LITERARY NOIR

All these hip US writers, born in the late nineteen thirties, coming through in the 1960s, interested in meta-fiction, had a penchant for the crime genre. Richard Brautigan (born 1937) – he of the great US fiction, “Trout Fishing in America”, got there early with his “Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942” - it is a minor classic. A generation later Paul Auster, newly flying meta-fiction’s flag, came up with the ingenious "New York Stories". Umberto Eco had already got in on the act, of course, with "The Year of The Rose".

Then, just last year, the great Thomas Pynchon (also born 1937) produced "Inherent Vice", an hilarious doper take on the private eye novel set in Sixties California – kind of Lew Harper crossed with Hunter S Thompson.

And now along comes Robert Coover (born 1932), a brilliant American proponents of the short story (and one certifiable classic American novel, "The Public Burning", a surreal take on the Rosenbergs and a young Richard Nixon). He’s written "Noir", a novella that packs in -and twists around - every trope (and cliché) noir fiction has ever used. If I say the private eye is Philip M Noir you’ll get the idea of the tone. Good fun.

CHRISTMAS 2009 OBSERVER REVIEWS

James Lee Burke: Rain Gods (Orion)

The great thing is that Burke shows no sign of running out of juice. The not-so-great thing is that he’s still taking us to gloomy, hopeless places in the American psychic landscape. Actually, hopeless isn’t right, since Burke always finds hope somewhere – in this case in the courage of ordinary people. And in that sense the hero of this south Texas story is not elderly Sheriff Hackberry Holland (cousin of Billy Bob, Burke’s Montana character), the ostensible protagonist, but gutsy puffball Nick Dolan, a sleazy club owner and brothel keeper who’s defence of his family leads him to take heroic measures.

Dolan is not the only complicated character. There are hit-men you wouldn’t want tracking you and a scarred veteran of the Iraq war with a too good to be true girlfriend. Hackberry himself is tormented by Korean War nightmares. Hackberry doesn’t have much of an emotional arc in he novel, except to approach tentatively a relationship with his female deputy.

The people in the novel are on the whole hanging on to existence just as dearly as the shallow-rooted flowers and plants that cling on in the savage desert that is Burke’s other main character. For, this being one of America’s finest conveyors of sense of place, landscape looms large in “Rain Gods”.

The hard-bitten beauty of the desert mesas is magnificently evoked. The novel is set in a land used by drug runners and people smugglers, part of an axis that links the worst crime families in Mexico City with the worst in Texas and beyond. Burke looks at the suffering these criminals profit from with an unwavering eye.

As always, his theme is the struggle to be good in an evil world. His world view is paradoxically soaked in both realism and religion.

There are flaws in this book. Some minor characters, such as a Pakistani taxi driver, are caricatured; the main ones don’t always cohere. (The relationship between the Iraqi veteran and his girlfriend, for example, just doesn’t make sense.)

Criticising James Lee Burke can seem like taking the Lord’s name in vain but the novel could do with better editing too. This particular form of realistic writing requires detailed information about what people are doing moment to moment but does virtually every character at some point have to “chew on a hang-nail”? And as for the description of a man killed by machine gun fire: “The wounds in his chest and stomach and legs were egregious”. Egregious?

Otherwise – thanks James Lee Burke.

Ryan David Jahn: Acts of Violence (Macmillan New Writing pp237)

This spare debut novel is based on the horribly true 1964 real life murder of Kitty Genovese, whose murder was witnessed by some 38 people, none of whom did anything to help her. Jahn uses a similarly protracted act of violence to look into the lives of a number of characters, most of whom live in the apartments overlooking the scene of a young woman’s protracted death.

It’s a concept that has become popular in the cinema in recent years in films such as 21 Grams, Crash or Babel, each of which tell separate stories artificially linked. And it’s a risky concept as it can veer towards soap (of however superior a sort) but the power and focus of his story-telling allows him to pull it off.

His description of the assault on the woman and her scrabble to preserve her life through a long night is bone-jarring and visceral. The different stories, especially those of a bad cop and a hard-working black man whose wife thinks she has run a baby over, are told in an under-stated, almost matter-of-fact style.

The publisher’s blurb compares him to Tarantino, James Ellroy and Bret Easton Ellis. I don’t get any of that although I assume it is something to do with the depiction of violence. However, there is no sensationalism in the account of the murder, as there would be from that trio. Indeed, the author that most springs to mind in terms of style, tone and content is Raymond Carver and the cinematic comparison that seems most apt is therefore be Altman’s “Short Cuts”, in which he strung together a number of Carver’s bleak short stories.

James Ellroy: Blood’s A Rover (Century pp666)

Ellroy is back – after an eight year hiatus – and the first surprise is that the self-styled Demon Dog of US crime fiction reads A E Housman, the 19th century English pastoral poet. The Rover in the title isn’t another dog-reference, it’s part of a quote from Housman: “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover/Breath’s a ware that will not keep./Up, lad; when the journey’s over/There’ll be time enough to sleep.”

The second surprise is that Ellroy hasn’t, as rumours have suggested, lost it. True, there are faults with this concluding part of his Underworld USA Trilogy, but it’s a dense, violent, romantic (in the broadest sense) deeply impressive page-turner.

He even allows himself the luxury of some sentences of more than nine words on occasion, unlike the almost unreadable The Cold Six Thousand.

Blood’s A Rover covers the period 1968-1972 when Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover are both in mental meltdown but still powerful and dangerous and Tricky Dicky Nixon rises and falls. There’s the black power movement, the hippy movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement. There’s Sonny Liston, drug- and drink-addled. And there’s crime in LA, Washington, Chicago, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The novel starts like the first scene of Michael Mann’s Heist with an armoured car heist in 1964 on a suburban street. It jumps to 1968 and we meet FBI agent Dwight Holly, a heavy with a surreal relationship with J Edgar; Wayne Tedrow Jnr, a naïve deputy in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated in The Cold Six Thousand; and Donald “Crutch” Crutchfield, a strange combination of punk and player, who forces his way into the dangerous world swirling round the politicos, the crooks and the security services. He is, perhaps, Ellroy’s most autobiographical character, especially as the author gives him the character traits of his own unsavoury adolescence.

The Mob is trying to recreate its Cuban success in the Dominican Republic; Hoover is trying to bring down the Black Power movement; and a dismembered body in an abandoned house leads back to voodoo in Haiti. Then there is a missing hoard of stolen emeralds.

It doesn’t all work. The character of Joan Klein, a political agitator who inspires the obsession of all three characters, isn’t believable but then Ellroy’s female characters have always only been objects of obsessive (often Oedipal) desire.

The Housman quote suggests that Ellroy’s main theme is that life is short and so should not be wasted but his main characters are all faced with the futility of their own existence. This makes for a genuinely affecting novel of surprising emotional resonance. As a novel standing alone, Blood’s A Rover is terrific. As the conclusion of an outstanding trilogy it is simply remarkable.

In a vainglorious letter to booksellers that accompanied the proof of the novel, Ellroy talks himself up and refers to the novel’s “mellifluous and macho-maimed magnificence”. And, darn it, he’s right.

WINTER 2009 OBSERVER REVIEWS

Ian Rankin: The Complaints (Orion, pp428, £18.99)

What does it mean to be good? Inspector Malcolm Fox of the Complaints and Conduct Department (aka The Dark Side) of the Leith police force, ponders that as he brings down bent coppers. When he’s asked to investigate a poster-boy detective for suspected paedophilia questions of good and bad blur, as does his life. His sister’s abusive partner is murdered, Fox is suspended and the credit crunch is messing up the profit-making exploits of Edinburgh’s other Dark Side: it’s criminals. Fox forges an alliance with the man he’s supposed to investigate and the novel is up and running. Let’s cut to the chase: Fox versus Rebus. Fox is a bear of a man in his early forties whose drink problem is that he doesn’t allow himself to drink, although he spends a lot of time with his team of two in a bar in New Town. He’s one marriage down and his sketch of a father is in a home. He listens to Classic FM, Radio 2 and the Birdsong channel. Different then, but The Complaint still has Rankin’s droll humour and use of Edinburgh as another character: here a city in gridlock thanks to the work installing a tram system, with new housing projects blighted by the credit crunch. The novel takes place over a three week period so if Fox is to be a new series character then his aging in real time is going to take a v-e-r-y long time. Excellent.

Peter Leonard: Trust Me (Faber & Faber, pp290)

Peter Leonard’s first novel, Quiver, came complete with encomia from a lot of his dad’s crime-writing buddies so it was hard to take seriously. However, with his second, Trust, he’s showing some individuality. He’s not come out of his father’s shadow quite yet – the cast of characters are straight out of Elmore Leonard’s central casting – but he’s crafted a pleasantly twisty thriller and a central character who could give Jackie Brown a run for her money. A couple of Detroit ne-er do wells try to rob a lucky gambler’s home and get propositioned by the lady of the house to take part in an even bigger robbery. Some guy has ripped off her savings and she wants them back – with interest. However, what seems like a simple job is complicated by the fact the guy is a loan shark who doesn’t intend to let anyone get away with robbing him. Double-crosses of every variety ensue. Very promising.

