Death on the Marais

I really wanted to like Adrian Magson's Death on the Marais (Allison & Busby, 2010).  Takes place in France, in a time not too far (but far enough) removed from our own.  Written by that Magson chap whose Harry Tate series (well, the first one anyway) I found entertaining.  Lauded by mystery bloggers here and there. 

But it just didn't happen for me.  It's not a bad story - two threads, one fairly obvious, the other the murder bit.  In the first, Our Hero, Lucas Rocco has been more or less rusticated , sent away from Paris in an administrative shakeup, to Picardie (a map would help).  It's not a punitive move, but he apparently regularly pisses off his superiors with his tough guy approach to policing so it is convenient.  We're told this multiple times, esp. via the irritating little chapter sub-headers that appear for the first half of the book. 
"Lucas Rocco?  Insubordinate bastard.  And insolent.  A good cop, though.  Capt Michel Santer - Clichy-Nanterre district." (10)
or
"Sgt. Rocco?  Solid  . . . professional.  Pity he hates officers.  But hey, who doesn't?  Capt Antoine Caspard - Gang Task Force - Paris Central."  (79)
or
"Rocco?  A gentleman.  A cop, too, unfortunately, but he always treated us like ladies.  Mme Viviane Bernard - escort services provider - Etoile"  (141)
These subheaders mysteriously disappear after Chapter 18.  But by then we get the point, good cop, rough around the edges.  Do I even need to mention he's divorced, no kids?  And saw combat in Indochina, suffering from a mild case of PTSD with respect to his experience at Dien Bien Phu?  Rocco also suffers from some very mild PTSD in his case caused by his experience at Dien Bien Phu.  This means flashbacks in the swamp, and while I don't mean to belittle the experience of PTSD or the humiliating French denouement in Vietnam, in Rocco's case it just feels a little shallowly written.  Why did he join the army in the first place?  There's an interesting side story with his then and now commanding officer in the new region, involving their shared past in Indochina. 

 I should also note that as with Harry Tate, Magson employs that most irritating of thriller fiction methods, the cliff-hanger chapter.
"'Because whatever took his hand off wasn't just a dodgy grenade. It was part of a detonator. The kind used with plastic explosives.'" (168, Ch. 21 ends)
(169, Ch. 22 begins) "Claude stared at him. 'He was using plastique? That's madness.'"
Irritating, too.
Anyway, surprise!, a body is found in a wartime cemetery, a young woman dressed in a rented Gestapo costume.  She turns out to be someone of substance, financial anyway, and how she ended up in a WW2 cemetery is the story. 

Despite the Indochina references, and the close connections to WW2 resistance, the story did not feel as deeply set in the mid-1960s as I'd have liked.  Other than references to old models of Citroën, and the relative paucity of telephone lines (land lines, natch), it just didn't transport me temporally.  Maybe I'm spoiled by Benjamin Black's extreme attention to period detail that drops you into the 1950s before you turn the first page.  Even the wartime promises, heroics, and betrayals that form the heart of the story just felt like they could have been 50 years ago instead of 20.  Consider this stock-ly sterile scene: 
"There were few other people about and no traffic.  A paper bag blew across in front of him, cathcing on a telegraph pole and fluttering in the breeze.  It felt like a scene from a western movie, where the white hat walks towards certain death and dubious glory against the black hats at the other end of town.
Cue a cowboy's lament."  (227-228)
Or a reader's.  There must be a better way to embed the sense of menace in a rural French town, than dipping into American film stereotypes? 

The one thing that does give a bit of a shiver is the omnipresence of UXBs from both of the wars fought in France.  WW1 artillery makes a wood a deathtrap, and WW2 shells open the first scene.  You are reminded of how profound was the impact of these wars on this civilian population. 

Red Station

You might feel a little guilty reading Adrian Magson's Red Station (Severn House, 2010) the first in his Harry Tate series.  There's no fine writing here, a la Benjamin Black.  What atmosphere there is, is oppressive and uninviting.  And Our Hero, Harry, is pretty straight-up:  no hidden psychological backstory for him.  Sure, Harry is angry that he's been relegated to a remote, off-the-grid posting in Georgia (as in Back in the USSR not peaches).  He oversaw a drug bust that went bad, not his fault, but he's in charge, so he takes the fall.  And that fall is to be sent to this unknown little remote post, staffed by a few others who misbehaved somewhere along the line.  It feels like a dead-end, career-wise, except no one told Harry that no one actually returns to active service from Red Station.  And now that the Russians are coming (really!), there is a bit of a problem for the UK govt.as to what to do with all these apparently misguided operatives who are directly in the line of fire.  It's not the fire that worries them, rather that even bad agents know more than we want the Russkies to find out.  So, who is after them, who knows about them, and how do they get out. 

I can't figure out why I enjoyed this so much.  The prose is serviceable, but poorly edited (do we need the word tits twice in one paragraph?).  And Magson employs one of my most-disliked mechanisms, the cliff-hanger chapter end.  I've never understood the point of ending a chapter in mid-conversation.  I'm not going to stop reading just because someone has put in some sort of artificial break like a chapter number.  The story even has that set-piece of spy thrillers, the desperate trip to the airport.  Finally, what is the point of the cover photo of snow-covered roofs?  We're not in Siberia for chrissakes.

But Red Station is a good yarn, moves fast, and like what I THOUGHT it was, MI-5 the telly series, is totally believeable in a cheerfully paranoid sort of way.  Harry's lack of psychological baggage is a refreshing change from so many of Our Heroes (up next:  Quirke, the master baggage handler, who offers quite a contrast).  We know that Government is behind all sort of nefarious schemes.  And, great to see the Russians as the bad guys still.  So I think I'll pick up another Harry Tate tale.  As it happens, I have another book next to the tub by the same author, this a completely different series, featuring a French detective in the 1960s.  I've given it a couple of starts, and see that Magson's inability to vary his prose strikes again. But the tale seems to involve some of la Resistance, so WW2, here we come!

Back to Grimsville

I was due for a letdown after my South Pacific idyll, I know.  But Peter May's The Black House was simply too abrupt a transition.  Twenty pages in, there has been a depressing attempt at teen sex in a dirty old shed in a deeply conservative town where nothing else happens, a horrifically, um, disturbed corpse, and our apparent hero trying to get his life back together after his child has apparently been killed. 

Yeah, I've tossed that the for the relatively bloodless world of a good old British spook, Harry Tate, in Adrian Magson's Red Station, "A Harry Tate Thriller."  Now, normally the word thriller would be enough to turn me off before even getting started (see Child 44).  And indeed, I had a false start here too, abandoning the already abandoned-by-his-agency Tate for Ben Kella and Sister Conchita.  The Solomons totally have it going on over the Essex marshes. 

But you know I love love love the British telly series MI5, and I THOUGHT it was connected here, that's why I bought this bloody book in the first place!  Known in the UK as Spooks, THAT MI5 team was led by Harry Pearce, who can always be counted on to make the right decision, especially when it means defying his superiors at Whitehall.  But you know what?  That was Harry Pearce and this is Harry Tate.  Now where did I ever get them confused?  In my own mind, apparently. 

So now I'm stuck in bleak Georgia, with a bunch of disgraced British spooks, and the Russians are coming.  Tate seems like a good man though, so I guess I'll stick around and see what happens.