DAVID THOMAS' OSTLAND

Ostland is an ambitious and very powerful novel that reflects the ultimate incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. Beginning with the framework of a crime story, David Thomas has made a brave effort to face what was, at heart, the crime of the last century, and perhaps his book struggles in the same way and for the same reasons we all struggle.

The novel, which is based on the true story of Georg Hauser, the Berlin detective credited with hunting down the S-Bahn Killer, who eventually was prosecuted as a war criminal. The first act details Hauser's joining the murder squad for the investigation, and its success in finding a serial killer, one who turns out to be impressively mundane. In the second act, Hauser is assigned to the East, the Ostland of the book's title, where he is responsible for the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish problem. The third act, which actually interweaves the other two, involves Hauser's trial, 15 years after the war, 20 after the S-Bahn killer was apprehended, and follows Paula Siebert, the only woman on the investigating unit, and the one assigned to interview Hauser.

The first act sets the scene superbly—as Hauser is shown to be someone without any fanatical calling for the Nazi cause, but with a keen eye toward self-advancement. The very existence of the S-Bahn killer calls the whole German society into question, much as the very existence of the Rostov Ripper was denied in the Soviet Union, a point that was central to Child 44. Thomas creates a fascinating tightrope for Hauser to walk, as he (and his boss) know the killer is likely not a Jew, but must continue to play to the racial prejudices of their superiors, right up to Heydrich himself.

Of course, this turns into stunning shadowing as Hauser becomes immersed in the business of eliminating Jews, watching himself and his fellow civilised Germans turn into serial killers one and all. The story, like the first section, is told by Hauser himself, and where his career as a rookie detective on the country's biggest case is told with an almost naïve taste, the narrative of mass-murder contains not a little self-service, if not pity, alongside its rationalisation. Thomas has also captured the matter-of-fact approach adopted by Hauser to his , something that seems to have been commonplace in the post-war revelations, and which seems almost inevitable—as well even more chilling. The parallel between Hauser and the S-Bahn killer is brought out more fully in this similarity.

It also reflects the self-serving nature of Hauser's testimony as Siebert interviews him. He is a skilled interrogator himself, and to an extent he is playing with her, as much as he plays with the ambiguities he understands all too well from experience. When society makes crime part of its raison d'etre, who is the criminal? Hauser plays with other moral equivalencies—the firebombings of German towns by the RAF, for example, which chill us even as they give us pause. Thomas is doing what Hauser wants to do, make us consider how to mitigate the evil he did.

The novel slows down toward the end. We don't need to know what the actual document Siebert finds in the Soviet archives, that confirms Hauser's guilt, actually is; we have seen enough and we can inuit it from the rest of the story. But knowing it would give us a sense of satisfaction; we want to follow the courtroom more closely, and see justice done.

Similarly, Hauser's falling for a beautiful Jewess and saving her and her siblings might well be true, but it feels too melodramatic, not least in the way he tries to turn it into a virtue to balance against his other acts. And Siebert's ill-fated relationship with her boss, Kraus, seems almost pointless, except it gives Thomas a way to stage a final discussion in which Kraus tries to explain Hauser's behaviour, and that of countless other Germans, under the Nazis, while commenting on Germany's reluctance to punish him and others more harshly. This is the ultimate ambiguity, and it may explain why, in the end, Siebert sends Kraus back to his family, to his place in that society. She, like us, is disappointed not to get more closure, to use the modern term. And that is the final ambiguity, and truth, which Thomas stares down frankly and honestly. His book is perhaps less of a thriller as a result, but it is more chilling, colder and more nightmarish, as a result. One of Hauser's most self-serving statements, which he tells Hannah, the 'mischling' Jewess he saves, is none the less true. She accuses him of being the Devil, and he replies 'I'll tell you something about the Devil I didn't previously understand. He's in Hell, just as much as the people he torments.'

Ostland by David Thomas

Quercus £16.99 ISBN 9781780877365 

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BILLIE SOL ESTES: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Billie Sol Estes, the flamboyant Texas fraudster whose accusations against Lyndon Johnson are one of the more fascinating sidelines of the JFK assassination, in online at the Guardian, and ought to be in the paper paper tomorrow (link to it here).

Estes accused Johnson of, in effect, ordering the hit on Kennedy, ostensibly to prevent his being dumped from the Vice Presidency in the wake of the Bobby Baker and Estes scandals. The theory gains traction because many of the deaths Estes attributed to Mac Wallace, who in this scenario was LBJ's private hit-man, can be verified--there is little doubt, for example, that it was Wallace who murdered Henry Marshall. But the print found in the Texas School Book Depository may be 'close' to Wallace's, but that doesn't mean it matches, and in the blow-ups of both prints I've seen I'd have to agree with those who say it doesn't.

Furthermore, the likelihood of Johnson's being dropped from the ticket far from a given. Kennedy was in Dallas in November 1963 to try and unify the Texas Democratic party, and he would have thought twice before dropping a southerner to run against Arizona's Barry Goldwater. But I'm not sure the scandal mud stuck to Lyndon. It's not like the Baker and Estes cases weren't publicized; I'm old enough to recall Time and Life magazine's takes on them--Life was wonderful in those days (allowing for its right-wing slanting) in its ability to dramatise crime and scandal, and Estes' self-aggrandizing style played right into that. I sort of associate Estes and his ammonia tanks with Nike missiles and Mercury space capsules in my recall of that America: the picture on the front of Estes' own book is the one from the cover of Time, except instead of a Texas flag, Estes was shown in front of an ammonia tank. Apparently, it was the biggest selling issue of Time to that point. So it's hard to see Johnson dying in the face of more coverage. In fact Goldwater ran against what he called 'a sordid picture of favoritism and fraud' by LBJ and look where that got him.

I've always been reluctant to see Johnson as an active participant in any plot against JFK--though I can see many who were plotting counting on his being a president more friendly to their point of view. It's hard to find him guilty based on Estes testimony--though there are others who've argued his involvement, and even claimed to have witnessed aspects of it--but there is a massive can of Texas worm still less than fully open.

