Very Bad Men by Harry Dolan

Published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam on July 7, 2011

Very Bad Men tells a very good story, an absorbing mystery with enough twists that you may need to take notes to keep track of the plot.  Someone is trying to kill the participants in a bank robbery that occurred seventeen years earlier.  We are well into the novel before the police discover the killer's identity, but this isn't a whodunit:  the reader knows from the start that Anthony Lark is the culprit.  What we don't know is why Lark is after the robbers.  Investigating the mystery are David Loogan, the editor of a mystery magazine; his law enforcement girlfriend, Detective Elizabeth Waishkey; and Lucy Navarro, a persistent tabloid reporter.   Rounding out the cast are the wheelchair-bound former sheriff who caught a bullet while foiling the bank robbery, his daughter Callie who is running for a Senate seat (and with whom Lark is more than a little obsessed), Lark's psychiatrist, and Callie's father-in-law, an affable senator whose behavior is a bit loopy.

The mystery's solution seems to be tied to the getaway driver who fled when the robbery went sour.  His identity presents a second mystery for Loogan and the police to ponder.  When Navarro disappears a little more than halfway into the story, yet another layer of intrigue is added:  Was Navarro kidnapped, and if so, by whom?

Lark is the novel's best character.  He suffers from an affliction that imbues written words with color and causes them to move around on a page.   He can handle Hemmingway's terse prose but Joseph Heller's abundant adverbs "swarm like marching ants."  While unexpected traits like this bring many of Harry Dolan's characters to life, Waishkey is a typical police detective, less interesting than the novel's other players.

Dolan uses crisp, undemanding prose to construct an effective plot.  We know that someone wants the truth to remain buried -- to that end, Loogan and Navarro are confronted with threats and attempted bribes -- but the puzzle surrounding the bank robbery kept me guessing to the end.  Although it's not always easy to follow, the plot never becomes so convoluted as to slow the story's steady pace.

Loogan is no Sherlock Holmes.  As he tries to puzzle out the solutions to the various mysteries, he's frequently wrong.  That gives him a measure of credibility that is too often missing from the seemingly infallible armchair detectives who headline mystery novels.  As unlikely as it might be for a mystery magazine editor to become embroiled in a mystery, Dolan concocts a believable excuse for Loogan's involvement.

This is the second David Loogan novel but the first I've read.  It was strong enough to earn my recommendation and to encourage me to buy the first book.

RECOMMENDED

Germline by T.C. McCarthy

Published by Orbit on July 26, 2011

This is the second military science fiction novel I’ve read in recent months that is told from a journalist’s point of view (the other is Dan Abnett’s Embedded).  Germline is by far the better of the two: the characters have more depth, the battle scenes are more realistic (the emphasis is on survival rather than gunning down hoards of enemy troops), the plot is more complex, and the focus is on the internal damage that war inflicts on soldiers rather than the external bloodshed (although fans of gore and decapitation will be well satisfied).

Marines are fighting Russians in Kazakhstan, in tunnels and on the ground, to gain control of ores and minerals that both sides would like to mine.  Reporter Oscar Wendell  is embedded with the Marines, getting high and hoping to stay alive long enough to win a Pulitzer.  Given a choice, Wendell and the Marines prefer to be in the tunnels (the subterrene) where, surrounded by rock walls, they’re less likely to be shot or burned to a cinder -- unless the enemy tunnels into a chamber occupied by soldiers and fills it with plasma. 

Fighting alongside (or ahead of) the Marines are genetically engineered teenage girls who move “like lighting on speed.”  According to Wendell, the Genetics look like killers but smell like they should be “sitting in school, driving guys crazy with a miniskirt.”  I have to wonder whether T.C. McCarthy threw them into the mix on the assumption that the majority of sf fans are young (or not so young) men who will enjoy reading about genetically engineered teenage girls who look like “a track team gone bad.”  Why not fight the war with genetically engineered teenage boys?  Because boys don’t smell like they would look good in miniskirts?  We eventually learn that genetically engineered males do exist but, like so many things, they aren’t American made.  We also learn that American defense contractors don’t make genetically engineered boys for reasons that (when they are finally revealed) didn’t strike me as convincing.

Silly as all this sounds, McCarthy at least builds some interest into the factory-made girls; they’re programmed to fight and die but they retain most human instincts (including, of course, the desire to kiss Wendell).  Although the Genetics are trained to believe in “death and faith” and are designed to rot away after they turn eighteen (a less appealing fate than the glorious death in combat they are conditioned to crave), Wendell finds that he prefers them to human women, apparently because they are less complicated (a characteristic Wendell identifies as “innocence”).  Perhaps too predictably, Wendall develops feelings for a couple of Genetics (unlike the Marines, who seem to be creeped out by them).  There are echoes of Blade Runner here, with its replicants who want to continue living past their expiration dates, but fortunately Germline follows a somewhat different path.

There’s more to this novel than fighting, but war pervades the story.  The combat imagery is vivid and intense, making Germline rich in atmosphere.   Germline is nevertheless at its best when the spotlight moves from war to Wendell.

Wendell’s self-destructive tendencies make him an intriguing character.  He’s often fighting his own demons:  his fear, his occasional death wish, his desire to tune out the war in a haze of drugs, his need for attachment to a female even if she isn’t a real person.  Wendell experiences personal growth (or at least change, for better or worse) during the course of the novel.  He has a better understanding of his nature and -- as he comes to understand a Genetic -- begins to question what it is to be human when thoughts and personality are shaped by war’s dehumanizing experiences.  The last chapter contains some surprisingly strong writing about the aftermath of war as Wendell, like every combat veteran, realizes that he can never be the person he was before the war, that he must adapt to a new way of living.  This aspect of the novel is very well done.

