The Shadows and Glaciers of Northern Norway

C.J. Cooke, The Nesting: a Novel

Sophie Hallerton has just secured a coveted job nannying for an esteemed British widower raising his children in Norway’s remote northern forest. One problem: she isn’t Sophie Hallerton. She’s Lexi Ellis, a chronic screw-up who stole Sophie Hallerton’s credentials to escape looming homelessness, or worse. When Lexi arrives in Norway, though, she finds that Tom Faraday’s house conceals secrets that make her lies seem small.

I really liked C.J. Cooke’s most recent novel, The Book of Witching, which combined family drama, mystery, and historical saga with a distinct voice. So I grabbed Cooke’s 2020 book expecting something similar. Indeed, she mixes liberally again from multiple genres with broad audience appeal. Somehow, though, the ingredients come together without much urgency, and I’m left feeling disappointed as I close the final cover.

Architect Tom Faraday needs a nanny to nurture and homeschool his daughters, because their mother committed suicide in a Norwegian fjord. Anyway, everyone believes Aurelia committed suicide. We dedicated readers know that, the more confidently the characters believe something in Act One, the more certainly they’ll see their beliefs shattered by Act Three. This is just one place where Cooke invites readers to see themselves as in on the joke.

Lexi secures the nanny position with her filched credentials and some improv skills, only to discover she’s pretty effective. But once ensconced in Tom’s rural compound, she finds the entire family up to their eyeballs in deceit and secrets. Tom’s build, in honor of his late wife’s earth-friendly principles, is badly overdrawn and short-handed. The housekeeper hovers like Frau Blucher. And Tom’s married business partners are fairly shady, too.

Supernatural elements intrude on Lexi’s rural life. Animal tracks appear inside the house, then vanish without leading anywhere. Tom’s older daughter, just six, draws pictures of the Sad Lady, a half-human spectre that lingers over her memories of Aurelia. The Sad Lady maybe escaped from Aurelia’s hand-translated compendium of Norwegian folklore. A mysterious diary appears in Lexi’s locked bedroom, chock-a-block with implications that Tom might’ve killed his wife.

C.J. Cooke

If this sounds familiar, you aren’t wrong. Cooke introduces her stylistic borrowings in an unusually forthright manner. Lexi reads “Nordic Noir” novels in her spare time, signposting the sepulchral midwinter setting, and Lexi describes her ward’s artwork as “Gothic,” the correct term for this novel’s many locked-room puzzles. This boldly announces Cooke’s two most prominent influences, Henning Mankell and Henry James, whose influence lingers throughout the story.

Unfortunately for contemporary English-language readers, Cooke also writes with those authors’ somber pace. Her story introduces even more narrative threads than I’ve mentioned, and more than the characters themselves know, because her shifting viewpoint means we have information the characters lack. We know how intricate their scaffold of lies has become, and sadly, we know that if that scaffold collapsed, most characters would be more relieved than traumatized.

Cooke unrolls her threads slowly and deliberatively. The narration sometimes includes time jumps of weeks, even months. Probably even longer, because Tom’s ambitious experimental earth-house would take considerably longer to build than something conventional and timber-framed; one suspects Cooke doesn’t realize the logistics that go into construction. Characters have mind-shattering revelations about each other, sometimes false, then sit on them for months.

Indeed, despite the unarguable presence of a carnivorous Norwegian monster inside the house, it’s possible to forget, because it disappears for weeks. Cooke’s real interest, and the novel’s real motivation when it has one, is the human drama. We watch the tensions and duplicity inside the Faraday house amplify, a tendency increased by geographic isolation. Indeed, we see every lie the character tell, except one: what really happened to Aurelia.

This novel would’ve arguably been improved by removing the folk horror subplot, focusing on the human characters. But that would require restructuring the storytelling. The characters linger at a low simmer for chapter after chapter, then someone does something to change the tenor, and for a moment, we reach a boil. Cook’s Nordic atmospherics, and glacial pace, put the best moments—and there are several good moments—too far apart.

Then, paradoxically, the denouement happens too quickly. After 300 pages of slow, ambient exposition, Cooke abruptly ends the narrative in a manner that leaves many threads unresolved. Despite Cooke’s pacing errors, I found myself invested in Lexi’s journey of discovery, only to find it ends hastily, in a manner scarcely prompted by prior events. Cooke’s narrative doesn’t conclude, it just ends.

I’ll probably read Cooke again. But after this one, I’ll approach her with more caution.

“Once Upon a Time” Could Be Right Now

Sarah J. Sover, Fairy Godmurder (Fractured Fae Book 1)

Gwendoline Evenshine worked hard to become a fairy godmother, and blew it; her very first charge was murdered on hallowed ground, in broad daylight. So she hardened her heart and rededicated her life to bringing down the killer, a serial monster nicknamed The Brain Scraper. This mysterious beast stalks the soot-streaked streets of fairyland, murdering magical beings for mysterious purposes. But the case has taken a dark turn, and Gwen suddenly finds herself the target.

Sarah Sover’s second novel isn’t groundbreaking, but don’t consider that a knock against it. Sover follows a beat-sheet beloved by popular cross-genre novelists like Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, a hybrid of traditional paperback fantasy and midcentury noir mystery. The product is a darkly playful overlap that, to Sover’s benefit, comes with a built-in audience. Veteran readers will recognize when the next plot twist or brutal betrayal is coming, without truly spoiling the surprise.

The story proceeds along two tracks. In the present, Gwen haunts the midnight streets of Korranthia, a fairy kingdom roughly corresponding with New England. Haunted by her greatest failure, Gwen paused her personal and professional life, dedicating everything to chasing that one phantom. She works as a police consultant, but only on the Brain Scraper case, using her fairy godmother skills to examine bodies for evidence that ordinary forensics can’t find. It hasn’t helped much.

In flashbacks, we get Gwen’s backstory. Fresh from the Academy, Gwen is assigned fairy godmother status over Princess Francesca (that’s “Frankie” to you), heir of Korranthia’s royal house. Frankie expects to inherit authority over the precarious balance between her fairy kingdom and the increasingly volatile United States. But she lives with a dark foreboding that she’ll never actually live to receive her inheritance. Despite her power and skill, Gwen is powerless to prevent Frankie’s doom.

This dualism gives readers a jarring view of Gwen at different life stages. The present Gwen is hard-bitten, desperate to avoid building relationships or having feelings. Because she dared to care about Princess Frankie, and her big-sisterly guidance ended horrifically. We know from Chapter One that Frankie is doomed, and watch helplessly as, like Amanda Palmer, her story plays to its inevitable conclusion. Gwen is desperate never to fail, or be that heartbroken ever again.

Sarah J. Sover

However, boring old reality persistently intrudes. Gwen can only pursue the case by remaining in the Korranthia PD’s good graces, and the fuzz cares more about maintaining order than pursuing justice. And Gwen never formally completed her magical training, meaning she still needs her old Academy connections to decipher the scanty evidence she’s collected. Thus, despite her desire for independence, she keeps falling back on the two institutions dominating young people’s lives: law and school.

Not that Gwen’s truly alone. Two allies, a griffin homicide detective and a pixie true-crime blogger, continue supporting Gwen, despite her cynical façade. And her old Academy mentor makes frequent overtures to tempt Gwen back, promising the largess of power and old-girl-network connections. Gwen, like Harry Dresden, is extremely powerful, but needs guidance to channel that power. But Gwen finds the temptations of friendship, insidership, and power threatening. Especially in fairyland, there’s farther to fall.

Sover mixes contemporary and folkloric influences in different measures at different times. The flashbacks presaging Princess Frankie’s murder, and Gwen’s fall from grace, read like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, salted with allusions to contemporary politics and culture war issues. Sover’s “present” chapters read more like a conventional hard-boiled procedural. This duality hits harder because this is the first novel I’ve read which effectively uses the COVID-19 pandemic in its setting. Sover’s fairyland feels very real.

As an aside, Korranthia’s mythic beings come from European myth: fairies, gnomes, ogres. The characters swear by Danu, an Irish goddess. Nowhere do Native American mythic beings appear, despite the New England setting. It’s entirely the mythology of the colonizers, not the colonized. This feels like a real missed opportunity, especially in light of Sover’s use of contemporary politics in her mythological milieu. I hope she corrects this understandable but large oversight in future books.

This novel feels like the slipstream genre I read extensively ten years ago, but haven’t seen much recently. Sover uses the imagery of myth and folklore, but brings the stakes into a contemporary scope. She addresses issues that seem timely to modern readers, especially women, but narrates those issues in ways that seem sometimes almost whimsical. She doesn’t lecture or scold her readers, but like in the best literature, ultimately, the story is about us.

