One Blood

If you read Crime Pays regularly, you'll know that I'm a big fan of settings.  Sometimes I read books just because I like to immerse myself in that world.  It's like taking a trip there - I find myself thinking about Berlin, or Laos, or Seoul, or wherever, at down times during my day, pondering what it would be like to live there, then.  This is the main motivation for sticking with Graeme Kent's series set in the Solomon Islands.  One Blood is the second installment in this series, featuring a native policeman named Ben Kella and an American missionary nun named Sister Conchita.

That's actually not entirely fair, because it makes it sound like there are no other redeeming qualities to these stories.  And there are - the characters are, if many, still strongly drawn, and the writing is solidly unobtrusive most of the time (this is a good thing).  The plot itself is a bit tortuous and unnecessarily layered.  This story takes place in the western Solomons (a map, a map, my queendom for a map).

oh my god I am never going to finish this.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

The threads in this plot include environmentalism (foreign companies taking advantage of the local natural resource, notably through destructive logging practices), local politics and a Solomons independence movement, Sister Conchita's efforts to shape up a missionary outpost and its set-in-their-ways nuns, and - tying it all together - what really happened with the crew of John F. Kennedy's PT 109 after the boat was sunk and before they were rescued.  This last plotline was obvious from the get-go, and clearly derived from 2004 effort to discredit US presidential candidate John F. Kerry via the now-infamous swiftboat campaign.  In what I think will be a standard plot turn of all Kella and Conchita books, Ben sleeps with the gorgeous dame, awfully casually in my opinion.  A couple of bodies pile up, and it really takes to the very end - you know, that scene where one person explains what happened to the other, thereby solving the puzzles and tying them neatly together - to figure out why.  I find this technique something of a cop-out, as it basically allows an author to write a big action scene that doesn't make a ton of sense, then neatly explain everything to the reader.  In other words, it is a way to tie all the plot threads together at once rather than weaving them throughout the story.  Feels a bit lazy, I guess.  But then, I'm not writing this stuff so who am I to judge how hard that is?

That said, Kent has a good sense of the import of detail to character.  Consider this description of Jake Michie, the unhappy Aussie manager of the troubled logging concern:
"He was a ruined avalanche of a man in his forties, some six feet six inches in height and broad-shouldered, but with all his physical attributes beginning to melt and sag downwards.  Jowls swung from his chin like wind chimes, and a once impressive chest slumped obscenely to his stomach.  While his body drooped, the big man's face seemed to have a life of its own and had expanded sideways, although at the same time his features had shrunk to those of a carelessly constructed snowman, with two buttons for eyes, a truncated carrot of a nose and a mouth that was little more than a perfunctory slash.  His head was completely bald.  He reminded Kella of an extra in an Ed Wood horror movie.  (50)
It's overkill - I can't recall that any other character gets this detailed treatment.  You wonder if Kent had been saving all these ideas in a little file, just waiting for the right character to come along.   But even as I roll my eyes a little, I think it works.

And it has to be noted that Kent has a strong attachment to the place of the Solomons, and presents the setting as both a fabulous backdrop a la South Pacific but also as integral to the story as the human characters.  In other words, the story is what it is because of where it is - it wouldn't be the same elsewhere (does that make sense?).  The logging operation that Michie is charged with running is on the island of Alvaro, part of the Roviana Lagoon, also, apparently, where the PT 109 action took place.  And remember, we're only in the early 1960s, so not that far removed from the war.  The whole area was directly involved in the conflict so the memories and physical reminders are yet another layer in the story.  I think I'll leave One Blood with some of Kella's impressions as he paddles toward Alvaro, early in the story.
    "Kella stopped paddling and looked ahead at the ruined logging island of Alvaro rising jaggedly out of the sea ahead of him . . . The last time he had seen Alvaro had been during the war.  Then it had been as beautiful as any of the other atolls in the Roviana Lagood, and it had remained a tranquil haven for its inhabitants during the fighting. . . The passage of a decade and a half had certainly changed that.  Now the island was little more than a tortured scar, suppurating on the surface of the lagoon.  The coral reef that had once surrounded it had been torn from the seabed, leaving only a few jagged, blackened stumps.  The water surrounding them had been transformed into a slurping cauldron of hollowed-out oil-stained debris and floating mangled logs and rubbish.  The narrow strip of beach was little more than a series of dumps for abandoned, rusty machinery cannibalized almost into extinction.  Huge patches of discolored diesel oil mottled the scuffed surface of the sand. . . The coastal mangrove swamps, with their slender, distorted trees, being of no commercial value, were still in place and continued to ooze stinking mud and thrust their tangled roots grotesquely into the air, like the clutching talons of drowning witches.  The mouth of a sluggish river coughed gobbets of red mud into the sea where its banks had been eroded by bulldozers.  Smoke drifted over the island from dozens of bush fires lit to clear land in the interior."    (46-47)
So, again, does the author have another file "good ideas for describing damage of logging on islands?"  But he makes his point, and you keep reading, now a convert to environmentalism!

