Murder in Mount Holly by Paul Theroux

First published in the UK in 1969; published by Mysterious Press on December 6, 2011

Originally published in Great Britain in 1969, Murder in Mount Holly is one of Paul Theroux’s early novels.  A prologue introduces its three main characters:  Herbie Gneiss, having unwillingly dropped out of college, must even less willingly find a job so he can support his gluttonous mother after his father’s death.  Mr. Gibbon is an aging veteran who walks around town carrying wrinkled paper bags when he’s not working in a war toy factory.  Miss Ball, a kindergarten teacher who collects products with catchy names, rents rooms in her house to Herbie and Gibbon so she’ll have extra money for the school janitor, with whom she’s having an affair.

“If you don’t laugh, you’ll go crazy,” says Herbie.  Murder in Mount Holly offers ample opportunity to increase your daily laughter quotient.  Theroux’s characters have ridiculous conversations, filled with non sequiturs and nonsense, and yet they all seem real, like recordings of conversations your near-deaf and slightly dotty grandparents might have with each other.  The older characters -- Gibbon, Ball, and Herbie’s mother -- are barely in touch with reality, living their lives in a past that never existed.  They are racially and religiously intolerant, wedded to political views that make Barry Goldwater seem like a pacifist.  To prove that they “still have a lot of spunk left,” they turn to crime, somehow justifying their scheme as a blow against communism.  It’s no surprise that things go wrong from the very start.  Meanwhile, Herbie gets his draft notice.  The old folks are delighted; whether he comes home is less important than their familiarity with someone who has been called to battle the communist menace.

If the story seems a bit dated, if Theroux’s targets seem too obvious, if the novel is less substantial than Theroux’s later work, the humor that inheres in his eccentric characters and absurd dialog endures, in the way that old Woody Allen comedies will always be funny.  I recommend Murder in Mount Holly to fans of offbeat comedy for that reason.

RECOMMENDED

Collateral Damage by H. Terrell Griffin

Published by Oceanview on December 5, 2011

Trouble surrounds Matt Royal despite his residence in paradise. It seems that Florida's Longboat Key isn't paradisiacal for everyone. A young man is shot by a sniper while he's walking on the beach near the Hilton, just a day after his wedding. Then a dinner boat runs aground after nearly colliding with Royal's boat. Then the bodies of two more murder victims are discovered, both of whom had been passengers on the dinner boat. When a town resident is killed, it looks like a serial killer has invaded paradise. The killings aren't connected in any obvious way, leaving Royal's friend, Detective J.D. Duncan, without any obvious hope of solving the crimes. When a former soldier from Royal's past shows up, the father of one of the victims, Royal joins the search for the elusive killer. Every now and then another death occurs, leaving the reader, like Royal, to puzzle out the connection that links the murders.

Some aspects of the plot are hard to accept. Royal is a retired lawyer. The victim's father wants Royal to start a lawsuit -- against whom, he's not sure -- to help gather information against the murderer of his son. It's difficult to believe that the police would willingly hand over their investigative file to him; giving open files concerning recent unsolved murders to private lawyers just isn't done. If you can suspend your disbelief in that regard, however, the story that follows is entertaining. It isn't particularly credible but that's standard for a thriller, and it's not much more difficult to believe than some newspaper stories.

The need to suspend disbelief isn't limited to the plot. One of the characters -- a waitress -- is the typical part-time computer hacker; a couple of community college computer courses and she can hack into airline and bank records, not to mention databases maintained by rental car, credit card, and telephone companies. Another character works for a double secret American intelligence agency. Royal's convenient friendships with people who can instantly access any information he needs is good for plot development but not so good for verisimilitude.

The investigation sends Royal down several blind alleys, all in a reasonably effective attempt to keep the reader guessing. An interesting plot twist occurs when Royal begins to wonder whether he can trust the quasi-romantic interest in his life. The solution to the complex puzzle -- the link that binds the murders -- is interesting although I had the feeling I was reading plotlines recycled from other thrillers and mashed together in an attempt to create something new.

While Royal engages in the occasional episode of hand-to-hand combat, he has a more fully developed personality than the standard tough guy character. Someone during the course of the novel accuses Royal of being a philosopher. He's no Aristotle, but he's capable of subtle thought, a trait often lacking in fictional tough guy heroes.  All the characters -- even the minor ones -- are refreshingly intelligent.

H. Terrell Griffin writes vividly, if not originally, about Royal's service as a Green Beret in Vietnam. His writing style in general is fluid, tight, and cliché-free. He blends action and exposition effectively, although the story is a bit exposition-heavy toward the end.

Collateral Damage is the sixth Matt Royal novel but the first I've read. It likely won't be the last.