I would have loved to have more space to delineate the details of Estes' career and fraud, and also to tell more about Oscar Griffin Jr., whose reporting basically sent Estes to jail. It was old fashioned journalism. I thought about because I've been reading the second volume of Forgive My Grief, by Penn Jones Jr., another Texas local journalist, who did yeoman work chronicling the unlikely death of som many witnesses and others involved around in the JFK killing. In the context of the deaths that followed Estes around, it seems prescient.

SARAH PINBOROUGH'S MAYHEM

It's odd that people still get excited when the crime and horror genres bleed into each other, since it's a natural slipstream which has been explored since at least the Victorian times. It's not just that horror involves the perpetrating of crimes, but there's also a stylistic merger: just as an example, point of view serial killer novels or police procedurals often follow the slow reveal and then gory suspense of the horror thriller. Like all genre blends, it works best when elements associated with one are brought into another, as John Connolly did by bringing a hard-boiled detective sensibility into a horror setting. Or maybe it was the other way around.

It's something that Sarah Pinborough has done with Mayhem, a mixture of crime thriller, police procedural, and horror set in the London of Jack the Ripper, and specifically dealing with the so-called Thames Torso murders, which were contemporaneous with the Ripper killings, and similarly unsolved. The novel follows the police surgeon, Thomas Bond, one of a number of characters who were real players in the Ripper and Torso hunts, and uses a number of other historical figures as well. This works particularly well because it sets up a parallel pathway—Pinborough's novel starts as a procedural, and moves slowly but inexorably into the horror mode, but as Bond gets more and more involved with the Torso murders, the stark reality of the Ripper killings provides an anchor in criminal reality, and reminds us that not all horror is supernatural. A modern trope, at least since Silence Of The Lambs, has been the empathetic understanding between monster and pursuer; here we get Bond relying on a pepped up version of his opium dream to be able to commune with the horror directly.

Bond himself is otherwise a somewhat diffident hero and reluctant investigator. He is an opium addict, needing the drug to escape from the brutal reality of his job—I was reminded of Noodles in Once Upon A Time In America during some of the opium den scenes—and the repressive reality of Victorian England. It's something from which he seems almost afraid to break free, and here again Pinborough is drawing subtly the link between the repression that characterises society and the brutal expression of rage that shocks it. This isn't new, not since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it benefits from the relatively modern attitude that the horror writers brings. Thus his relationship with his colleague's daughter echoes some of the best moments of Dracula, not least because it needs to transcend the small-world coincidences that draw the protagonists together.

Pinborough is also remarkably good at conveying the feel of the time, in dialogue and narration, without going to stilted period usage. A few small things ring awkwardly, particularly in some of the newspaper extracts, but this blending of period and modern is the kind of thing costumed crime drama on BBC has tried to do (Ripper Street) with far less success. To an extent, this is helped by the way Pinborough pans away from the Ripper killings, as if reminding us that behind our preoccupation with them, there were other literal horrors taking place, and back seat, to them.

Her book is strongest at the start, as Pinborough sets the scene and delineates the killings. The advantage here is that, as you would in a good crime novel, she creates enough ambiguity to keep the reader uneasy about the actual provenance of any of the characters, including Bond. She even introduces Aaron Kosminski, historically one of the Ripper suspects, but gives him what turns out to be a very different role. The characterising is sharpest here, because of that ambiguity. At the point the horror behind, literally, the murders is revealed, much of that ambiguity disappears, and the story becomes a much more straight-forward tale of how that horror is going to be tracked down and defeated. Here is where the characters in the final confrontation might need deeper drawing out, and indeed following the climactic confrontation there might have also been some further settling of issues—though a sequel, Murder, is already in the works, and may fill in some of those blanks.

If you think of how most serial killer novels, once the killer's identity is known, become a race against the clock, here the switch to the nominal horror villain gives Pinborough an edge, in which the clock is only part of the equation. But the story builds well, pulling the reader in, then races to a climax which does satisfy, at least enough to make the wait too long until the sequel appears.

Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough

Quercus/Jo Fletcher £14.99 ISBN 9781780871257

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THOMAS H. COOK UNCOVERS THE CRIME OF JULIAN WELLS

Many of Thomas Cook's characters live on life's periphery. They are watchers, often writers, people who observe but hesitate to jump freely into life's maelstroms. Philip Anders is such a man, but when his best friend rows out to the middle of a lake and slices his wrists, Anders needs to find out why, and find out exactly what is the crime that drove Julian Welles to his death.

Welles was a writer too, but not a critic like Anders. He travelled, and he wrote of places immersed in human cruelty, a veritable catalogue of all the worst crimes that lie within the capabilities of man. But he was not a part of that, in fact, as we read on we get the impression that Anders may have been doing some sort of personal penance, or at least investigation, of the motivations behind this behaviour. Nothing is really what it seems, and Philip, who thought he knew his friend, realises that he knew nothing important about him, in part because he knows so little important about the world. Philip is aware of this: 'I had little doubt that Julian had often found himself floating in some similar sea of strangeness, isolated, friendless, knowing little of the language or the customs, short of money, with only history's most vile miscreants to occupy his mind.' Note the way the poetry of alliteration early in the sentence lulls you, in an almost horror story way, before the straightforward tone of Philip's own analysis explains his understanding.

Cook has written a lovely, though chilling, Chinese box of a novel, full of hidden compartments, mirrors in which things are reflected from different angles, and panels that tell the same story from other perspectives. The tale moves very slowly; its format almost cliched in its simplicity, as Philip, later accompanied by Julian's sister Rosetta, moves through the maze from person to person, each adding another bit to Julian's story, each bit causing him to re-evaluate both Julian and himself. The tale takes him back to a vacation trip the two young men took to Argentina, and Marisol, the travel guide they met, who was 'disappeared', as the term goes, in the days of the junta. Philip's one true instinct is that her disappearance is the key to the story, and his pursuit of that story is one of repeatedly lifting covers, opening curtains, or raising blinds, to see what lies behind.

This may sound less than thrilling, and Cook himself is aware of that. As Philip explains: 'In a thriller it would be others who are trying to keep me from finding things out. They'd be shooting at me or trying to run me down in a car. But in this case it seems to be Julian who's covering his tracks'.

