Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo

Published in French in 1995; published in translation by Europa Editions on May 7, 2013 

First published in 1995, Total Chaos is French literary noir. Three friends from the melting pot of Marseilles (whose parents spoke Italian or Spanish at home) bond in their youth over their outsider status and a shared love of poetry and old books. That, and their shared love of the beautiful Lole. The three friends once participated in a series of armed robberies, but their adult lives have gone in different directions. Fabio Montale became a cop. Manu is dead. Pierre Ugolini, having spent some time drifting, returns to Marseilles to avenge Manu's killing. It is a question of honor, and honor is all that matters in Marseilles. It doesn't end well for Ugolini, and that's where the story begins.

Montale's job is to preempt rioting in a neighborhood where the French regard everyone who isn't of French ancestry as a dirty Arab. When Leila Mouloud disappears -- an Arab student upon whom Montale has something more than a crush -- Montale assures her father that he will find her. At the same time, Montale is determined to understand what happened to Manu. Therein lies the plot -- such as it is.

Montale spends quite a bit of time revisiting the past -- too much time, as the story is often slow to move forward. Much of the novel seems directionless. A fair amount of the novel -- apart from Montale showing off his exquisite taste in food, alcohol, and music -- consists of Montale's internal monologue. Some of it (particularly the woeful condition of immigrants) is interesting, but his redundant thoughts did not always hold my attention. I expect a certain amount of existential angst in a noir protagonist, but Montale just won't shut up about his relentlessly downbeat view of the world. There are only so many times I can read things like "We were all like insects caught in a spider's web. We struggled, but the spider would eat us in the end" before I want to slit my throat. Or maybe Montale's, to put him out of his misery.

Montale is a classic noir character, the alienated tough guy with a soft heart. He doesn't fit in with the police -- he too frequently identifies with the outlaws, rooting for the underdog -- but he cannot abide the pain caused by crime. He's surrounded by corruption and despair (from which, conveniently enough, frequent sexual encounters provide his only respite). He easily falls in love but never holds onto it, perhaps because he doesn't really want it. He tells us, more than once, that he loves women too much. Eventually, his "I am so passionate, I love every woman I take to bed, including the prostitutes; I cook wonderful meals for them with fennel and garlic but I will never be happy" attitude starts to wear thin. Maybe it's a French thing. And maybe observations like this are a French thing -- "There in front of me was every man's dream: a mother, a sister, and a whore!" -- but even by noir standards, that's a little too cute for my taste.

There are things about Total Chaos I admired. Jean-Claude Izzo writes short, punchy sentences that are well suited to the story he tells. He captures the atmosphere of Marseilles -- its music, ethnic restaurants, and commuter trains full of tough-acting kids -- in vivid terms (the city is "an ancient tragedy in which the hero is death"). While there is the skeleton of a good story here, it is given too little flesh. I like the way the twin mysteries are eventually resolved, but the story is too often dull, and noir should never be dull. Montale does no detective work to speak of, opting to drift through the novel, making existential comments upon the seedy events he observes ("life didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was death"). Not quite all: sex and cognac and sex and well-prepared food and sex also matter to Montale. It's unfortunate that he's too awash in self-absorbed despair to recognize the pleasure in the things that obviously give him so much pleasure. Total Chaos is the first novel of a trilogy, but it failed to inspire me to read the other two. I'm not sure I would survive the experience.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Little Green by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on May 14, 2013 

The good (if not particularly surprising) news for Easy Rawlins fans is that Easy isn't dead -- he just thinks he is. A few paragraphs into the opening chapter, his revival from a coma gives birth to a new Easy Rawlins adventure. Even before he is back on his feet he has a mission: to find a missing boy named Evander Noon (a/k/a Little Green). At about the novel's midpoint, Easy takes on a second assignment, helping a friend who is the victim of a blackmail scheme.

Walter Mosley always captures the place and time in which his novels are set in high definition detail. Little Green takes place Los Angeles in 1967, a time when hippies were still a phenomenon and the Watts riots were the prism through which whites viewed blacks. Mosley builds characters who, over time, become as familiar and as real as distant friends, yet -- like real people -- they're still capable of surprising behavior. For Easy Rawlins fans, Little Green is worth reading to discover the new stage of his life that Easy has reached. This is a mellower, more optimistic Easy, one who is finally coming to terms with his difficult life, one who, having been reborn, is starting over (just as, in many senses, the country was doing).

It's a given that Mosley's dynamic prose will sweep a reader along from his first word to his last. The plot of Little Green, on the other hand, is less engrossing than Mosley has delivered on his better days. The story moves at a steady pace but it never soars. There are so many backstories in play that they tend to overshadow the central plot. The voodoo medicine that keeps Rawlins going is a silly distraction. Yet Mosley has always been a chronicler of the human condition, and if the plot is unexciting, it nonetheless has revelatory moments that illuminate the darkness within his characters, as well as their struggles to overcome it. Little Green is ultimately a story about a changing world, one that offers more hope than despair. Viewed in that light, the novel is a modest success.

RECOMMENDED

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Published by Soho Crime on May 7, 2013 

Dead Lions has everything a good spy novel needs -- intrigue, strong characters, crafty tradecraft, byzantine plotting, sharp prose -- with the addition of a healthy dose of humor. The heroes (if you could call them that) are slow horses: Intelligence Service officers who aren't trusted with serious work, assigned to Slough House in the hope that they will retire or die of boredom.