The Truth, the State, and Store-Bought Justice

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 46
Michael Apted (director), Gorky Park

Three corpses lie buried in snow in Moscow’s most popular amusement park. Evidence suggests they were shot in broad daylight, two of them more than once, yet somehow nobody noticed. Then, when a curious KGB officer with no regard for procedure partially uncovers them, they reveal their most grisly sacred: the bodies have been mutilated, their faces and fingertips flensed. No way of knowing who they were.

The film noir tradition has its history in places of moral degradation and political malaise: Vichy France, London’s dockyards, McCarthyite America. Working from a novel by Martin Cruz Smith, director Michael Apted applies the same principles to Soviet Moscow. Apted leads us through a world where politicians love ideology but don’t live by it, where money greases the Cold War’s wheels, and evidence doesn’t determine truth, the state does.

Chief Inspector Arkady Renko (William Hurt) tries to unload the Gorky Park murders onto the KGB, not because he believes the murders are political, but because the KGB so clearly doesn’t want them. He’s accustomed to turf battles with state enforcement, so the state’s hasty acquiescence worries him. Especially when the autopsy reveals that at least one anonymous corpse belongs to an American national, an oddity in Soviet Russia.

Despite the Soviet Union’s society nominally being undivided by class, Renko is something of Moscow aristocracy. His superiors repeatedly name-check his father, a war hero, which probably explains why he outranks officers significantly older than him. Renko has, however, chosen a career in the Militsiya, the nationalized Soviet civilian police force, a dimly regarded profession for a member of the nomenklatura. This causes suspicion among an already distrustful bureaucratic hierarchy.

That same hierarchy quickly introduces Renko to Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), an American importer. Osborne wears slick suits, seems chummy with Moscow’s swells, and sleeps with much younger Russian women. When Osborne starts asking pointed questions about Renko’s investigation, Renko starts suspecting Osborne’s motivations. It seems Moscow’s chief prosecutor might share those suspicions, and urges Renko to investigate further.

Martin Cruz Smith wrote the original novel after spending several weeks in Moscow in the late 1970s. His book, and Apted’s subsequent movie, were condemned as anti-Soviet propaganda, and banned by the pre-Glasnost state. However, in fairness, Smith’s American characters hardly emerge smelling like roses. When Jack Osborne transparently bribes Soviet officials, those officials buy in hastily, making Osborne complicit in state-based suppression of facts.

Lee Marvin (left) and William Hurt at the big reveal of Gorky Park

Besides Osborne, another American begins probing the investigation. William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy) lurks around the crime scene’s periphery, but when Renko approaches, Kirwill rabbit-punches him and runs. Renko, his curiosity piqued, searches Kirwill’s hotel room, where he finds a gold-plated badge. Seems Kirwill, like Renko, is a homicide detective, NYPD. Renko quickly reminds Kirwill this isn’t his patch, and confiscates the badge.

Throughout the movie, the Moscow nomenklatura remind one another that Renko is one of Russia’s best homicide investigators. Quickly, however, we discover what “best” means. He casually lies to informants, threatens witnesses, and carries an unregistered sidearm. Despite showing no ambition to rise in the Soviet state, a tendency which worries his power-hungry superiors, Renko mixes a strong belief in justice, with a casual disregard for procedure and tedium.

Renko’s attitude arises from his circumstances. He learned early that powerful people manipulate rules, that the state’s ideological rigidity doesn’t translate into honesty. The same Soviet enforcers who censor media and redistribute private property, maintain a background life of lavish parties and under-the-table financial dealings. They attempt to break up the back-alley black market economy, while maintaining the exact same practices in their gilded offices and lavish country dachas.

Apted’s physical design emphasizes the movie’s moral themes. His Moscow (mostly shot in Helsinki, Finland) is constantly saturated with light. This illumination doesn’t make anything clearer, though: reflected off concrete buildings and mounded snow, Moscow’s constant sunlight is more blinding than enlightening. William Hurt squints into this overlit streetscape with the intensity of a man who loves and defends his people, but has clearly come to hate his city.

In some ways, this movie is distinctly dated. Its Reagan-era anti-Soviet propaganda, backed with James Horner’s melodramatic score, clearly belongs to the early 1980s. But in other ways, with its intrusive government that dictates policy, and its police who guard order without underlying principles of justice, this movie clearly describes our present. It’s easy to see ourselves, and the authorities who dictate our lives, portrayed in this film.

Because really, in forty years, neither post-Soviet Russia nor America has learned very much.

Magic Riders on the Underground Railroad

Nicole Glover, The Conductors

Hetty Rhodes didn’t smuggle dozens of escaping slaves to freedom in Philadelphia during the Civil War, just to watch them get murdered. But that’s exactly what’s happening. During the precarious Reconstruction years, White police have little interest in violence perpetrated in Philadelphia’s Black community. So Hetty and her husband Benjy take it on themselves to investigate, armed only with ingenuity and a little carefully chosen magic.

Nicole Glover’s debut novel channels multiple well-loved writers in the crime, historical fiction, and fantasy genres. But Glover also establishes her own voice based on her characters’ precarious economic and social positions. She writes from a position simultaneously outsider, kept down by institutional barriers and stark, unquestioned racism, but also insider, as her characters establish their own community in the shadow of White dominion.

The first body shocks everyone. Charlie Richardson, an escaped slave like Hetty and Benjy, parlayed his natural wits, and limited moral reserves, into a local fortune, but made enemies along the way. Because the community doesn’t trust lawmen, witnesses turn to Hetty, whose experience on the Underground Railroad has made her a local legend. But when Hetty begins investigating, she discovers a cursed mark carved into Charlie’s flesh.

Before long, Hetty’s astrology-based wizardry begins finding traces of magic strewn across Philadelphia. Hetty is an unusually skillful spellcaster, but in a city where magic is an artisanal skill, sold from street-corner stalls, her celestial powers get lost in a cacophony of evidence and rumor. Then the second body appears, suspiciously close to Hetty and Benjy’s door. Seems the killer’s motives are personal, and the Rhodes family themselves are targets.

Because of how books are marketed, Glover’s story will draw comparisons to writers like Laurel K. Hamilton and Jim Butcher, fantasy novelists whose supernatural elements heighten their gritty, crime-strewn urban settings. But reading Glover, my mind drifted to Walter Mosley. Both authors feature characters transplanted from their home communities, into segregated cities that prove to be anything but promised lands. Both address how cities create, and enforce, racial boundaries.

Nicole Glover

And both, in differing ways, deal with how law often functions as an impediment to order. Hetty and Benjy Rhodes, like Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, investigate crimes which law enforcement openly disregards. They accept penny-ante payments for their inquiries, and have to maintain day jobs among the suspects they’re investigating. They do this because, if the community doesn’t enforce ethics and punish wrongdoers, nobody will. Their neighborhood has to govern itself.

The Reconstruction-era setting emphasizes Glover’s themes of division and community. With the Civil War over, America has forgotten its pledges to Black citizens, who live marginally. Though key plot points turn on a local Black political machine, it’s dominated by men (specifically men) desperate to be seen as reputable by White Philadelphians. Notably, Black wizards aren’t allowed to own wands, just as freed Blacks weren’t allowed to own guns.

Magic, in Glover’s telling, isn’t a preternatural workaround for difficult situations, a way to suspend physics. Instead, it’s a skill, and a common one: every storekeeper and housewife has a few spells handy, just in case. Hetty is remarkably skilled at “Celestial Magic,” but so is the murderer. She uses magic like James Bond uses his famous gadgets, a handy way to escape momentary problems, but ultimately a tool.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I felt deeply invested in Glover’s atmospheric storytelling. For her, magical Philadelphia isn’t a background; she immerses readers in an intricately realized environment. An important side point in Glover’s novel is that Hetty is a renowned storyteller, who spins elaborate yarns of her Civil War adventures spontaneously for eager listeners. This lampshades the parts of storytelling that clearly interest Glover most.

But don’t overlook the mystery aspect of Glover’s storytelling, either. The murders, which start out with only a handful of loosely spaced clues, become more tangled as the investigation progresses. Hetty and Benjy have to pursue evidence without official help, even as the killer clearly aims at them. As a veteran mystery reader, I started a suspect list and tested it against the mounting evidence. But even I was wrong.

Glover’s writing hooks you early and keeps you engaged. Her style is familiar enough to genre readers that it won’t jar anybody, or probably change anybody’s understanding of the genres; but she uses readers’ expectations as a foundation to build on, not as a hammock. Her writing is familiar, but not passive. Even as I recognized the influences that shaped Glover’s voice, she never stopped finding ways to surprise me.

Miss Marple for a Darker Time

Brianna Labuskes, A Familiar Sight (Dr. Gretchen White, Book 1)

Whenever the Boston PD can’t solve a mystery, they contact Dr. Gretchen White, behavioral psychologist and amateur sleuth. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Dr. White, who mostly goes by “Gretchen,” asks the questions the fuzz isn’t allowed to ask. Unlike Miss Marple, Gretchen is a clinical psychopath, and may have killed someone twenty-five years ago. This means the Boston PD needs Gretchen, but they don’t trust her.

Brianna Labuskes’ sixth novel, and first series title, ties me in knots as a reviewer. It’s fast-paced, cinematic, and establishes a mind puzzle so intricate, I felt myself swept along. But Labuskes also trafficks in genre and regional clichés that drive me bananas. Repeatedly, I found myself so enrapt by Labuskes’ writing that I forgot myself and vanished into the book, then she dropped some banality so glaring, I jolted back to reality with whiplash.

Attorney Lena Booker left Gretchen an enigmatic voicemail before dying, in an apparent accidental overdose. But Gretchen refuses to believe her tightly wound friend (one of Gretchen’s few real friends) did something so careless as die accidentally. She persuades her PD handler, Detective Patrick Shaughnessy, to postpone a final ruling until she gathers every loose end. Shaughnessy agrees, provided Gretchen lets his partner, Det. Lauren Marconi, ride along.

Start right there. Labuskes names her police characters “Patrick Shaughnessy” and “Lauren Marconi,” about the most formulaically ethnic names you could give Boston characters. Shaughnessy is fat, ugly, and ill-tempered, a vintage Irish Policeman burnout character. Marconi is described as attractive, but makes herself as sexless as possible for professionalism’s sake. She reads like a Law & Order casting call notification. Major low-hanging fruit.

Gretchen zips through Boston with Marconi in tow, in her shiny, sleek Porsche, a metaphor for Gretchen’s hastily mobile mind. The late Lena Booker’s final case involved Reed Kent, a bereaved husband whose clinically psychopathic tweenage daughter stands accused of stabbing her mother, Reed’s wife, to death. But Gretchen discovers the case goes deeper. Lena, Reed, and Tess Murphy were thick as thieves twenty years ago… until Tess mysteriously vanished overnight.

Thus, Gretchen and Marconi vanish down a rabbit hole of overlapping mysteries. Solving Lena’s death means solving Claire Kent’s murder, which requires solving Tess Murphy’s disappearance. These difficult cases get compounded when Tess’s brother, a Congressman running for reelection, and Reed’s sister, a nurse specializing in troubled youth, both stonewall the investigation. Seems everyone has something to hide, including Lena, whose secrets remain locked even in death.

Brianna Labuskes

If this sounds Byzantine, don’t feel intimidated. Labuskes spins these cantilevered mysteries out through short, mostly dialog-driven scenes, where characters lie or disclose, slinging accusations at others or defending themselves. Labuskes, and her viewpoint characters, don’t indulge in philosophical maundering or long soliloquies. Gretchen, holder of multiple advanced degrees, sometimes pauses to explain complex concepts, but she always keeps it short.

Sometimes in reviews, I contrast “fully realized characters” with “authorial sock puppets.” By this I mean characters who have complex, nuanced motivations, versus those who do what the author’s outline requires. Reading Labuskes, I realize this is false. All characters, no matter how refined, exist entirely in the author’s head. Labuskes lets her characters feel as realized as she requires, while signposting that this is a story, a human-made contrivance, written by a person.

This comes across most directly in alternating chapters. In odd-numbered chapters, we see the present investigation unfold through Gretchen’s detached, analytical eyes. As both a psychologist and a psychopath, two groups famous for reading people, Gretchen spots lies and small details. Indeed, she sometimes comes across as a mind-reader. Because she is, indeed, the author’s narrative device, and someone needs to explain her finer points in plain English.

In even-numbered chapters, Reed Kent’s backstory unfolds in reverse. We watch him gradually realize he’s an unreliable narrator in his own life, possibly even a villain, whose stunted emotions drive people away. Thing is, as two mysteries unravel in Gretchen’s chapters, they become more constrictive in Reed’s. He knows the truth about Claire’s murder, and Tess Murphy’s disappearance, but he can’t tell us, because he can’t admit it to himself.

How you receive Labuskes’ story depends on the expectations you bring into the reading. Like a Hollywood thriller, she presents a tightly constructed, fast-moving narrative, where every character and action proves ultimately relevant. Like an Agatha Christie mystery, this story is remarkably bloodless and sexless (occasional vulgarity). Yet it’s also complex, even if the psychology is underdeveloped. It’s a new take on the time-honored thriller form.

Sherlock Holmes and the Contemporary Victorian Mess

Millie Bobby Brown (center) as Enola Holmes, with Henry Cavill (left)
as Sherlock, and Sam Claflin as Mycroft

Enola Holmes, the latest confection rush-released from surprise content factory Netflix, is a surprisingly good Holmes movie. I say “surprisingly,” because amid the recent deluge of Holmesiana, it’s pretty difficult to say anything particularly new or innovative. Like King Arthur or Robin Hood, whose most recent onscreen adventures landed with a distinct thud, Sherlock Holmes has been significantly exposed recently. Yet somehow, he remains new and relevant.

Yet why is a Victorian character, whose usual narrative arc is so predictable that his own creator grew to despise him, so durable? Sherlock Holmes has appeared onscreen more, supposedly, than any other character: more than Dracula or Miss Marple, more by some estimates than Jesus. He evolves to suit the times; I question whether any, but the most dedicated fans, have actually read Conan Doyle’s notoriously turgid Holmes adventures.

Robert Downey, Jr., in Guy
Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes

When Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of the character, entitled simply Sherlock Holmes, dropped in 2009, I initially refused to watch it. I’d recently seen two attempts to create a more contemporary and relevant for 21st-Century audiences. This included a TV film, in which Vincent D’Onofrio got top billing for playing Moriarty, and the camera lingered over Holmes having drunken sex with prostitutes, while Watson performed an autopsy live onscreen. It was pretty bad.

For contemporary audiences, the Holmesian appeal lies partly in the distant setting. Victorian London seems well removed, and we’ve become suffused with the images of rococo splendor. Conan Doyle wrote, after all, during the decades when the British Empire enjoyed (if that’s the word) its greatest success, as measured by wealth and plunder. He couldn’t know that, within a generation, World War I would begin the empire’s undoing.

Yet despite the supposed Victorian wealth and comfort, that London was thoroughly rotten. Holmes often wandered into East End flophouses, opium dens, and other scenes of what Victorians would’ve considered moral degradation. Conan Doyle didn’t signpost this class struggle, mostly because he didn’t need to. Like his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, he used coded language that seems opaque to modern readers. But his Victorian audience knew exactly what he meant.

The first screen adaptation I remember dealing explicitly with class and poverty, was the legendary Granada TV version starring Jeremy Brett. Launching in 1984, it didn’t deal directly with Victorian poverty, but it included many street scenes with Holmes and Watson walking through mud, past street vendors selling live chickens and rabbits. I remember one scene where, before entering a building, Watson paused to pick carriage-horse shit off his brogues.

While the TV version with D’Onofrio that I hated attempted to shock the audience, it didn’t linger over the Victorian division between wealth and poverty, between White English middle-class values and the supposedly morally degraded immigrants and sailors living on the East End. It failed to acknowledge what Victorian London had in common with today. The moralistic justification of English imperial wealth in the 1880s sounds painfully familiar in 2020.

Recent successful Holmes adaptations have taken one of two tracks. Some have embraced the shocking poverty of Victorian England: Enola Holmes wanders into Limehouse pursuing clues, where a hired thug repeatedly pushes her into the dung-filled streets. Ritchie’s Sherlock flees from machine guns that prefigure the trauma of two world wars. Brett’s Sherlock never commented upon class divisions, but nevertheless visibly lived among them.

Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock

Other adaptations move Holmes into a dreamland. Both Moffat and Gatiss’ Sherlock, and its American contemporary, Elementary, are set in 2010s cities, London and Manhattan respectively. But both are ceremoniously scrubbed, tourist brochure-friendly versions of those cities, with sleek architecture, merrily jostling streets, and almost no filth. Sure, people get murdered, but not mugged or even much discomforted; the cities are remarkably anodyne.

