Reviews from WILLIAM J. H. REED
JANUARY - FEBRUARY REVIEWS
THE CHINAMAN
FRIEDRICH GLAUSER
Translated from the German by Mike Mitchell
Bitter Lemon Press January, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-904738-21-3
THE
CHINAMAN, the fourth Sergeant Studer mystery to
be published by Bitter Lemon Press, presents the reader with classic elements of
crime writing turned on their heads to produce a rare treat for the fan of
1930’s mysteries. A corpse found on a new grave, shot through the heart
without the bullet piercing his clothing, the handkerchiefs of Anna Hungerlott,
recently dead from gastric influenza, which show traces of arsenic, and a locked
room murder in a college greenhouse all combine to keep the reader guessing
until the last pages are turned.
Friedrich Glauser gained fame
throughout
Europe
for his mystery writing. Often called the Swiss Simenon, Glauser was a
diagnosed schizophrenic, addicted to opium and morphine and a frequent resident
of psychiatric wards, insane asylums and, when arrested for forging
prescriptions, prisons. This did not prevent him from creating an enduring hero
in Sergeant Studer. Burly, rough spoken but quietly intelligent, Studer had been
a detective superintendent in
Bern
before being demoted for arresting the wrong politician. Now a lowly sergeant,
he remains the man who is always called to investigate puzzling murders.
THE
CHINAMAN of the title is no Chinaman but rather a
Swiss expat, returned home after making his fortune in the
Far East
. He predicts his own death and asks Studer to investigate it when the time
comes. He goes so far as to introduce a number of possible suspects to the
sergeant. Four months later he is found murdered and the game is afoot.
THE
CHINAMAN continues Studer’s crime-solving career and requires all of his
talents and those of his friends: the lawyer, Münch,
and the pathologist, Dr. Malapelle of the Institute for Forensic Medicine. Along
the way he picks up a sidekick who has escaped from the poorhouse and lived in
the woods to avoid jail. Part of the charm of the book is that it was originally
serialized in the National-Zeitung,
Basel
in 1938. Because of this, each chapter has its excitement and the pace never
lets up from beginning to end.
Another rare gem, THE
CHINAMAN is further evidence of why
Germany
’s most prestigious crime fiction award is called the Glauser prize.
- W. J. H. Reed
JACQUELINE WINSPEAR
AN
INCOMPLETE REVENGE
JACQUELINE WINSPEAR
Henry Holt and Company February,
2008
The
end of summer is a time of changes. In
England
, summer’s end brings an exodus of workers from London’s East End to the hop fields of
Kent
for a couple of weeks of agricultural work out of “the Smoke,” some extra
income and an otherwise unaffordable family vacation in the country. For Maisie
Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear’s psychologist and private inquiry agent, hopping
time brings a new investigation into a potential land sale in rural
Kent. Winspear’s fifth Maisie Dobbs adventure has all of the ingredients we have
come to expect: an oddly unremarkable case; a country and protagonist still
trying to recover from the impact of the Great War; and a memorable cast of
“ordinary” people.
Heronsdene is a picture-perfect Kentish
village with medieval cottages, pub, and church complete with attached
graveyard. Picture-perfect until you notice the wasteland next to the
blacksmith’s barn. Once the site of the village bakery, the lot was destroyed
the night a German Zeppelin thought the town was a good enough target to unload
its cargo of incendiaries on it. The baker, his wife and daughter died as a
result. Further inquiry shows that the baker’s son, along with a large number
of other village boys, was killed in
France
. Further investigation reveals that a series of petty crimes, including a
number of fires, have plagued the village for years and the locals don’t seem
interested in solving them.
All of this seems only peripheral to
Maisie Dobbs’ case, to complete a background study of the village and
adjoining estate to assist in the sale and expansion of the local brickworks to
a Canadian developer. Add to this situation a mix of Gypsies, Londoners and
locals all quietly suspicious of each other, a drunken lout of an estate owner
who is feared by everyone, a local reporter intent on breaking into the big time
and we have Winspear at her best.
In each of her Maisie Dobbs novels,
Winspear has advanced Maisie’s emotional recovery from her experiences in the
War and AN INCOMPLETE REVENGE
continues the process. This protagonist is psychologically damaged. So is her
whole country and these novels are as much about learning to cope with terrible
loss as they are about solving crimes. This fifth installment may well be the
best yet for the fans of historical mysteries and psychological dramas.
- W. J. H. Reed
THE
BLACK DOVE
STEVE HOCKENSMITH
St. Martin
’s Minotaur February, 2008
Stranded in San Francisco
in 1893, cowboys Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer and his brother Otto “Big
Red” are down on their luck. Fired from their first paying detective job with
the Southern Pacific Railroad (something about a train wreck and lost artifacts
from the Chinese exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair) the boys are at a loss
as to what to do next. No horses, no guns, no cows, turned down by the
Pinkertons and running out of money, they need a break. Soon.
