MARK BILLINGHAM'S CRY BABY

Cry Baby is Mark Billingham’s twentieth novel, and the seventeenth featuring Tom Thorne. This makes me feel old, because I still recall vividly the impact Sleepyhead made back in 2001, and he had amply delivered on the promise of that novel. I’ve been lucky enough to work with the man some might dub lazily The King Of North London Noir, but I think it’s a telling and indeed brilliant stroke that Billingham has chosen this landmark book to be a prequel to the Thorne series.

Set in 1996, Thorne is a DS, and still reeling from the effects of an earlier case where he didn’t follow or trust fully his instincts. Now he finds himself caught up in the abduction of a child, a child whose father is a career criminal currently in prison, and a case on which the force is under extreme pressure to get a result, and quickly. So although Thorne wants to use and trust his instincts, his commander doesn’t agree, and doesn’t trust him.

This uncertainty is part of what makes the story work so well. There are suspects, false leads and unexpected discoveries. There are leaks to the tabloid press which work against solving the case. And there is throughout the self-questioning of Thorne as he encounters a mother faced with the greatest loss imaginable, and her friend, who was looking after the boy and her son when, just for an instant, she missed them. The contrast of the two women, unlikely friends whom tragic loss separates, is part of the beauty of the story: Billingham is excellent with character and with setting, the contrast of their lives is not just that one woman lives in a council flat with her husband in stir, and the other in a nicer part of North London, with her divorced husband father out, but the way in which their statuses drive them apart. The subtleties of distinction have always been the meat of Billingham’s books, he has the detective’s eye.

Which is where Thorne is different from many of the other detectives with whom he is linked, some of whom influenced Mark when he started writing. The instinct which Thorne felt in his previous case is a sign that, like say, Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck, he is a detective, by nature; it defines him above any other human qualities. But unlike Beck, he is, or wants to be, a more ‘normal’ person outside the job, always one of the key dilemmas detectives in police procedurals often face. Some, like John Harvey’s Resnick or Henning Mankell’s Wallender, appear to succeed; others like Marlowe or Graham Hurley’s Joe Farady battle throughout their series, with different ends. I find it interesting that Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason (Erlendur) brought their detectives to a recognisable end, then began prequel series with them as cops on the beat.

For Billingham, this taking Thorne back to 1996 is case specific, and as such it works brilliantly to reveal Thorne’s inner core. As a story on its own, it delivers too; with an unexpected twist at the end which casts a chilling shadow over the story, and a brief coda set in the present which reflects perfectly on Thorne’s self, as both person and detective.

One you ought to read.

Cry Baby by Mark Billingham Little Brown £20 ISBN 9781408712412
This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MARK BILLINGHAM'S KILLING HABIT

Someone is killing cats up North London way, and although Tom Thorne can't help but feel tomicide is not his proper calling, he's going to be seconded to his old Kentish Town stomping grounds, an improvement over his new commute from his partner Helen's place in Tulse Hill up to Hendon. And he knows there is always the possibility the serial feline killer might move on to something more satisfying, for both of them. That's the grim reality for Thorne, an honesty that makes him one of British crime fiction's most compelling detectives.

But once up NW5 way, he works out a mutual assistance deal with DI Nicola Tanner, suffering her own recent loss, but investigating the murder of a drug dealer, a case which isn't as open and shut as it seems.

Savvy readers might think they know where all this is going, but one of Mark Billingham's strong points is the way he manages to confound expectations. There are twists along the way, and one big and very convincing one at the climax which will satisfy puzzle fans as well as those of the classic Scandi/British school of police procedurals.

Beyond that, what makes Billingham so good is the way the twists move within his own story and his relationship with the police itself. His cops are a rainbow coalition, ahead of the British curve in many ways, and the way their personal lives stack up, survive problems or not, is as much a thriller in its own way as the crime plot. And like John Harvey, one of the masters of the genre, the cops' own situations are often mirrored by the story itself: here there's an interesting doubling between a criminal held in protective custody and Thorne's own troubled relations with his partner and her sister.

Billingham is good enough with characters that when, for example, Thorne attends his first gay wedding, of the tough-talking Sergeant Christine Treasure, it actually brings a smile to the reader's face. It's that quality of writing that makes Mark Billingham, my old podcast partner on The Crime Vault Live (interest declared) one of the best, and most consistent, writers in the business.

And of course, there are the cats.

The Killing Habit by Mark Billingham
Little, Brown £18.99 ISBN 97807551566949
published 14 June

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

JOHN HARVEY'S BODY & SOUL

Frank Elder has almost got his quiet life in Cornwall sorted. Elder fled there after he moved from London to Nottingham to help his wife's career. His wife's infidelity destroyed the marriage; his daughter's life spiraled out of control, especially after she'd been kidnapped by a sex offender when she was 16, and though Elder was the one who rescued her, he could not put her life back together. In the end, he fled. Now he does odd jobs, some for the police, visits the pub, has an on and off relationship with a woman who sings jazz. Until out of the blue his estranged daughter asks to visit, and arrives in London with her wrist bandaged, demanding he ask no questions.

Of course he does, and she leaves, but Elder follows, and discovers Katharine was working as a model for Anthony Winter, a well-known artist, and their relationship ended badly. He returns to Cornwall, but then Winter is murdered, and Katharine Elder is the number one suspect. And just to make things worse, Adam Keach, Katharine's kidnapper, has escaped from custody.

If Resnick is John Harvey's greatest detective, Elder has always been a sort of id to Resnick's ego. Quick tempered, often harsh, not the type to calmly think things through. He's also risked more than Resnick, and as the summary above suggests, not always successfully. So his motivations in this case are a powerful drive, in a sense a chance for Elder to redeem or maybe even vindicate himself. And while he may be sleeping occasionally with a jazz singer, Elder didn't even like jazz.

Harvey's real skill lies in the way he makes the story reflect the inner turmoils of his characters' relationships, the ways they deal with life. It's always been one of the hidden highlights of his writing: balancing off the small pains inflicted by those we love or think we love, against the greater pain inflicted by the criminals his cops pursue. Although Elder, and to an extent Kate, remain the centre of the book, we see the conflicts reflected in the other characters he encounters—ex colleagues and friends on the London and Nottingham forces, his ex-wife, even his new circle in Cornwall. But it's mostly the shadow of exes that lowers over the story, as if the past is returning for a reckoning. Harvey is very good at the small nuances of people's everyday behaviour; alongside the tension of suspense comes the equally compelling tension of their lives. Body and Soul indeed; just listen to the song.

We saw the last Resnick novel not so long along, and Harvey retired from crime writing. He came back for this, Elder's last case, and as the various strands of the story weave together toward the climax it is every bit as touching as Darkness, Darkness was. If you've read this far, you might be interested in following this link to an appreciation of John I wrote for Windmill Books, on the publication of that novel four years ago. 

I have to declare an interest here: I don't know anyone who's written as many novels as John has, and I know very few who have written so well. But I also don't know many nicer people than John Harvey, so my declared interest may be interpreted as the hope John will write another novel, and once again surprise and delight.

Body and Soul by John Harvey

William Heinemann £14.99 ISBN 97811785151804

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

GUY CLARK, POKER DICE AND ME: IN MEMORIAM

I got drunk with Guy Clark once. He taught me how to play poker dice. It was almost 25 years ago, and I probably remember more about it now than I did the next day.

It was 25 August 1991, a Bank Holiday Sunday, and I was playing softball in Hyde Park with my ex-colleagues from ABC and some other friends. An American guy wandered past and stopped to watch, then asked if he could play. He joined my team, and we started talking. Tom Wohlke was the promoter at a music theatre in Westchester, just outside New York City. He was in town managing four singers who were playing that night in London: Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Peter Rowan and John Stewart. This made him immediately, to me at least, the coolest guy in London, since all his charges were favourites of mine. I knew Van Zandt's songs and I'd followed Rowan since his days in Earth Opera. I'd discovered Clark listening to Jerry Jeff Walker, live and on record, and Clark's album Old No. 1 was played to death on my turntable. John Stewart, had been an obsession of mine ever since I picked up California Bloodlines in the bargain rack at the store on High Street in Middletown in 1969; one of his songs provided the title of this blog.

Tom comped me tickets, and after the show I went backstage. Tom introduced me around, but Stewart and Rowan were each in a hurry to head out, so I never even got the chance to play fan boy (and at that time I was working for baseball, not freelancing, so I couldn't even pretend there was a piece of journalism at the end of the rainbow). Van Zandt was quiet, there was a bottle going round, but Guy Clark was welcoming. 'Come on back to the hotel with us, we'll play some poker dice'.

'Sure' I said, and piled into a cab with them and Tom. We went to the Phoenix Hotel in Notting Hill, and somehow some more bottles appeared and Guy went up to his room, and after a while came back down with the dice. These were poker dice—with 9 through Ace on the dice—we weren't playing dice poker, which you play with the real 1 through 6 dice. At least I think that's what he said. You play poker dice like yahtzee: three rolls, keep whichever dice you want, roll the rest. There are no suits, so no flushes, and of course you have to wait til the others roll til you discover who won.

And while you're waiting, you drink some more. And some more. This was a lot of fun.

I honestly don't remember what I was drinking, and what else might have gone on. I do know that sometime around 2 or 3 ayem Stewart and Rowan each returned to the hotel; Rowan went straight up the stairs; John Stewart watched a few rolls, and then went up to his room too; I never did get the chance to discuss his music with him. Tom and Townes and Guy and I went on playing, drinking, and talking for most of the night. At some point Townes adjourned himself, then Tom gave up, and finally, after a few hands of liar's poker with the dice, Guy gave me his address and said to come visit Nashville.

I went out in the street as the sun was rising and found a cab home. I woke up in bright sunlight, sitting on the steps of my house. I hadn't been able to face going up the four flights to my flat. Now I went up the 69 steps (I still recall the number) and collapsed on my bed. My pockets seemed heavy and noisy, and as I took off my jacket I emptied them. They were full of coins. So were my trouser pockets. And a few notes stuffed here and there as well. I passed out, and when I woke up I counted it and there was 60-something quid there. Monday was a holiday too, but the tour had moved on, so I didn't have a chance to lose back some of the cash.

I kept in touch with Tom Wohlke for a while. I wrote Guy, checking on the rules of Poker Dice, and offering him a chance to win his cash back sometime. I never had a reply and I still haven't been to Nashville. I saw John Stewart at the Borderline many years later, on his last tour, not long before he died. When he sang 'Mother Country' I cried, and when I saw my friend John Harvey afterwards he said he'd cried too.

You should listen to Guy Clark's 'LA Freeway', a great song about him and his wife Susanna's moving from California to Nashville. Jerry Jeff had a hit with that. Or 'Texas 1947', which, even though I'm 10 years younger, and a streamline never appeared through my Connecticut town, is as good a song about growing up in those heady postwar times as I've ever heard. Or 'That Old Time Feeling' which comes and goes in the rain. Or 'The Randall Knife', a talking song, with a haunting nostalgic tune behind it, about his father's life and death. If you want an album, start with Old No. 1, or his live one, Keepers, which has most of his best songs. He and Townes and Steve Earle released a live record, Together at the Bluebird Cafe, in 2001 that's fun. And there was a tribute album, This One's For Him, with various people covering his sons, which came out in 2011. To be honest, I've never listened to it. His last record, My Favorite Picture Of You, came out in 2012, after his second wife Susanna died. It won a Grammy. Clark had been ill for a long time, including ten years with cancer, but kept writing and playing. He died Tuesday. He was 75.

