The second novel in the Bar Lume series, by Marco Malvaldi, Three-Card Monte brings us once more into the life of Pineta, a small town in Tuscany, near Pisa, with the Bar Lume and its often hilarious characters as its focal point. Owned by thirty-seven-year-old Massimo Viviani, a single man trying to put his life back together after a devastating breakup, the Bar Lume and his responsibilities there have become almost a refuge for him – or as much of a refuge as any place can be when it is occupied every day by four cranky and gossipy oldtimers who regard “their table” at the Bar Lume as their “office.” Ranging in age from seventy-three to eighty-two, they have known each other all their lives –and they keep up a running commentary on everything that is happening in town and everyone who is involved in it. Drop one word in front of this elderly quartet from the Bar Lume, and it will make its way instantly all over town without any of the men ever having to leave the “office.” As the novel opens, Koichi Kawaguchi, a computer expert, has just arrived at the airport on his way to the Twelfth International Workshop in Macromolecular and Biomacromolecular Chemistry in Pineta, near Pisa, one of about two hundred theoretical and experimental scientists who are attending. Before long, the Japanese main speaker is dead and Kawaguchi is acting as a translator in the investigation.
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Norwegian author Linn Ullmann’s novel The Cold Song defies easy categories. It is not really a mystery, since the opening line announces that “Milla, or what was left of her, was found by Simen and two of his friends when they were digging for buried treasure in the woods.” We also know from the first page that a “boy known as K.B.” was later arrested and charged with her death. Still, this dark novel, filled with foreboding throughout, creates an atmosphere which mystery lovers will find intriguing, if not gripping, as the lives of the main characters move back and forth in time, creating their own suspense as each character reveals personal secrets and emotional limitations. Siri Brodal, the owner of two well-established restaurants; her husband, Jon, the author of two best-selling novels; their strange, sometimes irrational eleven-year-old daughter Alma; and Siri’s mother Jenny, a feisty, no-nonsense woman who is about to have her seventy-fifth birthday, form the crux of the novel and control the emotional climate throughout. Haunting all the action, however, is nineteen-year-old Milla, who disappeared two years ago, shortly after she was hired to care for Alma and her much younger sister Liv during the family’s summer vacation on the Norwegian coast. The discovery of Milla’s mangled remains, as the novel opens two years after her disappearance, preoccupies all the characters and looms over the action throughout.
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In this classic novel from 1977, Scottish author/poet William McIlvanney pulls out all the literary stops, creating a novel so filled with ideas, unique descriptions, and unusual characters that labeling it as one of the great crime novels does it a disservice. It is also a literary novel of stunning originality, so unusual for its time that it is now labeled as the first of the “Tartan noir” novels, with McIlvanney himself described as the “Scottish Camus.”* Two sequels – The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983), a Silver Dagger Award winner, and Strange Loyalties (1991), a winner of the Scottish Art Council Award – complete the story of Laidlaw. Despite his success and his prizes, however, McIlvanney’s “Tartan noir career” ended after these three novels, with the author concentrating instead on his poetry, literary fiction, screenplays, journalism, and essays – and winning prizes for his work in all of these genres. Inexplicably, considering the author’s successes and his prizes, all three of the Laidlaw novels have been long out of print – until this year – when Europa Editions in the US and Canongate Books in the UK decided to republish Laidlaw. The other two books in the Laidlaw series are scheduled for release this fall. This one is a true classic for anyone who wonders just how good a crime novel can be as Laidlaw holds to his own truths and refuses to succumb to the easy black and white view of the world so common to this genre.
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With his crisp, hard-boiled style, unrelenting pace, and a protagonist reminiscent of Travis McGee, whose earthiness was always mixed with a sense chivalric mission, Geoff Dyer might seem, at first, to have much in common with John D. MacDonald whose pulp novels of the 1960s and 1970s were so popular. Though Dyer does use a relatively tough and noir-ish style at the outset of the novel, and does have a main character with a mission, he quickly leaves the dark realism of MacDonald’s novels behind, however, and moves into far more philosophical realms, areas that Travis McGee (and his author) never even hinted at. Once beyond the first chapter, Dyer begins to reveal a more vibrant literary style filled with unique images and descriptions. The plot abandons pure realism and starts moving in and out of reality, dreams, literature, symbolic stories reminiscent of old allegories, with medieval quests and jousts with an evil enemy, and into serious metaphysical questions. No matter how surprising (and sometimes abstruse) the author’s focus may seem as the novel progresses, however, Dyer never loses sight of his plot or his characters, and the overall framework of the novel never disappears. Full and rich in its imagery and ideas, In Search masquerades as a noir mystery while behaving more like an allegory and metaphysical novel – reminiscent of some of the novels of Italo Calvino.
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Norwegian author Jo Nesbo never writes the same book twice, even within his best-selling series of ten Harry Hole thrillers. From The Redbreast, an historical novel which examines Norway’s Nazi era past and its neo-Nazi present, to The Snowman, a horror novel which out-horrors Stephen King, and The Leopard, with action which moves from Norway to Hong Kong and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nesbo always keeps the narrative moving at a ferocious pace, and the excitement at fever pitch. Though the reader does come to know Harry Hole and those who share his life to some extent during these ten novels, the emphasis has always been on action and thrills. Harry, an alcoholic loner at heart, has never been complex. Nesbo’s focus changes with The Son, a standalone novel. Though the plot here is every bit as fast-paced as those of Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels, the scope is smaller and more intimate, and for the first time, Nesbo seems to be allowing the reader inside his characters, making his characters and themes more complex and fully-developed. I loved it.
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