Instead,
they bump into an old friend in
Chinatown
, only to have him take a shot at them, ruining Otto’s new bowler hat and
giving him a painful crease in his scalp. Once everyone has calmed down, the
friend, Dr. Chan, explains that he’s in hot water with one of
Chinatown
’s Tongs and fears he’ll be killed. The next day, he is, and the cowboy
detectives are on the case. The only clue is “Hok Gup.” Black bird? Black
duck? The boys’ lack of Chinese will be a serious problem in solving the
mystery, not to mention corrupt cops, and hatchet wielding Tong warriors who
want the meddling strangers out of Chinatown.
Steve Hockensmith created the Holmes on
the Range series and was nominated
for an Edgar and a Shamus for his trouble. Sherlock Holmes and deductive
reasoning as seen through the eyes of two cowboys is both entertaining and
engrossing. The series is true to the sensibilities of both genres and the third
novel in the series, THE BLACK DOVE,
continues the tradition. Rollercoaster paced and hilarious, with more than one
homage to Hammett’s original Black Bird mystery, THE
BLACK DOVE is another winner for Hockensmith.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
- W. J. H. Reed
Picture
an urban winter scene. Cold, gray and unhappy. Add a third of the city
devastated by war and near starvation in the presence of conspicuous
consumption. Add spies in every block, a fascist police force oppressing a large
part of the city’s population and a new war about to break out. You now have a
hint of what
Madrid
in the winter of 1940 must have been like. C.J. Sansom has chosen this as the
setting for his third novel, WINTER IN
MADRID
.
1940 is a pivotal year for
Spain
and for
Britain. Franco is actively courted by Hitler to join the triumphant Axis in the war
against Britain. The prize:
Gibraltar, stolen Spanish territory since the eighteenth century. But Franco knows that
the British fleet still blockades Spain, allowing only enough food and fuel in
to keep the country going but easily able to cripple Spain if Britain is
annoyed.
Britain
has won the air Battle of Britain but had its army booted from the continent at
Dunkirk. The Nazis occupy its once powerful French ally. A new front for the war would
be disastrous.
Into this jumble, Sansom sends his
protagonist, Harry Brett. Brett was at
Dunkirk
and both physically and psychologically damaged because of it. He is recruited
by the British Secret Service to spy on an old school friend who seems to be
dealing with Fascist Spain, making money on shady schemes that might allow
Franco to decide to attack the British. This must be prevented at all cost.
At the same time, Barbara Clare, former
Red Cross nurse, is involved in a plot to liberate her ex-lover, an English
Communist who fought Franco in the Civil War, from a Fascist concentration camp.
Clare’s new lover is Brett’s school friend and Brett’s target. As
complicated a mess as the fan of historical thrillers is likely to encounter.
The interaction of the two plots and
the interplay of old loyalties with new realities create a nail-biting tension,
the climax of which will keep the reader on the edge of his chair. Not a novel
for the easily depressed or for those who think of the past in heroic terms, WINTER
IN
MADRID
rewards the reader with genuine historical insight and a memorable thriller
in the bargain. RECOMMENDED.
- W. J. H. Reed
BONE
RATTLER
ELIOT PATTISON
Counterpoint Press January, 2008
ISBN: 978-1593761851
The
eighteenth century was a time where the quest for knowledge was the highest
calling of any intelligent European. Whether with Captain Cook’s voyages of
discovery, the compendium of all known facts in the French Encyclopedia, the
search for precise longitude, or the massive discoveries in medicine, chemistry
and technology, the era was fascinated and defined by what it knew. The problem
with knowledge, though, is that it depends on your frame of reference, your
cultural background, your life experiences and the context in which you try to
apply what you already know to what you are seeing for the first time.
Eliot Pattison makes this problem of
knowing the central theme in his newest mystery, BONE
RATTLER. Set during the French and Indian War, the novel is first and
foremost a mystery. Beginning with a series of unexplainable murders and
apparent suicides on a prison ship bound for
New York
with a cargo of Scottish prisoners, Pattison confronts his protagonist, Duncan
McCallum, with strangely ritualistic crime scenes, unknown symbols and
unexplainable actions. To save the life of an innocent man, McCallum must
understand and solve a series of crimes unlike anything his European medical
background has prepared him for. Following the clues leads McCallum to early
New York City
and then out to the frontier. New York Colony’s Hudson and Mohawk valleys
were a battleground between the French and British and their Native American
allies. Raid and counter-raid, terrible massacres and the abduction of captives
to be sold as slaves make McCallum’s investigation both dangerous and
unpredictable. As he discovers a new link in the chain of evidence, that person
is scalped and killed. For McCallum, it becomes a race against time through the
darkly threatening wilderness of the
New World
.
Pattison makes much of the similar
cultures of the Highland Scots and the Native Americans, and understanding the
synthesis of the two on the frontier becomes the real key to solving the
mystery. I will confess that I had no solid idea of who the killer was until the
end of the novel, but the cast of suspects was among the most exotic I’ve run
into in a long time. Whether it turns out to be the Bible-quoting preacher, the
sadistic British army officer, the landed nobleman, the Scots deserter, or the
mysterious figure, Socrates Moon, who always seems to have been on the crime
scene just before McCallum arrives and then to have melted away into the forest,
the possible killers are all believable and, depending on the truth of what
McCallum thinks he knows, all could be the one. Pattison keeps us guessing until
the end and leaves us with the satisfying beginning of a new series of
mysteries.