 I think more than anything you should listen to 'Desperados Waiting For A Train', about his grandmother's boyfriend Jack, an oil driller, who raised him the way good grandads do. Here's a link to the original album version. Go to You Tube and listen to how it changes as he gets older. In the last verse, he visits Jack for the last time:

And then the day before he died I went to see him
I was grown and he was almost gone
So we just closed our eyes and dreamed us up a kitchen
And sang another verse to that old song
Come on, Jack, that son-of-a-bitch is comin.

We're desperados waiting for a train...

RIP Guy Clark. I still owe you another game. 

CRIME VAULT LIVE EPISODE 5: A GRAND FINALE

The fifth and final episode of our podcast The Crime Vault Live is now up. You can download or listen to it (and the previous four editions) at The Crime Vault website here or at ITunes here. It's a great listen, our guest is Alex Marwood, who's a fascinating interview; it helps that her novel The Darkest Secret is a definite winner. The reviews include new novels by Robert Crais, Chris Brookmyre and Gerry Seymour; discussion of lots of film and TV; the genre's game-changers; the passing of one of those game-changers, William McIlvanney, and the year's best-seller list and its domination by women crime writers. All killer, so to speak, and no filler.

Sadly, this will be the last in this series of Crime Vault Live podcasts, as Little Brown's Crime Vault website hasn't renewed our commission. They have been great to work with, from the moment Harry da Producer and I first discussed the idea with Mark Billingham; as Mark's publishers they were very supportive and we owe them a lot of thanks, especially the energetic Alexandra Cooper who was our point person at LB. I'm sure LB will continue to offer audio at the Crime Vault, so keep your eyes on the website. Meanwhile Harry and I will look to take the format elsewhere, because the response from many of you has been great, and the magazine-style format is one I hope we can continue, so keep your ears to the ground.

In the meantime, the upside will be more reviews up here on Irresistible Targets; in fact I may have to revisit some of the things we talked about in the five episodes of the podcast, just for those of you who didn't listen.

In case you haven't looked yet, our special guests in each episode were (1) Martyn Waites aka Tania Carver (2) Val McDermid (3) Ian Rankin (4) John Harvey (5) Alex Marwood. A pretty impressive group...enjoy!

JOHN HARVEY JOINS THE CRIME VAULT LIVE: EPISODE FOUR

The fourth episode of The Crime Vault Live is now up online (link to it here) and it may be the best one yet.

Mark Billingham and I greet John Harvey, one of the greatest of British crime writers, creator of Resnick, and as I point out, in many ways one of the last of the old style pulpsmiths. And it's the place John makes a stunning announcement about an unexpected new novel! It's a wide-ranging show highlighted by our INTERROGATION of John. I managed to avoid discussing his Clint Eastwoody western series, Hart the Regulator (of which I have a complete set of the old paperbacks) which has books with titles taken, as this blog's was, from John Stewart. Nor his excellent but now overlooked stand-alone thrillers Frame and Blind, and I spared you further discussion of his poetry magazine Slow Dancer (where I first encountered John when he printed some of my poems) and we should have talked about his own poetry. But listen to his take on the introduction of Paul Christopher in one of Charles McCarry's novels.

We also covered Adam Sisman's biography of John LeCarre, author bios in general, reviews of books by  McCarry (often billed as the 'American LeCarre'), Alison Gaylin, and Graham Hurley; Patricia Highsmith on audio; London Spy, Black Mass, and Unforgotten, and the return of the Crime Vault's Vault in which we discuss George V Higgins and The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. Listen in. The show fits perfectly; we come full circle at the end, which doesn't happen often. And check out the publicity photo above: we look like we're about to star in a 60s British sitcom....

JOHN HARVEY: THE FIVE BEST RESNICKS

At the same time I wrote the appreciation of John and his detective Charlie Resnick, I also chose the five best of the 12 Resnick novels (and a bonus non-Resnick selection) which has been published at the Dead Good Reads website. You can link to that here. I'd like to say there's something surprising, or controversial, in my choices, but there's not. It does reflect the fact that, as far as I can see from my reading, John's writing continued to grow and deepen as the series went along. For a guy with over 100 novels under his belt, that is a remarkable achievement. Enjoy--a review of Darkness, Darkness will be posted here soon...

THE DOWNBEAT BEAUTY OF JOHN HARVEY'S CHARLIE RESNICK

I've written a heartfelt appreciation of John Harvey, and his best-known character, Charlie Resnick on the occasion of the publication of the 12th, and apparently last, Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness. You can find the piece at the Windmill Books website, here, and I'd suggest reading all the way to the end, and following the link to the wonderful John Coltrane version of Tadd Dameron's 'Good Bait', to which I refer in the text (Resnick prefers Eric Dolphy's version, by the way). Ave et vale, Resnick. 

UPDATE: The link above no long seems to work, so I've decided to post the original piece I wrote for Windmill Books below, along with the choice of the five best Resnick novels which I did at the same time, and whose link (in the post that follows this one) does appear to be working still....

 

THE DOWNBEAT BEAUTY OF JOHN HARVEY'S CHARLIE RESNICK

Darkness, Darkness is the twelfth, and last, of John Harvey's Charlie Resnick novels (though, in fairness, we thought the tenth, Last Rites, brought the series to an end back in 1998!). It is elegaic, but it's also fresh; as the discovery of a corpse takes the aging Resnick back to the miner's strike of 1984, a defining time for a Britain in transition, and especially so for Resnick's Nottingham. It is the genius of John Harvey that he is able to make the reader feel the turmoil of the time by focusing on the people around the crime, making the giant tragedy and the smaller one work hand-in-hand to create a powerful look back.

Harvey broke new, hard-boiled, ground with the first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts, in 1989. Nine more followed, like clockwork, one each year. Their influence was immense. Resnick was the spark behind Ian Rankin's Rebus, Mark Billingham's Thorne, Graham Hurley's Faraday and Winter, and many more of our now best-loved detectives. He reclaimed Britain's mean streets for the sorts of people who walked them, and the sorts of criminals who preyed there. And it didn't hurt that, in Tom Wilkinson, the BBC found the perfect Resnick for the hugely successful adaptations of Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment, for which Harvey did the screenplays.

