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The Rise of the Green Hawk by Amid Lartane – political Noir in Algeria
The Rise of the Green Hawk by Amid Lartane (2007) Not available in English. Original French title: L’envol du faucon vert.
According to Babelio, we don’t know much about Algerian writer Amid Lartane. We only know it’s a penname, that he used to be a high level executive in the Algerian administration, that he now lives in Montreal and works for an international organization. I say he, but Amid Lartane may be a she, after all.
After reading his debut novel, The Rise of the Green Hawk, I really understand why he needs to be discreet. Since this novel isn’t available in English but only in French, I’ll use its French title from now on. L’envol du faucon vert it will be.
The book opens in Algier in 1998, at the end of civil war between the Islamic Salvation Army and the Algerian government, also known at the Black Decade.
Oulmène Makadem dreams of starting a new airline company. He doesn’t have the funds and well-intended people suggest him to start a bank which will enable him to finance his airline company. The Green Hawk Bank project is born.
Several powerful men who have their hands in many pies have a secret meeting to promote their next project: they want to support the founding of a new private bank, the Green Hawk Bank. They represent several areas of the corrupted power that manages Algeria. Lamine Boutramine, a retired general who pulls all the strings and runs or owns a group of men with key positions in the system: chief of the secret police, minister of Finance, VP of the state pension administration or shady business men.
Boutramine wants to promote young Oulmène to turn the page of the 1990s, show a new face of the country but most of all profit from all the money the business could bring him. Greed is the energy behind all this, for power and for money.
The main issue is to convince the director of Omnium, the state run pension fund, to invest the pension money into the new bank. He’s quite reluctant to do so.
Lartane shows how a web of relations, power play, threats and manipulations results in a green light to incorporate the Green Hawk Bank and fund it with the money of the state pensions of the people in Algeria.
Through flashbacks, Lartane describes the past of the protagonists and how, through compromissions, ambition, disillusions or naïveté, they ended in the cul-de-sac they are in. Former Islamist terrorists are owned by the power and do all their dirty business.
He demonstrates how a few men in power infiltrated all the areas of public services and private businesses. They bought obedience in all circles with bribes, money, positions but also through kidnappings and torture. Once a man has been tortured, he’ll cave to anything to avoid a repeat.
The story is based upon the Khalifa affair. Here’s a summary from Wikipedia in French. (There’s no entry in English, sorry) I didn’t remember it all, but it happened in 2003 during my “Nappy Years”, the years with babies and toddlers when I lived in a baby bubble.
L’envol du faucon vert is really close to what happened with Khalifa and is like a behind-the-scene footage of the events that led to the rise of Oulmène, a new but unfit businessman. Now you understand why the author has a penname.
L’envol du faucon vert is not crime fiction in the murder-solving kind of way but it’s Noir anyway, the worst kind because it’s based on true events. It’s published by the independent publisher Métailier, in their Noir collection. Although I’m late for ReadIndies, I still want to put this forward because I’m not sure any publisher would have published this book.
Honestly, after reading this, I wonder if Algeria or any country would ever get out of such a corrupted system since its roots are so widespread that it would mean replacing or changing the ways of many people in charge of key positions. All these people might not want to lose their power, their well-paid positions or the privileges that corruption brings them. Or maybe we can hope that the ones who silently disagree or who, like Sadek Bounab in the novel, are tired of living with a constant ball of fear in their stomach will change their ways.
If you can read in French, I highly recommend L’envol du faucon vert by Amid Lartane.
Third Crime Is a Charm # 16 : Wyoming and Norway, again.
- Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box (2004) French title: Sanglants trophées.
- Dry Bones by Craig Johnson (2015) French title: Dry Bones. Translated by Sophie Aslanides
- The Katharina Code by Jørn Lier Horst (2017) French title: Le code de Katharina. Translated by Céline Romand-Monnier
The last few weeks have been a permanent rush with little extra-time to read books that require focused brain cells or read other blogs. Again. So I fell back to easy reads and here we are, three crime fiction books in one billet.
I first read Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box, the fourth book in the Joe Picket series. I was back in Saddlespring, Wyoming, with game warden Joe Pickett, his wife Marybeth and his daughters Sheridan and Lucy.
This time the case opens with cattle and moose mutilations. It escalates to two men killed and mutilated.
Since the case involves humans and game, Pickett is included in the task force set up for the occasion. The local FBI agents, the sheriff’s office and the Fish & Wildlife services have to work together, not they are thrilled about it.
Box based his story on actual cattle mutilations that happened in Montana. He also uses contemporary Wyoming issues in his book. He explains quite a bit about Oil, Gas & Mineral rights (OG&M). The owner of a piece of land can lease them to oil or gas companies, as David Gran explains in Killers of the Flower Moon. In Wyoming, it’s the boom of CBM drilling. People who own ranches on the brink of bankruptcy can become rich, which is something ingrained in the American West.
It’s tempting to shake things up to make the prices of properties drop and be ready for the taking. It looks like a lunatic committed these murders but as usual, greed, hurt and revenge have a lot to do with murders, even if a very troubled man was involved in the actual mutilations.
This is another great volume of the series as it blends nicely Joe’s family life, the tension between him and the sheriff, political and economical issues in Wyoming (and environmental) with well-drawn side characters brought in for the plot.
After this new visit to Wyoming, I decided to stay there and read Dry Bones by Craig Johnson.
This one is the eleventh episode in the Walt Longmire series. I have the excellent hardback edition by Gallmeister, signed by the author and his translator Sophie Aslanides. I remember the lovely evening we had in a bookstore in Lyon when he came to talk about this book.
Like in Trophy Hunt, it’s all about money and money Wyoming people can make with the treasure buried in their land. Only this time we’re not talking about CMB but dinosaurs bones.
Danny Lone Elk is murdered over a fight about the sale of T-Rex bones from his property. Estimated price 8.5 million dollars. Who did it and how is what Longmire and his BFF Henry Standing Bear will try to understand.
We’re also following Walt’s private life and Sad news come from Philadelphia where Cady, Walt’s daughter lives. Their family life is turned upside down again. I wonder what decision she’ll make.
Craig Johnson says in the afterword that the idea of this story came to him as he was visiting the National History Museum in London with his grand-daughter and noticed that the T-Rex came from Wyoming. He started investigating this matter and based his story on the “dinosaur wars” that occurred in the region in the 1980s. (Wyoming but also the Dakotas) Reality always defies fiction.
For the anecdote, I loved that, in the final chapter where the T-Rex is auctioned, Craig Johnson named two of the bidders after his French publisher (Gallmeister) and his French translator (Aslanides).
In the end, Box and Johnson complement each other: Box deals with economic and land issues, with white people lives while Johnson mentions the Native American issue in the area and never says a word about the exploitation of the land by ranchers or oil companies.
I also turned back to the William Wisting series by Jørn Lier Horst and read The Katharina Code. It’s my fifth Wisting this year, I’m hooked. I was happy to be back to Larvik and Stavern, Norway.
This time, we’re looking into a cold case, the disappearance of Katharina Haugen 24 years ago. Wisting keeps in touch with her husband and visits him every year at the anniversary of her disappearance.
She left clues behind, and especially a code for something that nobody managed to decipher. This feels like an open file to Wisting who likes to revisit the case every year. He still hopes he’ll spot a clue or a connection he missed.
But this year, Kripos (some sort of Norwegian FBI) wants to re-open the case because new technologies brought a better analysis of the DNA clues found during the investigation. His agent, Adrian Stiller has unconventional methods that test Wisting’s professionalism. He also involves Wisting’s daughter Line, an investigative reporter.
I devoured this one as fast as the others and had a lovely reading time.
I’m looking forward to my next Joe Pickett, my next Walt Longmire and my next William Wisting. The three authors manage to keep up with an excellent combination of suspenseful plots, news in the personal lives of the heroes and good writing.
All have a great sense of place, incorporate natural landscapes in their stories and relevant topics of their region. It gives the reader a familiarity of the places and the people. We follow families in their private matters but also get a sense of the hot topics that impact their lives.
There are 25 five Joe Picketts, 21 Walt Longmires and 9 William Wistings. This means many great reading time ahead of me. Yay!
Good crime fiction is a real gem.
Third Crime Is the Charm #15 : Norway, Texas and Maine
- Ordeal by Jørn Lier Horst (2015) French title: Le disparu de Larvik. Translated by Céline Romand-Monnier.
- Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbø (2015) French title: Du sang sur la glace. Translated by Céline Romand-Monnier.
- Bluebird, bluebird by Attica Locke (2017) French title: Bluebird, bluebird. Translated by Anne Rabinovitch
- The Poacher’s Son by Paul Doiron (2010) Not available in French.
We’re in October now and I still haven’t finished writing about books I read during the holiday. So, let’s do a quick overview of the last four crime fiction books I read.
First, I was happy to spend some more time with William Wisting in Ordeal by Jørn Lier Horst. The author is steady: efficient style, well-drawn plots and a crew of nice characters you’re happy to spend time with. A good and entertaining crime fiction series, one of those you like to know about when you need reliable entertainment.
I also read my first book by Jo Nesbø, a celebrated writer who’s always at Quais du Polar, and yet, I never rushed to one of his books. Something kept me off but with our trip to Norway, it was time to read one. I picked Blood on Snow because it was short and I like starting with a short book when I try a new writer. For the record, this one doesn’t feature Nesbø’s main character Harry Hole.