These adaptations could also learn another lesson from Conan Doyle: learning when to stop. The author’s later Holmes stories, a crinkum-crankum mess of spiritless finger exercises, reflect how much Conan Doyle hated his cash cow. Similarly, the fifth season of Sherlock was jeered so badly that there’ll probably be no sixth, while the seventh and final season of Elementary ran as a summer replacement and disappeared quietly.

Basically, Holmes remains relevant because he provides succinct commentary upon today’s world, while remaining notably apart from it. The veneer of escapism lets us examine today’s injustices at enough of a remove that we don’t get emotionally agitated by them. Like Holmes himself, we’re able to keep our cool when confronted by manifest evil around us. As Victorian as he is, Holmes and his stories are ultimately still about us.

Sex and Murder on the Wrong Side of Town

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 99
Walter Mosley, Devil In a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins needs the money, so when a big-shouldered White man in a slick suit comes nosing around a Black bar, looking to hire a leg man for a poorly defined private investigation, he takes the job. Who is he to complain? Turns out the White man’s rich White boss needs someone inconspicuous to find a glamorous White woman who frequents Los Angeles’ teeming illegal jazz bar scene. Should be a quick payday, right?

Walter Mosley’s debut novel contains multiple dense allusions to prior genre fiction, particularly Dashiell Hammet’s legendary Maltese Falcon. Like Sam Spade, Easy Rawlins gets roped into a case he needs, but doesn’t necessarily want. He must work with a woman who lies as quickly as breathing, and a man who kills because he sees no reason why he shouldn’t. But Rawlins has the added complication of being Black in the years after World War II.

Newly laid off, Rawlins accepts a private investigation job for which he’s not particularly qualified, and also unlicensed, because his house payment is coming due. Like thousands of Black veterans, Rawlins served with distinction during the war, and grew accustomed to being treated with respect. He wasn’t prepared for renewed discrimination. He certainly wasn’t ready for California racism, which he thought he’d escaped when he left his crime-ridden Houston childhood. Apparently bigots are bigots everywhere.

Turns out his target, Daphne Monet, doesn’t want found. When Rawlins tries directly asking the right people whether they’ve seen her, good friends suddenly turn evasive. For a White woman in segregated California, she certainly seems to have plenty of Black allies. But to Rawlins’ shock, the people he questions start turning up dead. The police believe he’s the last one to see them alive. Rawlins faces interrogation at the blunt end of a fist.

To make matters worse, Rawlins’ White employer turns out to be a psychopath. DeWitt Albright keeps a long-bore pistol inside his slick suit, and points it at whoever earns his displeasure. Of all the White people Rawlins works with, Albright might be the least racist, since skin color doesn’t bother him when killing time rolls around. Rawlins must work quick-time to avoid Albright’s wrath, which isn’t easy once Albright decides Rawlins is already dealing dirty.

Walter Mosley

In Rawlins’ world, moral scruple doesn’t buy lunch. He quietly resists racism, but also proves remarkably willing to accept it as inevitable. “I didn't believe that there was justice for Negroes,” Rawlins mutters around the halfway mark. “I thought that there might be some justice for a black man if he had the money to grease it. Money isn't a sure bet but it's the closest to God that I've ever seen in this world.”

Trapped between a working-class Black community closing ranks against him, and a White city demanding results at any cost, Rawlins teaches himself detective work on-the-job. He discovers how to ask questions which don’t directly bear on Daphne Monet, but which cause others to reveal truths about themselves. He uses his employer’s advance to buy drinks for working-class people desperate to make their days go away; in return they oblige him with sudden welters of information.

The longer his investigation continues, the more Rawlins despises his community. Like him, many Los Angeles Black people moved west, thinking they’d escape poverty and bigotry wherever they fled (a remarkable number apparently grew up with him in Houston). But they moved in such numbers that Los Angeles didn’t expect them, or the cultural change they hastened; racism followed them west, and with it, a closed, guarded attitude about intruders asking questions. Even Black intruders.

Rawlins proves resistant to one tool that might loosen tongues: he won’t exercise violence against fellow Blacks. He fled Houston trying to escape the pain poor blacks push on one another. To his horror, his childhood friend Mouse follows him to California; only Mouse has a pistol as big as DeWitt Albright’s. Rawlins finds himself caught between two killers he has to appease, even though he knows either one will destroy him if they choose.

Mosley uses the tropes of crime drama with comfortable panache; mystery fans will recognize the tropes he uses, like the jaded antihero, the femme fatale, and the truth worse than ignorance. But he repurposes these tropes to tell a story about people born down, and kept down by a system that judges them from birth. Easy Rawlins didn’t earn cynicism, he had cynicism thrust upon him. And he’s ready to thrust it back on us.

On a related topic:
Small Town Murder in Black and White

Sherlock Holmes is a Queer Black Woman

Claire O'Dell, A Study in Honor

Doctor Janet Watson lost her arm and her dignity fighting the regressivist rebels in the Second Civil War. She came to Washington, D.C., to fight for a reliable cybernetic replacement from a cash-strapped and preternaturally risk-averse Veteran's Administration. But the fight is long and expensive. So while she arm-wrestles the government, she takes a flat-sharing arrangement with the strange and enigmatic Sara Holmes.

Claire O'Dell has written several previous novels and short stories which foreground LGBTQIA+ characters, especially women. Some have won prestigious awards, and been included on year end Best-Of lists. But with this novel, she proposes something apparently new in her C.V.: updating one of genre fiction's most beloved characters in a way that moves her protagonist between eras, genders, and genres, all at once.

This novel breaks neatly into two sections. In the first, O’Dell recreates the early chapters of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, where Watson meets Holmes and unpacks his personality. O’Dell makes appropriate changes, since her viewpoint character is American, Black, a woman, and same-sex attracted. It’s also colored by her near-future dystopian setting, where bigoted rebels in America’s heartland have rebelled violently against the government, and the war drags on interminably.

Besides scene-setting, O’Dell’s purpose in these early chapters is clearly political. Just as the crumbling British Empire provides background noise for Conan Doyle’s novels, the American house divided becomes the constant context for Janet Watson’s unfolding adventures. O’Dell couches this in real-world political events: the optimism Black women like Watson felt after the 2008 presidential election, and the inevitable descent into disappointment in 2016.

The second half is where O’Dell’s story really starts cooking. To mark time while the VA dithers on providing a better cybernetic arm so she can restart her surgical career, Watson takes a job beneath her credentials at a D.C. veterans’ hospital. Working below the level doctors ordinarily see, she uncovers a pattern of soldiers returning from the front plagued with symptoms beyond ordinary PTSD. Watson takes a particular liking to one damaged soldier.

Experienced readers know, the more confidently a genre protagonist likes an incidental character, the more certainly that character will die. The traumatized, over-medicated veteran Watson makes her special project, literally keels over one morning. Strangely, all of the veteran’s lab results, medical screenings, and documentation go missing from the archives. It’s like somebody wants the veterans to go away.

Claire O'Dell

Then a stranger attacks Watson on an empty Georgetown street.

Her curiosity piqued, Sara Holmes brings her considerable influence as a shadowy government agent into Watson’s case. That proves a mixed blessing. Holmes is smart, endearing, and sometimes charismatic; she also proves to be abusive, manipulative, and often dishonest. But this mix of virtues and vices proves her magic qualification to infiltrate a conspiracy so shadowy, even Holmes can only intuit its presence by the damage it causes.

This blend of near-future dystopian science fiction, with one of literature’s most classic detectives, gives a spin on political thrillers appropriate to today’s reading audience. As a Black, queer woman, Watson has a quintessential outsider’s perspective on circumstances of power. As a veteran herself, she knows the divide between those who start wars, and those who fight them. As a doctor, she can diagnose the destruction left behind.

If you’re anything like most people, you clearly see the widening gulf between government and governed, even when the government speaks the language of everyman. This has given rise to multiple conspiracy theories lately, everything from Q-ANON to flat-earthism to, well, whatever came dribbling from the President’s twitter account today. We’re surrounded constantly by aggressive distrust between the people, and those who speak for the people.

Janet Watson understands this distrust. She simultaneously depends on the government, as her employer and the bestower of VA benefits, and sees the ways murky bureaucracy devalues human life. When that bureaucracy turns violently against her, she has only one ally, Holmes—who, despite her vocal protests of loyalty and truth, is herself an admitted government agent. Watson must choose, repeatedly, between the devil she knows and the devil she doesn’t.

Authors wanting to update Holmes and Watson aren’t new. At times, O’Dell’s narrative suggests direct influence from Moffat and Gatiss, among others. Yet despite this common currency, O’Dell’s version remains worth reading, not because we know and love the characters, but because, like all the best literature, it’s ultimately about us. We live in dystopian, post-apocalyptic times. We don’t have cybernetic arms yet. But we need someone like Sara Holmes.

Small Town Murder in Black and White

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 98
John Ball, In the Heat of the Night

The richest man in a small South Carolina town lies murdered beside the main highway. This town’s police force is completely unprepared to investigate a murder, particularly one where the victim has national connections outside the South. So the frightened police chief orders a mass roundup of likely-looking suspects. His best patrolman brings in a traveling Black man guilty of nothing worse than being Black. Only it turns out he’s found an off-duty homicide investigator.

If you’ve seen Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning movie of the same title, you’ll recognize the broad strokes of John Ball’s most famous novel. Police chief Bill Gillespie, wracked with the prejudices of his time, doesn’t want detective Virgil Tibbs’ help, but he needs it. Tibbs doesn’t owe Gillespie anything, but feels honor-bound to solve a crime once it’s been identified. But the town would rather let the guilty go unpunished, than accept a Black man’s help.

But don’t think they’re the same story. Where Jewison shows the tension between Black and White in a South structurally resistant to change, Ball’s story is much more internal, driven by characters’ private motivations, which they struggle to acknowledge, even to themselves. Chief Gillespie’s sense of order collides with Virgil Tibbs’ faith in justice. This collision happens in Wells, South Carolina, a mountainous village that hasn’t changed in years, and isn’t ready to change now.

Most importantly, the characters are drawn differently than the movie. Unlike Rod Steiger’s middle-aged, gum-chewing cynic, this version of Bill Gillespie is young, only thirty-four, and inexperienced to the brink of incompetence. He botches the early stages of his investigation because he hasn’t read the correct textbooks yet. He begrudgingly accepts Tibbs’ help because he needs it, but an angered city councilman admits Wells hired him because they expect him to uphold generations of segregation.

This Virgil Tibbs, meanwhile, differs from Sidney Poitier’s screen depiction. Where Poitier intones “They call me Mister Tibbs!” with the suppressed rage of a man ready to resist unjust authority, this Tibbs simply speaks that line. He doesn’t actively resist South Carolina’s systems of bigotry, an action he knows would likely get him hanged. Instead, he quietly stays just inside the rules, giving unreconstructed bigots just enough powder to shoot themselves. Which they inevitably do.

One trait this novel shares with the movie is that the mystery isn’t the most important part. Though the murder of a small town’s most prominent resident starts the story, it becomes secondary to the character interactions. Because of history, these characters can never completely trust one another, and constantly scrutinize each other’s actions, hoping for a critical misstep. Yet somehow, socialized to their various social roles, nobody ever truly goes one step too far.

1967 cinema poster for In the
Heat of the Night

Author John Ball shifts his story among several viewpoint characters, mostly but not exclusively Chief Gillespie and Patrolman Sam Wood. Both men are racists, among their multiple failings, and view Tibbs through racialized lenses. Even when Tibbs proves his competence enough to earn their grudging respect, they still consider him through their own prejudices, and consider him “almost a white man.” As readers, we understand and appreciate these characters. But we can never like them.

One viewpoint we never get is Virgil Tibbs. He remains the one character we observe entirely from outside. Unlike Gillespie and Wood, whose bigotry we see in such detail that it almost clings to us, Tibbs’ anti-racism remains private to himself. Instead, we see him act. He uses others’ narrow bias against themselves, turning the intolerant into their own worst character witnesses. It’s no surprise to discover Tibbs is also a fairly advanced Judo practitioner.

Through his Judo-influenced investigation techniques, Tibbs forces several retrenched South Carolinians to acknowledge the blinders they’ve worn so long, even they forget they’re wearing them. Simply by remaining present when White people talk, he makes them uncomfortable enough to reveal long-simmering truths. By the end, Tibbs probably hasn’t cured anybody’s racism. But he forces people to admit, to themselves if nobody else, that they are, indeed, bigots.

Nobody likes to face hard truths about themselves.

Even by genre novel standards, this book is remarkably short: under 160 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. Yet it never feels short. Ball’s language is terse yet detailed, convincing us to sympathize with characters without ever liking them… and making us question why we like or dislike anyone. By the final page, we feel we’ve undertaken a journey. And like Chief Gillespie, our journey isn’t over yet; the next step is up to us.

Crime in the Dark Heart of Space

Chris Brookmyre, Places in the Darkness

Ciudad de Cielo, humankind’s first permanent orbital civilian settlement, is a picture of responsible productivity. Industrious, thriving, with a robust native economy and (officially) low crime rate, it has qualities humanity’s sprawling, overpopulated Earthside cities desire. New security head thinks she’s taking a rubber-stamp job, until her first day, when someone takes a potshot at her. But even that pales when, almost simultaneously, CdC gets its first official murder.

Probably no genres are more innately tied to the times in which they’re written than crime and science fiction. That makes reviewing them particularly difficult when an author has clearly not been reading the current developments in the genres. British crime writer Chris Brookmyre has clearly been reading vintage Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, because his science fiction looks around thirty-five years out of date. His buddy cop narrative isn’t much newer.

Having not been formally inducted into her position yet, Alice Blake goes undercover to investigate this murder alongside Nikki Fixx. Ex-LAPD, Nikki is manifestly corrupt and runs multiple shakedown operations which keep her well-paid, while keeping CdC’s official crime rate low. She’s also the city’s only security officer with experience running a murder investigation. Which makes it puzzling when she sleepwalks through the most desultory investigation since Raymond Chandler started phoning them in.

This isn’t accidental. Nikki has a “round up the usual suspects” attitude toward crimefighting, colored by the fact that she’s in neck-deep with the criminals she supposedly busts. Alice, in her undercover persona, repeatedly leans on Nikki about the importance of law. Nikki, meanwhile, uses object lessons to show Alice how only someone who thinks like criminals can successfully enforce the law. Veteran noir audiences know how this debate ends.

Ciudad de Cielo, CdC in official parlance, “Seedee” on the streets, is a careful balance of rational ingenuity and moral compromise. We know this because Brookmyre repeatedly stops the narrative to tell us. Brookmyre is a master explainer, pausing his story to repeatedly explain how subsurface maglevs work, the space elevator that brings everything to Heinlein Station (!), the processing of food and other necessities in deep orbit.

Chris Brookmyre

Unfortunately, Brookmyre’s science and technology are as pointedly dated as his noir. I keep noticing pieces I recognize from reading authors like Robert Silverberg, Orson Scott Card, and Pat Cadigan back in the 1980s. His “dirty streets” pop psychology is equally dated. He fronts multiple, long-winded explanations why, even in space, people skirt the law and indulge their Freudian impulses. “Feed the beast” looms large.

Nevertheless, I could accept Brookmyre’s dated sci-fi and his sketchy postwar ruminations on human nature, if he’d put primary emphasis on his story. When he permits events to happen, they generally happen with a reasonable degree of punch. We get glimpses into the vulgar undercarriage of space exploration, the Mos Eisley of Low-Earth Orbit. Repeatedly, I feel something starting to happen, and get excited for genuine genre-bending crunch.

Then, whoomp, Brookmyre interrupts again. If he isn’t lecturing audiences directly through his third-person-limited voice, his characters lecture one another. This happens literally once, when an important supporting character, a university professor, delivers an actual TEDtalk about the nature of consciousness, an important theme in a society where neural implants are a career necessity. This lecture pinches, almost verbatim, from Sam Harris and Daniel C. Dennett.

While Brookmyre continues frontloading such information, I spend time trying to identify what sources he plunders for influence. I’ve name-dropped several already; you may spot others. The mere fact he has important events take place on a platform entitled Heinlein Station bespeaks just how dated his sources are. The events on that platform, incidentally, include members of a crowd going around a room introducing themselves. Talk about low tension.

I don’t mind Brookmyre’s familiarity with genre history. I myself still enjoy vintage Asimov and Silverberg. But dated references come so close upon one another, it becomes questionable whether Brookmyre has read any sci-fi more recent than Neuromancer. Science fiction and crime fiction, both dependent on current technology and social mores, usually evolve very quickly. If your cultural references are outdated, your audience, familiar with the tropes, can tell.

Shame, really. Because Brookmyre’s reputation as a “Tartan Noir” author precedes him, I expected something more earth-shattering. I expected something that would propel both genres he blends into new, adventurous territory. Instead, this pop-culture porridge will only interest readers who aren’t particularly familiar with either genre. Veteran audiences will get distracted spotting Brookmyre’s sources. There’s little else to hold our attention.