RECOMMENDED

Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov

First published in Russian in 2002; published in translation by Melville House on September 27, 2011

When we last saw Viktor Zolotaryov (at the end of Death and the Penguin), he was fleeing the crime syndicate that threatened his life, leaving Misha, his penguin, in an animal hospital in Kiev. Now on an island near Antarctica, Viktor is offered the opportunity to adopt a new identity. Returning to Kiev, the melancholy with which he was afflicted in Death and the Penguin is replaced, at least temporarily, with "a cheerful touch of mystery," largely the result of a happy encounter with a part-time prostitute named Svetlana. Still, the murder of his former editor reminds him that "every story must end at a full stop, and none bolder or more final than that of death."

Viktor's search for Misha brings him back into contact with some shady characters. Even worse, he becomes a political consultant, a job that gives Andrey Kurkov the chance to lampoon politicians, their image makers, empty promises, and hypocrisy. Fans of cynicism will find much to love in this novel, but so will fans of humanity. The tender relationship that Viktor established with a little girl, Sonya, in Death and the Penguin continues in Penguin Lost, but Viktor's time in Kiev is limited. Soon he is off to Moscow, on three missions: one for the man whose identity he borrowed; one for his political employer; and most importantly, one of his own -- his search for Misha. Viktor will do almost anything to recover Misha, but does that include traveling to Chechnya?

The Russia and Ukraine that Kurkov describes are full of problems and (as one of the characters advises us) woefully short of individuals who are capable of solving them. The characters in Kurkov's novels are resigned to their dismal fates, but they persevere in their grim lives -- even Misha. Viktor endures his trouble-filled life yet always retains a faint hope that something better might come along; a hint of optimism flickers throughout the story as Viktor ponders the nature of fate.

Of course, there is always the chance that what comes along next will be death, but death might not be so bad. Viktor finds something enviable in the death of fisherman whose frozen body he finds on a lake; he deems the man "worthy of respect, though, not having known him, he could not say in what particulars." The comment is typical of Kurkov; respect for the living and for the dead who surround them is inherent in his work.

The story Kurkov tells is odd (the supposedly dead don't always stay dead in Penguin Lost), filled with strange twists and unexpected turns, but in Kurkov's view, life in Ukraine and Russia (and particularly Chechnya) is odd. "The absurd here was amazingly real," Kurkov writes. "Life here was ruled by it." The absurd is more real than Viktor's life; in his isolation, "noticed by too few to feel real himself," he wonders if he even exists. He wants to feel something, to recover himself, but only in rare moments does he feel empowered to control his own destiny. Fortunately, if there is one thing that can be counted upon in a dismal world, it is a man's love for his penguin.

Kurkov balances the story's darkness with light touches, comic moments that provide relief from the gloom. Of course, political corruption is always good for a laugh, and any scene centering on a penguin is bound to provoke a smile. Reading Kurkov's short chapters is like eating tasty snacks -- they're easy to devour and it's difficult to stop.

RECOMMENDED

A Perilous Conception by Larry Karp

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on December 6, 2011

It's 1976. In vitro fertilization is in its infancy and Dr. Colin Sanford has a plan: teaming with embryologist Giselle Hearns, Sanford wants to earn his fame and fortune by producing the first baby conceived in vitro. The plan is going well -- Sanford's patient, Joyce Kennett, is pregnant -- when a lab supervisor blackmails Sanford, threatening to expose his clandestine research before he's ready to reveal it to the world. Sanford's plan really turns sour on the day he intends to announce the successful birth of the first child to be fertilized in vitro. Before the press conference can be held, Hearns is shot to death, the victim of a murder-suicide committed by Joyce's husband, James Kennett. In the meantime, the blackmailer has gone missing. It falls to Detective Bernard Baumgartner to piece together the various components of the mystery. Except it's not much of a mystery: James' motivation for killing Hearns becomes apparent in chapter four although it's not revealed until the final chapter.

I don't need to like the characters in order to enjoy a novel but both Baumgartner and Sanford are such insufferable jerks that it's difficult to care about their actions. Baumgartner has a self-righteous attitude that is probably intended to make him heroic, but he instead comes across as annoying. Only readers who worship the police, who think it's fine for a cop to break the law, will find anything admirable about Baumgartner. A Dirty Harry attitude, while a bit stale, might at least make a law enforcement character interesting, but that isn't the case with Baumgartner. He's nothing more than a trite clone of the rogue cop whose warped sense of duty overshadows the rest of his boring life. Anyone with the intelligence and resources of Sanford would have laughed at Baumgartner's outlandish attempts to be intimidating.