There has never been a detective less superhuman, nor more human, than Charlie Resnick. Wilkinson understood instinctively that Resnick was defined by an essential loneliness. In many ways he was the antidote to Inspector Morse, trading the lofty spires of an idealised Oxford for Nottingham's damp grey streets. Morse had his opera, Resnick played classic jazz. Morse did cryptic crosswords, Resnick constructed monkey-puzzle sandwiches. Morse read poetry, Resnick enjoyed the shaky free verse of Notts County football club. Resnick showed the influence of American hard-boiled classics, of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, but more crucially he was a direct descendant of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Swedish detective Martin Beck. Like Beck he is a loner forced to work in a team context. Like Sjowall and Wahloo, Harvey uses Resnick's stories to reflect on changes in society, and contradictions between appearance and reality (interestingly the Beck series was consciously planned to run for ten novels, just as Resnick originally seemed to be). Beck is an obsessive who finds his quest for solutions, for truth often at odds with the reality of his job. And with the reality of his life.

And this is where Harvey excels, because I can think of no novelist who's been better at using the story of the crimes being investigated to reflect on the personal situations of the people doing the investigating. The human dimensions of his stories remain unchanged, regardless of the setting, and there's a persistent quality which Michael Connelly once described as 'wistful' about them. They contain a mirroring of the human condition expressed through violence, and more tellingly through emotional pain, inflicted, suffered, repressed, endured. Few writers have used the framework of the crime novel more poetically.

It was through poetry that I first encountered John Harvey, more than 30 years ago when he published some of my poems in his excellent magazine, Slow Dancer. It took me a while to connect him with the author of a couple of fine stand-alone crime novels, Frame (1979) and Blind (1981), but by the time I began reviewing Resnick novels, I'd discovered John had also been one of the last of the great pulp novelists—churning out paperback originals at a peak rate of one per month. It was an apprenticeship that makes Darkness, Darkness his 102nd novel, more or less, counting those written by Thom Ryder, Terry Lennox, Jon Barton, James Mann and a handful of other pseudonyms. He wrote everything from biker adventures to teenaged stories of The Tempest Twins; from the novelisation of Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo to ten westerns inspired by Sergio Leone about a gunfighter called Hart the Regulator. I confess proudly that I assembled a complete set of them. And before writing this, I searched out a copy of Amphetamines And Pearls, the first of four Scott Mitchell detective novels, a pulpy precursor of Resnick, with much of the darkness but less of the jazz.

Reading Darkness, Darkness, I was reminded of a night about eight years ago when I bumped into John at the Borderline, where the American singer-songwriter John Stewart was playing on what obviously would be his last UK tour. Stewart's songs provided titles for a couple of John's pulp novels (and for my own blog), and as an encore he performed 'Mother Country', a song about a horse-breeder who's going blind and wants to ride his favourite horse one more time. Walking out, we shared our immense sadness, and the sense that Stewart himself was singing with the same knowledge we shared. And that is the quality John Harvey brings to this final Resnick novel, a finish not of melodramatic incident, but of honest and poignant reflection on the way life is, and the way we live it.

In 2011 John published Good Bait, a non-Resnick novel whose title comes from a classic Tadd Dameron jazz song. My favourite version is John Coltrane's on Blue Train, where the tune tries to escape itself, be free and happy, but can't quite shake its way out of the blues. That's how I see Charlie Resnick, and how I think he sees his life as he's lived it. As John Harvey has written it so well.

THE FIVE BEST RESNICKS

If you're coming to Darkness, Darkness as your first Resnick, I envy you, because you

have the whole series to work through. I'd go beginning to end, without waiting a year at a time for the first ten, then ten years for the next, but if you insist on the highlights, try these five, listed in order of publication:

1. Lonely Hearts (1989) The first, and still one of the best. Introduces and establishes his unique character in a novel that the Times called one of the 100 best crime novels of the century. It's the book where Harvey finally relaxed from his feverish pace of writing, and gave his characters and setting more depth, and the result was stunning.

2. Wasted Years (1993) In which a series of brutal robberies forces Charlie to face events from ten years before: an incident he'd tried to forget, and a marriage he'd lost.

3. Still Water (1997): Perhaps the best illustration of the way Harvey uses the criminal investigation to mirror the lives of his characters. A woman's body found floating in a Nottingham canal reminds Resnick of a similar killing that dragged him from a Milt Jackson concert many years before. And the nature of the sex crimes reflects the relationship problems of some of the detectives involved.
   
   
4. Last Rites (1998): In its own way more elegiac than Darkness, Darkness, as Resnick deals with two drug gangs involved in a turf war, and pursues an escaped murderer, and tries to protect his sister. It's a novel about the things love forces us to do, and about the loss of such love.
   
   
5. Darkness, Darkness (2014): Alone after the death of his partner Lynn, Resnick is presented with a thirty-year old murder which took place in the midst of the violent chaos of the miner's strike, forcing him to revisit those times while trying to solve the murder today.
   
   
   And if you have already read Darkness, Darkness, then treat yourself to at least one non-Resnick novel: In A True Light (2001), the story of Sloane, an art forger, which encompasses abstract expressionism, jazz, family relations, and a man finding himself all in one perfectly formed novel.

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S BLACK SKIES

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the Reykjavik police, while Arnaldur Indridason's detective Erlendur has been completely out of touch while on holiday in the lonely eastern part of island where he grew up. The compression of time in published fiction means that while readers wait and wonder what has happened to the moody Erlendur, Indiridason has now written two novels, each starring one of Erlendur's supporting cast. In the previous one, Outrage, Elinborg took centre stage, and as I wrote at the time (you can link to that here), her dilemmas, and the case, encapsulated Indridason's recurring theme of conflict between the older traditional Icelandic life, and the new.

Black Skies, which features Sigurdur Oli, is very much rooted in the new Iceland, the boom country which famously went bust in a perfect foreshadowing of the global economic crisis. Oli himself is very much entrenched in a new Icelandic identity: he spends most of his time aping all things American, especially sport. In my own identity as an American sportscaster I began wondering if Oli's TV in Iceland, or his computer, actually could pick up my commentary on Channel 4, or Five, or Eurosport. Although Oli has disdain for most things Icelandic, in another sense, in his aloof loneliness, he seems a much more traditional figure: substitute hamburgers for horses' heads and he's as shut-off as Erlendur.

But he's dragged into a very modern-seeming case when a friend asks him to do a favour for his sister's wife and her husband, who are being blackmailed with photos taken while experimenting with wife-swapping. When Oli goes to visit the woman blackmailer, he finds she has literally just been murdered, and though he can't chase the baseball-bat killer, his dogged pursuit winds up uncovering other crimes, a possible second murder, and a number of small betrayals of his trust. Meanwhile, one of Erlendur's informants has supplied him with a small bit of film depicting his own abuse as a child, and he is in the process of extracting revenge on his abuser.

As the first case expands, Oli finds himself in almost over his head with the world of fast-moving high-finance, looking on with disdain at the conspicuous consumption which seems to be fuelling it. He's also forced to face the breakdown of his own relationship, and re-examine the way he saw the divorce of his own parents. That story acts as a parallel of sorts to the story of Andres, the abused child, and yet again provides the contrast with the old: Andres' only happy times was when he was taken from his mother and raised briefly on a farm, away from the 'modern' Iceland.

Oli's doggedness finally solves the murder, which turns out to be unconnected with the larger issues of money-laundering and speculating, and the possible second murder, another out in the old Icelandic wilderness, which may have done the killing itself. And Anndres' story resolves itself too, with a touching ending that acts as a coda to both stories, reminding us that beneath the trappings of our lives, how basic the needs of human existence really are.

Oli makes the perfect protagonist, in a sense, because he doesn't mull through these issues himself, as Erlendur would (Erlendur actually strikes me as being perhaps closer to John Harvey's Resnick, or Graham Hurley's Faraday than his Swedish forebears). This means the reader is free to make the connections and draw the conclusions for himself. This is why I think Black Skies is one of, if not the best, of Indridason's books. And, of course, we still don't know what's happened to Erlendur.

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846555817

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

JOHN HARVEY'S GOOD BAIT

John Harvey's police novels have always been built on the characters of his cops, and there is no one better at revealing those characters through the day-to-day concerns that real people have. In that sense, you might place Harvey firmly in the path forged by, say, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, and Sjowall & Wahloo's Martin Beck books. Harvey is a master at very subtly using the cases his detectives pursue to reflect the conflicts they face in their 'real' live, and this is what is most impressive about Good Bait, which follows two separate investigations.

In London, DCI Karen Shields is lumbered with the corpse of a teenaged Moldovan boy found on Hampstead Heath, and despite a number of leads, finds herself running into walls. Not only from potential witnesses who won't talk, but from higher-ups in the department who want certain aspects of the case left alone. Meanwhile, in Cornwall, DI Trevor Cordon, playing out his string in the sticks, is asked by Maxine Carlin, a long-time problem for social services and the police, to find her daughter Rose, who never showed up for a planned visit with her father. Years before, Cordon had tried to help Rose, now calling herself Letitia, and found himself getting more involved emotionally than was safe for a cop. But when Maxine herself is killed just a few days later, underneath a train in London, Cordon decides he will get involved.

Involvement is the real danger in Harvey's work: his characters find it dangerous, and often withdraw rather than take the risk. Although the two cases will be brought very close together, the real parallel between them is the sense of danger emotional attachment can bring, how committing yourself to a person, for whatever reason, always brings risk. The dead boy was involved with a girl whose parents disapproved; Letitia/Rose has a child, by very dangerous man who believes the boy belongs to him. At the heart of each subplot is also a father's desire to protect or possess his child, and a mother's to protect it. The personal is never far from the criminal in Harvey's writing.

Meanwhile, Shields winds up facing an unexpected relationship on the job, and Cordon (a name full of resonance in this context) finds those old feelings for Rose are indeed real, though just as dangerous and unlikely to be fulfilled as ever, and his efforts on behalf of her and her son show him just what his own withdrawal from life has meant. This is where he is vulnerable, and he has to face and shrug off that vulnerability if he is going to get a 'result'. Meanwhile, since in Harvey's books the bureaucracy of the police is often more threatening (and sometimes more criminal) than the villains, Shields finds herself having to walk a fine line, which her new relationship may make more dangerous. It seems likely this is a potential conflict to which Harvey may turn in the future.

Drawing all these stories together, in a way, is 'Good Bait' the Tadd Dameron tune which has become a jazz standard. Harvey name-checks quite a few versions throughout the book (as well as the Swedish Wallander TV series, Eric Dolphy, and his own early western novels!) to the point it becomes a motif, and we remember that we are the bait for each other, and the hooks we take are often barbed. My favourite version might be John Coltrane's on Blue Train, where it's a tune that tries to escape itself, be free and happy, but can't quite shake its way out of the blues. That's what this quiet and affecting novel, whose layers draw out feelings in a masterful way, is all about. It's a very early entry for the best crime novel of 2012.

Good Bait by John Harvey
William Heineman £12.99 ISBN9780434021628

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

GRAHAM HURLEY'S BORROWED LIGHT

When this series began, eleven novels ago, Joe Faraday was the featured character. But his Portsmouth police colleague, and sometimes rival, Paul Winter, joined him centre stage, almost by force of will. This reflected their characters, the bigger-than-life Winter played fast and loose with the rules, and wound up working for the kingpin of Portsmouth crime, Bazza Mackenzie. Meanwhile Faraday plodded on, as frustrated as Winter with the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of the police business, but too honest and decent, too committed to his own idea of justice, to give up in frustration, like Winter.