A Proper Lefte Bank Murder

Mark Pryor, The Sorbonne Affair: A Hugo Marston Novel

Bestselling American author Helen Hancock believes her Paris hotel room is bugged, but she dare not involve local authorities. So she contacts Hugo Marston, security chief at the American embassy. Marston doesn't take Hancock, her potboiler novels, or her suspicions seriously... until an actual pinhole camera appears behind a painting. This spy gewgaw traces back to an indebted American hotel employee, who turns up dead, crashing Marston's investigation into a wall.

Reading British-born American author Mark Pryor's seventh Hugo Marston novel reminds me of Inspector Morse, the classic British mystery series. Both feature educated, well-spoken protagonists whose gentlemanly demeanor conceals a roiling past. Both have subdued tones and cerebral characters whose occasional sudden bursts of violence feel more powerful because they surge forth unexpectedly. This comparison could be good or bad, depending.

On the one hand, Pryor writes with a pensive tone reminiscent of a primarily cerebral subgenre I haven’t much seen in years. His characters discuss facts, evaluate evidence, and have long conversations about, well, stuff. In a paperback thriller market dominated by antiheroes who love kneecappings and fistfights, this approach, with a primary emphasis on the puzzle, seems somehow both nostalgic, and a welcome relief from the constant action.

Not that the character is bloodless or boring. Like Inspector Morse, Marston continues believing he’ll find the right woman, even well into middle age. And when, in an important subplot, a convict from Marston’s past comes barging into the present, we discover his repressed capacity for naked savagery. One suspects Marston’s normally donnish approach to even ordinary conversations serves to shackle a powerful inner conflict between libido and violence, between Freud and Nietzsche.

On the other hand, this subdued tone, so welcome throughout most of the novel, does set a very slow pace. The number of important expository scenes that occur in bistros, while Marston and another important character chat over wine, becomes pointed somewhere around page 80. Especially since Pryor has a large ensemble of characters to reintroduce from prior novels, the exposition gets long and talky. Much bread and zinfandel is consumed. When there’s a body in the stairwell, maybe postpone introductions?

Mark Pryor

Pryor establishes an interesting locked-room mystery. Despite the impression I gained growing up during the Cold War, watching off-label spy thrillers, bugging somebody’s personal space is very laborious. Most remote surveillance devices have limited range and short battery life, Thus Marston and his multinational battalion of crime experts must unlock a mystery that could only take place within limited geographic range. They successfully find the bug’s receiver… after its owner is already dead, but the data must still be going somewhere. Evidence accumulates without any clear suspects.

Helen Hancock compounds these problems by her personal quirks. Her first scene establishes she probably hasn’t learned the meaning of the word “inappropriate.” She strives to emulate Hemingway-era stereotypes about American expats in France: sexually flagrant, workshy, and moody. She fears spies pirating her yet-unfinished novel, but apparently spends little time writing. Though she came to Paris for research, her labors apparently consist of wine by the bottle, hot stone massages, and indolently mentoring American MFA students. She flirts with Marston in front of his date.

This collision between Hancock’s histrionic behaviors, and how the evidence supports her paranoia, provided momentum enough to propel me through Pryor’s more sluggish passages. Fundamentally, Pryor cares less about what happens, than about how characters respond. One suspects Pryor might rather write highbrow character novels, but his training as an attorney, and the exigencies of today’s publishing market, make genre series more lucrative.

It’s somewhat cliché to say a novel has a self-selecting audience. Don’t all books, especially in today’s niche market? Yet Marston’s distinctive retro style, reminiscent more of Agatha Christie than Raymond Chandler, deserves mention. Hugo Marston, our protagonist, has the capacity for profound violence and coarse outbursts, especially when a suspect from his FBI-agent past barges into the present. But he’s primarily a thinker, a tendency conveyed in his dialogue and slow, discursive expositions.

I found plenty to like about this novel. But I had to adjust my mental rhythms to match those of my author, a choice not all readers make anymore, when television and Internet pander to our hunger for novelty. Pryor’s audience will want an experience that takes them outside themselves, an experience more like literary fiction than the usual genre boilerplates. I’m glad I read this novel, and will probably investigate Pryor’s previous Marston novels. But ask yourself whether this book is right for you.

The Usual Australian Suspects

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 18
Craig Monahan (writer/director), The Interview

When a police raid busts down Eddie Rodney Fleming’s (Hugo Weaving) door and arrests him for a stolen car, Fleming’s first reaction is to piss himself. Hardly the reaction of a street-hardened car thief. Also hardly the reaction, as the story unfolds, of a serial killer stalking the Australian outback, a predator stalking young students for the thrill of sport. But he may not be that either, as an excessively aggressive interrogator starts pulling contradictory stories loose.

Despite a brief flirtation with international fame following 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Weaving had essentially returned to anonymity outside Australia by this movie’s release. His debut as a staple of high-dollar American science fiction wouldn’t come until the next year, with The Matrix. This relative obscurity limited Weaving to smaller paychecks, but it permitted him artistic liberty to pursue intellectually adventurous art-house fare like this.

Most of this movie takes place within the confines of one urban police station, mainly a single interview room. It has, somewhat, the conventions of a single-set play, with dialog-driven scenes, revelations driven primarily by claustrophobia, and no clear act divisions. The aptly named Detective Sergeant Steele (Tony Martin) grills Fleming for hours, demanding information on crimes so grisly, Fleming visibly shrinks when asked about them. Steele rains down like God’s own vengeance.

Most of the movie turns on two questions: did he or didn’t he? And, do the ends justify the means? Fleming engages in surprisingly strategic horse-trades around his confessions. In exchange for a hot meal and dry shorts, he begins spilling details about crimes so gruesome that the tables turn, and Steele flees the room to regain his composure. But when Steele’s superiors ask follow-ups, Fleming insists his confessions were lies, calculated to end the humiliating interview.

Tony Martin (top, armed) arrests Hugo
Weaving in The Interview

Behind Fleming’s ambiguity, lies Steele’s. Fairly early on, as Steele sounds out Fleming, we discover somebody else is observing this interview. Apparently, Steele has a history of ethics violations, which his direct supervisors have overlooked because he gets results. But we watch Steele feed Fleming information, ask questions off the record, and directly threaten his suspect, all of which directly contravene Australian justice procedures. Steele is as rotten as the criminals he busts.

Writer-director Craig Monahan unabashedly plays with audiences’ loyalties. Fleming comes across initially as a shapeless nebbish: unemployed, divorced, living in a mold-stained flat with stacks of magazines and a pathetic goldfish. We wonder why Steele persecutes this poor sap so mercilessly. But Fleming’s confessions are too specific and detailed to have been invented spontaneously. Or are they? Even Steele realizes they’re contradictory and coincidence-driven. Who’s fooling who?

(An unused alternate ending, available on the DVD, sadly resolves this ambiguity. Skip it if you can.)

This movie is, essentially, an ongoing power struggle. DS Steele has the power to threaten, cajole, and coerce Fleming, confident he has the entire Australian justice system behind him. Falsely confident, as it happens. Fleming has only his stories to assuage the hot-tempered detective, but his words giveth, and his words taketh away. As Steele’s administrative support dwindles, Fleming manages to save his hide by playing both sides against one another.

Tony Martin, as Steele, is almost completely unknown outside Australia. He’s mainly done television and theatre at home, and hasn’t cultivated Weaving’s international audience base. That actually helps him with global audiences here: we have no baggage in seeing his performance. At times, he resembles Tim Roth or Harvey Keitel, actors whose characters are known for disregarding ethical norms in pursuit of their goals. Martin, as Steele, proves you can be right and still be wrong.



Monahan’s movie asks its audiences difficult questions about moral authority. Are people in power ever justified in lying to citizens who can’t fight back? Is it right to hang a suspect with rope he spun himself? When we have only verbal testimony, how can we be sure objective reality even exists? More important, this movie avoids the temptation to offer elementary solutions to these puzzles. To watch this film is to buy into its invitation to doubt the nature of reality.

This isn’t a crime movie. There’s no physical violence, no gunplay, no hard-bitten detective antics. Half police procedural, half psychological thriller, this movie forces audiences to adjust their rhythms to the pace presented, almost like a religious experience. Watching the movie, we, like Fleming, find ourselves transported to a world where words like “truth” and “time” have little meaning. And we return to our world changed by the experience.

