Tenebrae criminibus

Five titles which reveal the emphasis I have placed on choosing crime reading.  When my life is taken up with a rolling programme of visitors and visiting, with all the supporting fielding activities that such a life entails, in order not to lose my personal plot, crime and detective novels which necessitate sustained reading sessions where the urge to page-turn is strong are welcome opportunities to switch off from all the practicalities of life and relax with an engaging read.  And, often,  to fall asleep...........

Let's start in the frozen North.  Snowblind (Dark Iceland Series) by Ragnar Jonasson is set in Siglufjorour: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, accessible only via a small mountain tunnel, is where no one locks their doors. Snowblind is an impressive debut from a new talent.

Enter Ari Thor Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik - with a past that he's unable to leave behind. When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theatre, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life. An avalanche and unremitting snowstorms close the mountain pass, and the 24-hour darkness threatens to push Ari over the edge, as curtains begin to twitch, and his investigation becomes increasingly complex, chilling and personal. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts, while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness - blinded by snow, and with a killer on the loose. Taut and gripping,

I listened to Snowblind on Audible and it was read by an Icelandic actor, Thor Kristjansson.  Whilst using a native affords verisimilitude to a reading of the novel, I found the heavy Icelandic accent often distorted the pronunciation of the English translation and was a distraction to concentration.

In contrast I read Arctic Chill (Reykjavik Murder Mysteries) by Arnaldur Indridason in hard copy.  A dark-skinned young boy is found dead, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood.

The boy's Thai half-brother is missing; is he implicated, or simply afraid for his own life? While fears increase that the murder could have been racially motivated, the police receive reports that a suspected paedophile has been spotted in the area.  Detective Erlendur's investigation soon unearths the tension simmering beneath the surface of Iceland's outwardly liberal, multi-cultural society while the murder forces Erlendur to confront the tragedy in his own past. 

Racial tension was to me a surprising theme to crop up in an Icelandic crime novel.  Preoccupied, as we are in the UK, with the extreme racism as well as xenophobia which has manifested since the result of the EU referendum, and aware these are issues that prevail in our immediate European neighbours such as France, I had not expected that this sociopolitical problem had extended its nasty tendrils as far as an apparently tolerant and liberal nation such as Iceland.

Freeze Frame (The Enzo Files) by Peter May implies another novel set in the chilly North.  In fact, the setting for this novel in the Enzo Macleod series is a small island off the Breton coast.  A promise made to a dying man leads Enzo Macleod, a Scot forensic expert who's been teaching in France for many years, to the study which the man's heir has preserved for nearly twenty years.

The dead man left several clues for his son there, designed to reveal the killer's identity but ironically the son died soon after the father. This opens the fourth of seven cold cases which have been written up in a bestselling book by Parisian journalist Roger Raffin.  Enzo has rashly boasted that he could solve these cold cases and he has been successful with the first three.

On the tiny Breton island Enzo must confront the hostility of locals who have no desire to see the infamous murder back in the headlines. There are possible suspects and the crime scene is frozen in time.  A dangerous hell hole (Trou d'Enfer) up on the cliffs and a collection of enigmatic messages as clues, add to the gripping narrative.  There are red herrings along the way, the solution is satisfying and it makes for an enjoyable read.  .

Mo Hayder can always be expected to grip her reader and turn out a crime thriller which breaks out of the traditional mould of plotting. As a crime writer she is fast-paced and addictive; Hanging Hill centres around a pair of estranged sisters—one a cop, one a coddled wife fallen on hard times—and the gruesome homicide of a teenage beauty, which exposes the nightmares that lurk at the edges of our safe domestic lives.

One morning in picture-perfect Bath, England, a teenage girl’s body is found on the towpath of a canal. Hanging Hill is a much better than average thriller with a masterful twist in the ending.  Always a bonus.

Why was she on the towpath alone late at night? Zoe Benedict—Harley-riding police detective, independent to a fault—is convinced the department head needs to look beyond the usual domestic motives to solve the case, but no one wants to hear it. Meanwhile, Zoe’s sister, Sally—recently divorced and in dire financial straits, supporting a daughter who was friends with the dead girl—has begun working as a housekeeper for a rich entrepreneur who seems less eccentric and more repugnant, and possibly dangerous. When Zoe’s investigation turns up evidence that the teenage girl's attempts to break into modeling had delivered her into the world of webcam girls and amateur porn, a crippling secret from Zoe’s emerges.  All roads seem to be leading to one conclusion: there’s something very wrong at the house on Hanging Hill. But will Zoe and Sally put their differences aside and fit all the pieces together before it’s too late?

Often one saves the best till last.  Not in this case though.  I was given a copy of Silken Prey (John Sandford) by an American friend who found he had two copies.

  All hell has broken loose in the Washington. An influential state senator has been caught with something very, very nasty on his office computer. The governor find this incredible.  In his view the senator is too smart to be caught out like that. It does not make sense.  As Davenport investigates, the trail leads to a political fixer who has disappeared, then—troublingly—to the Minneapolis police department itself, and most unsettling of all, to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons in manipulation. She has very definite ideas about the way the world should work—along with the money, ruthlessness, and cold-blooded will to make it happen.

