Better Red Than Dead
No books of history or political theory have helped me understand the Communist world better than the mysteries written about it. Fiction, especially mysteries, makes propaganda revelatory and often ironic; characters from countries surrounded by walls of distrust open their hearts in the stories and prove both their common humanity and their unique vision.
DEATH OF A RED HEROINE, by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho)
Qiu Xiaolong knows that words can save your soul, and in his pungent, poignant first mystery, “Death of a Red Heroine,” he proves it on every page. Qiu, who was a published poet and translator in Shanghai, came to the U.S. on a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1988— the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre—and decided to stay. That he left a large part of his heart behind is evident in the character of Inspector Chen Cao, a young poet and translator of everyone from Ruth Rendell to T.S. Eliot who also happens to be a Shanghai homicide detective.
Chen became a cop in a sincere effort to be a useful citizen, and he is seen as a rising star (he even gets his own apartment—a tremendous coup at his age and station). He puts up with the Communist Party’s Byzantine code of behavior, although it still seems in 1990, a year after Tiananmen, to be designed to thwart human aspiration at every turn. As head of the special-case squad,
Chen has not only a supervisor—a reasonably supportive party official—but also a watcher: a semiretired military man, Commissar Zhang, who on the surface represents the spirit of pre-Tiananmen rigidity and political repression. But then, halfway through the book, in a scene that would bring tears to the eyes of a statue, Zhang has a telephone conversation with his daughter, and we see with blazing clarity the damage done to everyone during the so-called Cultural Revolution.
The true beauty of “Death of a Red Heroine” is the muscular ease with which Qiu blends history, plenty of poetry and a compelling mystery: the murder of Guan Hongying, a former national role-model worker, a beautiful young woman who slipped from patriotic fame into loneliness and depravity. Hampered by his superiors, Chen and his older, rougher, but no less sympathetic colleague, Detective Yu, try to penetrate a world of privilege, where the children of once-powerful, then-reviled public figures walk both sides of a dangerous line between loyalty and freedom. On the way we get to see, smell, taste and hear an amazingly evocative portrait of a country in love with words. Staying in a special guesthouse for writers in a provincial town, Chen, as a poet, is treated like royalty by a businessman who invites him to dinner, saying: “The rain has ceased. So let us go then, you and I”—invoking the spirit of Eliot and his Prufrock to light up a wasteland of shattered dreams.
THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
“Emil had joined Homicide in order to deal with the clearest and least ambiguous issue of social conscience: murder,” writes Olen Steinhauer of the hero of his first mystery, 22-year-old Emil Brod. It’s 1948, three years after the Russians liberated Brod’s fictional East European country which sounds very much like Romania—where Steinhauer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Think of the savage brilliance of J. Robert Janes’s mysteries about World War II France; of the suspenseful erudition of Alan Furst’s thrillers, especially the earlier ones, like “The Polish Officer;” of Philip Kerr’s eye-opening “Berlin Noir” trilogy and Uwe Timm’s heart-breaking “The Invention of the Curried Sausage.” Steinhauer’s debut—the start of a promised series—is right up there on those stellar heights, casting new light on relatively recent history we thought we already knew everything about.
Emil, an orphan who spent most of the war years skinning seals in Finland, has returned to his native city to live with his grandparents—hard-working, dedicated Communists whose mud-stained Party cards have earned them an apartment. But the men who now rule the country—the so-called “thick Muscovites” who spent the war in Moscow and returned “so plump their own families had trouble recognizing them”—have already begun the process of selling out their people to Russia’s imperialistic vision.
On his first day at work as a homicide detective, Emil is ignored, insulted and even assaulted by his colleagues, who think he’s a spy for the new political regime. The only case he gets—by default, because nobody else will touch it—is the murder of a once-celebrated songwriter, whose propaganda stirred the masses and earned him rare privilege before he sank into corruption. Gradually, young Brod’s unusual combination of dogged intelligence and loyalty to the best concepts of his country win over the songwriter’s jaded widow and Emil’s fellow detectives—especially a fascinatingly complex Armenian named Terzian, who becomes an important ally as Brod’s search takes him higher and higher up the dangerous ladder of local politics.
