The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr

Published by Putnam on March 29, 2016

Living in the beautiful French Riviera, Bernie Gunther is almost paradoxically suicidal, but he’s bored and he misses being a cop in Berlin. Working as a concierge, Gunther is using the name Walter Wolf to conceal his past as an SS officer. The year is 1956. Gunther meets, beds, and falls in love with a writer who says she has been commissioned to write a biography of Somerset Maugham. To her apparent good fortune, Gunther’s passion for bridge brings him within the small circle of local friends maintained by Maugham, although Maugham intends to use Gunther for purposes other than filling the fourth seat at the bridge table.

Maugham is being blackmailed. Maugham’s embarrassment involves a sexual indiscretion with a well-known Russian double agent during an era in which the British espionage agencies were overflowing with Russian spies. The blackmail threat has been delivered by someone Gunther happens to know, giving him a chance to reflect upon the past. The reader is therefore treated to stories from 1938, when Gunther was working as a private detective in Berlin, and 1944, when he was an SS lieutenant (having been demoted after an unfortunate incident with Goebbels).

I never read Philip Kerr’s novels expecting scintillating prose, although The Other Side of Silence is a bit more graceful than some of Kerr’s work. Rather, I read them in the expectation that Kerr will deliver a strong plot and even stronger characters. The Other Side of Silence did not disappoint me on either front. The plot is clever, inviting the reader to guess which characters are betrayers and which are betrayed. The intricacy of the plot is worthy of the real-life deviousness of the Russian double agents with whom the story intersects.

Gunther continues to be one of my favorite characters in crime fiction. I admire the complexity with which he is crafted. The point of all the Gunther novels is that principles are easy to live by when they come without a cost. When the choice is between a principle and survival, or between a principle and the torture and murder of the people you love, principles are not so easy to follow. Gunther’s life is an illustration of the tension between survival and principle. The Other Side of Silence does not add new facets to Gunther’s character but it sharpens those with which fans of the series will be familiar. The novel’s other characters -- particularly Maugham -- are also given rich and believable personalities. The characters and the intriguing plot make The Other Side of Silence a welcome entry in the Gunther series.

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Hap and Leonard by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Tachyon Publications on March 1, 2016

Joe Lansdale has written eight or nine novels featuring the characters Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Hap provides the narrative voice. He's sort of an East Texas liberal who has been on a long and unsuccessful quest to find himself. His buddy, Leonard Pine, is a black, gay conservative who has anger management issues. Whether Hap and Leonard have a knack for finding trouble or whether trouble finds them is a question they often ponder.

Hap and Leonard are now appearing in a series on Sundance TV. Apparently the episodes can be streamed online. I haven't done that yet due to my lousy internet service but I'll get around to it eventually. I assume that this collection of Hap and Leonard short stories was released in anticipation of the Sundance show.

A couple of the short stories in the volume are billed as novellas. I’m not sure they’re long enough to qualify as novellas rather than long short stories. The entire volume is relatively short, but most of the stories are entertaining, as you would expect from Joe Lansdale.

The first long story is “Hyenas.” A young man looking for someone to help him prevent his brother from committing a robbery has the misfortune of meeting the wrong guys before he finds Hap and Leonard. A couple of violent confrontations later and the problem is solved. This is a fun, straightforward story that is enlivened by Lansdale’s trademark wit.

“Veil’s Visit” is co-authored with Andrew Vachss. The story blends Vachss’ trademark darkness with Lansdale’s trademark humor. The darkness (involving kids, another Vachss trademark) comes at the beginning but the story becomes cheerier as it progresses. Veil is a lawyer and an old friend of Hap. He travels to Texas to help out Leonard, who is charged with burning down a crack house. Again. The trial is a masterpiece of wit and theatrics. It’s also deliciously funny.

“Death by Chili” is a very short story that was written as a promotional giveaway. Leonard solves the mystery of how a person died. The chili recipe at the end is more amusing than the story.