Olav Johansen is a hitman and Daniel Hoffman hires him to kill his wife Corinna who’s cheating on him…with Hoffman’s son from a previous marriage. Yikes. Hoffman is a drug baron, it’s not the first time Olav works for him but this time, it’s not a business issue but a private one. He’s not sure he’ll be safe after this assignment, being in the know of the boss’ private affairs. Can he refuse the job, though? Certainly not.
Olav sets up a stakeout, observes Corinna from a nearby apartment windows and…falls in love with his mark. What will he do? That’s for you to discover in the book.
Olav is a cold-hearted hitman but he’s still entertaining because of his quirky ways. He’s obsessed with Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and uses the novel to decipher today’s life. He’s all over the place and Mary Essex would probably say his grey matters are slow. He had terrible parents and his childish mind seems disconnected from the horrible murders he commits as an adult. He makes it sounds as if he had stumbled into the hitman job the way one becomes manager of a fast-food restaurant.
Of course, it’s still a grime story but Olav’s voice makes it both bearable and horrible as he doesn’t really grasp what he’s doing.
Marina Sofia left a laconic review about Blood on Snow on GoodReads : Has a very French feel to it. Definitely. Must be all these parties with French writers at Quais du Polar that influenced Nesbø.
I’ll file this one on my shelf of funny crime books with hitmen, like Calling Mr King by Ronald De Fao and Nager sans se mouiller by Carlos Salem, which is still not available in English. Sadly.
There’s a full review of the Blood on Snow the blog I Read, Therefore I Blog
Now let’s leave the cool Norwegian weather for the sticky temperatures of East Texas with Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke.
We’re in Shelby County, East of Texas. Michael Wright and Missy Dale are killed within a couple of days. Michael is black and Missy is white and they were seen together before they got killed.
Michael isn’t from East Texas, he’s come to visit Geneva, an older lady who runs the only black business in this town, part café, part hairdresser salon and antiques shop. White people don’t go to her café. Black customers avoid the white bar, Jeff’s Juice House. This is not historical fiction, in case you’re wondering but it could be. It has the same feel as Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke.
I won’t linger on the details of the story because, even if the reader wants to know who killed Michael and Missy, the most remarkable part of the book is not the crime-solving part. It’s the stifling atmosphere of the place, literally because the weather is suffocating and figuratively because of the tensions between the black folks and the white ones. As if we were still in the 1950s.
The main investigator is the maverick black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. He’s on the verge of being kicked out of the force, kicked out of his marriage and drinks way too much. We learn a lot about his family background and the chip he has on his shoulder, one that feeds his reckless behavior.
It’s an excellent book, very atmospheric with good plot full of twists and turns, with an engaging main character even if he sometimes tested my patience.
And yet it’s very disheartening. How long must black writers write such stories of blatant racism and discriminations? How long will it be such an important part of their reality that they cannot leave it behind? I’m thinking of S.A. Cosby here too.
If I worked in the Tourist Office in Texas, I’d be worried. I read a lot of American literature and all the books set in Texas are not great publicity for the place. On edge Texas rangers on the border with Mexico, farmers, crushing heat, hard working conditions on oil platforms, oil pollution and racism against Latinos and Blacks, it really doesn’t sound like a friendly place to live. Just saying.
Now, let’s fly to Maine and meet Mike Bowditch, a rookie game warden whose father is accused of murder. Same country, very different atmosphere.
Mike is in his twenties and broke up with his long-term girlfriend Sarah and has a complicated relationship with his father Jack.
Jack is a professional poacher who lives in a cabin in the woods in rural Maine. He’s a drunkard and a womanizer. Despite all these flaws, Mike still believes that Jack didn’t murder Deputy Bill Bordeur and Jonathan Shipman from Wendigo Timberland LLC.
You see, Wendigo Timberland just bought some Maine woods they intend to exploit. As a consequence, they terminated all the concession contracts people had on their land. Goodbye fishing shacks, tourist camping resorts and holiday cabins. Some people have a lot to lose with this change.
Did Jack kill these two persons? Mike can’t imagine him shooting two people in a car. The police think they have enough evidence to charge him with murder.
Paul Doiron is from Maine himself and according to his bio on the back cover of his book, he lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine. In a nutshell, he’s the East coast version of a Montana writer. It helps with the description of the land and the sense of place the reader gets through the pages. It makes me want to visit Maine.
The Poacher’s Son is the first volume of the Paul Doiron series, which now counts 16 volumes. I don’t understand why it’s not translated into French, that’s our kind of book. Many thanks to the friends from Maine who gave me this book, it’s exactly my kind of read. 😊
And yay! I’m almost caught up with my billet backlog!
PS : I tried another cozy mystery, Date With Poison by Julia Chapman but I didn’t get on with it.
Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke – Texas Noir
Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke (1997) Narrated by Tom Stechshultz. French title: La rose de Cimarron.
I stumbled upon Cimarron Rose in my Audible subscription. Since I really enjoyed the books by James Lee Burke I had read, I was sure to listen to good literature.
This one is set in Deaf Smith, in rural Texas, not in New Orleans like the Robicheaux series. It’s narrated by Tom Stechshultz who reads it with a Texas drawl that gave the text another dimension but requested extra-attention from me.
It’s the first volume of the Billy Bob Holland series. He used to be a Texas Ranger and he’s now a lawyer in his tiny hometown. He gave up his badge after a botched up intervention on the Mexican border, chasing after drug mules and where he accidentally shot, not the sheriff, but his partner and best friend L.Q. Navarro. Now L.Q. Navarro haunts him and comes for a lot of visits, like a Jiminy Cricket.
Billy Bob has also an illegitimate son, Lucas Smother, that he never acknowledged even if the whole town knows he’s his kid. He’s a teenager now, raised by a father who’s actually a stepfather.
The issue now is that Lucas is charged with the murder of Roseanne Hazlit, a girl he dated. He didn’t do it, Billy Bob knows it and wants to prove it but with the way this town’s justice work, he knows that bringing evidence won’t be enough to change the jury’s mind.
Lucas is bullied by the local star’s son, Darl Vanzandt, a true sociopath who is protected by his powerful father. While investigating Lucas’ case, Billy Bob will step on many toes including a FBI drug investigation, and the Vanzandt’s criminal operations. He’ll stir trouble and put himself at risk. He also comes in the way of Garland T. Moon, a tough murderer who’s seeking revenge in Deaf Smith for past torture.
As the book progresses into the putrid waters of small town corruption, gossip, prostitution and crime, Billy Holland does his best to ensure that Lucas stays out of prison.
Billy Bob is looking for redemption for his past mistakes and needs to forgive himself for shooting L.Q. Navarro and abandoning Lucas. This pro-bono case is an opportunity to do that.
He’s reading Sam Morgan Holland’s journal written at the end of the 19th century. He was his great-grandfather and these notebooks document his relationship with his great-grand-mother Jenny, nicknamed the Cimarron Rose.
They relate how the family set roots in Deaf Smith, a history based on violence. Billy Bob is reading these journals and he’s looking for clues on how to leave violence behind and be a better man, the way his great-grand-father did. A tall order. That part of the book, included the excerpt from Sam’s diary reminded me of Dalva by Jim Harrison. The authors are from the same generation, have both lived in Montana, they must have met.
Cimarron Rose is set in 1997 but sounds like a novel by Jim Thompson set in the 1950s. Small town life doesn’t change much and the same forces are at play: rich people oppress the poor and trust the official positions, keeping economic, political and legal power to themselves. The country club is where things are decided. The sheriff is corrupt, the deputies are violent and influential people and their families can commit crime without being investigated.
James Lee Burke inserts the beauty and the violence of the Texas landscape in his book. His descriptions are breathtaking as the nature around Deaf Smith impacts the local life, the temper of the inhabitants and the atmosphere of the town.
We’re in Noir territory, all the ingredients are there, well cooked and suspenseful. It’s a first- person narrative, we see eveything through Billy Bob’s eyes. He’s a character I won’t forget. He carries a lot of weight from his past mistakes and tries to tone down the violence and follow his internal compass. He does right by Lucas now, dips his toes into fatherhood by spending time with Pete, a little boy from his neighborhood. He behaves properly with his lovers. In a nutshell, he tries to be a better man in a county rotten to the core.
Highly recommended if you’re a fan of Noir.
PS: Another book for my #20BooksOfSummer challenge.
Third Crime Is the Charm #14: Sardinia, Montana and Norway. #20BooksOfSummer
- The Illusion of Evil by Piergiorgio Pulixi (2021) French title: L’Illusion du mal. Translated by Anatole Pons-Reumaux
- DreadfulWater by Thomas King (2002) French title: Un Indien qui dérange. Translated by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné.
- Closed for Winter by Jørn Lier Horst (2012) French title: Fermé pour l’hiver. Translated by Céline Romand-Monnier.
Let’s open this 14th Third Crime Is the Charm with the excellent Illusion of Evil by Piergiorgio Pulixi. Alas, it hasn’t been translated into English. After The Island of Souls we’re back in Sardinia with Eva Croce and Mara Rais. This time, they have to track down a man called The Dentist.