The plot of A Perilous Conception is slightly more interesting than the characters but it didn't grab me (although a reader with a stronger interest in the history of medicine might have a more positive reaction). The plot hinges on Sanford telling Baumgartner a series of lies that he has no reason to tell. For long stretches, the story is slow moving -- too much exposition, too little action. Fortunately, the pace picks up toward the end.

A plot twist that might have been intended as shocking (or at least titillating) is closer to silly. I know the novel is set in 1976, but it reads as if it were written in 1976 and has been sitting on a shelf for thirty-plus years. On the other hand, another plot twist -- this one occurring toward the novel's end -- worked as intended: it surprised me while adding much needed life to the story. A final, over-the-top surprise, concerning a subplot about Sanford's childhood, adds nothing. The ending is equally over-the-top.

Larry Karp's writing style is capable, although it is marred by unnatural dialog and a dependence on clichéd phrases. The novel alternates point of view between Sanford and Baumgartner, each telling his story in the first person, but -- except for some unconvincing attempts to make Baumgartner sound like a television version of a tough guy cop -- the voices are nearly the same. Karp knows more about medical techniques than he does about police procedure: Baumgartner does things in his investigation that would never happen in the real world.

This isn't by any means an awful novel. It has its moments. Still, there is little in the plot, characters, or writing style that would encourage me to recommend it to anyone who isn't a medical history enthusiast.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Printmaker's Daughter by Katherine Govier

Published by Harper Perennial on November 22, 2011

This lengthy novel spans the life of a woman named Ei, a woman who eventually thinks of herself as She Who Paints But Does Not Sew (or cook, for that matter). In early nineteenth century Japan, writers and artists are being censored, sometimes arrested. Ei's father, Hokusai, is an artist who barely earns enough to survive. He takes ten-year-old Ei with him on his daily trips to create and sell his art because Ei's mother doesn't want her in the home. Hokusai is pleased when Shino, an apprentice prostitute, takes responsibility for Ei while he paints. Part two finds Ei and Hokusai fleeing from Edo, making their way to a fishing village to avoid arrest. Part three takes Ei into adulthood, when she further develops her artistic ability, takes a lover and later a husband, encounters death, and learns to be cruel as she becomes her mother's daughter.

Part four rather abruptly shifts to the story of a Dutch physician named Philipp von Siebold. His life, of course, intersects with Ei's, leading -- in part five -- to Hokusai's second flight from Edo. Part six brings competition between Ei and Hokusai, a new lover for Ei, and the reappearance of Shino. Part seven begins when Ei is fifty and heralds the arrival of demon ships from the western world.

The story gets better as it moves along although it often falters; I never found it particularly intriguing. A good bit of the early chapters are taken up by prostitutes chatting with each other. Frankly, they have little to say of interest, making the first part of the novel rather dull. Other early scenes detail the bickering between Ei's parents. Much of what passes for drama in the story is of soap opera quality: the mother-daughter conflict and the husband-wife conflict produce predictable tears and hand-wringing but little genuine emotion. As Hokusai refines his understanding of the world (and of art), the novel strives for depth that it doesn't quite attain (although I give Katherine Govier credit for the striving). The ending is just too over-the-top for my taste; it seems inconsistent with the rest of the story.

Govier made some odd choices in her rendition of dialog. The speech of some characters is written in standard English while others speak with a heavy accent. Given that the characters with an accent are presumably speaking a Japanese dialect or a heavily accented form of Japanese, I had no idea why the English version sounded like a blend of Asian, Scottish, and Appalachian accents, with a bit of Elmer Fudd tossed into the mix. I assume this is intended to approximate the accent the characters would have if they were speaking English, but since they aren't speaking English, Govier's rendering of the accent comes across as silly.

There are bits of this novel I admired: the enthusiasm for art; the characters' insistence on being true to their artistic natures; the suppression of knowledge as a means of social control; the strong sense of place and time. I also appreciate that the crux of the story -- a woman's growth, her lifelong struggle for independence in a culture where subservience is expected, her desire to be recognized as an artist, her patience as she waits for her time to shine -- may resonate with some readers more than it did with me. Other novels with similar themes, however, have made a stronger impression on me than this one did, perhaps because other writers have handled the subject with more subtlety. Govier repeatedly tells the reader how much Ei wants to live her own life, outside of her father's shadow. I got it the first time, and the one note song becomes rather tedious by part six. In fact, much of the novel seems redundant; a good third of it could have been excised without harm.

Of greater interest to me than Ei's story was a political thread that runs through The Printmaker's Daughter. To the extent that Govier writes about Japan's transition from an isolated group of islands controlled by shoguns to an open nation that melded its spiritual tradition with western science, the story is captivating. If Ei's story had been as interesting as the background that surrounds her, I would have more enthusiasm for the novel. As it stands, I don't regret having read it, but I wouldn't recommend it to readers looking for something special.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS