The Ways of Evil Men

You have to work a bit to stay ahead of the Soho Crime Club offerings.  I finally got around to two of them while on vacation a week ago.  The at times-banal prose in Helene Tursten's The Fire Dance frustrated me as much as it did in Detective Inspector Huss did (the latest and first, respectively, in the Irene Huss series).  I tossed the book aside in a fit of irritation with the writing - or maybe just the translator, or even the publisher for letting such dreck through.

Next up was The Ways of Evil Men (Soho Crime, 2014), much touted by the good folks at Soho Crime, and accompanied by a sad letter noting the death of author Leighton Gage late last year.  This is the eighth book in his series featuring a Brazilian police inspector named Mario Silva who, as far as I can tell, is the Salvo Montalbano of Brazil.  Silva, Salvo, you know.  But he is, so they say, as complex as his Sicilian counterpart, and surrounded by a group of supporting detectives and forensics experts and coroners just as Salvo is, although they're not nearly as sharply and wonderfully satirically drawn.  I'm getting a lot of this from conjecture - as noted, this is the eighth and last in this series, and I generally dislike going out of order.  But you know, new year, new approach, say yes, all of that, so in I jumped.

Gage gets high marks on the Escape-O-Meter for immediately setting you down in the Amazon rainforest, with some Indians (which is what they are called in Brazil).  There are snakes here, and all manner of biting insects.  A father and son out hunting discover the rest of their tribe dead from poisoning.  The local do-gooder, Jade Calmon, who works for the Brazilian equivalent of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs finds the survivors, and is determined to get justice for this tribe which has so clearly been executed.  But this frontier town - hours from anywhere on dirt roads or via rustbucket planes - is under the thumb of a few local wealthy ranchers and loggers who despise the Indians, apparently not an uncommon sentiment in Brazil per the Author's Note at the end.  It is said that Gage writes with a strong social conscience, and certainly the residents of Azevedo symbolize some profound racism in Brazilian society.  Early on in the story, one of the landowners is found murdered, one of the surviving Indians is fingered for it, and things go downhill for the latter.  Jade calls in some favors and gets Silva and his team flown up from Brasilia to "Brazil's modern-day equivalent of the Wild West.  Life was cheap; violence, rife; ignorance and poverty, endemic."  (33)  No one is happy that the cops-from-away are there, least of all the locals, who have negative sympathy for the Indians, and designs on their valuable land.  It's all kind of sordid, there is even a corrupt and drunken priest involved, not to mention the requisite dirty cop and smooth lawyer.

The Ways of Evil Men is not high literature.  The writing is not the point, and the story here moves rapidly -  action, talk, more action, more talk.  There isn't much room for rumination or finely-wrought description. Few characters are developed very precisely, although they make their mark.  (Gage does provide a useful dramatis personae at the beginning, which is helpful in keeping the names straight.)  Yet in the course of all this activity, Gage makes a strong point about the lawlessness of such places, and the damage that modern society's relentless pursuit of progress does to the world, and to people.  This story is not just one of of environmental frontiers, but also about clashing cultures and even the bedroom battleground of of personal relationships as well.  Here is no Turnerian-democracy-creating frontier, rather it is an ugly and brutal decimation of people,  land, resources, and lives.

Crime of the Month

My first installment from the Soho Press International  Crime Club arrived yesterday:  Helene Tursten's The Fire Dancer.  Hardback, pretty fancy!  I wasn't wild about the first Inspector Huss  novel that I read from Tursten, and this comes several books on in the series.  Skipping books in a series is VERY bold for me.

Anyway, the book came packaged in black wrapping stuff, nicely wrapped again in black (the color of CRIME you know), and with a Soho Crime tote bag that says CRIME KNOWS NO TIME ZONES.  Alluding to the international scope of their list, of course.

My son calls it my Crime of the Month Club.  This will be fun!

Merry Christmas to me!

I've not been shy about professing my admiration for the Soho Crime imprint.  Lots of my faves come in those colorful little paperbacks - Dr. Siri, Sueno and Bascom, Inspector Chen, and so on.  So, I just subscribed to the Soho Crime International Crime Club.  I'll get a book a month (yes, I do have to pay for it, but it's cheaper than list) and big discounts off of their backlist and other titles.  You can sign up here.

A year of profitable reading

Hello, and welcome to the one year anniversary of Crime Pays.  I think I've done pretty well reporting out on my reading for 2012, and I look forward to adding on in 2013.  If you're new to Crime Pays, you can start at the bottom of the list to your right, last January, and read forward for all the gory details.  This time of year, all the other crime fiction blogs seem to report endless lists of a) the best crime/mystery/thriller fiction of 2012 (almost none of which I have read) and b) what's coming in 2013 (more to add to the list of books I will probably never get to). Not I!  And no New Year's Resolutions, either.  But I may see if I can figure out a way to post some of my travel journals here, since you may find them mildly interesting.  And by all means, if you have suggestions for good books, please do send them my way. 