But as is often the case in Cook's novels, we, as readers, find ourselves standing in Philip's shoes, seeing through his eyes, just as limited in vision as he is. The real beauty of Cook's writing, the thing that makes him so appreciated and perhaps accounts for his simultaneous under-appreciation,is his ability to weave a thriller in this fashion. It is the minutiae of observation, of human understanding, of relationships, that form the crux of this book. Perhaps indeed the greatest crimes are the ones we commit unknowingly. As Philip is told: 'Betrayal is like a landslide in your soul, no?' he said. 'After it, you cannot regain your footing'.

The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

Mysterious Press/Head Of Zeus, £16.99, ISBN 9781908800145

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MICHAEL GOLDFARB'S 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED' MAYDAY MOMENT

Today is May 1st, which in many parts of the world, though not in either of my two countries, is a time for working people to celebrate and contemplate some sort of solidarity. This year, I thought of the international distress signal, 'mayday! mayday!' when an essay by my friend Michael Goldfarb reminded me that today is also the tenth anniversary of Shrub Bush's Top Gun moment, when he landed on the flight deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in his jumpsuit, to the carefully choeroegraphed dropping of a huge banner saying 'Mission Accomplished'. A decade later, after untold deaths, a new President, an entrenching of government policies allowing torture, encouraging repression, and increasing control over day to day life, the main question has become to which mission was Bush referring, and how long will it continue, accomplished or not?

Goldfarb has written an essay, posted to his blog, which deserves a much wider readership. It is a meditation on the nature of freedom as much as the nature of war, and it's based on his own first-hand sobering experience. We disagreed over the waging of the second Iraqi war, but when it began Michael was there, an unembedded correspondent, and he saw the so-called liberation of Iraq first hand, accompanied by his friend Ahmad Shawkat. That's them in the photo above. His essay, one of an occasional series he calls History In A Time Of Forgetting, is titled 'And Would It Have Been Worth It, After All'. You can link to it here. 

If what he says resonates with you, I'd suggest you read his book, Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace, which is both a brilliant exegesis of the war and a moving tribute to his friend. Although it was a New York Times notable book of the year, its balance and honesty seem to have left it, and Michael, underappreciated in certain areas of the mainstream, but it is a rewarding experience, and today's essay is a small distillation of that.

ALLAN ARBUS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Allan Arbus is online at the Guardian, you can link to it here, and should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it. I had traced the timeline of his marriage to Diane more fully--they divorced only after Allan moved to LA in 1969 to pursue acting, and along those lines had also suggested that the world-view which Sidney Freedman espouses acts in some ways as a dialectic with Diane's own bleaker perception of the world, and our coping with it. I'd also mentioned that Allan had met his second wife in an acting class, well before the divorce or his remarriage, and I'm curious about the circumstances under which their marriage failed.

I might have liked mentioning that Diane's brother was the poet Howard Nemerov, and I definitely did mention that the movie Hey Let's Twist actually starred Joey Dee and the Starliters. I definitely want to get a copy of the TV movie Judgement, about the Rosenbergs--I had a vague memory of seeing and disliking it because it assumed their guilt--the issue is more complicated than that--but that could well be one of the other many items about them that I studied in the 70s.

In retrospect, Arbus' portrayal of Major Freedman is perhaps the most memorable of any on M*A*S*H, challenged only by McLean Stevenson's Col. Blake and maybe Ed Winter's Maj. Flagg. As Alan Alda said so perceptively, the depth Arbus provided gave all the characters and their situation more reality. And it was brilliant of the Guardian to get a still from Coffy, with Arbus and Pam Grier, as the art for the piece.

RICHARD BEN CRAMER: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the journalist Richard Ben Cramer appeared in the Independent on 30 March, but I somehow missed it at the time. You can link to it here, but because there were a few literals in article, including my listing only five of the six candidates profiled in What It Takes (I left out Dick Gephardt, of course), I've reprinted it below with a few small corrections. Sadly, it appears that piece may be the last I do for the Indy, at least for some time...I've always appreciated them for their willingness to both cover some unusual people and allow me to present their obits while assuming the audience will understand the usually American context.

I've been reading What It Takes lately--it stands up superbly after 25 years, particularly because of its sympathy, its non-judgemental understanding--his one paragraph take on the essential difference between George Bush and Ronald Reagan is alone worth the price of admission. It was also fun to recall that Cramer had wanted to include one more of the candidates in 1988, Jesse Jackson, but couldn't because alone of the contenders, Jackson would not grant him the necessary access. What It Takes spawned many imitators, but by then few candidates would allow the same openess, but mostly because none of those who followed could actually do what Cramer was able to do so well...understand people, and put that understanding down on paper. Were I writing the obit again, I would probably compare it more to The Right Stuff--but Cramer has a sharper, less romantic, conception of the American drive for success than Wolfe. Anyway, here's the piece:

Richard Ben Cramer: Journalist noted for his empathy with his subjects

The New Journalism opened the floodgates for writers of non-fiction to use the materials of fiction. When Richard Ben Cramer produced his landmark study of the 1988 US presidential campaign, What It Takes, it was criticised widely for its perceived lack of seriousness. Reviewers seemed to expect Cramer's 1,000 page study of the six contenders, George Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Biden, to creak under its accumulated gravitas. Instead they got Tom Wolfe typography and bursts of wild metaphor they'd expect from Hunter S Thompson, blinding them to the fact that, with his energy and empathy, Cramer was able to explore deeply these lives, and uncover the dilemma faced by all of them: the price they needed to pay to achieve their ultimate goal. Today, What It Takes is considered a classic.

Its theme was something Cramer has addressed before, in the showcase article from the famed June 1986 special "The American Man: 1946-86" issue of Esquire. Cramer's profile of the irascible and notoriously private baseball star Ted Williams was both revealing and endearing. Half of Williams' quotes appeared in all capital letters, emphasising his awkward bellow. Asked how old he was, Williams answered 'WELL HOW DO I LOOK?.. HUH? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TED WILLIAMS NOW?' That provided the story its title, but what made it was Cramer's realisation that what drove Williams' insecurity was the other side of his drive to be the greatest hitter of all time, the best sport fisherman, the top fighter pilot. It was deeply American, and it became Cramer's theme: "He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust."