Steinhauer spins out his story in clean and simple prose that gleams with authenticity and captures a uniquely East European spirit. In Berlin to check out a lead, Brod is harangued by an American officer for his refusal to hate the Russians. “That’s what drives me crazy about you people!” shouts the officer. “You’ve got the lowest standards in the world.”
To which Emil replies, “We’re never disappointed.”
DEATH OF A NATIONALIST, by Rebecca C. Pawel (Soho)
Another absolutely riveting first mystery—this time from a 25-year-old who teaches Spanish in a Brooklyn, N.Y. high school—takes us a step further back in history, to Madrid in 1939, when the Fascist-backed Nationalists have already smashed the Republican forces.
Pawel’s first act of surprising courage is to make her main character not one of the romantic Republicans of folk song and Hemingway story but an officer of their much-hated enemy, the dreaded Guardia Civil. Sgt. Carlos Tejada drifted into the civil guard as a compromise with his father, a wealthy Granada farmer, about a career choice between the law and the military. “This is what I wanted,” he thinks at one point, “to get away from being Senorito Carlos. To just be a member of the Guardia Civil, without all that damn nonsense.” And while he sympathizes with his fellow Nationalists in their hatred for the Reds who would destroy their way of life, Tejeda is smart enough to realize that the Republicans have some right on their side. (He also finds himself attracted to a young teacher of Republican sensibilities, which helps to weaken his resolve.)
The dead Nationalist of Pawel’s title is a fellow Guardia officer, a boyhood friend of Tejeda’s who was probably killed because of his black market activities rather than his politics. The Guardia, of course, would rather pin the murder on a missing Republican hero, Gonzalo. So Tejada tracks Gonzalo across a starving city littered with the bones and wreckage of recent battles to a conclusion that might remind you of John Ford’s classic film “The Informer” in its depiction of how dangerous politics can be to human life.
THE SKULL MANTRA, by Eliot Pattison (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
There is no faster way to get under the skin of a country in turmoil than with the needle of a murder investigation. Nothing I’ve read or seen about how China has systematically crushed the soul of Tibet has been as effective as “The Skull Mantra,” a debut thriller by a veteran journalist that uses that hoary plot device of a discredited detective being given a chance to redeem himself by clearing a politically dangerous case.
Like Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, Shan Tao Yun was once a high-ranking communist cop: the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing, specializing in fraud cases. Now, because he offended someone too high up in the food chain, he is a laborer in a Tibetan gulag called the People’s 404th Construction Brigade in the Himalayas, breaking rocks along with some hard-core Buddhist monks and other troublemakers. Shan manages to survive under these harsh conditions because of the spiritual guidance of his fellow prisoners, whose unshakeable belief rings with the simple poetry of pure courage.
Then the headless body of a local Chinese official turns up near a road-construction site, wearing American clothes and carrying American cash. The missing head soon appears in a cave with great religious significance: It’s the resting place for the skulls of dead monks. The shrewd army colonel in charge of the district asks Shan to investigate. Offers of better food and conditions are mixed with threats against his monk friends.
Col. Tan wants a quick and dirty job that implicates a monk found near the cave, but Shan is certain the man isn’t guilty. More likely killers include other high-ranking Chinese officials and two American mining entrepreneurs who had personal and financial dealings with the dead man.
Eliot Pattison makes Shan a fascinating mixture of understandable depression and growing spiritualism, a man who has managed to defuse his anger but not turn off his belief in doing good. The other main characters are equally complex: The monks are sharply separate but spiritually unified personalities; Col. Tan seems at first to be just a time-serving bureaucrat, but his motives are not at all straightforward; and the American woman who wants to protect the skull cave and make money from local oil is another interesting blend.
Then there’s Shan’s temporary aide, an ambitious and conflicted young Tibetan called Yeshe who can “sound like a monk one moment and a party functionary the next.” The physical background, ranging from the barren hills of the gulag to the achingly beautiful mountains just out of reach, also helps to mark this as a thriller of laudable aspirations and achievements.
