“It’s so beautiful,” she said, peering out at the valley.

“Yeah, Idaho is a beautiful state. But Blight County itself is a corrupt little place.”

“Corrupt?”

“Only in the good sense. Most of the politicians can be bought, but they don’t charge much. Even the poor can afford a politician or two. It’s very democratic that way.”

People have been telling me for years I have to read some Patrick F. McManus, and I see now what they mean. Judging by The Blight Way, the first book in the series, McManus’ Sheriff Bo Tully is a welcome departure in the world of mysteries and police procedurals. Here’s a book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

When Sheriff Bo is called out to view a dead body, hanging over a ranch fence and dead of a couple of bullet wounds, his first suspicion is against the outlaw Scragg family, on whose land the corpse was found. But why would they call the police on their own murder? Shortly thereafter, a shot-up Jeep is discovered not far away, with three dead bodies in it. Bo’s going to find out what happened, and he’ll do it the Blight County way, which means a lot of cunning and a minimum of pesky legalities. He has his crotchety old father, a former sheriff himself, to help out, and there’s a pretty new medical examiner for him to romance – he’s already romanced most of the single women in the county, without a lot of success.

The Blight Way is refreshingly free of some character elements I’ve gotten tired of (as I’ve told you more than once) recently in mystery stories. Bo Tully is a widower, having lost a wife he loved deeply. He was raised by a single mother, and never even knew who his father was until he was nine. That could be the background for one of those grim, damaged detectives we see so often in contemporary mysteries. But Bo is optimistic and self-confident. He has a good time dating, even if he strikes out a lot, and he has an amusing, cross-talk relationship with “Pap,” his reprobate old man. He’s surrounded by a colorful cast of citizens, most of them more or less involved in criminality, and he generally enjoys riding herd on them. Most of them don’t hold grudges, on either side.

The Blight Way was a fun read. Mild cautions for the usual things, but I don’t think many of you will be much offended by anything here.

That Stuart Neville has produced a moving, arresting, and troubling novel in The Ghosts of Belfast is notable. That this was his debut novel is amazing. Any number of writers would be happy to produce a work of this quality at the end of a long career.

Gerry Fegan is a former IRA hit man, legendary in his home city of Belfast. Since the Troubles died down, he’s been living a quiet life, drawing a salary (of which he spends little) for a government job which involves no duties. He actually spends most of his time drinking, because he needs to be drunk to sleep. His constant companions are twelve ghosts – people he murdered whose voices scream in his head. At last he realizes that they want something from him – they want him to kill the men who ordered their murders, as well as a couple of his accomplices. So he begins that business. The chapters in The Ghosts of Belfast are numbered in reverse, starting with Twelve, counting down as he carries out the ghosts’ commands and they vanish, one by one or in small groups.

At the funeral of his first victim he meets the victim’s sister, a pariah among the Irish Republicans because she married a Protestant, who has since abandoned her and her daughter. Gerry becomes their protector, gradually opening his heart as he touches, for the first time since childhood, the normal relationships of decent people. But his presence puts them in greater danger, and finally they all have to go on the run. Can Gerry protect them while finishing his mission? Should he finish it at all?

The Ghosts of Belfast is more than a thriller, it’s an examination of the complicated tissue of alliances, betrayals, and self-interests that make Northern Irish society and politics so complicated, cynical, and dangerous. It’s worth noting that a professional killer carrying out a vendetta is the most admirable male character in the book. Yet there’s sweetness here too, a sensitive appreciation of life and goodness made more vivid by contrast.

Christianity doesn’t come off very well, if I understand what I read correctly, though there’s no polemicizing against it. At one point Gerry specifically rejects the idea that he needs forgiveness, thinking rather that he needs “something else,” which the reader is left to guess.

I found The Ghosts of Belfast utterly engrossing and deeply moving. Recommended for those who can handle strong meat. Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.

My wife and I watched Certified Copy, a beautiful film by Abbas Kiarostami with Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, last week. It’s such a rich, moving film I wanted to write about it. All you need to know about the plot is that an English author on a book tour in Italy meets a French woman, both of them art lovers, and they spend the day in a neighboring village. All the tension I enjoyed in this story came from my knowing no more than that. What follows will be my attempt to talk about this film without spoiling any enjoyment for those who have yet to see it.

