Mick Herron!

Having been born long ago enough to have lived through some of the Cold War, I was too young to have been interested in reading spy fiction of the times.  And soon enough, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissolved, and most spy fiction seemed to become irrelevant.  Or implausible.  Or ridiculous.  (Invariably, one man racing against a ticking clock to prevent the destruction of the world.  And only this one man can do it.)

Maybe 20 tears after the end of the Cold War, enough time had passed for that era to become of interest again for me.  I read my first John le Carre novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and was blown away.  The vocabulary of espionage in that book was a revelation to me - some of the words I knew of, others were new, some real, and some invention.  And some having been coined by le Carre had passed into general usage:

tradecraft
safety signals
juju men
housekeeping
mailfist job
lamplighters

(Actually, I am no longer certain which words are real or made up or even in use.) 

But the question of what should come next had no good answer as far as I was concerned.  I'm generalizing but all of the spy fiction I saw looked formulaic or outdated.  Or farfetched.  Until I stumbled upon Mick Herron and his Slough House series.

In a nutshell, instead of having elite special agents populate a series, Herron has created a series stocked with agents from the trash bin.  If you screw up and MI5 thinks it will cost too much to fire you, you are exiled to a building called Slough House, where you are consigned to do mindless paperwork assignments until you quit.  (Denizens of Slough House are called slow horses.)  But it turns out that often these agents are not washed up - they've merely been disposed of by a corrupt or dysfunctional hierarchy or are scapegoats - and are still quite skilled. 

In the first book in the series, Slow Horses, they work to track down a domestic terror cell that is threatening to execute a hostage on the internet.  In Dead Lions, they investigate the death of an old spy whose death may have a connection to a Russian oligarch.  In Real Tigers, a slow horse is kidnapped and Slough House responds.  (There's also a novella called The List, concerning how old spies are looked after.) (And there's a great stand alone called Nobody Walks, set in the same fictional universe but not a part of the series.)

I devoured Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, The List, and Nobody Walks way back in 2016 - which feels like YEARS ago.  Brexit and Trump's Russia scandal displaced my desire to read spy fiction for a while.  But the prolific Herron has since written two more Slough House novels, Spook Street (which I am currently reading) and London Rules.  He also managed to write another standalone thriller This is What Happened (which is waiting for me at the library).  And somehow he's had the time and energy to write another novella in the Slough House world set for this fall called The Drop.

All of these books are absolute page turners but yet are filled with fantastic detail and insight that does not bog down the reader.  The plots are all very relevant to the headlines (bad Russians, fundamentalists, sleeper cells, bad politicians, terrorisms, the internet) and make for convincing stories.

In terms of language, Herron invents (or seems to? who knows?) some new spy words: stoats, weasels, Dogs, joes, and the Enhanced Retirement Package.  And what I may love the most, that really good dialog you get in certain spy novels where they spell out how the either know things or have worked things out.  It's so cool and convincing and this trick has the reader convinced something special is happening.

In sum, go and read Mick Herron.  Just do it.  Start at the beginning with Slough Horses.  Buy a few of his books at a time as you will want to start the next as soon as you've finished your first one.

(Bonus: I was looking at the Summer reading issue of The Tablet and Herron gets recommended three times.

Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent

Earlier this year, in the span of 24 hours, I saw two of my favorite writers, Denise Mina and Rupert Thomson, both Tweet about the Irish writer Liz Nugent.  One for her upcoming UK title, Skin Deep, the other for her upcoming American release, Lying in Wait. 

This is clearly a sign to pay attention and meant that I had to get ahold of these books right away.  Which I sort of did.  The library had Nugent's first novel Unraveling Oliver but I had to wait a while until I got an advance copy of Lying in Wait.  (Technically, I can't get my hands on Skin Deep until it is published in the US, whenever that is.  Next year I'm guessing.)

While I was prepared for the hype, I was not prepared for the first lines in these books. 
Unraveling Oliver: "I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her."
Lying in Wait: "My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it."
Skin Deep: "I wondered when rigor mortis would set in, or if it already had."
Who isn't going to keep reading after opening lines like those?

In Lying in Wait, an Irish judge and his wife open the book by murdering a woman named Annie Doyle.  Why this has happened is not immediately clear.  It's complicated.  But once you murder someone, you've got a lot of work to do to get away with it, especially if you are not the murdering kind.  The story of why a judge and his wife would be in this situation and how it unfolds is told in alternating points of view from the wife, Lydia, her son, Laurence, and the victim's sister, Karen.