At any rate, the turn of the year sees me enjoying the start of another promising series from Soho Crime, with Martin Límon's so-far-terrific Jade Lady Burning.  The tough pair of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are CID detectives with the 8th Army in Seoul in the early 1970s, and while they've seen it all, Límon's strong sense of place keeps the story grounded and compelling.  I'll report out on this one as soon as I finish it, which will be soon because I am really inhaling it.  There have been series from Soho Crime that I've not cottoned to, but man when they hit it, they really hit it.  Maybe this will be the year I write and tell them that, and they will hire me  on the strength of that letter as a senior editor who works from her home in Cambridge just twenty hours a week, choosing the next great crime fiction series while being a devoted and loving wife and mother and getting to yoga regularly. 

I'm also taking a little break from the dark stuff with Miranda Hart's Britishly sweet and funny Is It Just Me? (she's a kind of nerdier English Tina Fey- can you imagine), Jennifer Worth's Call The Midwife (yes, Miranda Hart is game Chummy in telly version of same), and the so-far rather melancholy My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss.  Crime, England, humor, and food are an odd literary mashup, but it works for me, in fact now that I put it together it is rather the perfecta of my interests (minus musical theater of course, but that's for another day).

On deck are Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (xmas gift), Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody (ditto), Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (more in the immensely entertaining genre of look-what-a-dorkus-I-was-and-how-I-turned-that-into-being-a-super-smart-and-wildly-successful-comedienne), Benjamin Lorr's Hell-Bent:  Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga (that's me, competitive yogi), and Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale (because one should just keep up with Kerr).  Possibly not in that order.  I'm also pretty excited that the latest Charles Todd and Andrea Camilleri books are coming out in January and February respectively.  Well, that may be another New Year's Resolution:  I will not buy any more books for the next week.

I note that in my introductory entry on this blog, I thought I might also note what was for dinner.  That seems to have fallen by the wayside, probably because if you really want to know what we're eating you can just friend me on Facebook, and there you'll find it pretty much every day that I cook.  For what it is worth, frascatelli with mustard greens tonight. 

Siren of the Waters

Life in a Soviet satellite nation just sucked, no matter how you lived it.  It was especially tricky if you were an honest cop, just trying to do your job and maybe get ahead.  Michael Genelin's Siren of the Waters (Soho Press, 2008) is reminiscent of Olen Steinhauer's unnamed-Easter-bloc series in how it so effectively displays this totalitarian bleakness.  Our hero in in Siren, the tough Commander (anyone with the rank of Commander has to be tough) Jana Matinova, has had any shred of hope or empathy crushed out of her by the last nasty throes of the Communist regime in then-Czechoslovakia.  Genelin's description of what the system did to her relationships is disturbingly believable in its intimacy and inevitability.  While I generally am not a fan of a lot of background story in my crime fiction, in this instance, this was one of the better plotlines in the book.  Given the author's background - describes himself as a "writer, lawyer, and international consultant in government reform" - one has the sense that he knows from what he speaks. 
Jana is called in to investigate a car crash that may be a murder, and may be connected to some really bad guys who traffick in humans around Europe.  To do this, she has to go to Ukraine, and France, and work with a couple of nice Eastern cops and some other EU types who may or may not be bad guys.  That plot line is not outrageously original, and even in France, with a really fine meal (in the Alsace, bien sur!) the whiff of autocracy accompanies Jana. 

And she is the quintessential post-Communist tough cookie.  Early on, questioning a dispirited street performer, Jana decides that the conversation isn't getting anywhere. 
"Jana held up the passport she had taken from Seges, opening it to the photograph of the dead man, holding it up in front the clown's face.
'Who is this man?'
He looked at the photograph, trying to decide what to disclose.  'Are you putting me in danger if I tell you?'
'Clown, your daughter is dead.  Who is the man?'" (12)

It is good to have more girls in the lead roles in crime fiction, but I wonder if it is hard to write them well.  Jana's hard shell is the predictable result of her brutal State-engineered personal experiences, and we learn this as her backstory is woven throughout most of the novel.   Jana is deeply ambitious, pretty much humorless, and adept at distancing everyone, intentionally or not.  You think it is hard balancing motherhood and a career here!  Yet I'm not particularly drawn to her. 

The backstory thread plays a tangential role to the main plot, by introducing characters who are the bridge between the two stories.  I dislike the back-and-forth style of incorporating the backstory, it is distracting.  And there was a certain jumpiness to this plot - now we're with Jana (in the present or the past), now with the bad guy(s), that made for a more thriller-like read than I generally like.  That said, the opening scene, Jana arriving to investigate a terrible car crash on a bitterly cold, snowy night, is terrific - a cold and clinical crime scene grabber. 

Ultimately, Jana's story a bit like a prelude, as if we must know all of this to really understand Jana, and now that we are acquainted, we can get back to letting her solve crimes.  But having read the pilot, will we be back for the next installment?  Yes, I think so. Soho Crime almost always delivers.