Crime Fiction – Page 177

Alphabet in Crime Fiction: J and K

Published on December 19, 2009October 30, 2017 by Margaret3 Comments

Whilst I’ve been busy moving house Kerrie’s A-Z Crime Fiction meme has featured the letters J and K. Now that I have the computer up and working (well D actually did that for me) I’m having a little break from unpacking boxes to add to the series. I’ve written about the following books earlier in this blog and have adapted my reviews for this post.

the letter J J is for A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell.

This portrays Eunice, an illiterate woman and a psychopath who does anything to stop anyone from finding out that she can’t read or write. Her ingenuity and resourcefulness is amazing. She blackmails people and killed her father. I found the whole premise of such a damaged person apparently functioning normally in society scary.

She is employed by the Coverdales as their housekeeper and in the interests of having their house kept clean and tidy they tried to make her comfortable. But part of the problem was that they looked on her as little more than a machine, not as a person. They meant well, wanting to make other people happy, but they were interferers and things went from bad to worse. Then Eunice met Joan, who was completely unstable, in fact she was insane. Joan is a religious fanatic, a sinner who delights in telling people of her past sins and wanting them to seek God’s forgiveness. Their friendship ends in tragedy.

I felt helpless whilst reading this, desperately wanting the Coverdales to realise Eunice’s problems, but they were blind to the fact that Eunice was illiterate and although they tried to prevent her meeting Joan they were unaware of the danger they were in. This inflamed Eunice and pushed her into taking the actions she did.

Although Eunice’s crime is known right from the start, that does not detract from the suspense. It actually makes it worse – you know that the murder is going to happen and as the reasons why it happens become clear, the tension builds relentlessly.

letter K is for King of the Streets by John Baker.

I read this over two years ago. It depicts violent murder in graphic detail, which I found hard to stomach and the subject matter of the abuse and murder of children is neither easy nor pleasant to contemplate, but it’s a quick read. This was the third book I’d read by Baker, all set in York and featuring the private detective, Sam Turner and his assistant Geordie (naive, but street-wise). Sam is investigating the murder of a blackmailer and the death of a teenage runaway, hampered by a gangster and his “minders”.

It’s well written, giving insight into the minds of both the detective and the criminal characters. I particularly liked the nickname ‘Gog’ for one of the ‘minders’, who trashes Sam’s office. Gog is, as the name suggests, a huge giant of a man, with little reasoning power, but plenty of brawn, looked after (not very successfully) by his brother, Ben. Baker also refers to Gulliver’s Travels in describing Gog as ‘Brobdingnagian’. At times I even felt sorry for Gog.

I enjoyed this book immensely, despite the violence it portrays.

Teaser Tuesdays

Published on December 8, 2009 by Margaret10 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

We’re still not in our new home, but still have access to the internet and I’m still reading! Next week it’ll be more difficult with all the unpacking and settling in, so I’ll probably be missing from the blogosphere then.

Currently I’m reading Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin.

About the book (from the back cover): It is August in Edinburgh and the Festival is in full swing… A brutally tortured body is discovered in one of the city’s ancient subterranean streets and marks on the corpse cause Rebus to suspect the involvement of sectarian activists. The prospect of a terrorist atrocity in a city heaving with tourists is almost unthinkable. When the victim turns out to be the son of a notorious gangster, Rebus realises he is sitting atop a volcano of mayhem – and it’s just about to erupt.

My teaser is from page 54:

Rebus shrugged. I’m just wondering how professional all of this really was. I mean on the surface, if you look at the style of execution, then yes, it was a pro job, no question. But then things start to niggle.

I always enjoy reading the Rebus books. Although you can read each one as a stand alone book, reading them in order helps with understanding the background and the characters as they develop. I prefer reading to watching the TV series, but inevitably it is the faces of the actors I imagine as I’m reading.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: I

Published on December 3, 2009January 22, 2021 by Margaret2 Comments

Continuing with the Crime Fiction Alphabet, I is for Ian Rankin and Inspector Rebus.

Earlier this year I decided to read Rankin’s Inspector Rebus books in order, starting with the first, Knots and Crosses, published in 1987. Recently I finished the fifth – The Black Book, published in 1993. In all there are 17 in the series, so I’ve a few to go yet. I have read a couple out of sequence – Set in Darkness (2000) and The Falls (2001).

My copy of The Black Book is packed away with our belongings in storage, so this is going to be a bit brief. This is the first book in which both Big Ger Cafferty the ruthless gangster boss, organiser of crime in Edinburgh and DC Siobhan Clarke appear as main characters. DS Brian Holmes has been mugged and is in a coma in hospital, so Rebus with the help of Siobhan, is investigating his attack in the carpark of the Heartbreak Cafe. (I liked the references to Elvis in this book, with dishes such as ‘Love Me Tenderloin”.) When Rebus finds Brian’s little black book, with his coded notes on various criminals and old cases he is drawn back to investigate the fire that five years earlier had destroyed an Edinburgh hotel leaving an unidentified dead body. His team are also running Operation Moneybags, aimed at busting Big Ger’s moneylending business.

Rebus has plenty of personal problems in this book. His girlfriend, fed up with his unreliable hours has locked him out of her flat and his brother and ex-con Michael has turned up in Edinburgh, sleeping in the box room in Rebus’s flat. So Rebus, who has let his flat to students has to sleep on the sofa in the living room. As usual with the Rebus books there are a number of twists and turns, with different sub-plots running at the same time as the main plot.