I too easily resort to calling things Hitchcockian (which is short-hand for a lot of tension and suspense, or anticipated fear, especially waiting to see if people are going to get caught).  But this is one of the greatest Hitchcockian things I've read in a long time.  Who will get caught?  Will they find the body? What else are these people capable of? What is Laurence thinking?

One of the other admirable qualities of this novel is that Nugent is very good at exploring the long lasting effects of trauma on people.  We learn about the mother's childhood and how it shapes her adult life.  We see how the murdering of Annie Doyle affects Laurence's childhood and early adulthood.  One gets a good understanding of why things have gone off the rails for these people - yet the suspense never lets up.  Not for a second.  And sometimes, when you least expect it, Nugent drops another surprise on the reader.  Endings are hard to do but the ending here is spellbinding.

A Double Life by Flynn Berry

The mark, or a mark, of a good writer is the ability to make one interested in a subject that one previously considered uninteresting.  In the case of Flynn Berry's new novel A Double Life, I am now interested in Lord Lucan.  

For years I routinely avoided all mention of the Lord Lucan case.  For some reason I instinctively don’t like books about aristocrats.  Or perhaps I am a bad Anglophile - I don't care for kings and queens, Downtown Abbey, dukes, lords, earls, etc.  Castles, no.  Elephant and Castle, yes.  (Corgis, I like.)

I had been reading some of a very good new biography of Agatha Christie by Laura Thompson and I noticed that one of her earlier books was about the Lord Lucan case, A Different Class of Murderer.
  So I started skimming that and it, too, is really good.  So though I was a bit skeptical about whether I would enjoy a novel that is loosely based on the Lucan case, I figured discovering and liking the biography was a sign that I would.  And in this case, that sign was right.

But first, another concern I had about A Double Life.  This is Berry's second novel.  Her first, Under the Harrow, was impossibly good for a debut novel.


So good that it seemed more plausible that she benefitted from some sort of Robert Johnson/crossroads/deal with the devil agreement than just happened to write it all on her own.  I don't mean this to be disrespectful - but most first novels are nowhere near this good (and most other novels as well) and yes, it probably was years of hard work combined with tremendous talent that produced such a good book and not a deal with the devil.  (I had the same feeling about Tana French after I read her debut novel.)  But still, she's very young and she's set the book in a country not her own.  So I don't feel I can be blamed for speculating how she could be so good right out of the gate.  And with her debut novel being so good, I cynically wondered if the new book would fall prey to the sophomore slump.  No, it doesn't. 

A Double Life is the story of a young doctor who has had to assume a new identity and lives in hiding because her aristocratic father tried to kill her common mother back when she was still a child.  The father failed to kill his wife and only succeeded in butchering the nanny.  Possibly with the help of his aristocratic friends, he has fled London and disappeared to a live a new life in exile.  Flynn tells the story of Dr. Claire Alden in flashbacks to her childhood, how her parents met, married, fell out and then ended in tragedy.  We also see the effects of this childhood trauma in her younger brother.  After an encounter with a childhood friend from before the murder, Claire decides to attempt to infiltrate her father's old social circle in an effort to learn his whereabouts.  If these people helped him flee after the murder, they may still be in contact with him.  I thought these parts of the book about how these old elites protect one another were very good.  (Really, the entire book is very good but felt learning why they would protect a murderer was fascinating.)

Since this is a novel of suspense, let's just say the constant threat of exposure of Claire's true identity as she digs for evidence of her father's whereabouts in her old life more than justifies calling this book a thriller.  And the part in the cemetery where she’s standing in the rain over a grave with a shovel brought back or created feelings and reactions that I haven’t felt since I saw Hitchcock’s Rear Window, anytime anyone was about to be caught doing sneaking into an apartment.  

I can't say much more about how things develop without giving away too much.  Maybe those who know all about the Lord Lucan case will expect what happens.  I had no idea and was floored by all that Claire does.  And how it ends.  A Double Life is a tremendous thriller and at the same time I felt it was very moving, which is a difficult combination to achieve.   The ending is fantastic and it turns out that there are two double lives in this book, one predictable and one satisfying.  I hope I see everyone reading this book later this summer.