The modus operandi is always the same: a man kidnaps a criminal whose trial didn’t end up with rightful imprisonment. The target of the operation gets their teeth removed and sent as a present to the victim who didn’t get a proper judicial redress. (Hence ‘The Dentist’) Then he sets up a poll where people get a notification on their smartphones to vote and decide whether he should kill his victim or not. He acts as the vengeful ringmaster of a media circus, enabled by the power of social networks.
Eva Croce and Mara Rais are on the case, and a prosecutor from Milano, Vito Strega, is sent to Sardinia to give them a hand.
The reader is dragged into a thriller involving a serial killer who acts and thinks of himself as a vigilante. It’s an excellent page turner, the plot is well-designed and the ending is realistic.
It’s coupled with an underlying analysis of the state of the media in Italy and of the effect of news spread through social networks. It’s dynamite, setting up mediatic wildfires that are difficult to extinguish. We all know that. But it’s not just about social networks, it’s also about trash TV, these scandalous true crime programs that throw people to the wolves when the case isn’t closed or hasn’t been closed for a long time.
Pulixi goes beyond pointing out that unscrupulous media feast on people’s tragedies. (This is not new.) He also questions the killer’s motivations and since life is made of grey areas, he shows that the killer’s side of the argument is not unfounded. There are concerning misfunctions in Italy’s judicial system.
The whole book is so plausible that it’s frightening.
To top it off, Eva, Mara and Vito are great characters, I loved spending time with them, their internal struggles, their past, their faults and their qualities. Vito reminded me a bit of Harry Bosch, Eva is still grieving her daughter while Mara tries to figure out how to be a single mom and a cop.
The translation by Anatole Pons-Reumaux is impeccable. He chose specific words to translate the vocabulary of the Italian judicial system that I never saw before. They sound a little Latin to me, like vice-questeur but I’m sure they fit with the original. The spoken language sounds contemporary, it flows well.
He chose to leave some words in the original Sardinian or Sicilian, depending of the speaker, and it translates the experience of the Italian readers to the French ones. I also had a blast with the humorous footnotes describing various insults with creative periphrases, like “Generic Sicilian insult referring to the genitals of the recipient’s sister.”
If you enjoy crime fiction and can read in French, rush for it. Very highly recommended. I’ll definitely read more by him, Gallmeister has already published 6 of his books. Yay!
Strangely Gallmeister didn’t publish DreadfulWater by Thomas King although it meets their usual criteria: crime fiction and Montana. This time, we’re in Chinook, in the north of Montana and the blurb is a perfect summary of the book.
Thumps DreadfulWater is a Cherokee ex-cop trying to make a living as a photographer in the small town of Chinook, somewhere in the northwestern United States.
But he doesn’t count on snapping shots of a dead body languishing in a newly completed luxury condo resort built by the local Indian band. It’s a mystery that Thumps can’t help getting involved in, especially when he realizes the number one suspect is Stick Merchant, anti-condo protester and wayward son of Claire Merchant, head of the tribal council and DreadfulWater’s sometimes lover.
Smart and savvy, blessed with a killer dry wit and a penchant for self-deprecating humour, DreadfulWater just can’t manage to shed his California cop skin. Before long, he is deeply entangled in the mystery and has his work cut out for him.
The same cause produces the same effect.
Like the Pulixi before, DreadfulWater has everything to be a good book: a great sense of place, engaging characters, a well-wrapped crime plot and a bit of social commentary. I didn’t know there were Cherokees in Montana, I thought they were in the Appalachians and in Oklahoma, but who am to say otherwise?
Thomas King is of Cherokee descent and Thumps Dreadfulwater is the recurring character of his crime fiction series. He’s a favorite of Marcie’s from Buried in Print and she recently wrote a billet about Thumps.
I’d love to read more of his books but they are hard to find in French or in English (except maybe in Canada). This was part of my Reading With Séverine readalong and I’m happy that we picked another great book.
The last book of this billet is Closed for Winter by Jørn Lier Horst, the first of the William Wisting series published in French but the seventh in the series in Norwegian. I’m now reading them in the right order, the next one should be The Caveman.
This one starts with a dead body found in a cabin after burglars ransacked it. Wisting and his team investigate what is obviously a murder but first, they have to find out the identity of the victim. The case is more complex than just a series of burglars.
The series keeps its promises and after The Hunting Dogs, it’s clearly a good series to turn to when in want of quality entertainment.
When I read foreign literature, I love to observe little details from everyday life. It’s a big bonus of reading in translation and something caught my attention here.
At some point in the book, the police is preparing an intervention against the criminals they are tracking and Wisting gets a gun as part of the equipment. He reflects that it’s been a while since he held one. Does that mean that in the Norway of the early 2010s, a detective such as Wisting does not carry a gun all the time? Interesting perspective, especially when you know that the author is a former police officer.
Closed for Winter mixes a good story with suspenseful threads and interlinked subplots. The police team is finding their footing with their newly appointed public prosecutor and Wisting helps her with media attention. Wisting navigates new waters with his partner Suzanne while checking on his daughter who, as a journalist, tends to meddle in police cases and put herself at risk. The setting, the plot and the characters gel well and reading the book is like watching a good film.
These three books are perfect Beach & Public Transport Books and Closed for Winter is my second read from my #20BooksOfSummer TBR.
Third Crime Is the Charm #13 : Florida, Norway, Texas and Sweden.
- Body by Harry Crews (1990) French title: Body. Translated by Philippe Rouard.
- The Hunting Dogs by Jørn Lier Horst (2012) French title: Les chiens de chasse. Translated by Hélène Hervieu.
- Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias. (2018) French title: Les lamentations du coyote. Translated by Pierre Szczeciner
- Buried in Secret by Viveca Sten (2019) Not available in French.
My March and April weekends were awfully busy, too busy to write posts and read blogs but not too busy to read. The equation equals to a big backlog of billets, one I’ll tend to with several books in one billet. Let’s start with four crime fiction books, all very different.
Our first stop is at the Flamingo Hotel, a luxury hotel in Florida where Harry Crews set the plot of his noir fiction Body. A bodybuilding competition is taking place in this hotel, the Miss Cosmos prize is at stake.
The retired bodybuilder Russell Morgan played Prometheus and turned Dorothy Turnipseed from Georgia into Shereel Dupont, a serious contender for the Miss Cosmos prize. Russell has his creation under control until her whole redneck family and her not-quite-ex-yet crazy boyfriend arrive from Podunk Georgia to support her.
Things turn into a shit show and it’s both hilarious, unexpected and a bit tense as Harry Crews keeps the reader on their toes. I expected a catastrophe each time I started a new chapter.
The satire extends to the hotel management, to another coach who breeds champions like thoroughbreds and wants to make as much money as the Agent Orange that is now POTUS but was only a businessman at the time. I mention it because it’s only a little paragraph in the book but a symbol of how far the fascination for the man goes back since the book was written in 1990. Weak signals, a bit like the offhand antisemitic comment you’ll find in a novel from the 1930s.
The information about the bodybuilding world sound real, like staying below a certain weight to compete in the right category and the rules of the Miss Cosmos contest. Crews shows all the sacrifices these athletes make to change their body into the standards of their sport.
I had a lot of fun with Harry’s crew of characters. I think it’s OOP in English, though.
Our next stop is in Norway, where we’ll spend our summer holiday. So, expect to hear about few Norwegian books in the coming months. (Recommendations are welcome.)
The Hunting Dogs is my first book by Jørn Lier Horst but it won’t be the last since my husband bought the whole series and I’m looking forward to spending more time with William Wisting, the police officer of this series.
In this episode, a court reopened a case closed seventeen years before. Rudolf Haglund was convicted of murdering Cecilia Linde and spent years in jail. His attorney says that the evidence used by the police were falsified.
Wisting will dig into the case again, looking for clues in order to defend himself and understand what happened. His daughter, an investigative journalist, will help him.
It’s classic crime fiction with engaging characters and well-managed plot twists. The two threads of two different investigations are nicely tied. In other words, it’s good entertainment, and I’m not surprised it was made into a TV show.
After Norway, we’re heading to Texas, on the border between Texas and Mexico with Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias. I don’t even know how to describe it.
It’s set at the frontera, an undefined zone between Mexico and Texas where the Coyote helps children cross the border. He feels he’s on a mission and under the protection of the Virgin Mary. It sounds like things have not changed much since Lonesome Dove.
It was written during the Agent Orange’s first term and first focus and radical measures against illegal immigration in Texas. I think that Iglesias wanted to draw attention to the horrors that happen in this areas and since his craft is pulp and horror fiction, his cast of characters go from boys to ghosts.
From a literary standpoint, it’s a good book, well-written. The characters have clear and distinctive voices, it’s atmospheric and all. It’s just that this horror story with horrible characters, revengeful ghosts and monsters isn’t my kind of book.
Since the author himself picked his less violent book for me when I met him at Quais du Polar last year, I guess we’ll part good friends but I’m not going to be one of his enthusiastic readers.
Last stop: Sweden. I finally finished the Sandhamn Murders series by Viveca Sten. Buried in Secret was the last one and for an unknown reason it hasn’t been translated into French when all the previous ones had been. Weird.
