/ 24 August 2007

Crime scene

If an American writer is to win the Nobel or Man Booker International, it must surely be Cormac McCarthy. His work stands as an anti-history of the West, counter both to old-style, covered-wagon triumphalism and, later, saintly indigenous revisionism.

Harrowing and haunting, his meditations on the meaning and passing of the West have given us at least five great books: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain (collectively known as The Border Trilogy), Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men (Picador). The last will soon appear in a film version, directed by the Coen brothers: of contemporary filmmakers, perhaps only they and Clint Eastwood possess the sensibility to translate the elegiac quality of McCarthy’s prose.

No Country for Old Men is no easy read. It is as bloody and remorseless as its unyielding antagonist, Chigurh, who totes an abattoir’s bolt-shooter among his weapons of choice. His is a world without salvation and it is only Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, nearing retirement, who is able to offer a contrary world view.

McCarthy intersperses Bell’s ruminations on time, place and change with a story that is both hyper-paced and vividly detailed. The earlier Blood Meridian is subtitled ”or The Evening Redness in the West”; No Country for Old Men, with its acute awareness of the irrevocable passing of grace, moves McCathy’s magnificent oeuvre beyond nightfall.

Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith (Macmillan)

Renascent nationalism in Russia drives the plot of the latest outing for Moscow policeman Arkady Renko. Nikolai Isakov, a decorated veteran of Russia’s war against Chechnya, is exploiting his hero’s reputation by standing for election to the duma as a Russian patriot. His campaign managers are two Americans and his greatest endorser is Stalin’s ghost, an apparition reportedly witnessed on the Moscow Metro.

Isakov, though, also is one of Renko’s colleagues and their paths repeatedly cross in investigating the spate of murders of former veterans of the Chechen war. Renko struggles towards the truth, mired as much in Russia’s recent past as in the World War II mass graves of Soviet soldiers back in Isakov’s hometown of Tver, on the Volga.

The invoking of Stalin and the taut resolution, in the dark woods near Tver, remind one a little of Robert Harris’s Archangel, in which Stalin’s son comes to life. Nonetheless this is Renko at his determined, principled best, struggling in a Russia yearning to restore its former power and glory, and with a conflicted lover and his adopted son, the troubled chess prodigy Zhenya, in tow for added tension.

A Case of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong (Sceptre)

The great capitalist leap forward in China that followed Deng Xiaoping’s lauding the glories of wealth is easier to understand with some help from Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau. The stew of corruption, with high-ranking cadres and petty party bureaucrats equally on the take, is vividly evoked in this, the fourth in the Chen series.

The execution this year of China’s former pharmaceuticals approval boss shows the reality that underlies and inspires Chen’s world. Central is guanxi — connections, and using this mutually beneficial system of relations to advantage. City property officials, property speculators (curious how the Americanism ”developers”, with wholly inappropriate positive connotations, has replaced that) and media figures with clout all fall under Chen’s searchlight as he moves delicately between power factions in the Communist Party and elsewhere and negotiates the breakneck evolution of Shanghai.

Throughout Chinese history investigators had to balance the truth against maintaining the authority of the ruler. Compromises were inevitable and a diluted justice the norm. It is no different for Chen who, in the middle of his investigation, finds himself tasked to lead a delegation of Chinese writers to an America-China literature conference in Los Angeles.

As Chen is also a translator and published and acclaimed poet (like his creator), this assignment is not entirely out of left field. But is it meant to divert Chen from his job? At least Chen has the chance to meet US Marshal Catherine Rohn again, with whom he worked to solve the murder in A Loyal Character Dancer (Sceptre).

Shanghai-born Xiaolong now lives in America and is good at cross-cultural and inter-cultural interplay. In his frequent quotations of Chinese sayings and classical Chinese poetry he gives insightful glimpses into Chen’s melancholic heart and soul, as well as into the spirit of the Chinese.

Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon? (William Heinemann)

Donna Leon and Qiu Xiaolong, academics and detective writers both, seem to have infused their characters with a touch of themselves. For Xiaolong, it is translating and writing poetry that his Inspector Chen inherits; for Leon, it is Paola, wife of Commissario Guido Brunetti, who is a professor of English literature in Venice, just like her creator. Often it is tempting, if misguided, to ascribe Paola’s utterances to Leon’s personal views. No matter, the admirable Paola has seen Guido and Leon fans through much.

That said, Leon’s latest is disappointing. It’s not that there is an absence of bodies. Leon has never felt bound to the genre dictum that a body must appear in the first chapter. But the absence here goes further: Leon herself appears missing, as do Brunetti, Paola and their children as they ghost through a story driven by the fate of children, spirited away from their birth mothers and illegally adopted.