WOLVES EAT DOGS, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
From his first appearance, in 1981’s “Gorky Park,” through his last, “Havana Bay” in 1999, Arkady Renko has been the perfect dark mirror of his time and place in history—the replacement of Cold War Russia by what passes now for a more democratic and capitalist society.
Martin Cruz Smith’s police detective has certainly paid the price for his obstinate loyalties to truth and justice during those years, suffering physical and psychological trauma in a withering variety of settings. He is as out of place in the so-called New Russia as “an ape encountering fire” as he thinks when he sees a sleek new computer. “Stop using the phrase ‘New Russian’ when you refer to a crime,” his superior tells him wearily. “We’re all New Russians, aren’t we?”
“I’m trying,” Renko replies, and in his own way he is. When a powerful billionaire named Pasha Ivanov (a man photographed often with world leaders, including Putin “who, as usual seemed to suck on a sour tooth”), commits suicide, Renko just wants to do a thorough job of investigating. When he takes the sadly silent and badly damaged 11-year-old boy he’s volunteered to provide some entertainment for to a big charity event thrown in the dead man’s honor, he is finally taken off the case.
But the dogged Renko follows a clue to Chernobyl—the Ukrainian city where a nuclear disaster in 1986 began Old Russia’s downfall and frightened the world into some semblance of sanity. Chernobyl is now a radioactive wasteland, and Ivanov’s successor has been found with his throat slit and his face eaten by wolves in a cemetery inside Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion—an area inhabited by a strange band of scientists, soldiers and some disfunctional citizens who risk their health to live in its abandoned houses and apartments. A faded poster from 1986 says “Confident of the Future” and a reading on Renko’s radioactivity detector taken at a rink of bumper cars at a small amusement park “shot the needle off the dial.”
As he did in his second Renko outing, “Polar Star,” in which the detective is punished with one of the world’s nastiest and most grueling jobs aboard a fish-processing ship, Smith manages to make the horrors of Chernobyl almost a redeeming experience—for Arkady and for us. As Renko searches for the truth about the two murders he’s investigating, he seems to single-handedly be trying to tell us that Russia and its people, New or Old, are worth the effort.
THE CONFESSION, by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
There are many ways of continuing a mystery series—including the most familiar device of focussing on one central character. Olen Steinhauer has decided to take another route. His gripping, subversive first novel, “The Bridge of Sighs,” was set in 1949, in an unnamed East European country. In this second book of what has been billed as a trilogy, it is 1956, and Emil Brod, the hopeful young homicide detective who played the central role in “The Bridge of Sighs,” has turned into a settled, pragmatic secondary character, content to search for the perfect martini.
As the socialist promises of the immediate postwar years fade, Steinhauer now focuses on another homicide detective, the hulking Ferenc Kolyeszar, who wears on each finger a ring with a bloody personal history. Ferenc is a talented novelist himself, although his one published book is long out of print. The confession of the title is to be his next book—a work as depressing about the fate of artists in the Soviet-dominated satellite countries as “The Gulag
Archipelago” was about Russia.
Agonized by his wife’s infidelities and driven perversely into sins of his own, Kolyeszar also comes up against a frighteningly amiable KGB agent named Kaminsky who has been assigned to his office. As they work on several past and present murders, Ferenc digs a hole for himself that seems inescapable. More ambitious in scope and action than “The Bridge of Sighs,” with deaths and betrayals exploding out of control toward the end, “The Confession” makes us wonder just what Steinhauer will do for his final encore.
Brits Behaving Badly
The English might not have invented the mystery, but since the golden days of Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey they certainly know how to put a twist and a polish on it. Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill, Val McDermid and John Harvey are just a few of the fine writers who mystify us from London to Dublin. And then there’s a little-known but highly imaginative series by Paul Johnston, set in an alternative Edinburgh future, that is well worth digging out of publishing obscurity. Many of the British mysteries reviewed here were written before the current publishing superhighway between that country and America, but the thrill of their discovery still lingers.
