Wednesday 6 September 2017

SUMMER READING CRIME SPREE



Three crime books in as many weeks amounts to a spree of summer reading, all in the turning days of August, full of showers, thunderstorms, goldening chestnut trees and the occasional blast of sunshine, so glorious even the drearest of hearts are enlivened.


Never mind that the swallows are gathering, forming ranks along the telegraph wires, while the sea still rolls onto the pristine beach and the weans, sleek as seals in their black wet suits, shriek when their body-boards tumble in the waves, turf and timber still warm the stove in the evening, so the books come out.

Sara Paretsky’s long term Private Investigator, V. I. Warshawski, undertakes her eighteenth adventure in FALLOUT (Hodder and Stoughton, 2017).

Michael Connelly, with almost thirty novels under his belt, introduces a new lead in THE LATE SHOW (Orion Books, 2017). His Detective Renée Ballard, a woman, works the night shift at the Los Angeles Police Department.

Brian McGilloway’s creation, Detective Sergeant Lucy Black of The Police Service of Northern Ireland, faces her latest policing challenge in BAD BLOOD (Corsair, 2017).

Connelly's and McGilloway's books are, at core, police procedurals, the former in a huge north American metropolis, the latter in a small city in the north-west of Ireland. Paretsky's presents a private investigation, so there is less police procedural work involved. All three sit within the genre ‘crime’, though the word ‘thriller’ is also applied. Thus, they can be grouped together in an old-fashioned school essay of the ‘compare and contrast’ variety.

Firstly, a small note for enthusiastic fans of Connelly and Paretsky and their creations. They both have characters named Chastain, hardly a common name in the U.S.A. There are no Chastains in McGilloway’s book.

Connelly and McGilloway’s characters live in the world of police forces. They have hierarchies; briefing rooms; colleagues with whom they share professional and sexual tensions. The protagonists face antagonism from criminals, citizens and from colleagues. There are ‘good’ cops and ‘bad’ cops, but no obvious critique of policing as such. The grossest crime is murder – the unlawful taking of life - and Connelly’s detective, Renée Ballard, in particular, holds to an ethic of doing right by the victims.

McGilloway’s detective, Lucy Black, holds to this ethic as well and, when there is a conflict between staff members, ‘doing the right thing’ is the favoured norm. 

In a sense, both these books are morality fables, in which the good guys, Ballard and Black, prevail, though the contexts in which they struggle remain largely unaffected. There is an undertow of hopelessness pulling at the torrents of action careering along the main channel of both books.

Paretsky's world is more expansive, with FALLOUT ranging across territory and history in great sweeping rushes. Because Paretsky’s lead, Victoria Iphigenia (V.I.) Warshawski, is a private detective, her antagonists include various city and county police authorities, military and civil authorities, families and clients, though there is, as ever, one decent cop.

With Connelly and McGilloway, we are in cities. The great metropolis of Los Angeles is the territory covered by Renée Ballard. Long hours driving on freeways, with hurried lunches and traffic snarl-ups map the reader’s journey from the decadence of the Santa Monica shoreline to the towns that stretch into the valley, then back through the Hollywood hills and into the downtown area. There is very little introspection on the long car journeys. There are African Americans involved, but Renée Ballard never makes it to South Central in this story.

McGilloway’s Derry, in the north-west of Ireland, is a small border city. He tells the geography of the city with the loving attention of a native, taking the reader to locations not often visited. The scene where Detective Lucy Black crawls through the innards of the city's giant span bridge is particularly effective.

Paretsky takes the reader to a mixed rural and urban story-scape, once again lovingly depicted, as the university city of Lawrence, in the state of Kansas, is her birthplace. Her detective yearns for her home metropolis, Chicago, and effective use is made of the inter-play between the blow-in from the big city and the Kansas locals.

Like all crime novels, these three fine examples sometimes veer towards the preposterous, with the protagonists placed in jeopardy and achieving salvation from unlikely sources, each consciously consistent with the drive of the stories. Though the detectives are formidably committed to their work, they all have capacities to maintain relationships with colleagues and to evoke sympathies from freshly encountered allies.

V.I. Warshawski is vivacious, forceful, athletic and resourceful. She is the most colourful of the three lead characters. They are all singular and single, with complex personal relations in hand or lingering. Warshawski exercises by running, often with her dogs, while Ballard is an expert paddle surfer, who seems to live between a pop-up tent on the beach and her locker in police HQ, with occasional overnights with her grandmother. Lucy Black’s relationships with her parents are important elements the reader enjoys. They all eat junk food and Lucy Black, perhaps the youngest, takes no exercise and is physically fit enough to chase suspects. Ballard is driven. Black is adamant. Warshawski is fervent. All are engaging and effective lead characters.

The plots in all three books work satisfactorily. McGilloway creates, manages and advances the story in a dense, often claustrophobic world, where overlapping actions, involving drug suppliers, loyalist paramilitary factions, Roma immigrants, a gay club, a fire-brand pastor, bent and misogynistic cops, conclude with successful outcomes for Lucy Black and a satisfactory sense of order restored, even as a dread undertow sloughs on.

Connelly’s plot has the precision of a well-oiled machine, pumping and resolute, with action trumping action until that acme of the genre, the vital forensic revelation, clarifies and condemns in a sweepingly believable conclusion.

Paretsky’s plot veers most closely to the preposterous zone. It is the marvellous cast of characters Sara Paretsky creates that drives the story, including the two mechanics who arrive late on and who, quite literally, save the day, ably assisted by Peppy the dog. The reader is in danger of being seriously charmed.

The language in Connelly’s THE LATE SHOW is generally hard-boiled. McGilloway’s language is clipped, enlivened by crisp descriptions and brisk turns of phrase in rooted dialogue. Paretsky, unlike the other two writers, uses a clear “I” voice, addressing corporate, federal and military malfeasance far away from the largely blue-collar concerns of Connelly and McGilloway, all laced with V.I. Warshawski's hip and metropolitan tastes in food, music and clothes. Kefir for breakfast anyone?

All three books are a treat for readers of the genre and were enjoyed as summer reading, with Paretsky's coming slightly ahead of the other two, joint second on the pleasure-ometer, because of its expansiveness and the exposure of corporate and military crime.

All three are light on irony and humour, though the occasional witticism breaks through. Readers will have to re-read their well-thumbed Elmore Leonard paperbacks for the boons of laughter and the askance view.

Next up? Arundhati Roy’s collection of essays, lectures and talks, THE END OF IMAGINATION (Haymarket Books, 2016), where she notes that

Writers imagine they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world.”

These three crime stories: FALLOUT, BAD BLOOD and THE LATE SHOW have culled fine writers from the world and readers look forward to more such criminal culling in the future.















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