His own lack of success in sport drove Cramer to journalism. Born in Rochester, New York in 1950, he joined his high school newspaper after being cut from the baseball team. He edited the paper at Johns Hopkins University, where he took his degree in 1971. He fell in love with Baltimore, but after failing to land a job with the Baltimore Star he took an MA at New York's Columbia School of Journalism, before getting hired on the second attempt by the Star in 1973. In 1976 he left for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who sent him to Israel, where his reporting from the Middle East won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.

He went freelance and moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore, writing for Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated as well as Esquire. His wife Carolyn White was a talented editor who, while he worked on What It Takes, gave up her own work to, in the words of one friend, 'become his Maxwell Perkins'. It took Cramer six years to research and write the book; a heavy smoker and prodigious coffee-drinker, he suffered health setbacks, including phlebitis, pleurisy, and Bell's palsy, before finishing it. It was published to coincide with the 1992 elections; the four-year delay was a factor in its cool reception.

Cramer wrote the copy for The Seasons Of The Kid (1991), a photo-book about Williams based on his article, and with The Choice (1992) began writing and narrating documentaries for America's Public Boradcasting System, PBS. The Battle For Citizen Kane (1995), made for their American Experience series, was nominated for an Academy Award. He expanded part of What It Takes into a 1995 biography of Bob Dole, and in 2001 returned to his theme of the demands of fame with Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, the first warts-and-all portrait of another American baseball icon.

Cramer returned to the Middle East with How Israel Lost: Four Questions (2004), whose thesis, that Israel was a victim of its own victories, and whose straightforward answers to its four questions, provoked some predictably contentious reviews. His final book, in 2011, was a return to his 1986 article, but by this time the title, What Do You Think Of Ted Williams Now, became an invitation to reflect on time passed.

Cramer died of lung cancer. He is survived by his and White's daughter Ruby, and by his second wife Joan. In a tribute, Vice President Joe Biden recalled reading about himself in Cramer's book: "It is a powerful thing to read a book someone has written about you, and to find both the observations and criticisms so sharp and insightful that you learn something new and meaningful about yourself. That was my experience with Richard."

Richard Ben Cramer, journalist: born Rochester, New York 12 June 1950 died Baltimore 7 January 2013.

REMEMBERING PAT SUMMERALL

Pat Summerall always reminded me of George Reeves, the guy who played Superman. The resemblance isn't overpowering, though I think it's there, but it's more the demeanour, that kind of quiet authority that you don't even realise someone has until after you've stopped to think about it and appreciate what it is you've experienced.

I'm old enough to remember Summerall as a player, though I won't claim to have ever seen him play end. He was a good kicker for the Giants, though not as good as Don Chandler, the team's punter, who assumed both jobs when Pat left. But he found his place as an announcer, one of the first to make the transition from the football field to the broadcast booth. This was something a few baseball players, most notably Dizzy Dean, had done, in radio, but since New York was America's media capital, and the Giants were New York's team (and a very good one in the late 50s/early 60s) it wasn't a surprise that the glamourous former college stars Frank Gifford or Kyle Rote should move into broadcasting. What was more surprising was that a kicker would. Rote was never a natural, and Gifford relied on his looks and charm. Summerall was something else entirely.

He was good enough looking, but he had a golden voice, not as deep as Ray Scott's but authoritative in a resonant quiet way. People forget he started his career as a colour man, working with greats like Chris Schenkel (remind me to tell you my story about supplying security for the Schenk when we did a Barry McGuigan fight in Belfast), Jack Buck and Scott, one of football's alltime best. Scott had the pipes to match Pat, but that was the problem: you had two guys talking beautifully with each other, but Pat just didn't naturally take to being the show horse.

He found his metier when he was paired with Tom Brookshier for CBS, with producer Bob Wussler. Brookie was outspoken, and Pat was the perfect foil to get the best from him. But after seven years, CBS replaced Brookshier with John Madden, creating probably the best football broadcast pair ever, and maybe the best pair anywhere. Madden brought a new perspective to the booth, a coach's ability to break down plays for an audience, and a creative intelligence that needed to be both indulged and directed. He delivered his words with bombast, and then Summerall would bring us all back to earth, back to down and distance, back to the beauties of the game itself.

Because no one was a better master of the understatement, of letting the game speak for itself, than Summerall. Those of us sometimes unable to do such things appreciate them even more, especially when they're done so well. If you want a snapshot of the difference between Summerall and Madden compare their work as hardware store pitchmen: Pat for TrueValue and Madden for Ace.

They had started to get stale when they were hired away by Fox, after the Murdoch network spent big to take the NFC contract from CBS. The huge deals from Fox (especially Madden) and the move rejuvenated the pairing, until Madden jumped to ABC for Monday Night Football, where he was teamed with Al Michaels, probably the second-best play-by-play man the NFL's had. Madden was again rejuvenated. Summerall retired briefly in 2002, then came back to work with Brian Baldinger, which was a very good pairing; Baldy's only fault was that sometimes he tried too hard to be Madden (and I imagine someone upstairs was asking for that). I caught the two of them on a Cotton Bowl one holiday season, and thought they still worked together well.

We knew Pat was a recovering alcoholic; his face would tell you that if you didn't know it. But I knew a lot of people like that when I was working for ABC, and since, and about most of them you hear various stories. You never did about Pat, in fact, I can never remember a harsh word being said. He seemed to handle himself outside the booth the way he did inside it—with a minimum of fuss and an attitude of respect. He respected his audience, his colour commentators, and the game. That's what came through his wonderful voice on the television screen. He was the best. But when I shut my eyes (and eyes) I can still see him kicking for the Giants.

THE FIVE BEST BASEBALL NOVELS: THE BROWSER INTERVIEW

NOTE: About a year ago, I did an essay for BBC Radio 4's Open Book, about baseball novels. You can link to that post here, but the IPlayer link has disappeared, so I will try to find my original script and reprint it. 

Shortly after doing Open Book, I was interviewed by The Browser, a literary website, and asked to pick my five favourite baseball novels, something the structure of the Open Book essay hadn't allowed. I went to look at that interview, but it too seems to be suffering from the internet's missing link disease. Luckily, I had the website's rough draft of the interview available, so, with a few small amendations, I offer it here...

Michael Carlson on Baseball Novels

Why do you think that baseball forms the basis for so many great American novels?