CLUB, by Bill James (Countryman Press)
Any month that includes a new Colin Harpur book is off to a fine start. The latest arrival in this excellent British series by Bill James is just about perfect—full of all the pith and vinegar we’ve come to expect from Detective Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles.
Harpur is a remarkable creation: a dedicated copper by day and a determined adulterer in his off-hours. His sexual habits have already caused him serious injury, thanks to a romance with the wife of a police sharpshooter. Now he’s taking even greater risks by offering comfort to Iles’ errant wife.
But if Harpur is the meat of this series, Desmond Iles is the spice. A man of taste and intelligence, angry and cynical after being passed over for promotion and embittered by his wife’s unfaithfulness, Iles is fiercely protective of his friend Harpur and scathingly funny about his superiors.
In “Club,” James has concentrated more on Iles than ever before, making him a leading suspect in the murder of a low-level criminal who was also his wife’s lover. Other suspects are the heavies who persuade Ralph Ember—once known as “Panicking Ralph” for his nervous habits, now the owner of a drinking club called The Monty—to return to a life of crime.
As before, James gives equal weight to his cops and his villains, treating both sides with a delicate blend of honesty and satire. Who else could come up this domestic scene, where Iles is ironing his shirts and watching a ballet video while his wife sits grieving for her dead lover and wondering if her husband killed him:
“He set the iron on its end again and for a couple of minutes tried to imitate in the space between the board and the bookcase a sequence of steps by the lead male dancer on the video, arms and hands extremely expressive, his body taut.…‘I’m sure I could have made a bright go of ballet or possibly professional darts if I hadn’t drifted into the police.…’ ”
THE REMORSEFUL DAY, by Colin Dexter (Crown)
This review is what they call a spoiler—because it gives away essential details of a book’s plot. But the fact that Colin Dexter’s book is subtitled “The Final Inspector Morse Novel,” plus extensive coverage of its contents when it first appeared in England, make me feel justified in believing that most readers are ready to accept the inevitable.
As Joseph Conrad might have put it: Inspector Morse, he dead. His body weakened by diabetes, beer and Glenfiddich, Endeavour Morse suffers a heart attack and dies. His last words to his nurse are, “ ‘Please thank Lewis for me.’ ” But, writes Dexter, “so softly spoken were the words that she wasn’t quite able to catch them.”
Morse, of course, isn’t dead at all: There are now 13 books in this wonderfully droll, always readable and occasionally brilliant series, as well as dozens of episodes of the equally enjoyable British TV version, which pop up regularly on PBS and A&E. In his new book, Dexter thanks the producer of the series, and he’s right to do so: No book and TV character in recent memory blend together in the mind as well—or influence each other as obviously—as Morse and actor John Thaw. (Kevin Whateley as Sgt. Lewis and James Grout as Chief Supt. Strange are also perfect matches, as are the Oxford of Dexter’s imagination and the actual city caught on video.)
Because this is an epitaph of sorts, Dexter seems to be more revealing about his creation than usual, as in this early musing by Sgt. Lewis: “With most prime suspects, if female, youngish, and even moderately attractive, Morse normally managed to fall in love, sometimes only for a brief term.” Here it’s the victim with whom he had been in love (or at least lust): a 48-year-old nurse with large sexual appetites who was found beaten to death a year ago in her home in a village near Oxford. Handcuffs and other bondage items were discovered on the scene, leading to theories of a burglar’s perhaps stumbling on a wild moment. Morse and Lewis were never officially on the case (being busy elsewhere), but Morse and his boss, Strange, did know the dead woman quite intimately. Now Strange, on the verge of retirement, wants Morse to solve the murder and leave him with a clean slate and a clear conscience.
Worried about his declining health (although not enough to give up alcohol as ordered) and his own feelings for the murdered woman, Morse is at first reluctant to get involved. His world shrunk to music and booze, he feels some regret at what he has missed, as reflected in a scene in a favorite pub:
“He ordered himself a third pint, conscious that the world seemed a considerably kindlier place than heretofore. He even found himself listening to the topics of conversation around him: darts, bar-billiards, Aunt Sally, push-penny…and perhaps (he thought) his own life might have been marginally enriched by such innocent divertissements.