In this last story, a woman’s skeletal remains are excavated on an uninhabited island in Sandhamn’s archipelago. Thomas Andreasson (police officer) is on the case and his best friend Nora Linde (Prosecutor for finance crimes) is on holiday on Sandhamn. She’ll start an unofficial investigation while he does his job. We follow the investigation and what happens in their personal lives as well.
It took me a while to finish it but I wanted to know how Viveca Sten would close the series. I was left hanging, to be honest. She left clues in the novel that made me think the two characters would quit their jobs and that it would explain the end of the series but no. It ends abruptly and you’d never guess it’s the last one.
Looking back on it, I enjoyed the Sandhamn Murders and the author improved from one book to the other, shifting to thrillers. Many thanks to the colleague who pointed Viveca Sten to me, it’s a fantastic Beach & Public Transport series.
Next crime fiction book will probably be L’Illusion du mal by Piergiorgio Pulixi.
Third Crime Is the Charm #12 : England, Wyoming and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon
- Local Gone Missing by Fiona Barton (2022) French title: L’eau qui dort. Translated by Séverine Quelet.
- The Serpent’s Tooth by Craig Johnson (2013) French title: La dent du serpent. Translated by Sophie Aslanides
- Any Other Name by Craig Johnson (2014) French title: Tout autre nom. Translated by Sophie Aslanides.
- In the Capelans Fog by Olivier Norek (2022) Original French title: Dans les brumes de Capelans. Not available in English.
It’s time for the twelfth episode of my series Third Crime It The Charm where I review several crime fiction books in row. Let’s start with Local Gone Missing by Fiona Barton, a book I received in my Quais du Polar subscription last year.
We’re in Ebbing, Sussex, a little coastal with a growing number of holiday homes that remain empty most of the year. This is where Elise King, police officer, lives while on sick leave. She’s recovering from breast cancer and from her breakup with another policeman. Both occurred at the same time.
Charlie Perry is an older gentleman who lives in Ebbing, currently in a trailer while the huge house his wife convinced him to buy is under renovation. His wife Pauline is a harpy who doesn’t accept her age (74) and behaves like she were twenty years younger. At least. But is Charlie the avuncular old man he seems to be?
Dee is one of the town’s cleaning lady. She doesn’t gossip but she knows a lot of the townies’ secrets. Her childhood was rough and she has a new life in Ebbing with her husband and son.
When Charlie Perry disappears, Elise’s instincts kick in and she cannot help from investigating this case, share her discoveries with her colleagues and slowly ease herself back into her job.
Local Gone Missing is an OK book, for lack of a better word. The plot was well done, engaging enough for me to finish the book and see how past and present links and secrets would merge and how the story would unfold. It’s like watching a TV show, good entertainment.
Entertainment and escapism are the reasons why I indulged in two Craig Johnsons in a row: The Serpent’s Tooth and Any Other Name. These are the volumes 9 and 10 of the Longmire series set in Wyoming in the fictional Absaroka county and with a fictional town, Durant, that looks a lot like Buffalo.
The Serpent’s Tooth opens with Cord, a fifteen-years old teenager who shows up in Durant and nobody knows where he comes from, which is weird in such a small town.
Cord has never watched TV and is astonished by so many everyday life things that it is clear that he was raised in a closed community that a European would call a cult. Why did head for Durant when he escaped from his community? He says his mom has disappeared and Longmire starts investigating, finding his grand-mother in Durant and getting in contact with the community who raised him in South Dakota. I enjoyed Longmire’s excursion in Custer National Park and in Deadwood.
The whole issue is linked to a fishy business around oil extraction. Never forget that Wyoming is not only about ranches, horses, cowboys, Yellowstone and ski.
In Any Other Name, Longmire goes to a neighboring county, Campbell county where a policeman, Gerald Holman, recently killed himself.
His wife doesn’t believe it was suicide and asks Longmire to dig around his death. The local sheriff cooperates and lets Longmire do his thing, out of respect for the widow.
Longmire stumbles upon three strange disappearances: three women vanished into thin air in the area and nobody knows what became of them. Holman was working on these cases, what did he find out?
As usual, the Longmire episodes are as much fun for the investigation as for the cast of characters and their personal lives. We get reacquainted with Lucian, former sheriff of the Absaroka county, Vic, Longmire’s second in command and the whole crowd of the Absaroka county sheriff department. His daughter Cady is having her first child. It’s always nice to see what the characters grow into.
The books are very entertaining but you need to get into them with a healthy dose of suspension of belief. For example, Longmire is old (he’s a Vietnam veteran), he never exercises and yet goes into long chases in difficult weather conditions. Also, I’m not too fond of the romance between him and Vic, I don’t think it was necessary to add this plot thread into the mix.
I’ll keep reading the series because it’s pure escapism and Johnson writes better than many mainstream crime fiction authors. From a literary point of view, it’s good quality entertainment.
For example, Johnson’s writing is better than Norek’s in Dans les brumes de Capelans. This is also a book I got through a Quais du Polar subscription. While I wouldn’t have read the Barton by myself, I was looking forward to reading this Norek.
Victor Coste, his character from Code 93, is back. In this volume, he’s now a special officer in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. He operates a hidden house where former criminals turned witnesses are sent under the French witness protection program. The explanations about the program and its workings were fascinating. Norek is a former police officer and his familiarity with the system is apparent in his work.
His next guest is Anna, a young woman. She’s not a criminal but a victim this time, that the French police wants out of her aggressor’s way. He’s a serial killer who kidnaps, abuses and kills women. He’s on the lose and the novel is a thriller where we see Coste on one side, having talks with Anna and trying to learn as much as he can about the killer to help his colleagues in Paris and the killer on the other side and his new acts of barbary.
I couldn’t finish it. I’m sick of thrillers with serial killers who beat, abuse and murder women. I can’t read them anymore. I can stand an investigation after a murder is done but the chasing of a serial killer while women are in danger is too much. I still had 150 pages to go and it was too much.
I had to abandon it which is a tribute to the writer in a way. It was too realistic for me. It took me a while to make the decision to drop the book, as I was torn between knowing what would happen and not subjecting myself to a book that made me uncomfortable for no good reason. It’s not about the book, it’s about me.
I am curious about Norek’s new book though. Les Guerriers de l’hiver is historical fiction about the invasion of Finland by the USSR in 1939. The critics were ecstatic, it got several literary prizes and it sounds very good, but very bleak and a little too close to current affairs. But this sounds worth pushing myself through an uncomfortable story.
Third Crime Is the Charm #11 : Women stories in Utah, in France, Britain and Sweden.
- Black Widows by Cate Quinn (2020) French title : Les trois épouses de Blake Nelson.
- The Listening Eye by Patricia Wentworth. (1955) French title : Les lèvres qui voient.
- 1803, the Midwife’s Night by Anne Villemin-Sicherman (2023) French title : 1803, l’année de la sage-femme.
- In Bad Company by Viveca Sten (2018) French title : Sous protection.
Somehow, I managed to read four crime fiction books, all different and all about women stories. The series started by Black Widows by Cate Quinn and it was very creepy and left me reeling.
Blake Nelson is murdered on his property in the desert in Utah. This old farm is off the map, not a lot of people knew that he and his three wives lived there. Yes, Blake Nelson is a Mormon extremist, a polygamist who lives on the edge of the Mormon community. Who killed him?
His three wives, Rachel, Emily, and Tina are prime suspects. Nobody knew the area but them. As they are brought to the police for a thorough questioning, we discover their way-of-life, Rachel’s bleak past in a cult and Emily’s and Tina’s broken families. Blake Nelson preyed on vulnerable women. He was fascinated by Rachel’s father founder of the cult that was broken by a police investigation.
With Blake’s domineering presence gone, the three wives start thinking on their own and team up to understand what happened to their husband.
The whole story is creepy as we are taken in a world where women are abused physically and mentally, treated like servants, and forced to live in squalid conditions. Sex slaves, work slaves and prisoners in their own homes.
The book also comes back to Rachel’s past in her parents’ cult and everything in it is awful, humiliating, and abusive. Sadly, the author did her research and based part of her book on real events. *shudders*
It’s a good crime fiction book but not one that will entertain you. I felt dirty after reading about these crazy religious and survivalist men.
The I read book of the four, The Listening Eye by Patricia Wentworth, with the unforgettable Miss Silver.
She’s always sharp, knitting, making people talk and comfort them with the ultimate British pick-me-up, a cup of tea or in desperate times, brandy. Inspector Frank Abbott is the one who describes her the best:
She was, he considered, a period piece, from her Edwardian hair style with its controlling net to her beaded shoes of a smaller size than is usual today, and from her admiration for the late Lord Tennyson to the stock of elevated maxims which he was in the habit of referring to as Maudie’s Moralities.
In this episode, Miss Paulina Paine “overhears” two men talking about a robbery. Paulina is deaf but reads perfectly on the lips and the criminals understand that she caught their conversation. She conveniently dies in a bus accident, after confiding to Miss Silver, who will investigate and solve the mystery. Of course.
I got from this book exactly what I was looking for: an engaging plot with great characters and all of Miss Silver’s little quirks that make the reader fond of her. Excellent entertainment, Beach & Public Transport book at its finest.
The next book of this crime fiction roll is 1803, the Midwife’s Night by Anne Villemin-Sicherman, also an excellent book for escapism. It’s set in Metz, in 1803, after Napoléon came to power.
