by Dick Adler
A FEARSOME DOUBT, by Charles Todd (Bantam)
Who would have thought that Charles Todd’s brilliant concept for a mystery—a Scotland Yard detective suffering from shell shock who goes back to work after taking part in some of the worst horrors of World War I—would not only continue but grow stronger from book to book? In his sixth outing, Inspector Ian Rutledge has begun to come to terms with the voice of Hamish MacLeod, the Scottish soldier he executed for cowardice, which he hears in his head at times of stress. (Rutledge knows that he must leave a seat empty for Hamish in the back of an automobile, for example—or risk the ghostly voice’s wrath.) But as the first anniversary of the armistice of 1918 approaches, Todd actually ups the ante, by questioning the quality of Rutledge’s police work before the war.
Was he in fact part of a police conspiracy to railroad a man hung for the murders of several elderly women? The man’s widow seems to have proof that he was—and the doubts come rushing in to shake his wounded psyche. There’s also the weirdly familiar figure Rutledge glimpses in a Kent village: could it possibly be the German officer who saved his life on the last day of the war, and was killed for his kindness?
“He had been another man then,” Todd writes of Rutledge as a bright young policeman. “…A stranger to the hollow shell who had come back from the war and for months struggled to rebuild his peacetime skills. He had more in common with the voice of Hamish MacLeod than he did with his prewar self.”
MAISIE DOBBS, by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho)
It’s good to see an approving quote from Charles Todd on the back jacket of this extremely competent first novel by Jacqueline Winspear, because her book resonates with the same sense of sadness and waste about England’s role in World War I as Todd’s superb series about shell shocked Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge.
It’s 1929 when we meet Maisie, just setting up a modest detective agency of her own in London after working for several years as an apprentice to Dr. Maurice Blanche, an impressive mentor whose combination of talents and abilities (Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud) might be a touch too good to be true. In fact, Maisie has been very lucky in her mentors: the daughter of a greengrocer, she went into service as a maid for the wealthy, liberal Lady Rowan Compton—who, along with her friend Dr. Blanche, sent her to Girton College, Cambridge when they realized how smart the child was. But it was her years as a nurse at the front during some of World War I’s worst battles that gave a final polish to Maisie’s compassionate but pragmatic soul.
The first client to finally walk up the stairs to “M. Dobbs, Trade and Personal Investigations” is a stiff but sincere businessman who wants to know why his wife disappears on a long, mysterious errand twice a week. Maisie takes the case only after getting the man to agree not to make any rash judgements based on what she discovers. “My job is rather more complex than you might have imagined,” she tells him. “I am responsible for the safety of all parties.”
What Maisie finds out rather quickly is that the wife is indeed visiting a former lover—or at least the grave of one, a severely disfigured soldier who died under mysterious circumstances at a country home where badly wounded veterans have gathered to avoid the stares and pity of their families and the public. A full-fledged investigation into the man who runs this group home takes up most of Maisie’s time, but not before we learn in perhaps a bit too much detail, through flashbacks, all about Maisie’s formative years. A more experienced writer might have slipped this material in more subtly, but Winspear more than makes up for occasional lumpy moments by catching the sorrow of a lost generation in the character of one exceptional woman.
KALEIDOSCOPE, by J. Robert Janes (Soho)
If you’re trying to read J. Robert Janes’s tremendous series about World War II France in order, this one comes immediately after “Carousel.” On the last page of that book, Inspector Jean-Louis St.-Cyr of the Surete is asked about his partner, Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo, by St.-Cyr’s lover (a prostitute working for the Resistance), “‘Will you have to choose between him and France some day?’ ” St.-Cyr replies: “ ‘He’ll have to choose between me and the Third Reich. I could never shoot him, not after what the two of us have been through.’ ”
The bond between these two men is what gives Janes’s series its heart: Despite the bleakness of their environment and the horrors of the small crimes they investigate inside the larger crime of war and occupation, despite the fact that they spend a great deal of their time evading the treachery of their French and German superiors, St.-Cyr and Kohler have become brothers.
