More Beer by Jakob Arjouni

 

First published in Germany in 1987; published in US by Melville House on June 7, 2011

There is more story in this short (176 page) novel than you'll find in most 400 page thrillers. That's because Jakob Arjouni doesn't waste words. Using language that is both efficient and precise, Arjouni manages to set evocative scenes, create convincing characters, and tell a story that is lively, meaningful, and entertaining.

The Ecological Front put an end to the pollution emitted from a chemical company's waste pipe by blowing it up. The four people involved deny responsibility for the contemporaneous shooting death of the company's owner, Friedrich Böllig. Böllig's death is fortunate news for the rival chemical companies that want to demonize the Greens but it also seems to benefit Böllig's young wife. The lawyer defending the four activists believes there was a fifth participant in the sabotage who might have been involved in the shooting but his clients won't betray their colleague. The lawyer hires private investigator Kemal Kayankaya to find the missing culprit. Spanning only three days, Kayankaya's investigation is impeded by violent hoodlums, corrupt (and equally violent) police officers, an unethical doctor, a reporter, and Böllig's family, among others. As Kayankaya continues to dig (in between incidents of getting his head bashed in), he discovers that the circumstances surrounding Böllig's death are ... complicated.

The story is entertaining but it is the main character that makes More Beer worth reading. Kayankaya is a Turk by birth and, despite having lived his entire life in Germany, he is regarded as an undesirable outsider. His fellow Germans expect him to be uncouth, sexist, and odoriferous. Instead, he's cantankerous, tenacious, and a bit philosophical. As the German-Turk version of the hard-drinking noir detective, Kayankaya is at once familiar and strange.

More Beer was first published in Germany in 1987. It is the second of four Kayankaya novels. Kayankaya meets a character in More Beer who shows up again in the next novel -- One Man, One Murder -- but Arjouni doesn't engage in the sort of novel-to-novel character development that makes it necessary to read the series in order. I don't think More Beer is quite as good as One Man, One Murder, but it's nonetheless a quick, engaging read. Readers who enjoy international mysteries and those who want to sample a different shade of noir should give Arjouni's Kayankaya novels a try.

RECOMMENDED

Iron House by John Hart

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on July 12, 2011

Iron House starts as the story of a man (Michael) who wants to leave the crime family in which he was raised after escaping from a brutal orphanage. Michael's desire to change his criminal life is motivated by his love of a woman (Elena) who doesn't know that he's a mob enforcer. Iron House later tells the story of Michael's attempt to defend the brother (Julian) he hasn't seen in years from the crime family's retaliation. Michael discovers that he must protect Julian from a different kind of harm when dead bodies are discovered on the estate of the senator who adopted Julian. The two stories eventually connect in unexpected ways.

John Hart strives to bring literary quality to his prose. Often he succeeds. Occasionally he reaches for metaphors that don't quite work, or has characters speaking with unnatural eloquence. I nonetheless regard Iron House as an unusually well written thriller. The plot is clever and, although it threatens to go over-the-top toward the end (as is the trend in thrillers), the story managed to stay within the realm of plausibility, if only barely.

While the story is surprisingly good, the characters lack depth. Michael is a garden-variety "killer with a heart." Elena's initial decision to rid herself of this monster is believable, but her later waffling is inconsistent with the limited personality that Hart gave her. The gangsters are stock gangsters and Julian, supposedly a brilliant author of children's books but deeply damaged, is a character we never get to know.

Iron House has other problems. A minor one: All the characters are convinced that if Julian is arrested (and the police are determined to arrest him for the dead bodies that are found on the senator's estate despite the complete absence of evidence against him), he will respond to an interrogation by making an incriminating statement. I can't believe Julian, at thirty-two, is so weak-willed that he can't remember to answer the first question with "I won't talk to you without a lawyer," at which time questioning must cease. And even if Julian is that weak-willed, the army of lawyers working for the senator would hang a sign around his neck invoking Julian's Fifth Amendment privilege. All the hand-wringing about Julian's impending arrest is nonsensical.

A more serious problem: I think John Hart cheated by trying to make the reader like (or at least empathize with) Michael. Hart repeatedly tells us that Michael was raised "to be better than the things he did" but that's dishonest. We are the things we do. Michael is a killer. Sure, we're told that he only killed other criminals, a caveat that Hart apparently added so readers wouldn't reject Michael out of hand, but by killing other criminals Michael was advancing the goals of his adopted crime family. Hart skates around Michael's true nature, does his best to make Michael seem like a decent man, probably because he knows that many readers dislike books if they don't like the characters. I think Iron House would have been just as good -- better, in fact -- if Michael's murderous past had been directly confronted and more openly displayed.

So: good plot, strong writing, weak characters, not entirely honest, and a few other problems but not so many as to destroy my appreciation of the story.