It’s a historical crime fiction novel that mixes read characters and events with fictional ones. The real event is the stay of Madame de Staël in Metz, when she was on her way to Germany.
The fictional characters are Albert Montfort, commissaire, head of the police department and his wife Victoire, one of the first midwives trained in the new school for midwife that opened in Paris.
The book mixes an investigation about a murder, as Victoire does a bit of sleuthing as she enters homes as a midwife but also describes perfectly the political atmosphere of the time, as the new Napoleonic regime settles its power everywhere. The monarchists are still plotting against the new regime and part of the Catholic Church would also love to see a king come back to power.
Metz is a city I love and it was fantastic to walk around the town with Victoire, in streets and plazas that still exist. The author is a gynecologist fascinated with history. She combined her passions in this new series and I truly enjoyed reading her book.
And last, but not least, the ninth book of Viveca Sten’s Sandham Murders series, In Bad Company with Nora and Thomas as main protagonists.
Nora is a prosecutor at the Second Chamber of the Swedish Financial Crimes, which tracks down financial criminals. She’s currently after Andreis Kovăc for drug dealing and money laundering.
Thomas comes into the picture when Kovăc beats his wife Mina so badly she almost died. She escapes from their home with their baby boy and Nora finds her a place to stay at a woman’s shelter.
The whole book is a thriller where Nora and Thomas look for enough clues to put Andreis behind bars and race against the clock as his rage spreads around him and reaches Mina’s family and his own clan.
Kovăc was a child when his family fled the combats in Bosnia and found asylum in Sweden. Viveca Sten chooses to insert chapters about his early life in Bosnia and the violence he witnessed to explain (but not excuse) his behavior. It remined me that we don’t address refugees’ psychological traumas well-enough when they arrive.
It took me months to read this book because it felt oppressive. I couldn’t stand to read what would happen to Mina, as I was dreading a terrible fate for her at every turn of page. I couldn’t read it at night and dreaded to go back to it as the atmosphere was so claustrophobic.
My strong response to it is a compliment to Viveca Sten who managed to draw such a realistic picture and story. Feminicides and violence to women make me emotional and I’m not sure I can stand that kind of book anymore, however good it is.
I still have the last book of the Sandham Murders to read and I’ll finish it because I want to know how the series ends and where Nora and Thomas stand at the end of the series
That’s all for this Third Crime Is a Charm episode. I keep reading crime fiction, so there’ll be other ones.
PS: Considering the spineless surrendering or offensive adhesion to extreme right ideas by some US tech moguls that-shall-not-be-named, I have removed the X, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads share buttons from my blog. I don’t want any of my billets on these sites anymore. Please don’t share the content I write on these sites and IG. Money is the only language they speak fluently. Data is what make them money and I don’t want to add my data to their loot. Thanks! 🙂
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby – brilliant
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby (2021) French title: La colère. Translated by Pierre Szczeciner
I got my copy of Razoblade Tears signed at Quais du Polar in the Spring, after I was blown away by All The Sinners Bleed. I was eager to read other books by S.A. Cosby and Razorblade Tears didn’t disappoint.
We’re in West Virginia. Isaiah Randolph and Derek Jenkins have just been murdered because they were gay, leaving their little girl an orphan. We don’t know for sure if it was a crime solely linked to their sexual orientation or if it has something to do with Isaiah’s job as a journalist.
Their fathers Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins think that the police aren’t working fast enough to find the murderer of their sons and they decide to take the matter into their own hands. They soon have very violent bikers after them, the ones who were hired on a mission that involved killing Isaiah and Derek. Indeed, a local hotshot wants to hide a particularly embarrassing secret.
A bloodbath ensues as they fight against ruthless bikers. (I have a higher tolerance for violence on the page than I have on screen, because I can skip paragraphs if I feel uncomfortable).
The bikers never imagined that the two grandpas were a duet of a former gang member and a sick man who has nothing to lose. Things don’t go according to their plan at all and the pair of fifty-year-old are a lot more ready for battle and crime-savvy than expected.
That’s the crime fiction plot but as usual in literary crime fiction, there’s more.
S.A. Cosby draws a beautiful portrait of these two men who are seeking revenge for their sons’ deaths and redemption for themselves. Neither of them was supportive of their son when they came out. They have insulted them, fought with them, and refused to attend their wedding. They are not likeable characters and they only discovered how deeply they loved their sons when it was way too late. Too late to make amends, too late to have a good relationship with these two lovely young men.
Ike used to be in a gang and missed part of Isaiah’s childhood because he was in prison. When he was released, he settled down for his family’s sake. He founded a landscaping company. He tamed the violent side of his personality to take care of his family and now runs a successful business. Ike is a bit unsettled by how quickly he becomes pre-landscaping Ike again. All the reflexes from his life as a criminal come back easily, too easily.
Buddy Lee is an alcoholic who lives in a trailer park. He can’t hold a job, his ex-wife, Derek’s mother left him to marry a local politician. He’s very-ill and he doesn’t care about what happens to him now. He’s the one who forces Ike’s hand into investigating the murder by themselves.
Their investigation leads them into their late sons’ life and they see a happy and healthy young couple. They realize way too late that their sons’ homosexuality wasn’t such a big issue after all. They now have a hard time forgiving themselves for their inacceptable attitude towards their sons.
Besides their epiphany about their sons and the bitter regrets about their homophobic behavior, the two men build an odd kind of friendship. They don’t have anything in common besides their sons’ marriage and their appalling response to it.
Working with Ike on this investigation makes Buddy Lee understand what it means to be a black man in West Virginia. His newfound proximity with Ike and his family shows him their quotidian and their ingrained reflexes to protect themselves from racism.
For example, Ike sends Buddy Lee ask questions in a white neighborhood, a Trump one he says, and Buddy Lee acknowledges that it was better that he and not Ike knocked on doors to enquire about their sons. After breaking into someone’s house, police officers arrive on the premises, Buddy Lee can’t help thinking that, had he been black, he would have been assaulted or killed by the police. Racism isn’t the main topic of the book but it goes along with the experience of the two men: they learn empathy and tolerance.
Let’s be clear. This is not a Hallmark movie dripping with good feelings. The sons are still dead, Ike and Buddy Lee are improving but still have a horrible past; there’s hope for them, that’s all.
S.A. Cosby has lived in West Virginia his whole life, just like David Joy comes from North Carolina. Both writers – who share the same publisher in France—write books set in their own State, with a great sense of place. They write crime page turners that include an excellent social commentary.
Highly recommended.
Third Crime is the Charm #10 : China, Britain and Ancient Egypt
- Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong. (2000) French title: Mort d’une héroine rouge.
- Through the Wall by Patricia Wentworth (1950) French title : A travers le mur
- The Masque of Ra by Paul C. Doherty (1998) French title: Sous le masque de Rê. Translated by Régina Langer.
September and October have been incredibly busy months at work and I turned to easy crime fiction for entertainment. Big TBRs are comforting, you know you’ll always find something that’ll suit your mood.
I started with Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xialong, the first volume of his Chief Inspector Chen Cao series. It’s set in Shanghai in 1990, just after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Deng Xiaoping is in power, and China is moving toward a more capitalist economy.
Chief Inspector Chen is head of the special case squad, Homicide Division, Shanghai Police Bureau and “Special,” (…) was applied when the bureau had to adjust its focus to meet political needs. He’s a policeman who ended up in this career because the Party assigned him to this job. His real call is writing poetry. He’s doing it in his spare time, he’s a bit famous for it and he’s also a translator of anglophone crime fiction.
He’s in his early thirties, still single which raises questions, and has just been allotted an apartment, a hot commodity in Shanghai. His colleagues are rather jealous of it.
The crime plot is about the murder of Guan Hongying, a “red heroine”, meaning a model worker praised by the Party.
Qiu Xiaolong describes Shanghai very well, its housing issues, its traffic jam, and its new-found love for market economy. He also shows how the country is turning a new leaf, leaving old Party dogmas to a more open economy and what it means for people who believed in the Party and its politics. People are also scarred by the Cultural Revolution and where they spent these years is part of their resume.
Death of a Red Heroine is a crime fiction book whose pace is more Tai Chi than cross-fit but still enjoyable. Inspector Chen keeps quoting classic Chinese poets and writing his own poems while solving the crime which is rather unusual. I was invested in his private life and how political scrutiny puts him under pressure. Qiu Xialong shows well how China is changing at this pivotal time.
I’m curious to see where the series will go, so I’d like to read another one.
The second cozy crime was Through the Wall by Patricia Wentworth that I picked for Spinster September hosted by Simon but I didn’t manage to write my billet on time.
In this episode, Marian Brand, a young and poor woman suddenly inherits Uncle Martin’s fortune, an uncle she never met because he had fallen out with his brother, Marian’s father. Marian and her sister Ina move in the late uncle’s house, to the current occupants’ dismay. Indeed, another part of the family used to mooch off Uncle Martin and they are still shocked and angry that his money went to Marian.
When a guest is found dead at the house, Miss Silver starts working her magic.
I really like Miss Silver, her constant knitting for her grand-nephews while observing everyone keenly. Everyone underestimates her, except the police. She’s an outmoded spinster, raised at the end of the Victorian era who loves Tennyson and has a precise notion of how people should behave. She’s not judgmental but she’s a remnant of the 19th C vision of life, like Miss Marple.