“Perhaps not, though.”
At first Lewis pursues the case on his own, following a man newly released from prison because of a phone tip to Strange. But annoyingly, even a semi-engaged Morse still manages to be one step ahead of his earnest, hard-working assistant. When the ex-con disappears, Morse knows just where to look: a vast garbage dump that services the Oxford area. The relationship between Morse and Lewis is, as always, a delight to observe: the intellectual battering (even when Lewis buys a tape of “Parsifal,” he can’t win); the tightwad boozer Morse still sticking his underpaid underling with a much larger share of the bar tabs. Even the praise is grudging: “When and how the circling vultures closed in for their shares of the kill— your guess, Lewis, is (almost) as good as mine,” Morse writes in his final summation of the case. But there is also respect and a great deal of fondness on both sides, perhaps more than ever.
Even the burly Strange, who always seems to be firing or threatening Morse, comes in for a large portion of humanizing in this final outing. Waiting for Dr. Laura Hobson, the medical examiner, in a pub that features taped Irish music, Morse astonishes Lewis by asking the landlord to turn it up instead of off. But the recently widowed Strange understands:
“ ‘You know, Morse, I’m glad you said that. The missus…we had a couple of days in Cork and we did a bit of Irish dancing together.’ ”
Then Morse asks Strange if he remembers the lines from a Yeats poem, “When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,/Folk dance like a wave of the sea.”
“ ‘Yes! Yes, I do,’ said Strange gently.
“And for a while Sergeant Lewis and Dr. Hobson remained silent, as if they knew they should be treading softly; as if they might be treading on other people’s dreams.”
As befits a series set in Oxford, Dexter’s books are ripe with quotes not only from Yeats but from Shakespeare (a lovely and most apt joke about a ladder), A.E. Housman (the titular “remorseful day,” another perfect pun), and comedian Rita Rudner. The stew, as we’ve come to expect from Chez Dexter, is rich and meaty; the herrings (clues planted to lead us in false directions) are perhaps redder than ever but still not outrageous enough to spoil the surprise of the outcome. Morse is dead: Long live Morse.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE, by Pip Granger (Poisoned Pen)
Among my late British mother-in-law’s books was a wonderful three-volume collection of Oxford paperbacks called “A Victorian Family” by M.V. Hughes—“A London Child of the 1870s,” “A London Girl of the 1880s” and “A London Home in the 1890s.” They weren’t fiction but memoirs of a bygone era—sharply observed and sweetly remembered in all their details. I suspect that Pip Granger’s mysteries about a rowdy family of survivors who live in a street called Paradise Gardens in the Hackney district of East London will become the same sort of classic texts, to be invoked whenever the spirit of the city during and just after World War II is conjured up.
While John Lawton writes an excellent World War II series full of blood and thunder (“Black Out,” “Bluffing Mr. Churchill”) about a Russian aristocrat who becomes a British copper, Granger’s books feature people as ordinary as bread. Her first two—“Not All Tarts Are Apple” and “The Widow Ginger”—were widely praised and nominated for prizes. “Trouble In Paradise” ends with the birth of Rosie, the extraordinarily moving and articulate narrator of the first two books, but it stands on its own shapely, sturdy legs as a marvelously evocative read.
The book begins in 1945 on the day the war ends. “Paradise Gardens was a miracle, or so everybody said. Somehow, throughout the war, it had remained more or less intact, although large chunks of the surrounding area had been flattened by doodlebugs or burned to blackened stumps by incendiary bombs,” says Zelda Fluck, Rosie’s mother-to-be. The end of hostilities threatens to return Zelda’s feared and loathed husband, Charlie—who got her pregnant at 17 on a drunken night and who later killed her unborn baby by throwing her downstairs. The woman who saved her then—Zinnia Makepeace, a healer and nurturer who came down from Scotland many years before to look after a dying cousin and who Zelda tells us speaks with a “tiny trace of haggis-noshing accent she still had after all her years in the East End”—is Zelda’s good friend and mentor. But Zinnia will be badly treated and put into danger when Zelda’s nephew Tony, a 12-year-old boy with the voice and looks of an angel, gets involved with the son of a local female Fagin named Ma Hole who could have walked right out of Dickens.
