PAUL THOMAS' DEATH ON DEMAND

I have to confess; I pulled Paul Thomas' novel off the 'to read' shelf as soon as I returned from a too-short trip to New Zealand, and tore through it. It may be the most Chandlerian detective novel I've read in a long time. This is a compliment, but not in the way you might think.

What Death on Demand is not is descriptive of Aotearoa, neither the land nor the cities in which the action takes place. Neighbourhoods are barely sketched in, there's little of the background life, and even individual locations have none of the detail which Chandler uses to give clues about the nature of his characters and the character and the nature of Los Angeles. Nor is it written in the kind of wise-cracking first-person prose, full of evocative similies and wry commentary that translated so well into the mouths of actors like Bogart, or closer to Marlowe himself, Dick Powell or James Garner.

Tito Ihaka shares with Marlowe is a healthy disrespect for authority—though unlike Chandler's idealist, he is a realist who has stayed in his job in the police, because, as one character puts it, what else would he do? Plus, Tito is a Maori, and as such has a healthy outsider's scepticism about the pakeha who run New Zealand. Scepticism, in Marlowe's case, is idealism smashed on the shores of reality, but Ihaka was never an idealist. This seems to appeal to women; like Marlowe he sometimes has them throwing themselves at him, but where Marlowe, ever the schoolboyish knight of Chandler's imagination, usually keeps them at arm's length, always aware of the potential for ulterior motives, Ihaka again is more realistic.

But what made me think of Chandler was the depth of the story, the way it works back in time, through layers of society, through people who are not the people they seem, and through intense corruption, personal and institutional, at every layer. Thomas' picture of New Zealand society is drawn through the aspirations and limitations of the characters, through the goals of success they've been set within their society, and the brilliant way every personal conversation can have many layers. This works best when Ihaka is involved, and as I write this, it strikes me that he bears more relation to Hammett's Continental Op than to Chandler's Marlowe, but Ihaka is, in effect, a sounding-board for all sections of the society he protects.

Not least in the police department itself. I'm partial to tales of the infighting within the police, the way the bureaucracy often works against crime-solving, especially as one moves up the social strata. In that sense New Zealand is a small town, and you very much get the sense that to some cops, 'it's Chinatown', that, as in the best hard-boiled fictions, many crimes cannot be solved, or if solved, cannot be punished.

Ihaka is brought back to Auckland from exile in Greytown (both places I know) because a well-connected man Ihaka was convinced had staged his wife's accidental death wants to speak to him. Ihaka's refusal to leave the man alone was what had hime shipped to the Wairapa in the first place, that and knocking out his police nemesis in a men's room and pissing, literally, all over him. Now he's back, and he's looking for an anonymous hitman who did commit that murder, and others besides. The story is as compicated as the best of Chandler, with as many twists; I thought of The Little Sister, Farewell My Lovely, and The Lady In The Lake at various times, and that is high praise indeed. As I said, it's told in the third person, with the narration jumping times and characters, but the prose works best when Ihaka's on stage, and he's drawn well enough to get the reader identifying with him, and making it almost like the first-person when you see through Marlowe's eyes. The first three Ihaka novels appeared in the mid-1990s; is so good I'd lobby for Bitter Lemon to bring them all back into print in this country.

Death On Demand

Death On Demand by Paul Thomas

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, ISBN 9781908524171

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

JACQUES CHESSEX'S A JEW MUST DIE

Like The Vampire Of Ropraz, Jacques Chessex's previous novel (see my review here) published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, A Jew Must Die is based on an historical crime, and like the first book it raised questions Swiss society did not necessarily want raised. But where Vampire was more concerned with the way society reacted to a crime, A Jew Must Die is more concerned first with the crime itself, the murder, in Payerne, of a Jewish cattle-merchant by Swiss Nazis, and by the lack of reaction from Swiss society to this crime. The beauty of the work, if beauty is the right word, is the way Chessex expands that lack of reaction into a wider indictment, an analysis using a Swiss microcosm of the awful phenomenon that was the Third Reich.

He does this in prose that is consciously bare, factual, its emotions controlled. Chessex grew up in the area where the murder took place; he was at school with the son of one of the killers, and there is something very Swiss about the cold rationality with which he presents his story. It is a tone which survives the translation by W. Donald Wilson, and since Wilson translated Vampire as well it is telling that he's able to convey Chessex's different voices so well.