Maigret and the Funeral

I never go anywhere without a book but sometimes you can't take the book you're reading with you.  Case in point, I had to go a funeral last week and Philip Pullman's new book, The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage, is a big, fat hardcover and its size made it impossible to conceal and carry.  Georges Simenon is my go-to writer in cases like this - almost all of his paperbacks will neatly fit inside a suit pocket.  But titles and cover designs can be problematic when reading in public.

I couldn't take these because of his fascination with butts.

These two had titles which I felt inappropriate for a funeral.

I have some of the new Penguin translations but as nice as they are, you can see that they are now too big to fit inside a suit pocket.

In the end I narrowed it down to Maigret and the Calame Report,

Maigret and the Apparition, Maigret in Court

and The Hatter's Phantoms - which had the advantage of a neat cover and a Christmas setting for all the murders.

Before I could settle on a book, I found a photograph tucked away inside of Maigret in Court (which I really should be saving for jury duty):

I can't figure out if these people are relatives or not.  No one seems to know.  But the handwriting on the back of the photograph is familiar, so it seems possible they are.

In the end, I settled on Maigret and the Calame Report.  I didn't get much reading done that day after all, but this Maigret feels like it is going to be fantastic.  

New French Crime Fiction

A few years ago, I endured one of the greatest catastrophes of all time in reading translated foreign literature.  For various reasons, sometimes a series is published out of order.  A long time ago (pre-internet) I struggled to discover the correct order of Maj Sjowall’s and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck series.  And for a long time I held off reading Fred Vargas’s Adamsberg series as the books were published out of order in English.  In 2013, I heard about a fantastic new crime novel from a French writer by the name of Pierre Lemaitre called Alex.  I ran out and bought a copy and was then absolutely gutted to learn that it was the second book in a series.  It turns out that the untranslated first book in the series, Irene, had one of the most tragic and devastating endings in all of crime fiction.  (That sounds like an exaggeration but I think it is accurate.)  Starting on the second book first, experiencing that ending was ruined for me.  Why on earth the publisher chose the second book of a trilogy to be published first, especially when the ending of the first book contains such a smashing revelation, is beyond me.  I dutifully read the rest of the series and though I have since held a grudge for having to read the books out of order, Pierre Lemaitre became one of my favorite crime writers.

That brings us to the two books considered here - Pierre Lemaitre’s new novel Three Days and a Life and Sophie Henaff’s The Awkward Squad.  I am delighted to report that The Awkward Squad is the first book of a series and that it looks to be the start of a great series.  Sophie Henaff is journalist at the French edition of Cosmopolitan magazine and this appears to be her first book, something I find a little hard to believe as this is as finely polished a debut police procedural as I have read in a long time.  And it has a great hook - Anne Capestan, a decorated police officer, is coming off a six-month suspension and as further punishment, is exiled to head up a new squad of Paris’s worst police officers.  Other reviewers have compared this to Mick Herron’s failed spies in his Slow Horses series - an apt comparison and also a great series.  It also brought to mind the ragtag bunch of detectives assembled in the first series of the great TV drama The Wire.  Or to go back further, The Dirty Dozen.  So, not the newest concept but one that delivers when done well - which Henaff does with her awkward squad.  The squad’s first two cold cases inevitably merge (but that’s okay, this happens all the time in crime fiction) and soon Capestan’s assortment of castoffs are doing the same things that got them in trouble to solve these previously unsolvable crimes.  I look forward to reading more Sophie Henaff.

Pierre Lemaitre’s new novel, Three Days and a Life, is a stand alone. This book is stunning. Initially, it is the story of a young boy who impulsively and unintentionally murders a younger boy and conceals his body in a forest outside their small French town. Given the title, I assumed it would take three days for him to be found out or to find a solution to his dilemma. As authorities search for the missing boy, the tension is unbearable. I can't think of anything I've read where I've felt so bad for the suffering of a murderer as he waits for his crime to be uncovered. I don't want to spoil anything but that there is no immediate resolution to the disappearance of the small boy does not mean the murderer escapes. He is unable to forget what he has done and it warps his life until the time comes for him to return to the town where he grew up and murdered his neighbor. When he does, the tension and dread again becomes unbearable as the reader waits for the inevitable. Something does happen but not at all what might be expected. A sentence of a different sort will be served for this crime. Rarely have I read something so powerful, gripping, and agonizing and that has a convincing ending. Though this is not Pierre Lemaitre's first novel it is the perfect book to start reading this great French writer.