At the end of “Trouble In Paradise,” Zelda has moved out of Hackney and into Soho, where the first two books in the series are set, and where in the 1950s Pip Granger’s family lived above The Two Is Café on Old Compton Street. Luckily for us, she has the art and imagination to bring her past back to vigorous life.
BLUFFING MR. CHURCHILL, by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press)
John Lawton returns to the World War II London Blitz setting of “Black Out,” his memorable first thriller about Anglo-Russian cop Freddie Troy, with equal skill and energy, producing an intriguing, stimulating, all-too-plausible story. Wolfgang Stahl—a top aide to Hitler’s SS chief Heydrich—turn out to be a spy for the Americans, forced to flee Germany for England in 1941 to avoid capture and carrying with him plans for the German invasion of Russia. One of Stahl’s handlers, a shy and clumsy American intelligence agent named Calvin Cormack, is flown to London to help find and debrief the frightened Stahl—who disappears down the ratholes of bombed-out London known best by a tough old policeman called Walter Stilton. Cormack is taken in by the Stilton family, enjoying the sexual favors of daughter Kitty, also a police officer. Kitty’s (mostly) ex-boyfriend Troy gets involved in the search for Stahl through his job on the Murder Squad. The blend of Lawton’s fictional creations with real characters like Winston Churchill and distant cousin Robert Churchill (a gunsmith who plays a vital role here), H.G. Wells and newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook produces a rich and juicy montage that throbs with life.
THE WATER CLOCK, by Jim Kelly (St. Martin’s)
Another gripping and most promising debut mystery from a British journalist—this time set in the strange, wet world of Ely and the Cambridgeshire Fens, where the ever-moving and changing tides shape the lives and deaths of the natives. Philip Dryden has taken a job as chief crime reporter on the local weekly, The Crow, after an unhappy stint in London, and he is coping with the tragedy of his wife still being in a coma two years after a not-completely-explained car accident. Ferried around the Fens by a wonderfully Falstaffian minicab driver named Humph, who studies Catalan on tape between and during his runs (“Get a lot of Catalan speakers on the school run?” Dryden inquires acidly), the reporter takes full advantage of his previous connections to earn extra money covering two grotesque murders for the national press. He also walks a very sharp ethical line by promising to help an inept copper keep his job in return for a look at the file about his wife’s accident.
Kelly’s rich evocation of the area—also used to good advantage in Graham Swift’s novel “Waterland” and the ensuing film—is equalled by a plot that is well worked out and a supporting cast of fascinatingly soggy Fen folk.
THE FIRE BABY, by Jim Kelly (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
I am even more full of admiration for Jim Kelly’s second mystery about British journalist Philip Dryden than I was for his impressive debut, “The Water Clock.”
Kelly could very easily have coasted on the qualities which made his first book so distinctive; the landscape (the mysterious oozing Fens surrounding the old East Anglia cathedral town of Ely, where he and Dryden both live), the fascinating secondary characters (an about-to-retire cop who trades crime tips for bird-watching news; a minicab driver almost as large as his vehicle, which has become Dryden’s sole means of transport); the absolute sadness of Dryden’s private life, as his much-beloved wife Laura remains in a coma after a car accident.
Instead, Kelly chooses to keep those ingredients and push the envelope they came in. Laura has amazingly begun to make progress, communicating (heartbreakingly slowly and painfully) by pressing Dryden’s hand through the alphabet, stopping at letters which seem to make words. What she is trying to tell him is about a confession she heard from someone who thought she was completely comatose, concerning a murder which Philip is covering for his local newspaper, the Crow.
Maggie Beck, the woman in the other bed in Laura’s room, is the lone survivor of a fiery crash of an American bomber which plowed into her farm after a dust cloud ripped apart its jet engines in 1977. The “fire baby” of the title is Maggie’s love child, also burned to death in the disaster. But now Maggie, dying of cancer, is stirring the ashes of that painful past and seems ready to disclose some important new information.