The first quarter or so of the dialogue is dominated by the ideas of originality and copies. What makes an original work of art uniquely superior to an excellently made replica? What is genuine? What is false? Is there a purpose in a composition or statue that the original fulfills but the copy does not? The two look briefly at a painting that was thought to be original, but discovered to be a recent copy of much older work. She is fascinated by it and hopes he will be too, because it fits the subject of his book, which is also called Certified Copy, but he isn’t. He tries to keep his distance from art, he says. It can be dangerous. I have to wonder if he keeps this distance because he is uncomfortable with that which is truly genuine, beautiful or hopeful.

The Englishman, James Miller, brings up another idea early on, that humanity’s purpose is pleasure. People should be free to do their own thing. The woman counters by saying people have responsibilities, such as family, that need tending, and she tends her own family with a bit of irritation. At one point, he continues talking about this need for living one’s own life while she is on the phone with her son, who can’t find something. She calls her son an idiot for not looking where she is telling him to look. He’ll find it if he’ll listen to her. Though they are not talking to each other, she and James are talking about the same thing. He is looking for self-fulfillment; she is telling him she knows where to find it.

She seems to tell him again indirectly in a scene in which she disappears into a church for a few minutes. He looks in at the door and believes he sees her praying. When he asks her about it, she shrugs it off saying she was doing something else, but the church setting must be significant. She is a figure of hope, a call for self-sacrifice, and she draws him to the church (which seems to either interest or trouble him; it’s hard to tell). In the same space, an elderly couple, probably married for 50 years or more, inches across the courtyard from the church door to an inn door. They are a picture of the love and faithfulness James wants know but believes does not exist.

Now, having thought this far, I think I’ll have to turn on the spoiler alert. Sorry. Continue reading Certified Copy →

He rattled his ice. “The death of friends, or death of every brilliant eye that made a catch in the breath.”

“Yours?”

“Yeats. I came across it in a book the other day while I was looking for something else, you know the way you do. Can’t get rid of it.”

“What’s it mean?”

“The lights are blinking out, buddy. Every night there are a few less than there were the night before.” He set down the glass sharply. “Let’s go out in the sun.”

I tend to think of Loren D. Estleman as one of the new kids in the detective novel biz, because that’s what he was when I first started reading him. But in fact he’s an old veteran now, a solid purveyor who unashamedly works Raymond Chandler’s old corner, instead of trying to put out big, thick thrillers about government conspiracies like so many others in the genre. He gives honest value for the reader’s money, and I relish his books. Among those, Every Brilliant Eye is (in my opinion) one of the strongest. It’s not a new book – it goes back to the 1980s, yet it felt fresh to me.

Amos Walker of Detroit, Estleman’s series detective, gets a call to go and collect his old friend and army buddy Barry Stackpole, who’s fallen off the wagon, out of a “blind pig” bar in a bad part of town. Barry is Detroit’s top crime reporter. The bar gets raided before Amos can extricate Barry, but he manages to sneak them both out (by punching a cop). The next time Amos sees Barry, he’s dried out again, but then Barry disappears completely. The newspaper’s lawyer hires Amos to look for him, because he has a date to testify before a grand jury.

Searching for his friend, poking into his affairs, Amos finds evidence that Barry had been writing a book about their time in Vietnam, and he comes to believe that Barry is dead, and that he’s dead because he was uncovering an old crime from the war. There’s police and civic corruption (business as usual in Detroit) involved, and Amos finds himself set up for a fatal accident, among other threats.

There’s real pleasure to be had in plain, old-school mystery writing, and I enjoyed Every Brilliant Eye immensely. Recommended. Cautions for language, violence and adult themes (including the hero committing adultery).

English writers are well known for mysteries, but not (so far as I’ve noticed) much for hard-boiled mysteries. English private detectives tend to the very cerebral, like Sherlock Holmes, or the very domestic, like Miss Marple. If novelists want to write gritty crime stories, they’ve traditionally chosen police procedurals.

But Keith Dixon has broken ranks. In the novel Altered Life he introduces private eye Sam Dyke (one assumes the name’s a tip of the fedora to Dashiel Hammet), a two-fisted shamus who works the mean streets of Manchester (and they’re plenty mean).

As the novel begins he’s meeting with Rory Brand, who runs a high end consultancy service that’s branching out into software development. Rory believes somebody’s plotting to ruin him, and he wants Sam to investigate. Sam says no thanks. The job calls for skills he doesn’t possess. Anyway, he doesn’t like Rory much.

The next day Rory is dead, his neck broken. And when Sam (rather guiltily) attends the funeral, he meets someone important from his own past. One of Rory’s subordinates hires him to investigate the murder, and there’s a kidnapping, and things get dangerous.