Better Late Than Never

My 2016 Top Ten List

Some might say posting a top ten list of books read in a year five months after the year has ended is a case of extreme procrastination.  I prefer to think of it as a case of extended deliberation.  Indeed, the list I drew up at the end of 2016 is not the same as my final May 2017 list.

10. Boxes/Too Close to the Edge by Pascal Garnier

A tie for 10th place for two short novels by Pascal Garnier.  In both books, people leave their lives in the cities and move to villages in the French countryside and have their worlds collapse.  No Peter Mayle-Provence escapism here, these are unromanticized depictions of modern French life.  I also read Garnier's The Eskimo Solution (sort of a reworking of A Modest Proposal that plays with killing the elderly to redistribute their wealth).  And having spent some time in Pascal Garnier's France, I have a better understanding of the rise of Marine Le Pen.  Gallic Books has been translating Garnier's books into English since his death in 2010 and publishing his work in lovely paperback editions.  I look forward to reading more of him.

9. The Human Flies by Hans Olov Lahlum

A wonderful, quirky, and deliberately old-fashioned murder mystery/police procedural set in Oslo, Norway in the late 1960s.  A young detective and the brilliant, wheelchair-bound young woman with whom he clandestinely consults work to find the killer of a retired Norwegian war hero in sort of a variant of a locked room mystery, the locked apartment building mystery.  

8. Leviathan by Paul Auster

 This is the story of a writer who tells the story of a close friend who has gone from writer to terrorist, though since this was written in the early 1990s, he's more of a pre-Unabomber, performance art terrorist rather than an unsympathetic and foreign World Trade Center era terrorist.  

7. Blood, Salt, Water by Denise Mina

This is the fifth installment of Denise Mina's series about Glasgow Detective Inspector Alex Morrow.  Honestly, it hardly matters what the book is about (a missing woman, a dead body, drugs, etc) - this series is so good I would read an installment about anything.  Morrow is a great character - she's normal, angry, hard-working, fierce, has a dodgy half-brother, and longs to be at home with her twin sons.  In other words, a refreshing change from the bog standard middle-aged, alcoholic male detective or the typical driven but tragically damaged female detective.  I started reading Scottish crime fiction because of William McIlvanney, then Ian Rankin.  While they are both first rate, Mina is the cream of the crop, and not just of Scottish crime fiction, but perhaps of all crime fiction.

6. Some Deaths Before Dying by Peter Dickinson

Back in the early 1990s I used to love Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels, about a woman PI in Chicago.  (I need to go back and catch up with that series.)  And back then, before the internet, in every magazine or newspaper profile of her, she always mentioned Peter Dickinson as the best stylist and storyteller in the genre and I've been carrying around that nugget of information about him all these years but never got around to reading him.  I found Some Deaths Before Dying while browsing in the library and loved it.  A physically infirm but mentally sharp old woman learns that one of two old dueling pistols she had given her long-dead husband, a former POW in Burma, as a gift has gone missing and she endeavors to get it back and unravel the complex mysteries stemming from its disappearance.  Quite a wonderful book, and just as much a proper novel as a mystery novel.  And the perfect example of Paretsky's claim about Dickinson's talents as a stylist and a storyteller.  I should probably rank this higher on my list.

5. Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

Technically, this is Claire Fuller's first novel but it is so good that I don't believe it.  This is the story of a young girl in London in the 1970s with two unusual parents - her father is an survivalist (sort of a doomsday prepper 1.0) and her mother, a renowned Germain pianist.  I want to avoid spoilers so let's just say stuff happens and these survival skills are put to the test.  But all the survival skills in the world are not enough for what really has happened.  It's been a long time since I read Rupert Thomson's The Insult but this reminds me a bit of that, something normal that turns into a dark fantasy/fairy tale.  A tremendous debut.

4. The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood

I love novels about artists, painters especially.  This brilliant and strange book is the story of a Scottish painter and how and why she has come to live at a special colony for artists on a Turkish island in the 1970s.  In a way, it reminds me of a William Boyd novel, where we get the story of an artist and her times (in this one, great sections on the London art scene of the 1950s) but at the same time, there is also something very strange going on, the less of which I say the better so as not to spoil anything.  Hypnotic and engrossing.

3. The Black Notebook/Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano

Like number 10, I again cheat and shoehorn in two slim French novels into one entry.  The Black Notebook is the story of a writer trying to reconstruct his past, from when he knew a young woman who may have been involved in a crime (or terrorism).   In Honeymoon, a documentary filmmaker disappears from his own life so as to be able to trace the lives of a couple he knew a long time ago and makes a moving discovery.  Modiano won the Nobel Prize in 2014 and that is how I learned of him and I'm so glad I did.  He's endlessly fascinating.  I'm still trying to figure out how he does what he does in these books.

2. Real Tigers by Mick Herron

I picked Real Tigers because it was published in 2016 but this is more of a series award as I read the three books and novella in this series all at once.  For a long time I thought spy novels were dumb.  By the time I was of an age to start reading them, the Cold War was ending and nothing seemed more pointless than books about our conflicts with the Russians (because we had soundly won the Cold War and there was no way the Russians would ever recover and infiltrate the White House).  After 20 or so years passed, that era started to get interesting again and I read some John LeCarre and realized I was perhaps a bit wrong to dismiss this genre for so long.  But I still thought any new/contemporary novels about espionage were stupid.  But then I found Slow Horses, the first book in what has come to be known as the Slough House series.  Too many crime novels are about diabolical and genius serial killers and reading about them is tiresome because those stories are all played out.  Similarly with spy novels, there is often a secret plot with the fate of the world hanging in the balance and only one special agent who can beat the ticking clock to stop it.  In an amazing stroke of genius, Mick Herron created a small section of MI-5 (the UK's domestic security service) called Slough House, where all the agents who are fuck ups get sent because it is too hard or too costly to fire them.  They are stuck in a disgusting building doing work so punishingly boring it is hoped they will quit.  The head of Slough House is Jackson Lamb, a once great agent during the Cold War who has been sidelined.  In this series, he uses his disgraced agents to handle some interesting cases that arise.  These books are fresh and fantastic and yet deliver those old thrills.

1.  Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer

I had a hard time starting this book.  I did not like the premise - a young medical student with Asperger's is convinced the cadaver he's been assigned in his anatomy class has been murdered and he's compelled to prove it.  But Rubbernecker turns into an extraordinary mystery and a coming of age story of a different kind as well as we follow this young man's search for the truth.   

The Eskimo Solution by Patrick Garnier

The Eskimo Solution by Pascal Garnier

One of my favorite Donald Westlake novels is Jimmy the Kid, in which a motley group of criminals plan a kidnapping of a child based on a book one of them has read in prison, in which the kidnapping of a child is plotted and carried out.  Westlake includes relevant chapters of Child Heist (written by Richard Stark, which happens to be a pen name of Donald Westlake) in Jimmy the Kid.  And this story within a story device works brilliantly and one reads with glee as the kidnapping goes wrong.  

Pascal Garnier flips this formula in The Eskimo Solution. This novel opens with the opening chapter of a novel by a writer named Louis about a man named Louis who is unhappy with his lot in life and concludes that killing his mother would be the solution to his problems.  And when it works, Louis realizes several of his friends could also benefit from such acts and if he did the job himself, his friends would never know and never be caught.  As the real Louis explains to his editor:

“Wait a minute, let me go on. It’s a very modest inheritance - but that’s beside the point.  Since everything goes to plan, no trouble with the law or anything, he starts killing the parents of friends in need.  Of course, he doesn’t tell them what he’s doing - it’s  his little secret, pure charity.  He’s an anonymous benefactor, if you like.”

“He kills people’s parents the way Eskimos leave their elders on a patch of ice because … it’s natural, ecologically sound, a lot more humane and far more economical than endlessly prolonging their suffering in a dismal nursing home.”

As the real Louis writes his novel about the fictitious, murderous Louis, Garnier treats us to installments of the novel in progress as he tells us the real Louis’s story.  The real Louis holes up in a rented house in Normandy to write the novel and to hide from his own troubles and the troubles of his friends, which begin to resemble the troubles of the fictional Louis.  And when the fictional solutions begin to occur in the real world, the fun (or the misery) begins.

Bleak, funny, unpredictable, The Eskimo Solution is tremendously enjoyable.  Pascal Garnier died in 2010 and it is only recently that his novels have begun to be translated into English.  Gallic Books has published nine of his books so far, which is fortunate because as soon as I finished The Eskimo Solution, I wanted more Garnier.  Anyone who appreciates the work of Patricia Highsmith, Donald Westlake, Georges Simenon, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Pierre Lemaitre, or J.G. Ballard should prove to be a natural reader of Pascal Garnier.