RECOMMENDED

Cold Glory by B. Kent Anderson

Published by Forge Books on October 11, 2011

B. Kent Anderson is a capable writer. He has a good sense of pace, his prose is clean, and he has a sharp eye for detail. It's unfortunate that he chose to write a formulaic thriller that rests on an implausible premise.

Cold Glory is the latest entry in the ever growing field of (for lack of a better term) historical conspiracy novels -- stories that imagine generations of people acting secretly and in concert for some nefarious purpose. The founders of the secret society at work in Cold Glory called themselves the Glory Warriors. The organization was born during the Civil War but continues to thrive in the present.

In the prologue, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sign a three page document during a private meeting in Appomattox, shortly before Lee's public surrender to Grant. The rest of the novel takes place in the present, beginning with historian Nick Journey's discovery of buried documents in southern Oklahoma. Journey puzzles over a single page that refers to an additional clause to the peace treaty that ended the Civil War -- a clause that will take effect if the President, the Chief Justice, and the Speaker of the House are all removed from office by conspiratorial means. The document's second page, containing the text of that clause, is missing.

Following the formula of historical conspiracy novels, the two men who attempt to kill Journey so they can recover the document have an identifying mark -- in this case, they're wearing gold G.W. pins -- giving Journey a convenient clue to the existence of the secret organization. One might think that secret society hit men wouldn't wear the secret society insignia while doing their secret work, but that's the formula and Anderson follows it dutifully. True to the formula, the out-of-shape history professor must rely on his wits to survive until he can recover the missing pages and divine the document's meaning. In that endeavor he is assisted by Meg Tolman, a beautiful agent of a fictional federal law enforcement agency that opens a file on Journey despite the absence (at least initially) of any reason to believe the federal government would have jurisdiction over (or interest in) an attempted murder in Oklahoma.

None of this makes the slightest bit of sense. The novel asks us to accept that intelligent people, some of whom have a legal education, believe that a "treaty" signed by Grant and Lee would permit a group of unelected individuals to seize control of the government in the event of a specified crisis. You don't need a legal education to understand that treaties (even those that are ratified, which this one wasn't) do not supersede the Constitution. Even though the conspiracy's leader controls a television network that is widely viewed by the gullible and intends to use that network to convince the public that his seizure of power is legitimate, I can't believe that this guy would find even a handful of people in a position of influence who would agree that his treasonous scheme would enjoy public support. The novel's premise is just so silly that it undermined my willingness to suspend my disbelief.

Another problem: We never learn the size of the "invasion force" that will support the coup, but it would take a significant number of people to occupy the structures of government. Anderson doesn't explain why so many members of the Armed Forces, all of whom took an oath to protect the Constitution, would be willing to overthrow it.

Unfortunately, the sad plot isn't redeemed by interesting characters. Journey is given an autistic son for no other reason than to show us what a wonderful person Journey is -- unlike the son's mother, who wants to institutionalize him. The theme of "evil selfish mom doesn't love her autistic son as much as heroic self-sacrificing dad" is too obviously manipulative to succeed.

The story starts losing steam about two-thirds of the way to an anticlimactic ending. The last couple of chapters are a bit dull. There is some solid writing here, but it's wasted on an ill-considered plot and tedious characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

 

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published in US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 19, 2011

If you read this book expecting it to be a murder mystery that will be solved by boy detectives, you're likely to be disappointed. The story does open with a murder, and young Harri and his friends make half-baked attempts to solve it, but like boys around the world, they're easily distracted. These aren't the Hardy Boys; Harri Opoku's idea of crime detection is to scan the horizon for clues using his plastic binoculars, to conduct stakeouts with an ample supply of Cherry Coke, and to stick tape on random objects near (and not so near) the crime scene to see if he can lift fingerprints. The kids he doesn't like (including the several who bully him) are, of course, his prime suspects. Quite by accident Harri stumbles upon actual evidence. When he gets close to the truth (again, quite by accident) trouble ensues.

Still, Pigeon English isn't a plot-driven novel; it's a chronicle of a short period in a boy's life. When he isn't detecting, Harri talks to his friends about superheroes, goes to school (he's delighted to learn that a lemon can be made into a battery), fights with his sister Lydia (who is keeping a mysterious secret of her own), admires his platonic girlfriend Poppy, and runs away from bullies (some of whom he provokes because he knows he can outrun them). Occasionally Harri thinks about his life in Ghana, where his father and grandmother still live, keeping in touch by telephone. Now and then he contemplates pigeons.

Harri loves pigeons. He believes he's communicating with a special pigeon friend, although he's uncertain whether these silent conversations are real or imagined. From time to time we're treated to a philosophical pigeon's-eye-view of the world. I confess to being a bit puzzled by those passages. Are we really hearing the thoughts of a numinous pigeon who is watching over Harri, or are we hearing Harri's thoughts as he imagines the pigeon's thoughts? The pigeon's voice is different from Harri's, more mature and less slangy, suggesting that Harri does indeed have a guardian pigeon. Either way, the pigeon passages don't fit in with, and in fact detract from, the rest of the story.