Germline is the first book in a series called The Subterrene War.  I hope the others are as strong as this one.

RECOMMENDED

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

Published by Doubleday on July 12, 2011

It is rare and wonderful to find a writer who combines the literary sensibility of character-driven fiction with the storytelling ability that shapes the best plot-driven fiction. Donald Ray Pollock is such a writer. I was enthused about the stories collected in his first book, Knockemstiff, and looked forward to reading his first novel. The Devil All the Time did not disappoint.

As was true in Knockemstiff, nearly all the characters in The Devil All the Time are ignorant, violent, and dirt poor. They solve problems with fists and guns. They are driven by sex but empty of love. For the most part, they are beyond redemption, particularly those who claim to serve a higher power. The characters are, at best, drifting through life; at worst, they are consciously evil.

The novel's title appears in nine-year-old Arvin Russell's thoughts: "As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time." Willard Russell's battle isn't entirely successful; his intense prayer sessions at an altar of his own making do not shield him from excessive drink or violence. As the novel moves forward, it takes us back in time, gives us a glimpse of the events that shaped Willard's life, then zooms ahead to events that shape Arvin's. The novel detours to other stories: a sheriff and his sister both have homicidal tendencies, as does the sister's twisted husband; a man in a wheelchair and his preacher friend eke out a living in a carnival tent show before they're forced to leave; a clergyman has a taste for young girls. Eventually, as the separate lives weave together, we realize that all these characters are battling the Devil all the time.

A couple of chapters read like the self-contained short stories in Knockemstiff, but they integrate well with the rest of the novel. At times the characters seem too much like the bedeviled losers who populate other bleak novels (clergy members preying on the young is becoming a cliché even if it's never far removed from the headlines), but Pollock's best characters shine with the polish of originality. Pollock's writing is crisp. He includes sufficient detail to develop his characters and to set scenes without slowing the novel's pace.

This isn't a novel for readers who need to like the characters in order to like the book. This isn't a novel for readers who have an aversion to gruesome violence or bizarre sexual practices. For readers who appreciate an intense story filled with sharply drawn characters struggling with lives that seem destined for doom, this is an excellent novel.

RECOMMENDED

A Small Hotel by Robert Olen Butler

Published by Grove Press on August 6, 2011

On the day their divorce hearing is scheduled, Kelly Hays flees to a boutique hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans while Michael Hays drives west of the city to a plantation called Oak Alley. Kelly brings bottles of Macallan and Percocet with her: an ominous combination of traveling companions. Michael brings Laurie Pruitt, the younger woman he has started seeing. Both destinations trigger memories; more than once, Kelly and Michael stayed together at the same small hotel (including the day they met) and at the plantation (where they got married).

Kelly passes her time in and near the hotel by telling herself a silent story, beginning with a flashback to the Mardis Gras celebration where she first met (and was rescued by) Michael. She reflects upon "how abiding and deep an early impression we can draw of another person from a single, unexamined incident." Eventually that story moves on to another man in her life. In the meantime, Michael and Laurie attend a period party where Michael tries to stay in the moment, a task to which he is unsuited.

Few readers will like Michael although many will recognize in him some of the men they know. The women in Michael's life, those closest to him -- his wife, his daughter, his girlfriend -- never know what Michael is thinking. Michael compartmentalizes his thoughts, the better to ignore those that arise from emotions. Laurie is trying to figure out Michael's "silences and hard edges," still believes she can, believes Kelly simply didn't know how to love him. Laurie is waiting for "the nothing that is so often there" to "become a nuanced something." The reader gets the sense that Laurie will, in that regard, be following a dead-end path that Kelly has already traveled. To use the phrase that has become so popular, Michael is not "in touch with his emotions." In that regard, Michael is more extreme than most men: he can't seem to express any emotion, no matter how obvious the need for expression becomes.

If this novel has a fault, it is that Michael's inability to say "I love you," even to his daughter, is difficult to believe. By taking Michael to an extreme, however, Robert Olen Butler illustrates a familiar divide between men and women: while Kelly and Laurie are waiting uncomfortably for Michael to say something, to express a feeling, Michael feels connected to them by their mutual silence. There are other moments involving other couples that reveal the different ways in which men and women think and perceive the world, but Kelly and Michael, independently remembering their shared lives, provide the sharpest examples of those differences.

That divide is one of the novel's strongest themes. The nature of manhood is another. We see a bit of Michael's life as a boy, enough to understand that Michael's father conditioned Michael to believe that emotional displays are unmanly. Perhaps it is trite that Kelly's father was emotionally unavailable and that Kelly is likely drawn to Michael for that reason, but sometimes trite is truth: women are often attracted to men who, consciously or not, remind them of their fathers, just as they are often attracted to "the strong silent type" until years of silence become oppressive.

As he explores these themes, Butler constructs sentences and paragraphs that move the narrative along like a locomotive gaining steam. There isn't much of a plot here -- you wouldn't call the events that have shaped your life a "plot" -- although Butler skillfully builds a sense of dread as the story unfolds. Two stories, really, seamlessly joined: one taking place in the present that has the reader worrying about Kelly alone in her hotel room with alcohol and pills, and the intertwined life stories that brought Michael and Kelly to this point. Butler condenses the life stories to their essence by focusing on those small defining moments in lives and relationships that become forever imprinted in memory. I'm not entirely satisfied with the ending -- it seems designed to appease readers -- but that's a small complaint, an authorial choice that I can accept.

The scenes describing the end of the marriage are beautifully written but painful to read. If you're looking for a book that is light and bright and cheery, look somewhere else. If you are willing to tackle an intense, insightful examination of two individuals, this is a rewarding novel.

RECOMMENDED

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