The prose is good, and I had only a few nitpicks about word choice. Although there’s one sour comment about Margaret Thatcher, there’s also a positive view of the business world that frankly surprised me in an English book. Sam Dyke is as tough a detective as you could ask for. All to the good.

On the negative side, I found him kind of dull. I know it’s a trope to make a hard-boiled gumshoe a wisecrack artist, but that serves a purpose, like the fools in Shakespeare’s tragedies. It prevents things from getting too dark, and keeps the detective from being a bore. Although Sam has a couple moments of cleverness, all in all he’s a dour fellow, and I got a little tired of him.

Also, in the final showdown, I thought he was just foolhardy, walking unprepared into a situation he knew he couldn’t control, leaving his fate to dumb luck.

Nevertheless, I thought Altered Life a commendable debut, and I might just read another Sam Dyke story.

Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.

I’m not sure what to think about Harry Hole (pronounced “WHO-leh.” You’re welcome), Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s series detective who’s catching on very well in the current vogue for Scandinavian mysteries.

In The Devil’s Star, Harry displays one characteristic that I’ve grown very weary of in fictional detectives. He’s a mess in his personal life. He’s an alcoholic, it’s ruining his job and his relationships, and he doesn’t care enough about himself to fight for his life. He’s a superior police detective, but lately he hasn’t come to work for days at a time. He loves a woman who loves him – and her son adores him – but he’s stepping back from them, afraid of commitment and failure, haunted by profound fatalism.

But it’s high summer, “holiday season” in Oslo, and the police are operating with a skeleton force. When his supervisor (who’s name is Bjarne Møller – an homage to the 1970s American cop comedy?) needs to send two detectives to a murder scene, he can find no alternative to calling Harry, and teaming him up with his worst enemy – Detective Tom Waaler, who Harry is convinced is not only corrupt, but a murderer.

The murder victim shows marks of ritual – one finger has been cut off, and a star-shaped diamond left on the body. Soon there’s another similar murder, and another, and it becomes a full-fledged serial case.

I was fairly impatient with the first half of the book, where Harry stumbles (sometimes literally) around, either drunk or hung over most of the time, pushing away all attempts to help him. But in the second half things start moving, and Harry comes to life at last, and I was pleased pretty well by that part. The final showdown was exciting and effective.

Attitudes toward religion are interesting in The Devil’s Star. Christians (Pentecostals and Orthodox) show up – I’m not entirely sure why, actually – and are not depicted as entire idiots. Harry does take one swipe at Christianity (unfair, in my view), but we are also told that he believes in the soul, and a formula he often repeats, “Paradoxes don’t happen,” is flatly contradicted by another character, who seems to know what she’s talking about.

All in all I liked The Devil’s Star better than I thought I would. Cautions for language, gore, and mature themes (some of them pretty kinky).

The theme song above will be familiar to many Americans of my generation. I was in junior high in 1963 when it first appeared on Walt Disney’s TV show, and it left a vivid impression. The Scarecrow of that series was a hero and a benefactor, a quiet vicar in a village church in coastal Kent who helped his parishioners earn a decent living through smuggling, while striking a blow against high tariffs (hurrah for free trade!).

The hero of Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh (the last book chronologically in the series, though first written – author Russell Thorndike had not intended to create a series character) is no particular hero. He seems to be a complete hypocrite in his Anglican ministry, as he is perfectly capable of casually ordering an innocent man murdered for “knowing too much.” He has certain positive traits too, but all in all he’s a particularly devilish example of what used to be known as a “picaroon” in fiction – an unapologetic rogue.

His Scarecrow costume serves a purpose – he rides with his cohorts in frightening disguises in order to scare people off the marsh on the nights when his pack trains are carrying contraband to and from the beaches. He is little concerned by the arrival of a naval ship to investigate smuggling in the parish, but a particular member of the crew – a mute mulatto with his ears cut off – sets fear in his heart. For Doctor Syn has a dark secret, and the mulatto knows it.

A particular weakness of this book is that author Thorndike seems to want to be Dickens. He loads his story with comical “characters” who slow the story down considerably with their long stories and speeches. Another problem (which I noticed years ago when I read the next book, Doctor Syn on the High Seas), is fairly vicious racial attitudes (though this was softened when I realized that the vicar was not intended to be a role model). This racism seems to be mostly directed at black people, as Imogene, the female ingenue of the story, is said to be half Incan Indian, and gets no less respect for that.

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed in Doctor Syn, but I still plan to buy and read the rest of the series. Maybe Thorndike will develop his character into something a little more like the one Patrick McGoohan played back in the ʼ60s.