You don’t have to read the books in order as they each stand alone, but I think it helps to see Rebus’s character as it develops. The next book in the series is Mortal Causes, and as I have kept this handy (not in storage) I’ll be reading this next.

Sunday Salon – Today’s Book

Published on November 29, 2009 by Margaret6 Comments

We’re not moving into our new house for a while yet and I’m writing this in a rented barn conversion, which is just beautiful. I’ll take a few photos later. For now, I’m just writing a short post about what I’m reading today, which is not what is shown on the sidebar under “Currently Reading”.

I brought some books with me but as there are some here I had a look at them and started to read The Light of Day by Graham Swift.

I shouldn’t like this book – it’s written in the first person present tense, a style I don’t like much, it begins very enigmatically referring to characters and events when I have no idea who or what they are and there are quite a lot of short sentences without verbs – my English teacher wouldn’t have let me get away with that. And yet it works, it builds up suspense and tension. The cover is different from the one I’ve shown here, but I can’t find the same one on line, so this will have to do.

So far I’ve gathered that there has been a murder, and I know who did it. Now it’s a matter of discovering the why and the how.

Teaser Tuesday:Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri

Published on November 17, 2009 by Margaret5 Comments

I’m just going to write a short note about Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri because it’s a library book and I’m going to return it this afternoon in one of my last trips to my local library.

This is the fifth Inspector Montalbano mystery but the first one I’ve read. My impression of the book as a whole is that it is well constructed, with plenty of colourful characters, and the mystery kept me guessing to the end. Montalbano investigates the death of a young man, Nene Sanfilippo and the disappearance of an elderly couple, the Griffos. They had lived in the same apartment building, but at first this seems to be merely a coincidence. Montalbano is soon plunged into the dangerous world of Sciliy’s “New Mafia”. (This much is revealed on the back cover).

I particularly liked the way Montalbano’s thoughts are revealed and his relationship with his bosses. He’s another detective who works well on his own and with his own team independently of his superiors. He loves food and there are various desciptions of the meals he savours with great relish. He is also a bit of a philosopher – sitting in an old olive tree whilst musing on life and his work:

Straddling one of the lower branches, he would light a cigarette and begin to reflect on problems in need of resolution.

He had discovered that, in some mysterious way, the entanglement, contortion, overlapping, in short, the labyrinth of branches, almost mimetically mirrored what was happening inside his head, the intertwining hypotheses and accumulating arguments. And if some conjecture happened to seem at first too reckless or rash, the sight of a branch tracing an even more far-fetched path than his thought would reassure him and allow him to proceed.

Ensconced among the silvery-green leaves, he could stay there for hours without moving. (pages 99 – 100)

At times this book reads like a comedy, with some of the police talking in dialect before plunging back into the dark criminal world. I couldn’t work out what was behind the crimes at all, which for me was immensely satisfying. When you can see the end coming chapters away and have worked out who “did it” I sometimes feel let down – not so with this book.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: G is for A Good Hanging

Published on November 16, 2009January 30, 2019 by Margaret5 Comments

My choice for the letter G in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin. I first wrote about this book when I read it in April 2008. It was one of the first books by Rankin that I had read, although I was familiar with Rebus from the TV series.

A Good Hanging is a collection of twelve short stories featuring Inspector John Rebus, set in Edinburgh. All the stories are concise and I think convey the character of Rebus; he is cynical and analytical, a lone worker, who drinks and smokes too much. None of the stories pose complex mysteries and are easily solved by Rebus.

A Good Hanging First published in 1992 it’s one of the earlier Rebus books. The first story in this book is called ‘Playback‘. It’s a bit dated now with Rebus impressed by being able to phone your home phone ‘from the car-phone’ to get ‘the answering machine to play back any messages.’ As the title indicates, solving the crime in this story hinges on phone messages. The police receive a phone call from the murderer confessing his crime. He panics and tries to flee, only to be caught as the police arrive on the scene of the crime. He then insists on his innocence. Rebus disentangles the puzzle even though this seems to be ‘the perfect murder’.

In ‘The Dean Curse‘ Rebus is reading Hammett’s novel ‘The Dain Curse‘, which he tosses up into the air disgusted by how far-fetched and melodramatic that book was, piling on coincidence after coincidence ‘corpse following corpse like something off an assembly line’, when he receives a phone call with news of a car bomb that had just gone off in Edinburgh. He cannot believe it has happened. It seems as though this is the work of terrorists, the bomb having all the hallmarks of an IRA bomb and it had gone off seconds after the car had been stolen. It seems to Rebus as if the coincidences in the Hammett story have nothing on his case. But there is more to this case than at first meets the eye.

My favourite in the book is the title story ‘A Good Hanging‘ in which Rebus solves the crime through his knowledge of ‘Twelfth Night‘. It’s set during the Edinburgh Festival period, when the city is full of young, theatrical people. A Fringe group, comprising a number of students are staging a play called ‘Scenes from a Hanging’ promising a live hanging on stage. The story starts with the discovery of a young man found hanging from the stage scaffold in Parliament Square. It appears to be suicide according to the note in his pocket ‘Pity it wasn’t Twelfth Night’. But Rebus investigates and finds that all is not as it seems. crime_fiction_alphabet

The other stories involve the discovery of a skeleton buried beneath a concrete floor, a Peeping Tom, and blackmailers. One story I particularly like is ‘Being Frank‘ about a tramp who overhears two men talking about a war that’s coming. He is well known for making up stories and informing the police of numerous conspiracies so they just laugh at him. But fearing the end of the world Frank confides in Rebus who eventually begins to suspect that this time Frank is not lying.