In a sense it is because baseball symbolises something that was at one point an idealised version of American life. Today I think it is an idealised version of a fantasy American life which is pastoral, honest, competitive and entertaining. But the more important reason is that baseball recreates the quotidian nature of existence. Baseball is an everyday game. They play one hundred and sixty-two games a year but at the end of each one you win or you lose and then you start over, unlike real life. So it gives you a vast canvas on which to paint an equivalent of real life, but one that is more dramatic each day and builds to a more dramatic climax as the season comes to an end.

What do you personally enjoy so much about the game?

I think baseball is the most interesting game because of its variations on a simple theme. It is almost like an enclosed table game in that you have a very simple structure within which myriad possibilities take place over and over again. It is also the only sport I can think of that puts an individual confrontation into the middle of a team game. Even more so than something like cricket, you have this battle between the pitcher and the hitter which is the centre piece of the game. But within that you also have a team sport. If you look at Japanese baseball, for example, they take the team sport part of it much more seriously than the Americans do and they look at it as a team sport in the sense that we might look at American Football or soccer as being a sport where you have to cooperate with all nine players together. I worked for Major League Baseball for four years and during that time I got a lot of exposure to baseball players and I was constantly fascinated by the depth within the game, the vast amount of information I just didn't know about it.

I know you could have chosen from any number of books about baseball so what made you pick, Robert Coover’s, Universal Baseball Association?

This is my favourite of all the baseball books and I actually think it is one of the great novels of its period. Coover is one of the most interesting but practically ignored novelists of that period. He was writing what we now call metafiction in the 60’s alongside people like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. What I love about the book is the idea that someone who is a rather nondescript and average person uses baseball as a way of elevating himself into being the creator of a universe

For those who haven’t read the book what is going on to allow him to do that?

He has invented a simulation game of baseball --these existed in the days before fantasy sport which is a different thing. Fantasy sport is more or less asset stripping the statistics of the game. But the simulation games existed because baseball is the best sport for them, because it is so well documented statistically. The way they generally work is on probabilities out of a thousand and so in some games you would roll three dice to get a three digit number (a one in a thousand probablilty) and you would then use number charts to get a result which would reflect the baseball statistics. That is what happens in Waugh's game.

Waugh has his own teams and players and when the son of one of the great players of all time comes along as an exciting rookie, Henry – the character-- rolls his dice and rolls his dice again and the charts say something bad happens. And at that point as the creator of the universe he is forced to make a decision! But, I don’t want to give it all away.

Yet as a character Henry is a normal, not very exciting accountant.

Yes. He is someone who goes to bars every night when he is not playing his baseball game. He has a very depressing relationship with a woman who we might describe as a floozy but he lives within his baseball fantasy. The full title of the book is, The Universal Baseball Association Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop and if you look at what J Henry Waugh anagrams into it becomes obvious what Coover is doing by calling him Jahweh which of course is the Hebrew unspeakable name for god. I went back and looked at the original review of the book in the New York Times, by Wilfrid Sheed who was a very good writer himself and he said, “Not to read this because you don't like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don't like boarding houses. Baseball provides as good a frame for dramatic encounter as any. The bat and ball are excuses. Baseball also involves a real subculture, a tradition, a political history that were, in some sense, preordained, …... That the players and fans might be shadows in the mind of a Crazy Accountant up there is not only believable but curiously attractive.”

 

I think he is absolutely right, and idea of God as a crazy accountant makes as much sense as any other. This book most definitely deserves to be read even if you are not a big fan of baseball. There is a mythic element to baseball because in effect it is a pursuit of dreams, but not just the dreams of the player. You can look at it almost as a science fiction novel but it is prescient in the sense that fantasy baseball has taken over the sports fans universe. He is a wonderful writer in complete control of what he is doing.

Next up you have chosen, Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris which stars Henry Wiggin who has been described as America’s best-known fictional baseball player.

Mark Harris wrote four books where the main narrator is Henry Wiggin. The first one was called The Southpaw because he is a left handed pitcher, and they are baseball's oddballs. It's no coincidence the lefty's signature pitch is called a screwball! Bang the Drum Slowly, which I think is his best, is the second in the series. The first three were written in the 50’s and then he came back in 1979 with a book called It Looked like Forever in which the aging Wiggin can't throw as fast anymore, and losing your fastball is a wonderful metaphor for aging.

What is Wiggin like as a character?

He is a bit like someone from a Ring Lardner story. And the tone is very much like Ring Lardner. Ladner wrote stories which were collected as You Know Me Al, letters written by a player to a friend back home. Wiggin's a sort of cracker barrel philosopher, not quite as smart as he thinks. This comes out best in Bang the Drum Slowly. What happens is that his catcher, whose name is Bruce Pearson, is kind of dim witted and his teammates make fun of him. Wiggin finds out that Pearson is actually dying from Hodgkin’s disease and Pearson doesn’t want him to tell anybody. And Wiggin doesn’t break his trust but what he does do is to start to integrate Pearson into the team.

But, the book is not about what the team does, it is about how we deal with life. Wiggin is always playing a card game with one of the coaches called Tegwar and they use it to baffle rookies and newcomers and they teach Pearson what Tegwar is. Tegwar actually stands for The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. There aren’t any rules, they just make them up as they go along and in a sense that is what life is.

What is really interesting is that a lot of baseball novels have been made into movies and there have been a lot of great baseball movies as well, but not that many novels have translated into fine films. This one was made into a movie quite successfully with Robert De Niro as Pearson and Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggin even though Michael pitches with his right hand! When the book came out it was done on television for the US Steel Hour, (note: which were hour long live dramas, broadcast from 1953-1963) and it had Paul Newman as Wiggin and Albert Salmi as Pearson. I have never been able to find a tape to watch but I think it would be fascinating as well.

For all the reasons you have just given this is widely regarded as one of the best books in baseball fiction.

Yes, it is really entertaining. It’s bittersweet and what I really love are the silly things about it. For example Henry Wiggin’s nickname on the team is “Author” because he has written this book but Pearson is so dim he thinks its “Arthur” and calls him that through most of the book. The book ends with one of the best closing lines in American literature. Wiggin after Pearson’s funeral says, “From here on in I rag nobody.”

Wise words. Your next choice takes us to Mexico with Mark Winegardner’s first novel, The Veracruz Blues.