Boston Murder Supernova

Peter Swanson, Her Every Fear: A Novel

Young Londoner Kate Priddy worries about everything; she has major anxiety disorder. Too bad some of her anxieties are real. Kate accepts an apartment swap with an American cousin she's never met, to escape the memory of the recent violence she's endured. But the very day Kate arrives in Boston, her new next-door neighbor turns up murdered. Kate tumbles into an investigation so intense and baroque, it threatens to undo all the healing she's accomplished.

Throughout reading this massively intricate thriller, I kept looking forward to writing this review. Peter Swanson crafts a complex plot, populates it with interesting characters, and kicks it into motion so that, the more momentum it has, the more it picks up. I really enjoyed reading this book. Then we get to the resolution, and... um... squeak? It doesn't really resolve, just end, and Swanson kicks the victory to the wrong characters. What a letdown.

The story alternates between four viewpoint characters. Kate is younger than her age, having lost prime years to an abusive lover's violent jealousy. (Swanson withholds exactly what happened for nearly 100 pages, but the suspense is undercut because the secret is explained in the dust flap synopsis.) Her disorder has her seeing menacing boogeymen in dark corners, a tendency she restrains with prescriptions and self-talk. This, sadly, means she winds up missing the real threat.

Alan Cherney lives in the same complex as Kate. His strange obsession with Audrey Marshall, the murdered woman, gives him insight into the investigation, but also makes him creepy. He and Kate have immediate chemistry; perhaps their contrasting neuroses make them soulmates. But the investigation's surprise turns put these two damaged people at odds, and everyone quickly starts doubting everyone else. As if murder wasn't intense enough, who could've guessed romance would make things worse?

Corbin Dell, Kate's American cousin, has secrets too. Last time he visited London, he left a trail of destruction nobody's yet cleaned up. He's weirdly cagey about his relationship with the deceased Audrey, and his motivations are contradictory at best. The more the police seek his statement, the more evasive he becomes. Soon, Kate worries that a mere ocean isn't wide enough to protect her from a stranger who might kill to protect his secrets.

Peter Swanson

Then there's the fourth character. Experienced crime fiction readers know enough to start a suspect list, and test it against mounting evidence, so we quickly determine who really killed Audrey Marshall. The motive remains less clear, and we wonder whether the characters will twig who their real enemy is before the violence has time to escalate. The killer dribbles clues slowly, and not always inadvertently, daring the others to act before becoming the next victims.

Swanson plays out the theme of different ways people see the same event. His story unfolds mostly from Kate's perspective, as she attempts, mostly ham-handedly, to assist the police investigation. Then suddenly, he'll shift to another viewpoint, Alan's or Corbin's or the killer's, and replay the same events with new knowledge, forcing us to re-evaluate what we thought we understood. By replaying single events through multiple frames, Swanson demonstrates the difficulty of truly understanding anything.

We readers progress thus, seeing the same events several times, becoming aware of the real story only by increments. It's a dark story, too: Swanson creates a Stieg Larsson-ish world of subtle, invisible brutality, a world deeply divided between savage criminals and desperate victims. Though I disagree with that Manichean worldview, Swanson nevertheless spins it into a taut, gripping yarn, populated by tragic heroes and ambiguous villains. I found sticking with his story very easy.

Then, in the final forty pages, it whirls apart under its own weight. Swanson creates an overpopulated climax, tosses viewpoint scenes onto previously minor characters, and lets someone else vanquish the monster. I won't reveal the conclusion, since somebody may want to read this book. Its first 285 pages are quite awesome; as I say, only in the final forty pages does it unravel. I just wish the ending had the setup's tense, exciting texture.

I can't entirely blame Swanson. Many of my favorite authors have difficulty writing endings. And perhaps he's set the standard so high, with his rising action, that he couldn't possibly craft a conclusion to measure up. It just hurts, after enjoying the book so much, to see Swanson's story splatter like an egg dropped on a sidewalk. These characters deserve better. They've paid their dues; their conflict deserves a proper resolution, not a sudden stop.

Murder at the Time Lord Academy

Sally Gardner, The Door That Led To Where

Young AJ Flynn has flunked almost all his GCSE exams. In a British meritocracy that values official credentials, that renders him functionally unemployable—before he’s even turned 17. Post-industrial Britain doesn’t value his love of solitude and contemplation, his fondness for Victorian literature and pre-modern history. But a fluke job interview leads AJ to his long-denied inheritance, including a mysterious door into pre-Victorian London. He also finally discovers his name.

On first face, award-winning British YA novelist Sally Gardner’s latest novel pinches elements of Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes into a fantasy thriller for older youth and young adults. But themes slowly emerge subtly criticizing Britain’s meritocracy, and “skills drillz”-based education everywhere. Young AJ occupies a Britain where he’s unqualified for adulthood, but childhood diversions are costly when you’re poor in one of Earth’s most expensive cities.

Britain’s exam system pigeonholes students into career paths and avocational opportunities at an absurdly young age. The demand that AJ know his desires and calling at age 16 is anachronistically quaint. Maybe that’s why AJ stumbles accidentally into smoggy, cobblestoned historic London, because it’s important he views an era where he’s already considered a man. AJ flits between eras, seeking a time and place where he feels a sense of belonging.

In that pre-modern time, AJ witnesses a culture where science is rudimentary, technology is unreliable, and “madness” is a cultural disease more feared than cholera. He meets a winsome lass as dissatisfied with her own time as he is with his. But the vagaries of pre-Victorian inheritance law, and a long history of conveniently mysterious deaths, threatens Miss Esme’s sanity and freedom. AJ brings modern skills to defend his anachronistic love.

But in his present, AJ also struggles with 21st Century problems: London’s pervasive poverty, and his mates’ mutual lack of skills, lead to Trainspotting-like struggles with nihilism and identity. AJ’s friends Slim and Leon have run-ins with rotten, disreputable characters, and both need to hide. Regency London seems convenient, but that world proves even better than useful. The low-tech city gives two boys with simple manual trade skills a world where they can flourish.

Sally Gardner

Seriously. Slim quickly ingratiates himself with lucrative trading partners because he has a skill both rare and valuable: he can boil tea. The social criticism is blatant. Modern London de-values simple skills, giving unaccountable wealth to bankers, barristers, and other brainpower workers. Young adults who simply make stuff belong to another time. One simple fluke, politely unexplained because “why” doesn’t matter, shows them a world where their lives mean something.

Is this therefore an innate criticism of Britain’s education system? And by extension a rote memorization school system, regardless of nation? Gardner tacitly rejects Common Core and STEM movements, just in how the characters relate to their work and skills. Simply knowing how to filter water makes unemployable teens suddenly valuable. In a time when simple mechanical skills matter, being young isn’t a disadvantage.

How old is a 17-year-old boy? Is age based on anything internal, or does it derive from culture? At that age, teens seek their adult roles, and in a time defined by manual trades and other limitations, maybe 17 really is mature and grown. We’re at our peak physical ability. But in an age defined by mental skills, when accumulated knowledge and skills matters more, 17 is too young to know ourselves, much less our place in the world.

But there’s a trade-off. Like many teens, AJ considers himself as a man out of time, but when he encounters the time with which he feels most comfortable, it doesn’t value the mental skills he brings. The constant evolution of labor markets has trended away from manual trades: what Slim knows how to do, and revolutionizes London doing, is done today by machines. Slim can’t survive in a brain economy. Notwithstanding his scores, AJ hypothetically can.

The very exams that circumscribe AJ, and define his combative relationship with his very angry mother, supposedly channel people into brain jobs. But the attitudes reflect a pre-Victorian, mechanically skilled attitude of what it means to be adult. What constitutes “merit” is decided by bureaucrats structurally out of touch with modernity and its needs. Modern and pre-modern circumstances which metaphorically co-exist within the exam system, literally co-exist in AJ himself.

This book was warmly received when first released in Britain nearly two years ago. Advance responses to its American release, however, have been merely lukewarm. Maybe AJ’s culture clash is too inherently British to travel internationally. Maybe this book mainly attracts Anglophiles like me. But I think there’s something universal happening here. I believe, with time, this book will find its audience, and its message will resonate, regardless of nationality.

Those Legendary Belfast Vowels

Adrian McKinty, Rain Dogs: A Detective Sean Duffy Novel

Everyone assumes English journalist Lily Bigelow leapt off Carrickfergus Castle to her self-inflicted death. But autopsy reports confirm that, somehow, someone murdered her inside the locked and shuttered monument. Detective Inspector Sean Duffy can’t believe it: an actual locked room mystery. Those never happen, but he just received his second. Is someone gaslighting him? Or are grim forces conspiring to bury Northern Ireland’s darkest secrets?