It is because of a vicious, vindictive French police official that the two are dispatched from the relative comforts of Paris to an isolated village in Provence a week before Christmas 1942. A woman in her 50s, dressed in worn but expensive clothing, has been murdered with a crossbow, the only hunting implement the Nazis still allow. St.-Cyr and Kohler discover links to the black market and to the local Resistance; their own lives are soon in peril.
When it’s over, before they can return to whatever passes for family life in Paris (St.-Cyr has just lost a wife and young son; Kohler has two boys fighting in Russia), they must stop in Lyon to investigate a terrible fire in a movie house that is the next book in the series, the already-published “Salamander.” Not a perfect publishing plan, but being allowed to read one of the most important mystery series in recent memory makes the small annoyance worth suffering.
RED GOLD, by Alan Furst (Random House)
We first met the enigmatic film producer and reluctant Resistance hero Jean Casson in Alan Furst’s “The World at Night,” a romantic, even glamorous story set in Paris in the days immediately after the Nazi occupation. Casson returns in fascinating form in “Red Gold,” washing up broke and depressed in his home city, which by now has been totally ground down by its German occupiers. The glitter of nightclubs and expensive restaurants has been replaced at the center of Casson’s life by a grim municipal pawnshop, where selling his overcoat allows him to eat for a few more days and also where he meets a thief who recruits him into a desperate robbery. Survival is now the once-idealistic Casson’s only aim—although he does make a few feeble attempts to help a lover escape to Algeria.
Then, recruited by a sympathetic cop, Casson joins a group of army officers working undercover inside the Vichy government to help Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement. Casson’s job is to persuade a group of hard-core French communists who have no reason to trust him to risk their lives; to do so he must organize a complicated, dangerous transfer of weapons. There’s nothing glamorous or romantic about the work or its result, and death becomes an everyday occurrence. But Furst is so persuasive a writer that we come to realize just how much a victory it is for Casson to remain alive until the end of the book, when he hears “a light knock at the door.”
7
Better Red Than Dead
No books of history or political theory have helped me understand the Communist world better than the mysteries written about it. Fiction, especially mysteries, makes propaganda revelatory and often ironic; characters from countries surrounded by walls of distrust open their hearts in the stories and prove both their common humanity and their unique vision.
DEATH OF A RED HEROINE, by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho)
Qiu Xiaolong knows that words can save your soul, and in his pungent, poignant first mystery, “Death of a Red Heroine,” he proves it on every page. Qiu, who was a published poet and translator in Shanghai, came to the U.S. on a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1988— the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre—and decided to stay. That he left a large part of his heart behind is evident in the character of Inspector Chen Cao, a young poet and translator of everyone from Ruth Rendell to T.S. Eliot who also happens to be a Shanghai homicide detective.
Chen became a cop in a sincere effort to be a useful citizen, and he is seen as a rising star (he even gets his own apartment—a tremendous coup at his age and station). He puts up with the Commun
ist Party’s Byzantine code of behavior, although it still seems in 1990, a year after Tiananmen, to be designed to thwart human aspiration at every turn. As head of the special-case squad,
Chen has not only a supervisor—a reasonably supportive party official—but also a watcher: a semiretired military man, Commissar Zhang, who on the surface represents the spirit of pre-Tiananmen rigidity and political repression. But then, halfway through the book, in a scene that would bring tears to the eyes of a statue, Zhang has a telephone conversation with his daughter, and we see with blazing clarity the damage done to everyone during the so-called Cultural Revolution.
The true beauty of “Death of a Red Heroine” is the muscular ease with which Qiu blends history, plenty of poetry and a compelling mystery: the murder of Guan Hongying, a former national role-model worker, a beautiful young woman who slipped from patriotic fame into loneliness and depravity. Hampered by his superiors, Chen and his older, rougher, but no less sympathetic colleague, Detective Yu, try to penetrate a world of privilege, where the children of once-powerful, then-reviled public figures walk both sides of a dangerous line between loyalty and freedom. On the way we get to see, smell, taste and hear an amazingly evocative portrait of a country in love with words. Staying in a special guesthouse for writers in a provincial town, Chen, as a poet, is treated like royalty by a businessman who invites him to dinner, saying: “The rain has ceased. So let us go then, you and I”—invoking the spirit of Eliot and his Prufrock to light up a wasteland of shattered dreams.
THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, by Olen Steinhauer (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
“Emil had joined Homicide in order to deal with the clearest and least ambiguous issue of social conscience: murder,” writes Olen Steinhauer of the hero of his first mystery, 22-year-old Emil Brod. It’s 1948, three years after the Russians liberated Brod’s fictional East European country which sounds very much like Romania—where Steinhauer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Think of the savage brilliance of J. Robert Janes’s mysteries about World War II France; of the suspenseful erudition of Alan Furst’s thrillers, especially the earlier ones, like “The Polish Officer;” of Philip Kerr’s eye-opening “Berlin Noir” trilogy and Uwe Timm’s heart-breaking “The Invention of the Curried Sausage.” Steinhauer’s debut—the start of a promised series—is right up there on those stellar heights, casting new light on relatively recent history we thought we already knew everything about.
Emil, an orphan who spent most of the war years skinning seals in Finland, has returned to his native city to live with his grandparents—hard-working, dedicated Communists whose mud-stained Party cards have earned them an apartment. But the men who now rule the country—the so-called “thick Muscovites” who spent the war in Moscow and returned “so plump their own families had trouble recognizing them”—have already begun the process of selling out their people to Russia’s imperialistic vision.
On his first day at work as a homicide detective, Emil is ignored, insulted and even assaulted by his colleagues, who think he’s a spy for the new political regime. The only case he gets—by default, because nobody else will touch it—is the murder of a once-celebrated songwriter, whose propaganda stirred the masses and earned him rare privilege before he sank into corruption. Gradually, young Brod’s unusual combination of dogged intelligence and loyalty to the best concepts of his country win over the songwriter’s jaded widow and Emil’s fellow detectives—especially a fascinatingly complex Armenian named Terzian, who becomes an important ally as Brod’s search takes him higher and higher up the dangerous ladder of local politics.
Steinhauer spins out his story in clean and simple prose that gleams with authenticity and captures a uniquely East European spirit. In Berlin to check out a lead, Brod is harangued by an American officer for his refusal to hate the Russians. “That’s what drives me crazy about you people!” shouts the officer. “You’ve got the lowest standards in the world.”
To which Emil replies, “We’re never disappointed.”
DEATH OF A NATIONALIST, by Rebecca C. Pawel (Soho)
Another absolutely riveting first mystery—this time from a 25-year-old who teaches Spanish in a Brooklyn, N.Y. high school—takes us a step further back in history, to Madrid in 1939, when the Fascist-backed Nationalists have already smashed the Republican forces.
Pawel’s first act of surprising courage is to make her main character not one of the romantic Republicans of folk song and Hemingway story but an officer of their much-hated enemy, the dreaded Guardia Civil. Sgt. Carlos Tejada drifted into the civil guard as a compromise with his father, a wealthy Granada farmer, about a career choice between the law and the military. “This is what I wanted,” he thinks at one point, “to get away from being Senorito Carlos. To just be a member of the Guardia Civil, without all that damn nonsense.” And while he sympathizes with his fellow Nationalists in their hatred for the Reds who would destroy their way of life, Tejeda is smart enough to realize that the Republicans have some right on their side. (He also finds himself attracted to a young teacher of Republican sensibilities, which helps to weaken his resolve.)
The dead Nationalist of Pawel’s title is a fellow Guardia officer, a boyhood friend of Tejeda’s who was probably killed because of his black market activities rather than his politics. The Guardia, of course, would rather pin the murder on a missing Republican hero, Gonzalo. So Tejada tracks Gonzalo across a starving city littered with the bones and wreckage of recent battles to a conclusion that might remind you of John Ford’s classic film “The Informer” in its depiction of how dangerous politics can be to human life.