This book came out in 1997 and isn’t particularly well known. But I like it an a lot and wanted to include it ahead of some of the better known books. It's set in the Mexican League, which was run by two Mexican industrialists, the Pasquel brothers, and in 1946 they had a dream. The brother in charge was Jorge Pasque, and he wanted to go into competition with Major League Baseball. So they started offering big money to steal players from the gringo Majors.

Presumably they wanted to set up the league as a status thing.

Yes it was a status thing and baseball is a big sport in Mexico, not to the level of soccer but it is still big. Winter leagues in Mexico had always attracted Major League players so they decided to upgrade the Mexican League. What’s interesting from Winegardner’s point of view is that the league is integrated like winter baseball was in the Caribbean so you have black players coming down from the States who were Major League calibre players but of course barred by the pre-Jackie Robinson apartheid. And then the white players who jump to the Mexican league get barred from going back to Major League Baseball, for violating the reserve clause in their contracts, and one of them, Danny Gardella filed a law suit against the League which was kind of a pre-cursor to all the antitrust suits that have gone on in the last thirty years or so. He lost his law suit.

What were the reserve clause and antitrust exemptions?

The reserve clause dates to the early years of baseball. In January 1903, the American and National Leagues united to form Major League Baseball. They included a "reserve clause" in their contracts (as had already been National League practice for 25 years), which bound athletes to the teams that first signed them. If they refused to sign a new contract, the old one simply rolled over, and it, of course included a reserve clause too. In effect, players were indentured servants. They could be released, sold or traded, but they couldn't simply sign with new teams when their contracts expired. It was obviously a restraint of trade, but after Major League Baseball saw off the challenge of the Federal League in 1914, Congress exempted them from anti-trust laws, so the reserve clause stood for another 60 years.

Thank you. So the book includes some real life characters?

Yes – Gardella is a character in the book and so is Pasquel. It's based on real events, but narrated by a fictional sports writer named Frank Bullinger, and through him we meet other real people in it including Ernest Hemingway, down in Mexico for the bullfights, or the fishing, I forget which. Hemingway pops up in a lot of fiction these days! Winegardner is really exploring issues of racism and issues of capitalism that make the whole story interesting. There is the whole forced servitude issue that baseball players were faced with in the 1940’s. And you see this effort to get a better deal for themselves using these crazy Mexican tycoons. Mark Winegardner is an interesting writer. Recently he has been doing Godfather sequels which is kind of a hiding to nothing but he does them quite well!

So did the players who went to Mexico and were then barred realise that was a possibility?

They realised it would probably happen but they thought they would be able to get back into the Major League again. And some were older players being offered more money than they were likely to make in the entire rest of their careers. The most famous of them was Sal Maglie who was known as “the barber” for the way he pitched inside and 'shaved' players. He was a pitcher for The Giants. It wouldn't be until the 1970s, when Marvin Miller and the players union got the owners agree to binding arbitration, that they finally did away with the reserve clause, creating modern free agency.

Harry Stein's, Hoopla looks at one of the biggest scandals in baseball history.

This book is really overlooked. It deals with the Black Sox scandal in 1919. But there is a very good nonfiction book called Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof which deals with the same subject. So this book was kind of lost particularly when John Sayles made his film of Eight Men Out which is one of my favourite baseball movies. John Sayles by the way has written a baseball book called, Pride of the Bimbos which is worth reading too, as is Asinof's baseball novel, Men In Spikes.

What happened in 1919?

Some of the players from The Chicago White Sox accepted money from gamblers to throw the World Series, hence the name Black Sox. In the end, despite resevations and second thoughts, and in the face of threats by gangsters, they lost the series to Cincinnati Reds. A couple of years later, after being acquitted in court, eight of the players were banned for life by the new Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The White Sox at the time were considered the best team in baseball by far.

The fix is also one of the themes of W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, which got made into the movie Field of Dreams. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best player on that Black Sox team. Harry Stein's novel is told from two points of view. One point of view is another fictional journalist, Luther Pond who provides the backdrop to the corrupt nature of baseball in those days and the corrupt nature of Chicago in those days. The other chapters are narrated by Buck Weaver who was one of the players on the team. Although he didn’t throw any games himself he was barred from baseball because he knew about it and didn’t tell anyone.

Do you think there is still corruption going on in baseball?

Not game-fixing, but there is the whole issue of steroid abuse, for example. Some things never change within the sport. The money is a lot bigger these days, so gamblers couldn't really afford to make it worthwhile, but remember Pete Rose was barred from the game simply because he bet on games. The cheating that still goes on in baseball is sometimes referred to as gamesmanship. Taking steroids wasn't against the rules of the game, but it is against the spirit of the game (and against the law, of course, without a prescription!). I think baseball is the only sport in America where we still consider the spirit of the game to be important. When the British say, “it‘s not cricket” it is that same idea. No-one would ever say anything is against the spirit of American Football. It’s interesting because if you think of the film, Field of Dreams – there is a speech in the movie which is delivered by James Earl Jones about how baseball stands for everything good in American life. But, he is saying it about a bunch of guys that threw the World Series! So there is certain contradiction that Kinsella and the movie makers never came to terms with and this is brought out by Harry Stein who is something of a contrarian writer. He wrote a very interesting book a few years later about how he became a right wing Republican after growing up a Leftist. And that attitude is what gives this book a certain edge. I like the book a lot; he is a fine writer.

Your final choice, The Natural by Bernard Malamud is a baseball classic which was first published in 1952.

This was a tough call because I decided to pick a couple of lesser known books, so when it came to choosing which one of the real baseball classics to go for it was between The Natural and Philip Roth’s Great American Novel. Roth and Malamud share concerns about Jewishness and Americanism as well. I think The Natural wins it simply because Roth's is a very exuberant book and in some ways an essay about literature. If anyone has readThe Art of Fielding, that draws very heavily on Roth.

Malamud's is sort of a perfect mythic take on baseball in which he plays with the myth of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail.His character Roy Hobbs is a Parceval or Lancelot and he succumbs to corruption. The movie tacks on a happy ending which isn’t there in the book which kills what is a pretty good movie although Robert Redford really is too old for the role although he plays it rather well! The book ends exactly the way you expect those myths to end and he is brought down by his own hubris.