Val McDermid: Fever of The Bone (Little Brown, pp)

The sixth novel featuring clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan shows the psychologist to be in turmoil as he tries to track a killer who is focusing on teenagers with no apparent connection to each other. Of course, there’s nothing random about the killings but Hill can’t figure out the pattern. His investigation is clouded by his own emotions as his past comes back to haunt him. And meanwhile the killer is ticking off the names on his shopping list. McDermid is unrivalled at creating chilling scenarios and Hill’s torment is palpable in this scary, dark thriller. Horrible and brilliant.

AUTUMN 2009 OBSERVER REVIEWS

Jedediah Berry: The Manual of Detection (William Heinemann, £14.99, pp423)

The publisher’s name-check Chandler and Douglas Adams, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch and Jorge Luis Borges. US critics have tossed in Kafka and Paul Auster. And Berry’s debut detective novel is indeed imaginative, fantastical, sometimes inexplicable, labyrinthine and ingenious. When the palindromic Travis Sivart, legendary detective, disappears, his agency promotes Unwin, the clerk who catalogues his cases, to investigate. Helped by a narcoleptic assistant, his enquiries lead to him solving crimes committed in dreams and the discovery that Sivert’s detecting triumphs weren’t always as triumphant as supposed. Unwin, used to the fierce regimentation of the agency, is cast adrift in this chaotic dream world with only the eponymous Manual as his guide. Berry’s creation of this world of amusing coincidences and terrible puns (Sivert’s full name is Travis T Sivert and there’s a somnambulists’ club called the Cat & Tonic) is great fun and very clever. He keeps a tight hold on his plot and the skewed logic of the world Unwin explores. My comparison? Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – which is about as good as it gets.

Elizabeth Wilson: War Damage (Serpent’s Tail, £9.99, pp256) Cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson first explored post-World War II Austerity Britain as the setting for a crime novel in her atmospheric The Twilight Hour (2006), set around Bohemian Fitzrovia and Brighton in 1947. She again evokes brilliantly that bleak world of bomb sites, rationing and food shortages here in its loose sequel. This time the focus is on the equally Bohemian Hampstead, where ballet dancers and cabinet ministers, outmoded Mosleyites and flamboyant homosexuals all assemble at Regine Milner’s Sunday house parties. In this milieu of shabby, slightly seedy glamour, the death of one of her gay guests on Hampstead Heath one Sunday night kicks off an investigation that reveals past lives reconstructed and reinvented. Wilson present a nation struggling to get back on its feet without overdoing the period detail. Her plotting is more assured than in the previous novel and Regine Milner is an idiosyncratic, vivid protagonist. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Stav Sherez: The Black Monastery (Faber & Faber, £12.99/310.99; 352pp) Sherez’s haunting second novel continues the exploration he began with The Devil’s Playground into how people out of their usual context find out about themselves - and others. Here the strangers in a strange land are a successful English female crimewriter and a wannabe who is stalking her on a Greek holiday island. They forge an unlikely (and not always believable) friendship faced with drug-dealing locals, sinister monks, a Centipede Cult (don’t laugh – it’s seriously spooky) and a serial killer whose ritual murders of local boys and tourist girls has the gore-factor expected of the sub-genre. The English couple share centre stage with a Greek policeman returnng to his home island whose investigation into the murders brings back memories of similar killings 33 years before. The old and new killings, of course, eventually intersect. Sherez is good on atmosphere and his main characters are mostly well-drawn, though I couldn’t really get a hang of the wannabe writer. The plotting sometimes wobbles though – one menacing figure is built up only to fade away. Nevertheless, a brooding chiller that effectively combines the druggy, partying tourist scene on the island with its pagan past.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir: My Soul To Take (Hodder, £11.99, pp456) Iceland’s other bestselling crimewriter (Arnaldur Indridason leads the field) returns with the second in her series of four featuring lawyer Thora Gudmunsdottir. Sigurdardottir’s grisly debut, Last Rituals, marked her break from her prizewinning career as a children’s novelist but was also notable in that, despite its subject matter, the author injected a welcome dose of humour. She does the same in My Soul To Take. Gudmunsdottir is relaxing at a farmhouse health resort when a grisly murder occurs. She agrees to represent the owner, who is the main suspect. Gudmunsdottir, punctilious about research, discovers that the stories about the farmhouse being haunted might link to terrible events at the farmhouse decades before. As before, Gudmundsdottir balances her investigation and her complicated private life – grumpy ex-husband, grumpy teenage son with pregnant girlfriend, needy younger daughter and new German boyfriend. There are perhaps a couple too many twists at the end but My Soul To Take is both frightening and funny – a terrific trick if you can pull it off. Sigurdardottir does.