigret is called away from Paris to solve the crime of an almost-fatal shooting in the French harbour of Concarneau, which leaves the town in a state of panic as further attempts at murder ensue. And there is also the mystery to solve of the strange yellow dog that has been seen everywhere – does it provide a link to the most likely suspect? The unfolding of the plot is classically straightforward for a mystery novel, never taking any great leaps of deduction on the part of Maigret, who here remains a very taciturn and insular character. This is what differentiates The Yellow Dog from all other Maigret stories in that the reader is given no clues as to what is going on in Maigret’s mind, something that defines just about every other Maigret story. The plot twists are sometimes predictable, but best of all is that both the story and Maigret himself are such believable creations. Very enjoyable.  PY

MORE ON GEORGES SIMENON : MAIGRET  |  WIKIPEDIA

John Burdett, Bangkok Eight, 2003

Serious novels about modern Bangkok are always worth discovering, and this becomes a must-read given the glowing quotes (Deaver, Ellroy, Hiaasen...) that line all four sides of its front and back covers. John Burdett has gone so far under the skin of the city – and into the Thai mindset – that the rather straightforward whodunnit of a US Marine killed in a car full of snakes ends up playing a definite second string to the Buddhist prerogatives that give this book a unique direction. It is particularly well researched from the bizarre opening murder scene to the strange karmic resolution, and Burdett’s writing throughout is genuinely grown-up, multi-faceted and often darkly comic with an almost science fictional sensibility. There’s also a distinct avoidance of the more predictable clichés when dealing with Bangkok’s sex industry which forms a large part of this story’s background, giving it a level of authenticity than one might not reasonably expect from a farang author. Excellent.  PY

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Michael Chabon, The Final Solution, 2005

In 1944 a silent German boy arrives in Sussex as a refugee, with a talkative African Grey parrot on his shoulder. The parrot goes missing, a murder ensues and a veteran detective comes out of retirement. The influence of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories is clearly there above and beyond the usual trappings of mystery fiction, and the story also functions as a self-contained microcosm the same way that Agatha Christie’s ‘Miss Marple’ stories do, in that by knowing the ways of her village she knows the ways of the world; similarly, over the years the detective has developed an almost extrasensory intuition about people’s unseen behavioural patterns, and also seems to know what is in the air by the temperament of the bees he keeps. Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, writes with an extraordinary confidence in his own words that could almost convince you he’d spent time back in that era, and he quickly gets to the weary soul of the elderly detective, necessary for the reader to see how the detective himself gets to the heart of the matter. Impressive.  PY

Marcello Fois, The Advocate, 1998

A young man is convicted in absentia of sheep rustling in a rural Sardinian setting at the turn of the 20th Century, but the legal defender Bustianu suspects this is a smoke screen for a far greater crime if certain people can get away with it. Marcello Fois is onto a winner with the character of Bustianu, a young, introverted and solitary person more at home with the rustic Sardinian landscape than the selfish motives those around him. A straightforward enough mystery, well told at the right length.   PY