Patricia Wentworth is different from Agatha Christie though because there’s always a hint of romance in her books and she’s rather playful. In Through the Wall, the cat of the house, Mactavish is a funny side-character, who is both snotty and mischievous. Wentworth has a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that makes the reader chuckle…
Crisp did not exactly sniff. He merely gave the impression that he might have done so if he had belonged to the sniffing sex.
…even if the characters in the story are evil enough to have a killer among them.
The deliciously outdated vibe also comes from the description of clothes and make up. When I read this: the removal of her black afternoon dress displayed pink silk cam-knickers with French legs., I thought “what the hell is that?” (For the record, Google helped me solve the mystery.)
When she describes Marian like this: The fine, even skin was untouched by rouge, the well-cut lips were innocent of lipstick., the author conveys Marian’s appearance and gives her opinion on makeup and the girls who use it. It’s a conservative view that I find amusing and annoying. Let’s not forget what women’s lives were in the late 1940s. Not something I’m nostalgic about.
Anyway. I read many books by Patricia Wentworth when the kids were toddlers and I was exhausted all the time. It was easy, fun cozy crime and this one didn’t disappoint.
Then I picked The Masque of Ra by Paul C. Doherty off the shelf.
It’s set when Pharoah Tuthmose II died and his wife Hatshepsut came into power. (around 1500 BC) Judge Amerotke is appointed to investigate Tuthmose II’s death and several murders occur in the Pharoah’s palace. Amerotke needs to navigate the political issues and still lead an honest investigation. Caution and diplomacy are necessary as well a quick-witted mind.
Now that I think about it, Amerotke and Inspector Chen Cao need the same political acumen to keep investigating their case and accomodate their political leaders.
I would have loved The Masque of Ra in my teens, when I was reading books by Christian Jacq. I’m not into this kind of books anymore but it’s still good entertainment. Recommended for teens who are fascinated by Ancient Egypt as the descriptions of the palaces, the temples, the Nile and the pyramid will make them travel back in time.
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane – Plot, style, engaging characters and sense of place.
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001) French title: Mystic River. Translated by Isabelle Maillet.
There are books whose characters stay with you for a long time and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane is one of those. We’re on East Buckingham Avenue in Boston, within two blocks, the Flats and the Point, the last one wealthier than the first.
When the book opens, we’re in 1975. Jimmy Marcus and Sean Devine are 10. On Saturday afternoons, they get together because their fathers work at the same factory and have a beer together on weekends. Dave Boyle tags along. Jimmy and Dave are from the Flats and Sean lives in the Point. They wouldn’t have met if their fathers didn’t enjoy each other’s company.
On one Saturday, pedophiles drive by the three kids playing on the street. Sean and Jimmy refuse to get in the car but Dave goes and Sean and Jimmy watch him leave with the unknown men. He’ll come back four days later and will never tell anyone what really happened to him. The three boys are bound by this traumatic event.
Fast forward and we’re in 2000.
Jimmy Marcus is 36. He already has a whole life behind him. He got his girlfriend Marita pregnant in his teens, his daughter Katie was born when he was 17. He went to prison for two years and Marita died of cancer while he was imprisoned. When he went out, he had to reconnect with a four-year-old Katie who didn’t know him and had lost her mother.
He’s now happily married to Annabeth and they have two little girls, Sara and Nadine. Jimmy owns a grocery store and has stopped illegal activities, even if his brothers-in-law are well-known criminals.
Dave is married to Celeste, Annabeth’s cousin. They have a son, Mike. He looks like a functioning adult, with a family and a stable job but he hasn’t healed from the kidnapping.
Jimmy and Dave are still in each other’s lives. They married into the same family and still live in the Flats.
Sean is the only one who left the neighborhood and went to college. He’s married to Laura, who ran off a year ago, pregnant with another man’s baby. He’s a detective with the Boston police.
Then fate brings them together.
Katie, ready to elope to Vegas with her secret boyfriend, has a girls’ night out with her besties Diane and Eve. She drops them off before heading home and she gets murdered on the way. The same night, Dave comes home with blooded clothes and refuses to tell Celeste what happened.
Sean and his boss Whitey investigate Katie’s murder, bringing Sean back to his old neighborhood and reconnecting him to his childhood friends.
What happened to Katie? And what did Dave do?
Mystic River is rooted in Boston and Dennis Lehane has an incredible sense of place. He shows the changes in this Boston neighborhood, its blue-collar inhabitants, and its rules. It’s Boston, a big city but there’s no anonymity because families stay in the same two blocks of the city. In the end, these two blocks in Buckingham Avenue have the same atmosphere as a small town in the country. Everyone knows everyone and is in everyone’s business. Reputations are set in stone. People have each other’s backs (or not).
Ron Rash says he always writes books set in North Carolina because that’s what he knows and people are the same everywhere anyway. With Mystic River, Lehane proves that this assumption is right. He draws a vivid picture of blue-collar Boston but he reaches beyond this specific setting to the universal essence of human communities.
Through these three men, Dennis Lehane questions family bonds, fatherhood, and social determinism.
One of the issues raised is the strength of marriage and family bonds. Women and mothers are tough and even stronger than their husbands, especially Annabeth. To what extend must you be loyal to your spouse? Cover up for their mistakes or illegal dealings? When do you need to stop looking the other way? What are you ready to do for your kids? To protect them or avenge them?
Lehane also explores fatherhood. Like father, like son? Not really, he seems to say. There’s no fatality, no direct causality between the father you had and the father you will be.
Jimmy is a crooked man who loves his wife and daughters. He’s devastated by Katie’s death. He’s not an absentee father at all even if his dad wasn’t a good role model. Dave grew up without a father and loves Mike dearly. He wants to be a fabulous father to his son. Sean, on the other hand, has a loving father but doesn’t want children.
Mystic River is also laced with social determinism. Your social circumstances impact your vision of the world. Jimmy and Dave come from families where you can only count on yourself. They distrust official institutions. What good do they do them anyway? This brings them to take matters into their own hands and not rely on Sean’s investigation to learn who killed Katie. They are inclined to revenge, to do their own justice and take actions based on the laws of the street.
Mystic River is bleak because of all the pain and losses that could have been avoided if people trusted in the institutions, if people were more open with each other, if Jimmy’s past didn’t come back to knock him down. It’s a tragedy like Oedipus Rex, Le Cid or Hamlet. A mix of fate, family duty and revenge.
But Dennis Lehane never fully gives into fatalism. We also are what we do and what we choose to be. Jimmy stepped up and left his crooked life behind for Katie’s sake.
The characters in Mystic River are flawed, full of grey areas but also full of love. Their heart is in the right place when it comes to their families. They don’t have much and their family bonds matter more than anything. Readers can relate to that even if they live totally different lives from theirs.
Lehane writes as he sounds when he speaks about his books, his upbringing, his childhood, and the values he passes on to his own kids. He’s humble and respectful of common people. He isn’t dazzled by fame and money even if he enjoys their perks. (Who wouldn’t?)
He’s a compassionate writer who likes his characters. Jimmy is in the wrong and as a person, I don’t approve of his actions but I understand where he comes from, just like I understood Dwayne Brewer’s frame of mind in The Line That Held Us by David Joy.
The empathy towards the characters nurtures some hope for them. We can never truly give up on them and keep expecting that they’ll do better.
Books like Mystic River force us not to be judgmental. Before placating someone, what do we really know of their circumstances, their background, and their motives?
And last, but not least, Dennis Lehane can write. His style is exquisite, pages fly by without clichés, dialogues ring true, descriptions are well-done and long enough to bring the reader to Boston. They are not explanatory; they set the place and help us understand the characters.
Plot, style, engaging characters and sense of place. This book has it all. Why did I wait so long to read Dennis Lehane?
Clean Slate #4 : catching up with billet. Theatre, fiction, fan fiction and letters.
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959) French title: Un raisin au soleil.
- The Scared Stiff by Donald Westlake (2002) French title: Mort de trouille. Translated by Natalie Beunat
- For a Long Time I Used to Go to Bed Happy (2020) French title: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonheur.
- The noise of swings by Christian Bobin (2017) French title : Un bruit de balançoire.
I love going to the theatre and I hope to see A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry on stage one day. It’s a brilliant play written in 1959, set Chicago Southside “sometime between WWII and the present”.
The Younger family lives in a shabby apartment. There’s Mama (Lena), her daughter Beneatha, her son Walter, his wife Ruth and their son Travis. Walter and Ruth are in their thirties and Walter works as a limousine driver. Beneatha is about twenty and goes to university. This black family barely makes ends meet.
But now Mama is expecting a check from the insurance company after her husband died. $10 000. It’s a lot of money and the family must decide how to spend it. Lena and Ruth want to buy a house in a nicer neighborhood, to secure their housing and give them a better life. Walter wants to invest into a liquor store with his friends. Beneatha wants to go to university.
They all want to use the money to climb the social ladder, only they don’t have the same ladder. Three ways of spending the money, three visions of what a better life entails.
The mothers, Lena and Ruth, sound more practical, they’d take pride into moving out of this apartment and into a nice house. They see their self-worth in owning their home and welcome the feeling of security it provides. No landlord is already an achievement.