Dickie Bow, a former spook with a drinking problem who went off the books after the Cold War ended, spots a Moscow hood in London and, acting on instinct, follows him. While riding a bus a couple of seats behind the hood, Bow dies, apparently of a heart attack. Jackson Lamb, in charge of Slough House, investigates Bow's death, while his employees are diligently avoiding productive work -- not that they're ever given productive work to do. The slow horses are an engaging group of misfits, and as the novel unfolds, we get to know them all. We even start to like them ... most of them, anyway.

The Cold War is over, but as Lamb investigates Bow's death, he begins to wonder whether there are Russian spies who didn't get the memo. Particularly the greatest spy of all, a legend who never existed -- unless he did. Lamb's minions at Slough House aren't particularly suited for field work, but Lamb decides to mount an operation that will get to the bottom of Bow's (presumed) murder and a (presumably) long-dormant scheme involving sleeper agents. Meanwhile, without Lamb's knowledge, two slow horses are borrowed from Slough House and tasked with creating a security plan for an upcoming meeting with a Russian industrialist. As you would expect, these plot threads eventually join into a single strand.

I've read any number of spy novels that are more somber than this one without being half as clever. The plot is both wild and wickedly smart. It's also more believable than the plots in many novels that are meant to be taken more seriously. Mick Herron writes in a tone of perfectly understated sarcasm that never fails to amuse. At the same time, he manages to tell a conventional spy story that is sometimes heart-warming and always intriguing. Toward the end, he delivers the excitement of a thriller. All of that, coupled with the cast of quirky characters, make me want to read the novel that introduced the slow horses.

RECOMMENDED

McNally's Secret by Lawrence Sanders

First published in 1992; published digitally by Open Road Media on March 12, 2013

Expelled from law school for streaking, Archy McNally joined his father's Palm Beach law firm as an investigator. Archy refuses to take life seriously -- he blames most of society's troubles on an excess of seriousness -- and his whimsical attitude is showcased in the McNally novels. McNally's Secret is the first. Lawrence Sanders wrote six more, and Vincent Lardo continued the series after Sanders' death.

Archy's father, Prescott McNally, assigns Archy to look into the apparent theft of a block of rare postage stamps from his wealthy client, Cynthia Horowitz. With about a dozen suspects to investigate, including staff, family, and house guests, Archy has a formidable task ahead of him. He handles it with aplomb, taking frequent breaks for cocktails and long lunches at the club. The stamp theft eventually leads to a couple of deaths, turning McNally's Secret into a classic murder mystery.

Archy is something of a playboy. He spends his evenings wooing a new woman, despite the repeated warnings he receives that the relationship will lead to trouble. I enjoyed the superficially charming aspect of Archy's personality, but he's also a smug, condescending snob. Those traits begin to wear thin by the novel's end. Fortunately, it's a short novel.

The multilayered mystery itself is fun and, if one of the plot twists is a bit predictable, it leads to yet another twist that is quite satisfying. As a good mystery writer should, Sanders plants the clues and gives the reader a fair chance to pick up on them. While I'm a bigger fan of Anderson's grittier stories (I have fond memories of reading The Anderson Tapes thirty years ago), McNally's Secret should appeal to mystery fans looking for lighter fare.

RECOMMENDED

Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski

Published by Mulholland Books on April 30, 2013 

Had I read the first two books in the Charlie Hardie series before reading Point and Shoot, I might not have felt quite so lost as I tried to make sense of Hardie's flashbacks in the opening pages. What's this outfit called the Cabal and why is Hardie in low Earth orbit watching a daily video of his family in their kitchen? He's essentially been put to work (quite against his will) as a security guard whose job is to kill anyone who manages the nearly impossible task of breaking into the satellite. Of course, someone does. What is Hardie guarding? He doesn't know, but it's clearly something dangerous.

Point and Shoot is a thriller infused with elements that border on science fiction. It's sort of tongue-in-cheek Ludlum, complete with a conspiratorial organization and a protagonist who, like Jason Bourne, has been the subject of unorthodox experiments. Yet unlike Bourne, a protagonist who is meant to be taken seriously, Charlie Hardie is anything but. In addition to crime fiction, Duane Swierczynski writes comic books, and there's a touch of superhero in Hardie -- a jaded, reluctant superhero, sort of Howard the Duck crossed with any of those Marvel characters who were constantly complaining about their lives. The story has a comic book sensibility in that it's not quite grounded in the real world, although that doesn't diminish the fun of reading it.

And reading this fast-moving, tongue-in-cheek novel is loads of fun. Hardie is wild, "a force of living mayhem" whose unending bad luck is reinforced by the fact that he's so hard to kill. The poor guy would sometimes prefer death to the unfortunate life he's living, making him a sympathetic, even likable, protagonist. The addition of a second character who is carrying a lot of Hardie's baggage doubles the fun, and the spectacularly over-the-top killers who populate the novel are just hilarious. For all the mayhem, however, the ironic ending has a certain sweetness. (Although there's a second ending, more like the beginning of another novel, that culminates in a cliffhanger. How annoying is that?)

Swierczynski makes frequent references to movies, beginning each of the short chapters with a quotation from a film. The book would make an entertaining action flick. It isn't deep but it isn't meant to be. Hard-charging prose, goofy characters, and a mayhem-fueled plot are enough for readers who like that sort of thing ... and I happen to be one of those. (Note to sensitive readers: if you shy away from the F-word and its variants, you really want to avoid Point and Shoot.)

RECOMMENDED