Where Winter's character has always been defined by action, Faraday's has been one of metaphors: his seemingly isolated house, his bird-watching, his communication (or lack thereof) with his deaf-mute son. As in his police work, Faraday's need for truths and sureties in his personal life has been a problem, not least with his current girlfriend, the French sociologist Gabrielle. Borrowed Light begins with a car crash; Joe and Gabrielle are on holiday in Egypt, their driver is killed, his injuries are worse than hers, and by the time he wakes up Gabrielle has already become attached to a young girl from Gaza, who suffered terrible burns from an Israeli phosphorus bomb during the recent invasion. Joe returns to Portsmouth; Gabrielle and the girl follow eventually, and by now she wants to essay the almost impossible task of adopting the child.

Meanwhile, Joe is greeted back at work by a huge case, the murder of four people, their corpses found charred in the remains of a fire at an Isle Of Wight farmhouse. The killings involve drugs, and Bazza, and because of that Winter, but as the story progresses Winter, prodded by his former protege Jimmy Suttle, begins to realise he's had enough of the dark side of the street. Particularly as Bazza has decided to run for mayor of Portsmouth, and the press seem to be lapping up the image he's selling, of the rough local boy made good. It's another lovely reversal of the situation, but it's like a slap of reality when Bazza, while keeping Winter in the dark, reverts to violent form. But such realisation may be too late. It may also be too late for Faraday, who finds Gabrielle more and more distant, and, despite the thrill of the chase, finds himself less and less able to focus on his work.

Hurley builds a engrossing story, mixing his very accurate-feeling police procedural with the internal traumas of both Winter and Faraday, less reflections of each other than a sort of copshop yin and yang. Both characters seem somehow more real than most cops—eve though Faraday is very much in the depressive tradition of Martin Beck or Wallander, and Winter could come from Joseph Wambaugh or Trevor Preston. And they run up against a brick wall engineered by a madam who could come out of Raymond Chandler at his most fearful of cold calculating black widows.

It's all a heady mix, but the focus is our two main characters, and the ending, while not quite a surprise, is incredibly moving and well done. As well as ever so slightly ambiguous, if you want to read it that way. Hurley has always handled the complicated mix of police work, social analysis of Portsmouth (and by extension, the country—and the new 'coalition' government isn't spared), and the lives of his deeply-faceted characters. The Faraday and Winter series has done what John Harvey did with Resnick in Nottingham, or Ian Rankin with Rebus in Edinburgh, with increasing flair and deepening feeling. It really deserves a place in the British pantheon.

Borrowed Light by Graham Hurley
Orion £12.99 ISBN 9781409101239

This review will also appear at Crime Time, www.crimetime.co.uk

HARVEY AND HORACE: JOHN HARVEY'S TAKE ON HORACE MC COY

John Harvey has a very acute little piece on his Mellotone70Up blog (link to it here) about writing an introduction to Serpent Tail's upcoming reissue of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? in which he defines the fatalism in McCoy which makes him so popular in France.

I wrote a quick response and posted it there, but I thought I'd share that response with you here, and add a few small second thoughts...

Very nice piece–and interesting speculation. I havent read No Pockets For A Shroud (though I should have by now) but it seems to fit in with a number of works, going back to Jack London's Iron Heel and including President Fu Manchu, which speculate on proto-fascism in America: I wonder whether it’s the fatalism or the politics (or a little of both) that relate to its relative lower status?

There is that strange disconnect, more evident in noirish films, between the obviously corrupt society it portrays, and the triumph of the system (more than the little guy who is the nominal hero) which of course is what is corrupt in the first place. The honest are exceptions, and honesty is a flexible thing in the real world, and that’s what makes McCoy and Hammett (and George V Higgins) work…

Certainly McCoy is arguably the most fatalistic of all of them, which is what makes him great. In fact, you might call him at his strongest nilhilistic, which would also explain the French attraction to his work.

You can link to my take on the spectactularly good I Should Have Stayed Home at Irresistible Targets for March 2009, here. I do believe it was an influence on Wilder and Sunset Boulevard and it's certainly up there with the best Hollywood novels, of West or Fitzgerald or whomever (though it's hard to see Fitzgerald as proletarian, even in the Pat Hobby stories!). O’Hara is sadly overlooked today, there's an off-the-wall comparison to made with him and the Mailer of Deer Park.

Footnote: I'm not sure John can get away with blaming it all on Sun Ra, but with Sun Ra, all things are possible. A college friend of mine once sat in Ken McIntyre's office while he talked to Sun Ra on the phone, and afterwards I asked him what Ken called him, Sun? Mr Ra? Herman Blount (his original name)? Wasn't it a dilemma? No, my friend answered. He just called him 'man'.

PUSHER MAN: PLUGGING PELECANOS IN PICCADILLY: THE WAY HOME INTERVIEW

I've interviewed George Pelecanos any number of times before, but this one was something special. On stage at BAFTA, before the gathered work force of the estimable Orion Books, I got to do for George what he used to do for ladies shoes: sell to an audience that seemed already eager to buy. As it turned out, my selling was so emphatic I'm not sure I left George much room to reply, or many gaps to fill in, but it was rewarding to be able to push an author to his own publisher. Not that George needs much pushing. As I said to the Orions, Pelecanos has the enviable status of someone who's gone from cult writer to best-seller without losing his cult status. And his profile has been raised immeasurably by his writing/producing for The Wire, which started the cult status thing all over again. It seems non-stop; on my way to meet him at his hotel, I was startled to see his face staring out at me from an underground poster for his latest novel, The Way Home, which wasn't surprising because the Channel Four TV Book Club has picked The Way Home in its launch books. And that wasn't surprising because The Way Home to me is the kind of book that would appear both to fans of crime fiction but also transcend to 'the mainstream' as well; its themes of work and family are strong, but the book also plays with the tropes of pulp fiction and, indeed, westerns as well. You can link to my original review of the novel here.