Irish expat Adrian McKinty’s fifth Sean Duffy novel references prior novels, but is essentially freestanding. RUC Detective Sean Duffy solves crimes in Carrickfergus, outside Belfast, during the heart of the Troubles, that period when Northern Irish sectarian violence reached its historic peak. His police work is solid, but he picks unproductive fights, which keeps him from rising through the ranks. His approach, and career arc, resemble a Northern Irish Inspector Morse.

Lily Bigelow followed a Finnish trade delegation to Carrickfergus, hoping for juicy leads about international development in Britain’s most underdeveloped corners. But her questions seldom addressed the Finns. She seemed more interested in scaring up a controversy surrounding public figures in London, a controversy spanning leaders in media and government. But her notebook is missing. To chase down her killer, Duffy must re-investigate her story.

This investigation propels Duffy from Belfast to London to Helsinki, and finally unto Finland’s Arctic frontiers. He gradually unpacks a massive multinational conspiracy to re-victimize those already traumatized by the Troubles’ persistent violence, victims wholly unable to defend themselves. I daren’t spoil McKinty’s big reveal. Suffice to say, Duffy uncovers a (very real and historical) cabal, not unlike a British Bill Cosby, only longer, wider, and far more destructive.

McKinty’s prose style takes some some getting used to, especially for non-Celtophiles. He utilizes the frequently terse, telegraphic voice common among the Irish working class, a voice so distinctive that the familiar can almost hear those legendary Belfast vowels. Very lengthy passages and fraught discussions vanish quietly into three-word sentences. Newcomers may struggle somewhat with first-person narrator Duffy’s brusque style:

“Office. Window. Lough. Coal boats. Rain.
McCrabban and Lawson sitting there on the sofa, Gregorio Allegri’s comforting (for a Catholic) Miserere on the record player.
‘I don’t like it,’ I said.
‘What don’t you like?’
I pointed at Lawson. ‘He has put a seed of doubt in my head. A seed which has grown into a virulent little shrub of doubt.’”

Adrian McKinty

Readers unaccustomed to Gaelic dialects may find this off-putting. McKinty’s sentences, where they don’t run one or two words, are often purely subject-verb, sometimes giving his storytelling a feeling like he’s outlining something he hopes to complete later. Yet readers willing to persevere will adapt, finding his stylings absolutely correct for a character who thinks in an altogether unornamented style. Duffy speaks briefly because he thinks clearly.

Sadly, for his smart language and concise historical storytelling, McKinty paints himself into a corner. Having chosen a historical focus for his narrative, an event that wouldn’t actually get addressed for nearly a quarter century after this novel’s setting, McKinty can’t actually change history. Though Duffy solves the mystery to his own satisfaction, he cannot resolve things legally, nor bring closure to victims. Thus McKinty’s story less resolves then peters out.

Which is a shame, because before that irresolute ending, McKinty has crafted a first-rate character mystery. Besides the procedural circumstances, Duffy is a complicated character himself. A hipster before anyone invented that term, Duffy struggles to remain intellectually and aesthetically pure in a world of U2 and cheap television. He idolizes Muhammad Ali, accepting grunt duty just to meet The Champ. He numbs his powerful internal conflicts by smoking blunts in his off hours.

Throughout, Duffy struggles with issues of character. His much-younger girlfriend has moved out, but they give mixed signals about actually being over one another. His former colleague has entered the PI business, tempting him with a lucrative paycheck, if he’ll simply leave his scruples at the door. Paranoia runs so pervasive, he can’t get into a car without checking for bombs anymore. Circumstances repeatedly remind Duffy he could enjoy a cushy life, if he simply stopped caring.

Maybe McKinty set standards so high, so early, that any resolution would seem disappointing. Which goes double for a mystery where real life chose the resolution for him. McKinty crafts a novel that’s really, really good, right up to the “sad trombone” conclusion. A story this good deserves a better final page. Well, McKinty implies Duffy’s story isn’t over. Perhaps he’ll get the resolution he deserves in the next book.

The Mean Streets of Faeryland

Bishop O'Connell, The Forgotten: An American Faerie Tale

This review is a follow-up to Once Upon a Time In Olde Boston Towne

Children and teenagers are vanishing nationwide. Poor street kids mostly: the unwanted, the unloved, youth nobody will miss. Only the initiated truly understand the real pattern, though, as half-fae changelings and gifted young wizards vanish off the streets. It falls to the fae’s newly installed Regent of North America, the terse, mononymic Dante, to track the missing and reclaim the dispossessed. But mysterious forces outside Dante’s domain array history’s largest dark magical army against him.

Don’t call Bishop O’Connell’s second American Faerie Tale novel a sequel. The protagonists from O’Connell’s first novel appear as supporting characters, mainly in later chapters. Dante, who previously served mainly as a convenient plot driver, becomes central in a gritty story that’s equal parts Jim Butcher, Dashiell Hammett, and The Boondock Saints. These books form a series, but O’Connell doesn’t comfortably rehash past successes, veering instead into new directions like few genre writers would anymore.

O’Connell tells a two-pronged story reminiscent of Depression-era pulp novels. In his first storyline, Dante pursues clues about missing kids from Boston to Kansas to Seattle, and beyond. He enjoys all fae-kind’s magical resources in his investigation, but all the resources of a tiny, invisible minority has its limitations. This procedure-oriented storyline includes oblique, and not-so-oblique, nods to popular crime serials like Criminal Minds and The X-Files. It’s sleek, muscular, and doesn’t flinch from confrontation.

The second storyline features the wandering teenage wizard Wraith. (Okay, her name’s really Jane, but in O’Connell’s world, the dispossessed give themselves comic book names.) Rejected by both humanity and fae-kind, Wraith makes alliances with “fifties” and “slingers” (half-bloods and untrained wizards) to stay beneath general notice. But grey-robed child snatchers criss-cross America, seeking unwanted, magically gifted teens like her. They seem to especially want to capture Wraith, for reasons lost inside her swiss-cheese memory.

Bishop O'Connell

Veteran reader know these parallel storylines must eventually converge, ideally around the two-thirds point. Our only question becomes: when? And how will Dante’s masculine film noir plot and Wraith’s free-form punk explosion transform one another? As with O’Connell’s prior book, this novel doesn’t wholly break new ground. Rather, O’Connell repurposes narrative standards familiar to most genre readers, creating a story that’s both comfortingly familiar and dangerously frank in addressing our modern society’s deep festering wounds.

Where O’Connell’s first book was basically a conventional quest epic fleshed out with Jungian archetypes, this novel is a modern crime drama made larger by the inclusion of humanity’s legendary fears of the dark. Both share the theme of struggles for power, but they disagree deeply about what power means. Nobody here wants to wrest control of an idealized Celtic afterlife; they’re busy worrying about maintaining control within this world, which often proves much dirtier.

In exercising his newly-won, and precarious, dominion, Dante sometimes uses his inborn magical powers: shapeshifting, crossing great distances through magical forests, ensorcelling mere mortals to keep his secrets. But when confronting a disobedient fae administrator, he also doesn’t mind simply pulling his guns. Sometimes simple hardware still works best. Dante’s make-do ethical structure sometimes leaves us feeling clammy: he’s clearly the hero, but we frequently don’t approve of whatever he does to maintain his authority.

Wraith is frequently a more reliable character, inasmuch as she doesn’t have underlying morals. Her code has only two tenets, staying alive and staying loyal. She occupies a world where Manichaean concepts of good and evil don’t apply. But neither do winning and losing. Wraith’s world has two options: survive, or get captured by grey-robed snatchers. Nobody knows what the snatchers do with the teenagers they capture, but the trail of bodies gives a clue.

These two ethics bespeak a Nietzschean will-to-power motive directly counter to most fantasy. Though O’Connell has previously demonstrated that eternal verities exist in his universe, they don’t matter much. Humans might face everlasting judgement, but O’Connell’s fae characters, the ones who really drive this story, have their destinies written by whichever Court they’re beholden to. This results in a universe driven by one ethical imperative, familiar from the Greek tragedies Nietzsche loved: Winners win. Period.

Thus O’Connell’s characters demonstrate some of the most cold-blooded efficiency in literature since Sam Spade slept with Brigid O’Shaughnessy, then turned her over to the gallows. And oh look, one of O’Connell’s supporting characters is named Brigid. Probably a coincidence. O’Connell creates a world where we judge characters by their actions, not their intentions. Sometimes this is cold to individuals (brutal deaths are painfully common). But O’Connell’s epilogue implies that, in the end, balance obtains.