Walter wants to own a store because he resents being a chauffeur. His pride suffers from it and he wants to be a business owner to make better money but also to improve his social status. Pride impacts his decision making process.
Beneatha considers she’ll have a better future if she invests in her education, something that Ruth and Lena support.
What will Lena decide? It’s her money, after all. She’s split between good sense (investing in a house and in tuition) and help Walter with his dream.
The play is excellent as it blends efficiently three visions of life, the family’s dynamics, and political issues. Lorraine Hansberry questions two visions of the future of black communities : exploring their African heritage or blend into the white man’s way of life.
Racism invites itself in the debate but Lorraine Hansberry doesn’t pull the victim card for every issue this family faces. They also have their own family problems and if social determinism impacts their lives, they are also responsible for their decisions. A well-balanced text, à la Baldwin.
Highly recommended. And I’ll watch it on YouTube.
Let’s move to a totally different book, The Scared Stiff by Donald Westlake, classic crime fiction, something like Double Indemnity by James M. Cain.
Barry Lee and his wife Lola struggle with money. They decide to cash in their life insurance only to realize that they didn’t subscribe to a life insurance where you capitalize your premiums but to an accidental death insurance. To get the money, one of them has to die.
Since Lola is from Guerrera, a fictional country in South America, they decide that Barry is going have an accidental death while staying with his in-laws and then take the identity of Lola’s deceased brother.
Family, femme fatales and the local mob get involved, the insurance company is suspicious : will Barry and Lola pull this off and come back to New York rich, free and unscathed?
You’ll have to read this fast paced and fun crime fiction novel. It may me slightly unrealistic but it’s like an action movie with excellent dialogues. Westlake has a great sense of humor.
A good summer read for the beach, waiting time in airports or long train journeys.
With the title Longtemps je me suis levé de bonheur, Daniel Picouly makes a promise that his book doesn’t fulfill. Indeed, it is a play-on-word on the incipit of Swann’s Way in French, the famous Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure, (For a long time I used to go to bed early according the Scott Moncrieff translation).
Daniel Picouly changes de bonne heure (early) into de bonheur (with happiness) and the two phrases have the same pronunciation. In French, it sounds the same. In English it becomes For a long time I used to go to bed happy.
Picouly writes a story about an adolescent in a working class neighborhood (council flats) who discovers Proust in French class, thanks to his teacher. We’re in 1964 and Picouly transposes Proust and his characters into this neighborhood.
It was promising at the beginning, he really made me laugh but I eventually got tired of the constant banter.
The plot was a little weak, and even if the characters were well-drawn it wasn’t enough to hold my attention and finish the book. Too bad, it was an excellent idea for a book.
Our last book stop today is Un bruit de balançoire by Christian Bobin, a book hard to define.
The author captures moment of his life, writes letters to people and things. The Ariadne thread of the book is Ryōkan (1758-1831), a Buddhist monk, poet and calligraph that Bobin refers to in each letter of the book.
Honestly, I don’t know what to make of this book. There are beautiful passages, thoughtful ones that make the reader stop, think, and live in the moment.
| La vraie réponse c’est sans doute vivre, simplement vivre sans oublier de jouer. Les anges protègent les châteaux de sable, pas ceux de pierre. | The real answer is probably to live, just live and never forget to play. Angels protect sandcastles, not the ones made in stone. |
It’s a peaceful book, one to sip, to enjoy. It urges you to sit and be. Don’t expect anything from it except a bubble of beauty and of calm. Which is already a lot, in our hurried (harried?) lives.
Bobin also writes beautifully about books, the pleasure they bring, about bookstores and libraires, here’s something to take with us:
| Les livres sont des âmes, les librairies des points d’eau dans le désert du monde. | Books are souls and bookstores are water sources in the world’s desert. |
Happy reading, every one!!
Boundary by Andrée A. Michaud – Literary crime fiction and coming-of-age novel.
Boundary by Andrée A. Michaud (2014) French title (Québec): Bondrée. The English translation by Donald Winkler was published as Boundary but there’s also an ebook version is entitled The Last Summer.
| Bondrée était un monde en soi, le miroir de tout possible univers. | Boundary was a world in itself, a mirror of any possible universe |
Bondrée is the French name of Boundary Pond, a lake over the border between Québec and Maine.
Pierre Landry is a legend of the area. He was a mountain man who fell in love with a beautiful woman he nicknamed Tangara. He hang himself in his cabin over this unrequited love and they say he left bear traps in the woods near Bondrée. Now it’s a summer vacation spot, with a camp site and cabins where families come and spend their summers.
We’re in 1967, Lucy In the Sky is on the radio and it’s another summer at the lake, with its barbecues, its hikes in the nearby trails and its lazy days by the beach. Andrée Duchamp is twelve and she admires two older girls, Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan. Two beautiful, carefree and slightly provocative American teenagers. Their loud and dynamic duo is famous among the lake community.
An idyllic moment, until Zaza disappears and is found dead in the woods, her leg caught in a bear trap. She bled to death. Accident or murder?
The American police is called on the premises and detective Stan Michaud is in charge of the investigation. Despite his French name, he can’t speak French at all and hires Brian Larue as an interpreter. The bilingual issue is everywhere in the book, just as it is in books by Louise Penny, set in the same area.
Bondrée is a thriller, with Michaud and his partner Cusack leading a criminal investigation. And, yes, the reader is eager to know who did it but it’s a lot more than that.
Andrée is twelve and her older brother Bob is fifteen. This is the summer where they leave childhood behind and become members of their gender’s community.
Andrée gets closer to her mother and enters into the women’s circle. Meanwhile Bob takes part in the searches in the woods with the men, a rite of passage that includes him in the men’s circle.
Andrée doesn’t want to leave her child innocence behind just yet, but the tragic events at the lake will push her forward. She starts seeing her parents as persons not only as parental units. It’s the same epiphany as the one a pupil has when they meet their teacher at the grocery store and realize they have a life outside of their classroom.
Along with Andrée’s coming-of-age, we see how tragic deaths impact the people involved. Stan Michaud was never the same after investigating the murder of Esther Conrad, another teenage death. He brings this baggage with him at Boundary and it haunts him. These investigations take their toll.
The families around the lake help each other, bringing comfort, the men gathering to search the woods while their wives handle the logistics. Feeding everyone remains a way to bond, to soothe and to care. Bondrée brings to life the codified lives and roles of adults before 1968, where men must be strong and women hold the domestic fort.
Gilles Ménard and Samuel Duchamp, Andrée’s father were the ones who found Zaza and they were shaken to the core by the discovery. Andrée notices that men have weaknesses too. Florence Duchamp, Andrée’s mother, is a strong support for her husband, her children, and the other women around her. The author pictures women as rocks for as long as people can remember:
| En apercevant la voiture de police, elle était immédiatement sortie sur la galerie, comme le font les femmes pour accueillir le malheur autant que la joie, incapables d’attendre que l’un rampe jusqu’à elles ou que l’autre bondisse dans leurs bras. | When she saw the police cruiser, she immediately went out on the porch, the way women do to welcome misfortune as well as joy, unable to wait for the one to crawl up to them or the other to leap into their arms. My translation. |
Bondrée is also literary crime fiction, with stunning descriptions of the nature around the lake and Andrée’s happiness at running around freely.
| J’enterrais la gomme sous les aiguilles de pin et retournais au lac, aux pistes d’écureuils, à tout ce qui me comblait alors, à ces choses simples remplies d’odeurs qui me permettraient de revivre mon enfance et de toucher la simplicité du bonheur chaque fois qu’un froissement d’ailes soulèverait un parfum de genièvre. | I buried the gum under pine needles and went back to the lake, to the squirrel paths, to everything that then delighted me, to those simple things rich with odours that would later help me to resuscitate my childhood and renew contact with a simple joy every time a rustling of wings stirred up a scent of juniper. Translation by Donald Winkler |
Andrée A. Michaud has a melodic prose, a way with words that lifts the reader on a wave of sentences, pushing them from one paragraph to the other, one page after the one on a subtle and consistent hum. This thriller is not a staccato of quick chapters ending with a cliffhanger. It’s smoother and the story and the characters drip into the reader’s brain and stay imprinted.
Her prose enveloped me and brought me to Boundary Pond, a location I imagined, fed by her descriptions but also from memories of books by Louise Penny, of Boy Heaven by Laura Kasischke and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.
And it’s written in Québécois. I love French from Québec, really, probably because it’s full of English, like my head can be after reading a book in English or spending time online and blogging.
I love to observe how Québecois French manages to impulse the elasticity of the English language into French, especially the turning of nouns into verbs. There’s a porosity between the two languages and Andrée A. Michaud switches from one to the other from one page to the other. A trail is the Otter Trail on one page and the Sentier de la Loutre on the next one. Hard to follow when you don’t speak English but it gives back the atmosphere of Boundary Pond where Anglophone and Francophone families mingle.
I love the inconsistency the Québecois method for including English words or turn of phrases into their French. There’s no rule.
Some English phrases are literally translated from the English, using an existing French word in another way. Here’s an example: Dorothy visitait Laura. In French from France, you don’t visit a person, only a place. To visit a person you use rendre visite, not visiter.