THE SKULL MANTRA, by Eliot Pattison (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
There is no faster way to get under the skin of a country in turmoil than with the needle of a murder investigation. Nothing I’ve read or seen about how China has systematically crushed the soul of Tibet has been as effective as “The Skull Mantra,” a debut thriller by a veteran journalist that uses that hoary plot device of a discredited detective being given a chance to redeem himself by clearing a politically dangerous case.
Like Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, Shan Tao Yun was once a high-ranking communist cop: the inspector general of the Ministry of Economy in Beijing, specializing in fraud cases. Now, because he offended someone too high up in the food chain, he is a laborer in a Tibetan gulag called the People’s 404th Construction Brigade in the Himalayas, breaking rocks along with some hard-core Buddhist monks and other troublemakers. Shan manages to survive under these harsh conditions because of the spiritual guidance of his fellow prisoners, whose unshakeable belief rings with the simple poetry of pure courage.
Then the headless body of a local Chinese official turns up near a road-construction site, wearing American clothes and carrying American cash. The missing head soon appears in a cave with great religious significance: It’s the resting place for the skulls of dead monks. The shrewd army colonel in charge of the district asks Shan to investigate. Offers of better food and conditions are mixed with threats against his monk friends.
Col. Tan wants a quick and dirty job that implicates a monk found near the cave, but Shan is certain the man isn’t guilty. More likely killers include other high-ranking Chinese officials and two American mining entrepreneurs who had personal and financial dealings with the dead man.
Eliot Pattison makes Shan a fascinating mixture of understandable depression and growing spiritualism, a man who has managed to defuse his anger but not turn off his belief in doing good. The other main characters are equally complex: The monks are sharply separate but spiritually unified personalities; Col. Tan seems at first to be just a time-serving bureaucrat, but his motives are not at all straightforward; and the American woman who wants to protect the skull cave and make money from local oil is another interesting blend.
Then there’s Shan’s temporary aide, an ambitious and conflicted young Tibetan called Yeshe who can “sound like a monk one moment and a party functionary the
next.” The physical background, ranging from the barren hills of the gulag to the achingly beautiful mountains just out of reach, also helps to mark this as a thriller of laudable aspirations and achievements.
WOLVES EAT DOGS, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
From his first appearance, in 1981’s “Gorky Park,” through his last, “Havana Bay” in 1999, Arkady Renko has been the perfect dark mirror of his time and place in history—the replacement of Cold War Russia by what passes now for a more democratic and capitalist society.
Martin Cruz Smith’s police detective has certainly paid the price for his obstinate loyalties to truth and justice during those years, suffering physical and psychological trauma in a withering variety of settings. He is as out of place in the so-called New Russia as “an ape encountering fire” as he thinks when he sees a sleek new computer. “Stop using the phrase ‘New Russian’ when you refer to a crime,” his superior tells him wearily. “We’re all New Russians, aren’t we?”
“I’m trying,” Renko replies, and in his own way he is. When a powerful billionaire named Pasha Ivanov (a man photographed often with world leaders, including Putin “who, as usual seemed to suck on a sour tooth”), commits suicide, Renko just wants to do a thorough job of investigating. When he takes the sadly silent and badly damaged 11-year-old boy he’s volunteered to provide some entertainment for to a big charity event thrown in the dead man’s honor, he is finally taken off the case.
But the dogged Renko follows a clue to Chernobyl—the Ukrainian city where a nuclear disaster in 1986 began Old Russia’s downfall and frightened the world into some semblance of sanity. Chernobyl is now a radioactive wasteland, and Ivanov’s successor has been found with his throat slit and his face eaten by wolves in a cemetery inside Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion—an area inhabited by a strange band of scientists, soldiers and some disfunctional citizens who risk their health to live in its abandoned houses and apartments. A faded poster from 1986 says “Confident of the Future” and a reading on Renko’s radioactivity detector taken at a rink of bumper cars at a small amusement park “shot the needle off the dial.”