It came out in 1952 and a couple of years later a novel called, The Year the Yankees lost the Pennant came out which became the musical, The Damn Yankees. I think that was inspired by Malamud because it retells the Faust story as a baseball story. But, Malamud’s novel is much richer and deeper than that one. What is also interesting is that Malamud was born in Brooklyn just like Roth was but of immigrant parents. To people in that generation baseball was a major means of assimilation in American culture. You find that in all kinds of writing about the immigrant experience. The way to become American was to learn baseball.

Why do you think that the National Football League has become more popular than baseball?

As I said at the beginning I think baseball reflects an American ideal which is now an American fantasy. Football reflects what America really is.

Which is?

Mechanised, militaristic, violent, obsessive, not pastoral and not relaxed. This has been exacerbated by television and media. Dan Delillo wrote a story called Pafko at the Wall about the famous 1951 playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The story reappeared as the opening segment of his novel Underworld which is a great book. As a novel itself it would be a great analysis of what baseball means to America. But, he also wrote a novel called End Zone which in effect says that the reason that we are in the Vietnam War is because we love American Football! And oddly enough Robert Coover wrote a novel about Richard Nixon called, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Which was basically about Nixon’s failures as a football player and with his sex life. He was a scrub in college but never quit. He would drive Pat Nixon to dates with other men when he was first trying to date her!

When did football become popular in the States?

College football was always a big thing, but not a pastime, like baseball. Pro football was a fringe thing, in the industrial north, on autumn Sundays. The first big thing was the 1958 NFL championship game, the first to finish with sudden-death overtime. Then the New York Times and CBS reported on 'The Violent World of Sam Huff', the New York Giants' linebacker. It really began taking over from baseball with the Kennedys who were big touch football players, and of course with the advent of television it was discovered that American Football fits the television screen better than any sport.

Do you think there are better baseball novels out there than the ones about American Football?

Definitely. And the reason for that is that although there are some very good novels about football and boxing and some other sports they tend to be more about the sport itself. They use the sport to show the characters of the people in them. But even non-fiction about baseball has more depth. The best baseball novels tend to be about something bigger than the sport. They are using baseball simply as a metaphor for life itself.

ARNE DAHL'S BLINDED MAN

I haven't yet watched BBC4's broadcasts of the TV adaptation of Arne Dahl's novel, but when I read the book a few months ago I was struck by how firmly it was anchored in what I consider the classic Swedish tradition, which flows from Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck, and how consciously it seems to address modern society, while still maintaining its suspense as a police procedural.

The Blinded Man begins with two seemingly unconnected events—a well-planned bank robbery and a hostage situation in an immigration office. The first is unexplained. In the second, we follow Paul Hjelm, whose day begins with yet another instance of missed communicaton with his wife. Hjelm then has to deal with the Kosovar Albanian who's been let down by the system in the only way he can figure out how, by shooting him, non-fatally. For that, he is suspended and investigated for misconduct, but in the meantime he is recruited to join a new elite task force being assembled to deal with the murders of two of Sweden's leading businessmen.

You can see familiar elements already: while Hjelm is not quite as depressive as the popular image of Scandinavian detectives dictates, he is serious, inward, and finds communicating a challenge. Most of the best Scandinavian detectives function within a team—which serves as a microcosm of the society and its ethos in which they function. In Hjelm's case, this microcosm is a sort of rainbow coalition: an almost equally serious woman; an aggressive body-builder, who once in roid-rage turned wife beater; a Finnish intellectual (which plays on some Swedish ethnic stereotypes); a plodding Norrlander called Norlander (which plays on others of the same) and a 'new Swede' of Latin American decent. What is particularly interesting is the way Dahl plays, within the group, on generational differences in traditional Swedish values—particularly racism, and not only in regard to immigration. Perceiving minute differences in their own native society, Swedes have been both open to immigration and felt swamped by it, and this is an important side issue throughout the novel.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the serial killer has a somewhat clockwork feel to it—there is actually an Agatha Christie reference which seems somewhat self-conscious. There are secret societies and a clue built around an obscure jazz tape, Monk recorded live, that would be worthy of Michael Connelly or John Harvey had they ever worked in that fashion. Slightly less self-conscious is the analysis Arto Soderstedt, the braniac left-wing Finn, presents of what makes serial killers in the first place. It's worth quoting: 

'Plenty of magazines in the United States make heroes out of serial killers and mass murderers. It's related to the fact that their society is on the verge of collapse. A widespread feeling of general frustration makes it possible for an entire nation to empathise with extremists and sick outsiders...their disregard for all social rules exerts a strong fascination...we need to ask ourselves what sort of effect this sort of mess could have on the national soul of the Swedish people. There's no such thing as a simple act.'

This resonates within the book's approach to Swedish society, if you go back to Beck the whole idea of serial killing hasn't occured, while in Wallander it is a particularly bizarre crime. But it's also crucial

that both Beck (in Murder At The Savoy, to which I wrote the introduction to the Harper Collins edition) and Henning Mankell's Wallander (in The Man Who Smiled) were brought face to face in confrontation with Sweden's upper crust businessmen—Hjelm faces the same challenges, made more intriguing because the businessmen themselves are the targets.

Hjelm reminds me a bit of Leif Persson's Lars Martin Johnsson (who is a Norrlander himself) in that he's not, as previously suggested, as depressive as a Beck or Wallander or Harry Hole. Hjelm is decent, relatively good with people, but, as with most good Nordic detectives, finds his real battles come within the bureaucracy he faces—and that, again, echoes the society the police are supposedly serving.

Hjelm's relationship with his wife Cilla, however, is pure Beck, though Dahl writes it with more emotion than Sjowall and Wahloo. Here's their marriage, and their lives, in a nutshell: 'Did those few moments in the kitchen draw them closer together? Or had the final chasm opened up between them? It was impossible to say, but something decisive had taken place; they had looked right into each other's naked loneliness.'

These are the things television would find hard to adapt. In some ways, I expected The Blinded Man would find its way to television—more along the lines of the Danish Those Who Kill. The ensemble playing can be managed, and the plot itself works well. As with all police procedurals, the question of reveals, and thus managing tension, becomes crucial. But what made the novel most interesting was the inward-looking part, as with the above, and that would be the hardest to transfer to the small screen. I found The Blinded Man a worthy, if unspectacular addition to the line of Scandinavian police procedurals, and Hjelm potentially a major figure. I will turn to the adaptation with keen interest.