Another example: If I’d been in trouble becomes si j’avais été dans le trouble instead of si j’avais eu des ennuis. The word trouble exists in French but has another meaning. It’s exactly the same with flatter un chien, used to say to pet a dog when in France we say caresser un chien. The verb flatter exists but its English counterpart is to praise.
Some English words are simply translated into French and that’s how crisps become croustilles. Some are just written into French according to their phonetics: peanut butter turns into beurre de pinotte, when beurre de cacahuète exists. Some remain in English, like cooler or remover when the words glacière or dissolvant are is perfectly fine.
The verb frencher for French kissing reminds us that Québecois are North Americans. Obviously the concept of French kissing doesn’t have that vocable in France.
All these examples prove that the French language is alive, stretching, and changing. Francophones from other countries enrich our language when they put their daily lives into words and it makes me happy for the vitality of my native tongue.
Bondrée is a book with an excellent combination of beats, the one from the plot and the one from the author’s style. It won several prizes, among them the Quais du Polar one and it deserves the praise. Definitely a book to recommend to crime fiction lovers but also to readers who are not usual readers of the genre.
For another take on this book, check out Marina’s review here. This is Book 1 of my 20 books of Summer challenge. #20booksofsummer24
PS : It didn’t escape my notice that Andrée is the name of the narrator and that Michaud is the name of the detective who investigate the case.
All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – more Deep South noir and a masterpiece.
All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (2023) French title: Le sang des innocents.
Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood.
All The Sinners Bleed is set up in Charon County, in a small town in Virginia, near Chesapeake Bay.
It’s a rural —and fictional—county of 20 000 inhabitants with twenty-one churches. This ratio of church per inhabitant is mind-blowing for a French who usually sees in a town, a Catholic church, a Protestant one and sometimes a mosque.
In this county, two murders were committed in the last fifteen years, and now, they had a shooting at the local high school. Mr Spearman, a well-known, respected and white history teacher was shot by a black student, Latrell McDonald. The deputies who arrived on the scene with Titus shot Latrell as he was going out of the school.
Charon County elected its first black sheriff, Titus Crown. And now, he has to solve the murder of the history teacher and make sure that his deputies shooting the murderer was actual self-defense.
An African American man had been shot by two white deputies. Didn’t matter who was sheriff, there were going to be serious questions asked. Titus knew this, and even though some people wouldn’t believe it, he agreed with them. The history of policing in America, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, made those questions necessary.
Titus struggles to find his place as the sheriff. The whites are weary of him and the king of their community and head of the most important job provider of the area, Scott Cunningham, didn’t support his candidacy. Jamal, the influential reverend of the New Wave church hoped he’d become a support for the black community. But Titus is aware of the position he’s in:
The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.
It’s a tough place to be and he walks on a narrow line. His attitude is clear: play by the book, only by the book and ignore the fact that he knows most of the people in this town since childhood.
A former FBI agent, Titus came back to his hometown to lick some wounds, be close to his ageing father and eventually became the sheriff. He detached himself from this town for years, and he makes a fair assessment of his hometown’s mentality when he gives this example:
A new pharmacist had tried to take over the Sommers building but Billy’s cousins, still stinging from his arrest and subsequent conviction, started a rumor she didn’t really have a degree, and within a month the rumor was an immutable fact, and by the fall the young woman who’d tried to help the good people of Charon with their medicinal needs soon lit out for greener pastures. Titus thought the fact that she’d been a Black woman hadn’t helped to endear her to the white citizens in the county. Normally the Black folks in Charon would have tried to rally around a sister taking on a new venture, but the young lady wasn’t a native of Charon. She was a come-here, and people in Charon were loath to cotton to new faces. In this the citizens, both Black and white, were united.
A small-town vipers’ nest at its finest.
Everyone knows everyone’s business since the beginning of times, people grew up together, families have reputations. And the money comes from two major sources: Cunningham’s factory and drug trafficking. Black and white communities don’t really mix and rampant racism personified by statues of confederate generals is an endemic disease.
And this murder and the subsequent shooting lifts the lid of the pot where the town’s secrets, sins and hatreds are stuffed. Titus knows right away that things will get ugly very quickly.
That was the thing about violence. It didn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it saw a crack in the dam and then it flooded the whole valley.
All the Sinners Bleed is of course the investigation about the murder but it’s a so much more.
It’s the literary MRI of Charon County, a fictional county that looks a lot like Trickum County in The Devil Himself by Peter Farris. It’s the kind of place S.A. Cosby grew up in.
It’s also Titus’s personal journey. He still has open wounds from his mother’s death. He has scars from his career as an FBI agent. He has to reconcile with his family and his hometown. He wants to be a human, not a man defined by the color of his skin.
When they had discussed the possibility of Titus running, he’d gone to great pains to ensure that Jamal realized he was going to be a sheriff who was Black, not the Black community’s sheriff. He’d told Jamal he’d do everything he could to enact real change, but at the end of the day he couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore the law. Unfortunately, he’d failed in his attempt to make him understand that idea.
At the small scale of Charon County and according to the talks between Cosby and Lehane I attended at Quais du Polar, the election of a black sheriff unleashed the same fears and racism that the election of Obama did in the American society.
The unsolved issue of the consequences of the Civil War and slavery, its end and the Jim Crow laws are close to the surface and reappear.
All the Sinners Bleed is a masterpiece of crime fiction: excellent crime plot, state-of-the-nation exploration, and meaningful personal journey for Titus all wrapped in one book.
It questions the idea of identity on the level of a community and on a personal level with Titus’ inner struggles. And it’s summed up in two lines by Titus’ late mother:
You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”
Rush for it if you haven’t read it already. I already bought another Cosby, Razorblade Tears.
PS : I should start a challenge: “Pick up trout and fishing references in American books”. They seem to be everywhere, even in the most unexpected pages: Roger’s face was pale as the belly of a trout. 🙂
The Devil Himself by Peter Farris – Deep South noir
The Devil Himself by Peter Farris (2017) French title: Le diable en personne. Translated by Anatole Pons-Reumaux. In my copy of the book, the original title is Ghost in the Field. I don’t know which one is the title the writer chose.
We’re in Trickum County, Georgia. Maya is a prostitute who works for a pimp, Mexico. He’s the head of a vast drug-dealing and prostitution network. He has cops and politicians in his pocket. Maya is young, black and the mayor of the city is infatuated with her. He requires her all the time and he ends up oversharing information in bed.
Problem? Maya has an extraordinary flash memory and she’s a liability for Mexico now. Since he and the mayor are in cahoots and protect each other’s interests, Mexico sends two of his best goons on a mission. Javon and Willie have to kill Maya. But, she resists, escapes and ends of up on Leonard’s property. It’s the kind of property where you see a No trespassing sign and your instinct tells you you’d better comply and stay off these grounds.
Leonard is an old eccentric who lives like a hermit on a property covered with woods and swamps. He fishes, hunts, grows vegetables and only goes to town for absolute necessities. His wife is gone (either she died or she left him) and he lives with a doll he dresses like her and talks to as if she were with him. He looks like a dangerous basket case and the good people of Trickum steer clear of him.
He’s well-known as a former bootlegger, one & who played cat-and-mouse with the police and never got caught. For years. The man is mean, independent, and clever. He welcomes Javon and Willie with a shotgun and leaves them beaten up and dead.
The local sheriff, Jack Chalmer, gets involved. He quickly suspects that something big is happening and that their local detective won’t do anything about it. And indeed, he’s crooked and belongs to the mayor and Mexico.
Leonard takes care of Maya, heals her wounds, feeds her with hearty meals, hides her in his house and basically adopts her as his long-lost granddaughter. He teaches her how to survive in the area and he’s ready to risk his life to protect her.
He is true to himself. He lives with a tragedy in his past, one that concurred to his self-imposed isolation. Maya comes like a breath of fresh air and she needs help.
And she welcomes the rough love because for the first time, someone is fighting in her corner. She’s been on her own for a while, an easy prey to Mexico and his prostitution houses. She’s in danger but she’s free. For the first time too, a man pays her attention and it’s gratuitous, no sexual favors involved. It’s also a novelty.
The Devil Himself is an atmospheric book full of fascinating descriptions of the grounds surrounding Leonard’s property. It’s deep in the woods, and a bit creepy, with swamps, alligators, Spanish moss on trees. The heat is humid and suffocating. It’s on Leonard’s side and it’s a weapon again the people who want to reach Maya and kill her.
No such luck. Leonard is dangerous with firearms, and he’s got a lot of them at his house. He lives according to his own code of conduct, his own set of values. He’s in the wrong, what he does is illegal but the reader understands his motives and his logic anyway. His past is unveiled page after page and he’s a true bastard but I liked him anyway. Perhaps because his helping out Maya without asking anything in return is his way to redemption.
The whole book is like a thriller, even if it’s not tagged as crime fiction. Maya’s life has been hard, she was practically a sex slave in one of Mexico’s brothels. She reclaims herself, enjoys her freedom and grows attached to the place even if she’s more a city girl than a farm one.
Peter Farris writes well, takes us to a small town where criminal organizations are taking over, where opioids are a plague, where politicians are crooked and people too focused on living from pay check to pay check to care about politics.
The Devil Himself is a novel from the Deep South. Readers who enjoy books by Jim Thompson, David Joy or Chris Offutt will love it.
Highly recommended.
Book Around the Corner 