Barbara Ludman
crime Round-up
Newton Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone, circa 1976, is a post-apocalyptic novel posing as a thriller: bleak and brilliantly written, with characters you can’t shrug off, some of the best, truest and funniest dialogue you’ll ever read and a tragic and inescapable point.
Cutter is Alex Cutter, a Vietnam War veteran whose misstep on to a land mine has cost him an arm, a leg and an eye. He figures he hasn’t much else to lose, so he’s reckless with his life and the lives of those around him. Here’s the kind of thing he does: he’s sitting in a bar and a couple of Hell’s Angels walk in, tattooed, festooned with chains, the lot; they sprawl on chairs, feet on the table, and look for trouble. Everyone else looks away. Cutter stares, and then he laughs. It’s up to Bone to talk them out of killing him.
Bone is Richard Bone, a former Midwestern advertising executive who has chucked it all in and moved to the coast, and is now supporting himself as a part-time gigolo but most of the time crashing in stunning squalor with Cutter, his downer-and-Marlboro-addicted lady Mo and their sunny 18-month-old child, whom Cutter refers to as “brown pants”.
One night Bone sees a man shoving a sack into a trash can; the sack turns out to contain a dead teenager, and Bone thinks he recognises the killer as a self-made billionaire out of the Ozarks. That’s all Cutter needs. He sets up a hair-brained blackmail scheme, plunging himself, Bone, Mo, everyone he touches into jeopardy.
It’s probably just as well that they don’t write books like this any more; the competition would surely crumble and instead of, say, seven or eight good thrillers a year (and several dozen awful ones), we’d have to make do with just the one.
It has been reissued by Serpent’s Tail, along with another, David Goodis’s 1952 Of Tender Sin. They still write books like Of Tender Sin, but mostly in French; it’s a classic noir thriller, and somewhat obscure.
Ian Rankin avoids obscurity, but here and there in his latest, The Falls (Orion), only just and his books keep getting longer and denser. Never mind: he writes wonderfully well, his depressive, self-destructive, probably alcoholic Detective Inspector John Rebus is one of the more interesting characters in police-procedural fiction, and one learns a great deal about Edinburgh, where Rebus operates.
In this one, the daughter of a banker goes missing after she leaves her fashionable New Town flat to meet friends for drinks at a pub near the university, where she studies art history. She has been playing a game on the Internet run by someone who calls himself the Quizmaster, and Rebus’s junior, DC Siobhan Clark, takes over the game in an attempt to get to this shadowy figure. It’s a sort of treasure hunt, with messages stuck around town in unlikely places, which one must identify from cryptic clues. At the same time, tiny dolls in small carved wooden coffins begin turning up all over the place; Rebus finds a link to 19th-century body-snatchers and suspects there may be a link to the missing girl as well.
Dialogues of the Dead (HarperCollins) is the best yet in the series by Reginald Hill featuring Mid-Yorkshire CID Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe. If you’ve caught the TV series but never read the books, you’ve got a revelation coming. Dalziel is cleaned up for television no obscene language, no cutting insults, no scratching of the crotch during office conferences. In the books he’s shown in all his obscene, offensive glory.
This one is almost a model of how to write a literate, entertaining thriller. There are plenty of interesting victims, each killed offstage in a different way; a mad serial killer dubbed The Wordman who sends letters to the local cultural centre, describing and explaining the murders; two main suspects and a few dark horses; much banter and many word-games, some in Latin, some invented. Unlike most hardcover books, it’s worth the money.
Sasso by James Sturz (Century) isn’t, although it has been getting good reviews, which is a mystery all its own. Pretentious claptrap set in a depressed village in southern Italy, it moves among dead teenagers, tortured animals and frescoes of cherubim chortling at souls caught in hellfire. I shouldn’t bother.
Gillian White’s Night Visitor (Bantam) is a slow slog into Ruth Rendell territory: a family that looks ordinary from the outside but is, underneath, a seething mass of homicidal neurosis. Rose and Michael are in their early 50s, long married, with two grown daughters. When Rose gets it into her head that Michael is having an affair, she plots revenge, to take effect on their anniversary trip to Venice.
Cape Breton Road by DR MacDonald (Chatto & Windus) comes with a cover testimonial from Scott Turow, which should serve as a warning; the book looks promising but halfway through one loses interest. It concerns Innis Corbett, 19-year-old car thief, deported to a piney patch of Canada where he attempts to put a stake together by growing dagga and manages, in the process, to wreak havoc among the good and not-so-good pillars of the small, Gaelic-speaking community.