“Dead Aim” is the best story in the collection. Hap and Leonard are asked to help out a woman whose husband is threatening her. That problem takes a couple of twists before turning into a bunch of new problems … the kind that Hap and Leonard like to solve with an axe handle, a few bullets, and nonstop banter.

In “The Boy Who Became Invisible,” Hap recalls an incident from his childhood. This is a very short, very serious story, quite unlike the other entries. Also from his younger days, Hap explains how he got to know Leonard in “Not Our Kind.” The story features some of the usual Hap and Leonard banter, but its subject matter -- racism and homophobia -- give it a serious edge.

“Bent Twig” is a fairly predictable story about Hap’s efforts to find the drug-addled daughter of his girlfriend, who regularly gets into trouble and disappears. The plot gains some zip toward the end, and the snappy dialog and amusing moments that characterize Hap and Leonard stories make it worth reading.

Rounding out the collection is Lansdale’s brief interview of Hap and Leonard. It comes across as filler. Lansdale also devotes a few pages to explaining how and when he penned the various Hap and Leonard novels and stories.

On the whole, this collection is something that Hap and Leonard fans (or, more generally, Lansdale fans) will appreciate. It doesn’t consistently showcase Lansdale at his best, but “Hyenas” and “Dead Aim” are worth the price of the volume.

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Thirst by Benjamin Warner

Published by Bloomsbury USA on April 12, 2016

Thirst is not necessarily a post-apocalyptic novel, although it has features in common with one. An undefined ecological crisis has occurred, but not necessarily an apocalypse. Electricity is out. Cars are piling up at intersections where traffic lights have gone dark. The police are not responding. The internet is down. So are all the cellphone networks. No water comes from faucets. The creek is dry.

Ed Gardner takes a walkabout, looking for his wife Laura. He sees kids selling water for $30 a bottle. He meets someone who tells him about a fire on the Potomac. Soon his neighbors are fleeing, hoping that the city will have emergency water supplies or medical assistance that is unavailable in his suburban home. Ed and Laura try to tough it out with another couple, but the stress of dehydration and the need to survive take their toll on the Gardners and the neighbors who await the arrival of first responders.

Thirst is not one of those ghastly prepper/survivalist novels, for which I am grateful. Protagonists don't run around gloating about how superior they are to the rest of the human race because they hoarded water and filled bugout bags with stale chocolate bars and kept their guns well oiled. Rather, Thirst is a novel about a neighborhood that reacts -- not very well -- to a crisis, with a focus on the Gardners. The breakdown of social order, the conflict between the instinct to survive and the desire to help others, is well-illustrated, although I’m not sure the story offers anything that hasn’t been explored many times in post-apocalyptic fiction.

Thirst tells such a convincing story that I ended every reading session by downing a bottle of water. At the same time, I’m a bit disappointed that the cause of the water loss is never made clear. Nor is it clear why help is delayed for so long. Is this just a forgotten neighborhood or is the whole nation experiencing an overwhelming crisis? Apparently Benjamin Warner wanted all of that to be a mystery, but I couldn’t help wondering whether he simply lacked the imagination to concoct a plausible explanation for the scenario he envisioned.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, as are some scenes that could be delusions produced by Ed’s water-deprived mind. Still, Warner’s prose is lively and his descriptions of a rapidly deteriorating society are vivid. I liked Thirst for the quality of the writing, for the characters, and for some memorable scenes. Thirst is, in fact, one of those novels where the whole is less than the sum of its excellent parts. Still, I liked Thirst well enough to recommend it, particularly to readers who are more interested in reactions to a crisis that the cause of the crisis.

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Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

First published in 1960; published digitally by Open Road Media on February 2, 2016

To honor the republication of Rogue Moon, I am republishing my 2010 review of the novel:

Rogue Moon is based on a strong premise: to explore a newly discovered construct on the moon -- a thing that keeps killing those who enter it -- scientists make a duplicate human who is kept on Earth while the original enters the construct. The original and duplicate stay in a sort of telepathic contact until the original's death, so the duplicate can chart the course up to the moment of death. The duplicate then becomes the new original, is duplicated again, and the new original makes his way a bit further before dying. In this way, a map through the construct can be created.