The Blinded Man by Arne Dahl, translated by Tiina Nunnally
Vintage £7.99 ISBN 9780999575689 

Note: This review will also appear at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk)

IN MEMORIAM: ANNETTE FUNICELLO

It was as if Annette had died, at least in part, to provide spiritual relief from the media psychodrama and political point-scoring gush around Margaret Thatcher's passing. That was what Annette did for us, when we were kids, provided a sort of marker toward a different sort of life. Of course, I was about five when I was keen on the Mickey Mouse club—so keen I can recall begging Miss Molloy, our kindergarten teacher, not to keep me after school because it was Mickey Mouse night and my mother wouldn't let me watch the TV if I'd stayed after. It wasn't to watch Annette, and in retrospect I wonder if it really wonder if the Spin and Marty stories were really that intriguing. My memory tells me I liked Gunga and Rama on Andy's Gang more.

But Annette, even then, was a step or two ahead—the older sister (or her friend), the baby-sitter just discovering older boys, the only one of the Mouseketeer girls who actually looked like the girls we knew. She was a Funicello, just like the Bonessis, Montaltos, Volpes, or Aquilinos we grew up. She came from Utica, not California, though I didn't find that out until I read it in an obituary.

Which was ironic, because it was Annette who became the beach-bunny in those Disney movies. Uncle Walt had spotted her dancing, and in retrospect we can see both Graham Greene's appraisal of Shirley Temple and a touch of the Humbert Humbert in his appreciation of her. She was remarkably adult in her appeal, even before she astounded us younger males by hitting puberty full-force while we were just becoming aware of the difference in the sexes. Again, I say this recalling that the MMC went off TV when I was seven, so I may be applying some retro-analysis to my emotions when I say forget Darlene and Cubby and all the other goodie-goodies with their names written across their white T-shirts. And don't get me started on the adults. Jimmie? He was the kind of guy our parents should've been warning us about.

The explosion of breasts beneath the 'Annette' was like someone throwing a great switch on the libidos of millions of American baby boom boys. It was probably also the signal that the Mickey Mouse club was about to exceed its sell-by date. How big was the impact? A full decade after their last show, at a Yale football game, the marching band did a tribute to Annette, and in honour of her most lovable attributes formed two circles around two upturned tubas, signifying, as the stadium announcer intoned, 'her big brown eyes'.

By that time, she was another generation's sexpot. Her modest bikinis, and the equally modest Frankie Avalon, were soppy compared to what was happening, and Walt Disney's world-view was getting overtaken by times—it would come back when Annette's generation and the ones that watched her started looking for those comfortable childhood fantasies again.

Annette gave up the industry. Of course she did so to marry her agent—which must've made 'Uncle Walt' jealous. She took being the all-American mom very seriously indeed, and when she came back into the public eye it wasn't as a faux-moralist, like Anita Bryant, but as a spokeswoman and fund-raiser for the disease that afflicted her, muscular dystrophy. In the end, Annette wasn't our pre-pubescent fantasy; she became the kind of mother we watched in the Fifties—not so much on the Mickey Mouse Club, but on Donna Reed, or Beaver, or Father Knows Best. But it's hard not to look at those pictures, with the mouse ears and the bespoke T-shirt, and think about the kind of innocence we like to pretend the world had then.

HENNING MANKELL'S TROUBLED MAN

Kurt Wallander is 60 years old. He's living in his isolated house with a view of the sea. He's starting to forget things, including one night when he gets drunk and leaves his gun behind in a restaurant. But his daughter Linda, who followed him into the police, is having a baby, partnered with a Swedish businessman whose father is a naval officer from the old aristocracy. As always with Wallander, he has time to think, especially as he sits out his suspension while the punishment for losing his gun is decided.

Then Linda's partner's father disappears, and Wallander is drawn into the search—made more personal because Hakan von Enke had previous chosen to share with Wallander the fact that he was troubled, though not the specifics of what it was that was troubling him. Wallander's search eventually involves foreign submarines run aground in Swedish waters, international spying and evasdropping, and even murder. This touches on those keys moments of modern Swedish society—the time of Olaf Palme, and his assassination—which has been at the core of much modern Swedish crime fiction, and which continues to defines the problems of Sweden's view of itself and its place in the modern world. Of course, Wallander's quest is not an official investigation, but that is perfect because it is the detective doing what he has always done best—attempting to solve a mystery, the mystery of human behaviour, the one thing that has always been hardest for him to do.

What develops as he searches for von Enke, and then for von Enke's wife, is something different: it becomes a trawl through Wallander's own past. At times, the devices become a bit strained, as Henning Mankell attempts to cover lots of ground from the past that's been shared through the series, and indeed some that has not. But even if it at times creaks at the edges, the core of it is filled with the rise of emotions, as always restrained and even repressed, in the overwhelmingly Swedish sense, as Wallander and we contemplate his life.

He receives a visit from Baiba, the Latvian woman who was his one true love; he has to deal with Mona,his ex-wife and first love. He is forced to examine himself, and we are given the same opportunity. It is not always pleasant, but then, it never has been—the reality of Wallander has never been tortured genius, as portrayed by Branagh, or affable insecurity, like Krister Hendriksson. It has been his ordinariness, his restraint, his inability to fit in comfortably with the society he examines as he works. It has been a most Swedish inwardness, made more poignant by the ways in which Mankell has brought the outside world, the modern world, to bear on him. The core of his work has always been Wallander himself, which is what this novel, in its sombre way, celebrates.

For it is Wallander himself who is the troubled man, and his troubles are framed by his past on one side, and his newly-arrived grandaughter on the other. The prospect of tragedy hangs over this entire novel—the reader sits on a sharp edge of fatal anticipation-- but in the end Mankell resolves the Wallander series in exactly the way he has built it over the years, with a simple and, dare I say, Swedish realism or practicality about the nature of our lives themselves. If it isn't optimistic or affirming, neither is it tragic. It is, instead, exactly what it is, and deeply moving, particularly if you have followed the series. This is, obviously, not the place to start reading Wallander—you do not have to have followed the whole series, but the more you know of the man, the more affecting this valedictory novel will be, and the better you will understand Mankell leaving Wallander his last private moments.