With so much going on, it was nice to be able to relax for a couple of hours at the Cork & Bottle wine bar, where I tried an Ernest Hemingway burger (somehow I can't see Papa getting down with mango relish, but you never know) and held myself to just one glass of wine before going onstage. George wears the trappings of fame easily; his books originally attracted some cult status because of their prominent use of music, not just as scene-setting background but also for insight into character. Pelecanos play-lists were soon appearing in rock magazines. Indeed, while he was visiting Britain, he appeared on Open Book, and asked to pick his book of the decade, chose Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin, of the band Richmond Fontaine. Coincidentally (or not) he's going to see the band that very night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, along with the crime writer Mark Billingham. Since it was Mark and Martyn Waites who converted me to Richmond Fontaine in the first place, that brings something full circle! George also chose Charles Portis' True Grit as his favourite book, and we spend a long time discussing both the book's subtleties, especially as it's narrated by an aged spinster Mattie Ross, whose recollections may well be suspect, and the upcoming remake of the John Wayne version by the Coen Brothers, with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. 'People forget how strong the supporting cast was in the original,' George says. 'This is known as the Glen Campbell effect,' I say. 'But Robert Duvall, Jeff Corey and Dennis Hopper are all great.' 'And Hank Worden as the undertaker,' I say, and that, as they say, was that.

Over the rest of a conversation that raged from the joys of fatherhood to the tribulations of George's beloved Washington Redskins, I discovered that although he's done 16 novels in the past 18 years, he doesn't have a new one in the works. But I suggested that, as a writer who's done most of his books in contained series, his last three novels formed a trilogy, linked by the theme of fathers and sons (their predecessor, Drama City, shared important themes of work and family, but not directly fathers and sons.)

After just brief consideration George agrees, though he says it wasn't a conscious intention. He attributes the increasing focus on the microcosm of the family at least in part to The Wire. 'We did such a good job (with social issues of crime) I didn't have much left to say on those themes.' To me, it seems a natural progression, especially when you consider that Pelecanos is one of the few writers, in any genre, who's always concentrated not only on race but on issues of family and work – both keys to The Wire (series two, as you may recall, was themed around the disappearance of meaningful employment for the working classes of the city). Family and working values are the core of No Way Home, which John Harvey likened to a 'moral fable', (you can read about that discussion here) and which has elements of both westerns and 1970s exploitation films about it, points which appear to have got lost, in America at least, behind the fable. To me, it recalls Shoedog, still one of my favourite Pelecanos novels, and another book with pulpy fictions framing a story about men working.

'The Night Gardener was my biggest selling book in America,' George says, 'in fact, Clint Eastwood was interested in making a movie of it for a while, and he wrote me a very nice letter about it, which I will treasure, but it just didn't happen'. He's got other big-time fans too: Barak Obama gave George the same kind of moment Bill Clinton provided both Walter Mosely and Stephen Hunter, when he carried a copy of The Way Home with him as he left Air Force One.

But The Way Home didn't do so well.' George explains that he thinks his audience wanted him to stick with cops, or private eyes, and their investigations. In Britain, however, The Way Home has been his most successful so far, which has encouraged Orion to push him even more. 'They've got it right from the start,' George says, and I'm not sure if he means his British publishers or the audience. 'Well, both,' he says, diplomatically. It gratifies him too, because the book grew out of his experiences working in a prison reading project. 'I started to wonder not only what its like for these kids, but what it's like for their parents,' he says. He also talks about his own lucky history. 'When I was 17, I accidentally shot a friend of mine in the face. With a different background, in different circumstances, my life could have taken a far different course,' he explains. And the theme reverberates throughout Pelecanos' work, the idea that one small moment can have consequences that change your life, that you can be powerless to stop. This is also one of the classic themes of noir.

Whether these family novels will end as a trilogy or whether there's something more to come Pelecanos can't say. He hasn't launched another novel, but not because because he hasn't been busy. He's been working on two TV series for HBO. One is Treme, named after a district of New Orleans, comes from David Simon and many of the team that did The Wire, dealing with the lives of musicians and others in the post-Katrina Big Easy. Not long after we met, Pelecanos' writing colleague on Treme (and The Wire), David Mills, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm (see the link to my obituary, and George's comment on Mills, here). The other is Pacific, a sequel of sorts to Band Of Brothers, set in the Pacific war, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Pelecanos is again a writer/producer, and it had deep resonance for him. 'My Dad was a Marine and served in the Pacific, so it's a subject very close to my own history, and it's something I admire.' There's a sense of regret, of a sort, in much of Pelecanos' work, that his father's generation grew up in the experience of a war they could believe in, as opposed to a generation faced with a war no one could believe in, and a generation tried to avoid if they could.

That's because George Pelecanos is very much about the things a man's gotta do, or that he used to think he had to do. Thus his fondness for muscle cars, for football, especially at the youth level, for the social world of bars, for the importance of work and its camaraderie. It's an old-fashioned attitude that returns social contact, personal relationships, 'man to man' as it were, to the fore. And that's what his books boil down to: the sense that by letting these simple values be sacrificed on the altar of economics, or leisure, or whatever, we've lost something important, and that crime and tragedy is often the result.