There is also a fairy-tale, brothers Grimm feel to the story, particularly as the gang of ne'er do wells who make up the local Nazi party try to lure Arthur Bloch to his death on the pretext of buying a cow, one for which he appears to offer them a good deal. That they then butcher Bloch as they would an animal only heightens the monstrosity of the crime, but it is the relative lack of reaction from the locals which makes clear the parallel with the larger monstrosity that was the Holocaust, and the way the good burghers of Austria, Germany and more countries conspired with their silence and indifference to help it happen.

In the character of Fernand Ischi, the local gauleiter, Chessex both sets him apart and fits him into his community. Swiss authorities handed out severe sentences to the murderers, but the reaction of the locals was to ignore it, as if it had never happened. Yet when Chessex moves to the present, and himself, he discovers that in some ways nothing has changed in his small world.
Arthur Bloch's tombstone read Gott Weiss Warum. God Knows Why. Though in supernatural terms that may well be true, in this world, it is too pat a response. It is a telling and perfect amibiguity that lies at the heart, just beneath the perfect surface, of this novella.

Chessex died last October, my obituary was published in the Guardian two months later, you can link to that here, and to my IT posting here. The Last Skull Of M. DeSade, his last novel, is scheduled to appear from Bitter Lemon next year.

A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex Bitter Lemon Press, £6.99 ISBN 9781904738510

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

JACQUES CHESSEX'S VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ

This is a slim jewel of a novel, based on the true story of a grave-defiling necrophiliac in the remote Jura mountains of Switzerland. It’s the turn of the last century and although this Ripper attacks corpses, not living women, his crimes send no less a shock through the community than Jack did through London just fifteen years earlier. Despite a similar level of hysteria, the local authorities get no closer to a suspect than London’s did looking for Jack. Not until two more graves have been violated, does a canton-wide alert for any sort of ‘perversion’ result in a stable-boy being caught having sex with animals in a barn, and he is tried and convicted of the crimes.

What makes this book so enthralling is the subtle way Chessex weaves elements of genre fiction into an examination of a backward and repressed society trying to cope with what we think of as modern criminal horror, but in fact seem almost a natural outgrowth of rural isolation, Calvinist repression, and intense social jealousy. The most obvious comparison is with The Crucible, where the same factors come into play. Chessex gets more latitude than Arthur Miller for two reasons. One is that his setting manages to combine a number of classic archetypes: he is near to vampire country both geographically and in the time-frame of the great Dracula story, and the grave-robbing recalls that other Swiss classic, Frankenstein. Turn of the century Switzerland also allows the new ’science’ of psychoanalysis to make its telling appearance.

But Miller also had a more direct allegory to pursue, in McCarthyism, while Chessex works on a more general point, drawing a distinct connection with our modern era, and its obsession with sexual frustration. Of course if you think of that frustration leading to violent hysteria, built on lies, you could apply it to any number of modern tragedies, from Iraq down to Columbine, but I think Chessex is working on a subtler canvas. Dr. Mahaim, the shrink who examines Fevez, the stable boy, blames society’s ‘primordeal squalor; for creating the conditions for ‘merciless horror’ but still one wonders. Fevez is convicted only after being released, when the psychiatrist has realised his perversions don’t include any active desires towards humans. He’s then re-arrested, and convicted, after he attacks a local woman who had flirted with him. His more proactive, as it were, approach to sex has been triggered by nocturnal visits from a mysterious ‘woman in white’ who has bribed his jailers. Chessex appears to be casting his net for society’s squalors just slightly wider than Dr. Mahaim.

Fevez was convicted, but escaped the asylum to which he was confined in 1915, went to France, and joined the Foreign Legion. He was killed in the trenches that same year, and turned out to have been one of the bodies buried in France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. So war turns the Swiss pervert into a French hero, and again, we’re forced to re-examine our ideas of society’s squalor.

Interestingly, while nominating the suspects in the case, before Fevez was arrested, Chessex mentions one who is a novelist, wrote ‘strange love letters’ to ladies in the region, and considers writing a greater ‘sacrifice than some young girl’s mortal remains’. It’s satisfyingly tempting to imagine Chessex pointing us in the right direction there. This is a novel worthy of the best of Durrenmatt, and that is high praise indeed.

The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex
Bitter Lemon Press £6.99 ISBN 9781904738336