The execution is less satisfying than the concept. The lead scientist (Hawks), with the help of a rather disreputable personnel guy, finds a daredevil (Barker) who is capable of withstanding the psychological trauma of dying repeatedly. I wish the novel had focused more on that trauma, but the burden of dying over and over, as well as the mystery of the construct's purpose, receive little attention. The well written story instead focuses on the relationships between Hawks, the personnel guy, and Barker's girlfriend. There's nothing wrong with writing about relationships -- indeed, successful novels are about people, not just about ideas -- but I never got a good feel for Barker, for what it would be like to die again and again and again. That disappointed me a bit.

While Rogue Moon is intriguing and well worth reading, I think it is less developed than Budrys' other work, particularly Michaelmas and WHO?, both of which do a better job of combining well developed characters with intriguing ideas.

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Shelter by Jung Yun

Published by Picador on March 15, 2016

Kyung Cho is a Korean-American, 36 years old, who is married to Gillian, of Irish ancestry. They have significant debt. They are thinking about moving in with Kyung’s nearby parents when Kyung sees his mother, naked and bruised, walking through a neighboring field. He soon learns that something terrible has happened to his parents.

In Kyung’s dysfunctional family, father dominated mother and mother dominated son. It is a family without kindness, a family pretending to be normal. Kyung is trying to break that pattern in his own family, but breaking the pattern with his parents is more difficult. In adulthood, he has limited his interaction with them. Now circumstances force them together, with unhappy results.

Kyung is tense at every moment of this novel. Jung Yun conveys that tension so effectively that I felt tense while reading the story. Kyung is lost. He craves nothing but solitude and resents the well-meaning people who intrude. His parents are crime victims, but Kyung’s focus is on himself. His parents’ tragedy magnifies his own uncertainties and insecurities and discomfort. He desperately wants to be a better person, but he feels he’s never had a chance to develop the generosity of spirit that he sees in others. It’s only a matter of time before he melts down. Much of the novel’s drama comes from anticipation of the moment when it will happen. When drama finally presents itself, in a couple of different ways, it is all the more powerful for the foundation upon which it is built.

The question for the reader is whether Kyung is a victim of circumstances or whether he chooses to define himself as a victim rather than trying to improve his life and attitude. Kyung seems to be incapable of making good choices. It may be that nothing will make Kyung happy because he has chosen to be unhappy. Other characters also talk about how low expectations for life lead to an unhappy life. That’s one of the novel’s themes.

Another theme of Shelter is Kyung’s conflict between his role as a traditional Korean son (a role he plays poorly) and his role as an American husband (which he can play only because Gillian is, for most of his marriage, exceptionally tolerant). He is torn between American values (a husband should put his wife and child first) and traditional Korean values (a husband should put his parents first, his child second, his wife last). Kyung feels a similar conflict between his need to feel proud (or at least to avoid shame) and his need for money (which he could most easily acquire by asking his parents for help). The conflict between father and son is sharpened by the fact that Kyung and his father are so different while, in fundamental ways that are buried deep beneath the surface, they are so similar.

Still another theme is that people react to adversity in unexpected ways. Kyung thinks his parents should react to their painful experience differently than the reactions that they present to him and to their friends. He believes his father and the members of the church who are central to his father’s life have a distorted view of reality. Gillian thinks Kyung should react to his parents’ difficulties differently than the reaction that he presents to her. The point is that how people cope is how they cope ... or how they fail to cope. Their reactions aren’t necessarily right or wrong and it isn’t necessarily fair for others to judge them. At the same time, forgiveness is an essential part of moving on, although as various characters in the novel learn, it takes time to get there.

The novel moves from one dramatic moment to another, but none of the novel’s events are overdone or unbelievable. Yun’s supple prose and strong characterization complement a surprising story. The climax is satisfying, as is the novel as a whole.

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