This is one in the Lucas Davenport series and the author is talked up as a writer with "trademark razor-sharp plotting and some of the best characters in suspense fiction."  I didn't find that a convincing opinion.  There are more than twenty titles in the 'Prey' series but I am not tempted to tackle another.

Cold War Themes

Utz by Bruce Chatwin

Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English travel writer, novelist, and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982) and his novel Utz (1988) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times named Chatwin no. 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."

Chatwin was born near Sheffield, England. At 18 he went to work at  Sotheby's in London, where he gained an extensive knowledge of art and eventually ran the auction house’s Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments. In 1966 he left Sotheby’s to read archeaology at the University of Edinburgh, but he abandoned his studies after two years to pursue a career as a writer.

The Sunday Times Magazine hired Chatwin in 1972. He travelled the world for work and interviewed figures such as the politicians Indira Gandhi and André Malraux. He left the magazine in 1974 to visit Patagonia, which resulted in his first book. His work is credited with reviving the genre of travel writing, and his works influenced other writers.  Married and bisexual, Chatwin was one of the first prominent men in Great Britain known to have contracted HIV and to have died of an AIDS-related illness, although he hid the details. Following his death, the gay community criticised Chatwin for keeping his diagnosis secret.

Utz follows the fortunes of Kaspar Utz who lives in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Utz is a collector of Meissen porcelain and finds a way to travel outside the eastern bloc to acquire new pieces. Whilst in the West, Utz often considers defecting but he would be unable to take his collection with him and so, a prisoner of his collection, he is unable to leave.

Continuing with the Cold War theme, in The Noise of Time Julian Barnes gives a short fictional account of the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It is a narrative in which nothing much happens: a man waits for a lift; a man sits on a plane; a man sits in a car. All the action takes place in Shostakovich’s head; in each of these three sections we find him at a moment of reflection amid a larger crisis, the “skittering” of his mind represented by short bursts of text that flit between memories and the present.

Crisis Number One is the Great Terror. The story begins with Shostakovich on the landing of his apartment block in the middle of the night waiting for the lift that will bring the secret police. This is 1936 and Stalin’s great purge is under way. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has met with Stalin’s personal disfavour and the composer has been denounced in the press: a clear sign that the cogs of murderous bureaucracy have been set to grind. It can only end one way: in an interrogation cell in which a “confession” awaits a signature, and a bullet the back of a neck.

As Shostakovich waits, he thinks of his childhood, of past lovers and, compulsively, of the train of circumstances that led to his fall. He remembers the disaster of the debut of his First Symphony at an open-air venue in Kharkov, when the music had set the local dogs barking. The louder they played, the more dogs barked. “Now his music has set bigger dogs barking,” Barnes writes. “History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

Waiting for the lift, Shostakovich recalls being summoned to “the Big House” where he is interrogated by an agent called Zakrevsky. They want to know about his relationship with his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky, who stands accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin. Shostakovich realises that he is a dead man. But even during the Great Terror you can get lucky; Zakrevsky is himself purged, leaving Shostakovich reprieved, for a while at least.

Shostakovich’s next crisis – his second “conversation with Power” – occurs 12 years later, in 1948, when he is blackmailed into attending a Soviet-funded Peace Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. As the star of the Russian delegation, he is a target for the anti-communist intellectuals who have infiltrated the conference, specifically Nicolas Nabokov (the novelist’s cousin), an exiled Russian composer who humiliates Shostakovich by asking questions that expose how obediently he is forced to follow the party line.

The third crisis occurs after a gap of another 12 years, in 1960, by which time things have loosened up a little under Khrushchev. Shostakovich no longer fears for his life but faces a new attack on his integrity. It has been decided that he must join the Communist Party as an endorsement of the new direction taken by the Soviet Union. He had avoided joining the party while Stalin was alive but now, try as he might, he cannot escape what has been ordained.

In writing his account of Shostakovich's life Barnes does know what he is talking about. While Barnes is known for his Francophilia, he also studied Russian at school and university. Soviet Communism was a subject of frequent debate among his famous Friday lunch club. In the late Seventies a group of ambitious young writers assembled for boozy lunches at a Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury distinguished by its proximity to the offices of The New Statesman. The literary editor of that magazine, Martin Amis, was by all accounts the star of a show that included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and Ian McEwan.

Barnes, for his part, had first-hand experience of what life was like in the Soviet Union, having taken a road trip through Eastern Europe to Leningrad in 1965. He continued to visit the Warsaw Pact states in the following decades.  

In The Noise of Time, Shostakovich is forced to reconcile his own fragmented memories of his life with the story the state wants to tell about him. He is forced to participate in the degradation of his public self, as his family and his music are held hostage, and is tormented by his own complicity and duplicity. He clings to his music, hoping it will drown out the noise around him.

Towards the end, Shostakovich realises “he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself”.This was often the way with artists,” Barnes writes, “either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment… The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old.”