- W. J. H. Reed
Look for these reviews from Bill on the PAPERBACK PAGE:
THE BLOOD SPILT by Åsa
Larsson
THE SUSPECT by John
Lescroart
Home Page
NOVEMBER - DECEMBER REVIEWS
PRAYER
OF THE DRAGON
ELIOT PATTISON
Soho
Press December,
2007
ISBN: 978-1-56947-479-2
Shan
Tao Yun’s Tibet is not
Shangri La.
It’s not Sven Hedin’s “Kingdom at the Top of the World” and it’s not
the high plains gulag of the People’s Republic of
China. What Shan’s Tibet is, is a cultural mélange of all of these places, spiced
with rising cut-throat capitalism and Buddhist mythology and the perfect setting
for a series of mysteries involving the disgraced Beijing inspector and his
colleagues, the unlicensed lamas Lokesh and Gendun.
In this
fifth Shan mystery, Eliot Pattison poses an impossible puzzle. Shan, “the
confessor of ghosts,” must save a comatose man from execution for two murders.
The victims were found on the slopes of
Dragon
Mountain
and their hands had been amputated and removed from the crime scene. Shan
discovers that the suspect is not Tibetan but Navajo, speaking in the old
tongues, incoherent and unable to explain what happened to his companions, and
that the murders are just the latest in a series of unexplained deaths haunting
the mountain.
Illegal
gold miners, reclusive Chinese rocket scientists, Native Americans, East German
entrepreneurs, brutal policemen and the sad survivors of a culture almost
destroyed in pursuit of a workers’ paradise all add valuable clues to Shan’s
investigation. As he works his way
through the maze of false leads and improbable solutions, Shan is increasingly
convinced that the solution to his case will require him to solve the mystery of
the mountain and its inhabitants.
A major
stop on the 400-year-old pilgrims’ road through
Tibet,
Dragon
Mountain
is one of the tallest mountains in the region and the home of clear air
lightning strikes capable of incinerating the unwary traveler without warning.
Shan learns the mountain and deciphers the meaning of the mysterious pilgrim way
stations, but may be unable to put the pieces together in time to save his
client.
Pattison
is a master of the exotic locale and at the same time an author whose characters
are so normal that the reality of their plight is never doubted. PRAYER
OF THE DRAGON is the latest and we hope not the last of the Shan mysteries,
an unusual gem of a mystery and not to be missed.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
- W. J. H. Reed
TRUTH
DARE KILL
GORDON FERRIS
Crème de la Crime / Dufour Editions PBO 12/07
ISBN:
978-0-9551589-4-0
There
are fights where winning feels almost as bad as losing. For Danny McRae, a
recently demobilized SOE agent, and for the city of
London, January, 1946, feels pretty bad. World War Two has been over for three months
but the bombed-out buildings, fuel and food rationing and the physical injuries
of war remain in full force. Things just aren’t getting better.
McRae was
a prisoner of war, badly beaten and sent to a concentration camp after his
capture by the Gestapo. He only knows this because his doctor told him so. All
memory of his last mission to Occupied France is gone, except for weird, violent
dreams and paralyzing headaches that haunt his days.
London, his post-war home, is in the grip of a new Ripper scare with
Soho
prostitutes brutally murdered and no solid leads in the case.
McRae’s
dreams seem similar to the murders. As a former
Glasgow
cop and fledgling
London
private investigator, he is fascinated by the crimes, saving newspaper
clippings and visiting the crime scenes. Unfortunately, this makes McRae an easy
suspect and the police focus begins to concentrate on him. Proving his innocence
and finding the real killer with only dreams and shattered pieces of his past
for clues forces McRae to scour
London
without really knowing what he’s looking for.
Gordon
Ferris uses the quest for memory and meaning as the unifying theme for TRUTH
DARE KILL and the reader is led carefully through the diaries McRae keeps of
his dreams, the soon-to-be-boxed-up wartime records of his spy organization and
the half-formed deductions McRae makes regarding the murders and who he really
is. Characters including Chinese brothel keepers and upper-class debutantes
looking for lost lovers all add to the confusion of real and imagined links
between past and present, and Ferris keeps the puzzle alive and gripping to the
end of the novel.
Brutal,
bloody and totally engaging, TRUTH DARE
KILL is sure to be a favorite for the fan of noir and for the fan of
well-researched period mysteries, too. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
-
W. J. H. Reed
Michael Gilbert's THE
DANGER WITHIN is reviewed
by Bill in CLASSIC CORNER.
And Bill reviews CUT HER DEAD
by Iain McDowall
in THE U. K. REPORT.
Bill Reed and Louie exploring
the record snow in Oswego, New York
February, 2007
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