In a book so devoted to parenting it’s odd that what should be lacking is the characteristic loving family milieu that Leon has created so carefully and lovingly throughout the series. Paola has no meaningful life of her own here except as a maker of food, which was always supplementary to her substance as a profound thinker, humanist, wife and mother.

Also reduced is Brunetti’s unique relationship with Signorina Elettra, his clandestine researcher, and even his relationship with Inspector Vianello is relatively cursory. Other regulars become stock figures of the genre: Brunetti’s boss, Patta, is a cardboard cut-out caricature and Alvise is just the station buffoon, but carelessly evoked, in a throw-away, cast-off sort of way.

Besides all of which, there is an occasional lack of editing and proofreading. In quick succession, on pages 210 and 214, the Carabinieri officer Marvilli is confused with the suspect Marcolini.

All this is strange from someone who has given us a sustained essay on Venice observed, on the intrusion of the darker sides of contemporary Italy, and on the corpse of the Italian body politic.

The Return by Hakan Nesser (Macmillan)

No less an authority than Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse, is quoted on the front cover of The Return, saying: ”Destined for a place amongst the great European detectives.”

That could well be, but Hakan Nesser and his Inspector Van Veeteren have some way to go before entering the pantheon of Dostoyevsky’s Porfiry Petrovich (one forgets that Crime and Punishment is the greatest of all detective stories), Nicholas Freeling’s Van der Valk, Simenon’s Maigret and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander.

The Return is Van Veeteren’s second outing in English translation, rendered once more by Laurie Thompson, who has served Neser’s Swedish compatriot Mankell so well. It is a little startling so early in our acquaintance with the inspector that he should be facing his own mortality in the form of cancer of the large intestine. In contemplating his life Van Veeteren becomes an analogue of none other than Morse in The Wench is Dead and The Remorseful Day.

Similarities are evident elsewhere too. The loyal, long-suffering Münster is to Van Veeteren what Sergeant Lewis is to Morse; both the younger officers are happily married men with families, not grumpy loners. Morse and Van Veeteren are classical music buffs, with a tape always at hand to slip into the car cassette player.

In terms of plot The Return strikes notable chords with The Wench is Dead: Van Veeteren convalescing from intestinal surgery and Morse from a perforated ulcer both investigate murders committed many years before. No wonder Dexter approves and Nesser’s English publishers cranked up the back-cover blurb with: ”And is he — a little like inspector Morse can be on occasion ­— simply on the wrong track completely?”

Nevertheless, Van Veeteren is very much his own man. His stylistic tics — such as his somewhat repellent habit of invariably having a toothpick in hand or mouth — grow on the reader. More significantly, so does his sense of justice discharged, something very different from the legal system’s.

There are many returns here: of a man convicted of two murders years apart; of Van Veeteren to life and duty; of the ghosts of the past. The one return that the skilful, sometimes mesmerising, Nesser denies Van Veeteren and his fans is to the state of relative innocence before the events recounted here. The third Van Veeteren will be quite something in the wake of this finale.

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith (Polygon)

”We don’t usually get involved in cases where people have died, Rra,” she said. ”We may be detectives, but not that sort.”

Welcome to the world of Mma Ramotswe, founder and proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It is true that bodies and murder are rare in Alexander McCall Smith’s remarkable series. But each of the eight Precious Ramotswe adventures is a salutary exercise in detection and revelation of what matters in life.

In appearance, mien and gentle method, Mma Ramotswe is something of a cross between Agatha Christie’s stout Miss Marple and GK Chesterton’s genial Father Brown. And she has a store of humanity that more than compensates for her being a non-professional sleuth (this despite her conscientious reading of Clovis Andersen’s The Principles of Private Detection).

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive sees Mma Ramotswe challenged by many changes. Her trusty assistant Mma Makutsi departs, a natural development from the latter’s restlessness hinted at in the preceding book, Blue Shoes and Happiness (Abacus). McCall Smith shows his characteristic wit, warmth and insight into human nature by having Mma Makutsi leave in a chapter called ”Resignation Shoes”.

Two people are on hand to help Mma Ramotswe: her husband, the eponymous Mr JLB Matekoni, and Mr Polopetsi, taken into Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors a while back by Matekoni. But what’s this? Is the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency about to become the No. 1 Lady’s and Gentlemen’s Detective Agency? A later chapter, ”The Understanding of Shoes”, supplies the answer.

As always, there is pleasure in the curious cases McCall Smith devises for his heroine — a wayward husband, disappearing office supplies and three deaths in the intensive care ward at the hospital in Precious’s home town, Mochudi. The detection is subtle, working with psychology (watch out, Porfiry Petrovich) and a love of humankind that makes Mma Ramotswe unique and unforgettable.

From McCarthy’s spare and brutal West to McCall Smith’s gentle and lyrically evoked Botswana, crime novels reveal spaces in the heart and mind that many so-called literary novels do not — and sometimes cannot.