Sum-mertiiiiiiiime, and the reading is . . .

My bathside bookpile has grown enormously after my birthday - so excited to have the newest le Carré, A Delicate Truth on top.  But I find myself uncharacteristically too distracted to dive in immediately to his elegantly bleak worldview, so I may need to check in instead with Salvo Montalbano in perpetually summery Sicily, in The Dance of the Seagull.  For tropical splendor, there is also Graeme Kent's One Blood, the next in that Solomons Islands series although I seem to recall reading an interview with the author somewhere that left me a little unsettled about the series (I have a recollection of his coming across as a bit colonialist - but maybe my antennae were overtuned).  If it is winter that I need for a break I could always pick up Detective Inspector Huss where I left off.  I dropped it because it was kind of boring - everyone was so pleasant and it had a stilted quality that you sometimes find in translated works. Talking about winter, and cold, pretty much all year, I also started Melanie (M.J.) McGrath's The Long Exile, because I so enjoyed White Heat.  The exile in question is a forced removal of Inuit from the eastern side of Hudson Bay well north to Ellesmere Island.  I stopped reading after a while because I found it pretty dull, but it had a glowing review in the NYT in 2007, so maybe I should try again.  The reviewer found it mesmerizing; must be something wrong with my glasses.  

While stocking up at Porter Square Books for my son's camp session this year, I discovered Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens in the sale box, as well as P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction.  The latter should provide some good fodder for Crime Pays, and if nothing else, a brisk reminder of how really smart people think and write.

And these are just the books in the house; I have a long list going of things that I want to read that I haven't even laid my hands on yet.  Damn this working business.

But how have I come this far and not read any of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels?  Good god, this must be rectified immediately.  It may require a trip to the library, since the Wolfe stories are many and old.  

Wolfe reminds me that I'm starting to read a few food blogs regularly, too.  I like David Lebovitz, and Dinner:  A Love Story (although it veers close to cute at times).  I read Smitten Kitchen even when it feels a little full of itself (does a book deal do that?), and My Little Expat Kitchen (she's Greek!).  A recent discovery is the charming Miss Foodwise, who writes about British food (a whole article on a watercress farm - imagine!).  And I just can't decide if I love or hate The Wednesday Chef.  Mostly the former, and the latter is just jealousy of that damn perfect Italian place so get over it.  That chicken curry with sweet potatoes was pretty good.

Devil-Devil

You may find yourself reaching for your Michener or your Mailer after reading Graeme Kent's debut novel, Devil-Devil (SohoCrime, 2011).  Because, you might, like I did, find your taste for this part of the world rather whetted by Kent's congenial tale of a combo police sargeant/spiritual peacekeeper and a nosy nun in the Solomon Islands.  Maybe it was just the hugely refreshing change from grim old Europe, and the Vastly Important Struggles Between the Forces of Light and Dark that consume WW2 and Cold War detective fiction.  Maybe it's just that the sun shines (when it is not raining) and the men run about in shorts or less.  The women, too.  I've a feeling we're not in Cambridge anymore.