Fortunately, most of the novel is in Harri's voice -- a voice that struck me as authentic, although I admit I don't know any preteens from Ghana who are being raised in London. It took me awhile to figure out that "asweh" means "I swear" and I had to use Google to learn that "hutious" is Ghanaian slang for "frightening" but those words contribute to Harri's unique style of speaking. Harri loves words; "paradiddle" is one of his favorites. Sometimes he adopts (and misuses) a new favorite word ("orgasm," for instance) without quite understanding its meaning.

Harri is a completely innocent kid -- he knows several words and phrases pertaining to sex but his understanding of them is invariably inaccurate. When his sister's friend teaches him to French kiss (a skill he thinks he may need if he is to cement his relationship with Poppy), Harri is disgusted by the lesson. Harri understands the world with a child's logic; his observations -- the notion, for instance, that eyelashes are basically bug shields -- contribute a good bit of the novel's humor. Despite his desire to be as cool as the gang members who inhabit his neighborhood, Harri is disturbed by the crime and violence that surrounds him. Harri's innocence in a corrupt world is part of the book's charm.

The mystical pigeon notwithstanding, I enjoyed this quirky, offbeat novel. It captures the universal experience of childhood from an immigrant's perspective. That perspective is important; Stephen Kelman seems to be saying that life might be awful in Ghana but there's no guarantee it will be any better in London. Some readers won't like the ending. I'm not sure I liked it but I think it's honest. More than that I can't say without saying too much.

RECOMMENDED

The Castle in Transylvania by Jules Verne

First published in France in 1892.  First published in English in 1894.  Published by Melville House on July 6, 2010.

Someone (or something) appears to be living in Transylvania's Castle of the Carpathians. It isn't Count Dracula -- Bram Stoker's novel didn't make an appearance until 1897, while The Castle in Transylvania was first published in 1892. Like the family name "Dracul," however, vampire stories existed in Romania for centuries before Stoker wrote his novel. Jules Verne relied on the superstitions that are rooted in the history of Transylvania -- a land, Verne tells us, that lends itself "to all psychagogic evocations" -- when he penned this tale of an eerie castle. But is this a tale of the supernatural? Verne does a masterful job of keeping the reader guessing until the novel's end. Readers should be warned, however, that the phrase "the original zombie story" on the cover of the Melville House edition is a tad misleading.

Verne's story begins with the shepherd Frick, who takes his first look through a telescope when he meets a peddler offering one for sale. Gazing at the Castle of the Carpathians nestled in the distant mountains, Frick spies smoke rising from the keep. This disturbs Frick because the castle has been abandoned since the disappearance of its owner, Baron Rudolf of Gortz, many years earlier. The castle is never visited by the superstitious villagers for they are certain it is haunted, filled with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, surrounded by dragons and mischievous fairies.

Word of the smoke spreads rapidly throughout the village. The villagers readily accept Frick's explanation: a fire in the keep has been set by the Chort -- that is, by the devil. The village leaders meet to discuss what becomes one of the novel's most interesting themes: the adverse economic impact the village will suffer if travelers, fearful of the supernatural, decide not to tarry in the village shops and inn (not to mention what the Chort might do to their property values!). The leaders draft Dr. Patak to investigate since he has often derided their superstitious beliefs. Patak isn't happy to be chosen and agrees only after forester Nicolas Deck volunteers to accompany him. A voice then fills the inn, warning Deck that if he goes to the castle, misfortune will befall him. This foreshadows a terrifying adventure for Deck and the doc, and the events that follow certainly terrify Patak.

Is the castle infested with evil spirits or are the villagers falling prey to their own superstitions? It falls to Count Franz of Tellec -- who travels through the village by chance -- to answer that question. Count Franz and Baron Rudolf happen to have a dark history involving a beautiful opera singer. Is the opera singer alive or dead? Or is she undead? The genius of this story is the mystery that Verne creates. The reader doesn't learn until the final chapters whether supernatural beings inhabit the creepy castle. Unfortunately, Verne resolves part of the mystery in a clumsy narrative that slows the novel's momentum. Still, the story gets back on track before it ends.

Verne devotes a fair amount of this novel to the creation of atmosphere. The book is replete with information about Transylvanian history and customs. Readers who crave nonstop action might be put off by Verne's digressions, but I thought they added interest and authenticity to the story. Besides, reading Verne is a pleasure; even at his least exciting moments, his prose is never dull. The pace quickens considerably in the last third of the novel. The conclusion (like an earlier chapter involving the opera singer) is melodramatic but that's hardly a surprising feature of a nineteenth century story. This might be lesser Verne but it's still a story that fans of horror fiction, mysteries, and Victorian literature should enjoy.

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