Our Hero in Devil-Devil is Ben Kella, favorite if complicated son of the Solomon Islands, brilliant mission-educated student, courageous fighter of the Japanese, police sargeant, and aofia, which is a hereditary spiritual peacekeeper of the Lau people who live on Malaita.  In other words, Ben has a foot in both the British colonial community and the native world, and as a result is really not entirely trusted by either.  It's that usual theme of the outsider solving the crime, but in this case, Ben has to draw on his ultimate insider status of aofia to find out what exactly is going on in the high bush country.  There's been a death of an old saltwater man, an old corpse has been unearthed and discovered to have also been murdered, the first dead guy's grandson is soon killed, an American anthropologist has disapeared and then when they start shooting at Sister Conchita, well, you know its going to get complicated.  Did I mention that Kella is under a bones tabu, placed on him by the old, feared and revered headman, Pazabosi? 
"Kella was suddenly aware that they were not alone.  Thirty yards away at a bend in the track stood a tall elderly islander with a helmet of grey hair.  It had been years since they had last met but Kella recognized him at once.  For a moment the two men stood with their eyes locked.  Slowly, almost reluctantly, the old man lifted a short carved bone onto which he had impaled a bladder of a bonito fish glowing with phosphorous.  The islander pointed the stick at Kella.  At the same time, with his other hand, he lifted a bag made with a pandanus leaf and rattled the contents viciously.  Abruptly he turned and was lost to sight among the trees.
  Peter Oro looked at Kella.  All traces of the youth's truculence had vanished.  Suddenly he was just another frightened village boy brought against his will into contact with the ghosts.
  'That magic man has cursed you, Sargeant Kella,' he said, his voice shaded by misery and despair.  'Now surely you will die!'"  (18)
Spooky.  In a good way.

A great strength of this book is Kent's effective portrayal of the culturally complex island communities with myriad dialects, customs, and lifestyles.  The scenes in the capital city of Honiara, on Guadalcanal, particularly reveal this, with a bustling Chinatown, various different groups of islanders, British expats, and of course, the missionaries, all going about their business.  We learn pretty early on that the Solomons expect to become indepdenent from Great Britain (they are in 1960 a protectorate), and that awareness lends a certain energy to everyone, since everyone's going to want a piece of the new country, presumably.  (In fact, independence doesn't come until the mid-1970s, and then it is really only self-rule, QEII remains the head of state.)  And the setting is terrific - there really are palm-fringed beaches, and coconut trees, and waterfalls going over cliffs.  Kent doesn't overdo the tropical paradise bit, but places you deep in the islands with an economy of words. 

But back to those missionaries, because they are central.  Our Other Hero, Sister Conchita, is a nun from Boston with a habit (sorry) of causing trouble from getting overly involved in local situations.  Here she's in it up to her neck in the beginning of the tale, being involved in the unearthing of that old corpse, but then she pretty quickly removes to Honiara, where she operates a little behind the scenes, but mostly sits out the exciting parts of the story back on the island of Malaita.  The back-of-book description is a little misleading in this respect, since it implies that Kella and Sister C. will be working together to solve the crime, which they are not really.  The final scene is a set-up for future books in the series, so apparently that's where the team bit will come.  Still, the mission aspect is in some ways the most interesting because it is a long-settled white presence in the islands.  In some ways it is tolerated much better than the British government, and of course in other ways it is completely disdained by the islanders, who have their own belief systems and while polite, aren't really ever going to take on the Praying Mary's. The best missionaries, in the sense of being the most successful at integrating with the local communities, are the ones who go a little native - who actually make an effort to understand how the locals live, with some respect and less interference.  In that way, they are just one more group working and living on the islands, trying to get along.  Kent's churchy crowd are diverse and mostly sympathetic characters, even if he does play that old trope, the crafty old nun (Sound of Music anyone?) for laughs. 

I did not like the relative lack of Sister Conchita (more nuns fixing the old jeeps please!), and the almost complete absence of native women - except as set decoration or enthusiastic sex partners.  Given that Kent is an older white guy, the happy natives enticing the men with sex just jarrs. One could almost say that what we've really got here is a madonna-whore complex, although I think that might be an extreme interpretation.  You cannot argue that Kent does not know his subject:  according to the book's bio, he spent years in the Solomons working in education and broadcasting.  The setting and multi-culti aspects ring true.  He is actually a long-published author and sounds like an interesting guy, you can read an interview with him here.  So, I'll reserve judgement and hope that the ladies show up, smartly, next time.  I'll certainly check out Kent's next offering in the series, One Blood. 

As an interesting postscript, I learned from wikipedia that the Solomon Islands went through a civil war in the late 1990s-early 2000s, and are today considered to be a failed state.  Or perhaps stillborn.  It is interesting to think about that against the backdrop of this book, which looks forward so hopefully toward independence from whitey.