GEORGE PELECANOS BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nick Stefanos Novels:
A Firing Offense (1992), Nick's Trip (93), Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go (95)

Shoedog (1994)

The DC Quartet:
The Big Blowdown (1996), King Suckerman (97), The Sweet Forever (98), Shame The Devil (2000)

Derek Strange Novels:
Right As Rain (2001), Hell To Pay (02), Soul Circus (03), Hard Revolution (04)

Drama City (2005)

Fathers & Sons
Night Gardener (2006), The Turnaround (08), The Way Home (09)

GEORGE PELECANOS, JOHN HARVEY, AND THE MORAL FABLE

I had a short but interesting discussion with John Harvey yesterday, about my review of George Pelecanos' The Way Home, which you can read if you follow this link. He agreed with me that the conventions of the crime novel were there primarily to give the book some traction, but he also suggested that what Pelecanos really had written was 'a moral fable'. It's a good way of describing it--sometimes we used to think of genre melodrama as being moral in the sense of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, but that's not the context John is talking about-- and, though I didn't use the phrase, it fits what I was talking about. Since Pelecanos has often played with the genre's most melodramatic conventions, writing crime novels as spaghetti westerns, for example, he seems adept at using them to make his point; the 'difficulty' as it were, if I understand John's definition of moral fable, is that the story, in the end, seems to serve primarily as a way to get to that moral point.

This contrasts with something John discusses in his new Mellotone70up blog, K.C. Constantine's 1993 novel Bottom Liner Blues; you can read that here. John's point about this Mario Balzic novel is that Constantine uses it to discuss the things he needs to discuss as a novelist, to the degree that many of the plot elements and conflicts remain unresolved. The Balzic books are a series, of course, so some things can be left unresolved until later books, but the point is that Constantine is writing about the things he feels he needs to write about, and abandoning genre conventions in order to do it. But then if his detective's name were Balzac it would be a clue of sorts as to what he was trying to do.

And I've just sat down with Thomas H Cook for a long interview, which will be appearing here eventually. He is committed to 'expanding' as he put it, 'blurring the edges' of crime fiction's genre boundaries--enjoying the fact that readers will not know beforehand what the book is 'about.' I've said the same thing in reviews of a number of John Harvey's novels, and often the real 'subject' of the novel, as it's revealed by the crime being investigated, will mirror or be mirrored by the subject which is taking place in the lives of the characters. It's part of Far Cry, his latest, which I reviewed here.

So if George Pelecanos is writing moral fables that's all to the good. Whether his stories need the 'traction' of the crime format ought to be immaterial, though as I say in my review some of the tropes of the genre may give the ending a different kind of impact, because it is for want of a better phrase, a genre impact. Perhaps the difference is between asking questions, and answering them?

JOHN HARVEY'S WEST: A 'Far Cry' Sidebar

Apropos of John Harvey's new novel, which is reviewed immediately below, and not coincidentally, he's written a nice piece in the Independent's 'Book Of A Lifetime' series, about Arthur Groom's Buffalo Bill's Wild West Annual. You can link to it here. As I may be one of the few people with a complete set of John's 'Hart the Regulator' series (there used to be this great stall in Camden Market selling westerns, just behind my buddy Eric selling bootleg CDs), which he wrote as John B Harvey, the initial providing added gravitas. One Hart novel took its title from a John Stewart song, as does this blog; it's nice to be reminded of John's taste in music as well as his cowboy pulp roots.

John's reminiscence reminded me of a similar series that used to be in the Village Voice, in which the poet John Ashberry wrote about the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia arranged by recurring topics, rather than alphabetically, and the wonder of reading it, start to finish, picking up knowledge at random, or really in circles, as you revisited themes. When I was a kid I had my uncles' old BofK, so I was probably reading the same edition he'd read as a kid, and I'd had that same sense of wonder, at truth being stranger and more interesting than fiction. That sense of wonder, fact or fiction, is what John's writing about in the Indy today.

JOHN HARVEY'S FAR CRY: Harvey Hits His Century

I've always been bothered by OPS, or Opening Paragraph Syndrome, where writers craft a few lines of glorious, flowery, descriptive prose, before lapsing into something far flatter, and in some cases, sub-utilitarian, for the rest of the book. John Harvey's Far Cry opens with a two-page scene that is stunningly atmospheric in its tone, but the difference is not that he sustains it for the rest of the book, but that, even though the tone changes in the next chapter, as it must, Harvey's prose remains at that same high standard throughout a long and complicated novel.

There is no one writing crime who is better at the minutiae of day to day living than Harvey, making small details come alive, but more importantly, using the life those details provide to reveal his characters and his story. Far Cry concerns two missing children, nearly fifteen years apart, but daughters of the same woman, Ruth. In Cambridgeshire, DI Will Grayson is concerned that a serial molester, and possibly killer, has been released from prison, and his obsessive pursuit of that suspect threatens his career until the second of Ruth's daughters goes missing, and he and DS Helen Walker are moved to that case. Of course, the cases are connected, and of course the first disappearance is part of the story. Harvey winds the stories together deftly; that the 'solution' to the loss of the first daughter is not a surprise doesn't make it less effective; the second case, as it weaves in and out of Grayson's pursuit of Mitchell Roberts, provides more than enough suspense.

But what rivets the reader is the way Harvey is concerned with issues of parenthood and loss, the different ways we cope with loss, the different impacts it has on our lives. This is part of his fine descriptive eye, with his interest in the quotidien. The effect of crime goes beyond the criminal and victim, it can also be serious for the families, and for the police as well. Harvey is careful to show all his families in an equal light, while pointing out the subtleties of relationships, of class, of expectations, on family life. He's always been good on the pressures of police work on relationships; but here Grayson and his family serve partly as the reminder of how fine the line is between happiness and tragedy. The story moves between East Anglia, Cornwall, and north London, with the human dimensions unchanged regardless of setting. This is what Harvey is a master at doing, perhaps better than any crime writer in Britain, detailing the impact of society on real people, while chronicling crime and punishment within it.

This is, apparently, John Harvey's 100th book. He is something of a national treasure, in an understated English way; though his books are firmly grounded in the English provinces, they are never provincial. But as a jazz fan, I wish only that every time a lover of jazz turns up in Harvey's writings, he weren't always such a lonely guy. This is one of John Harvey's best novels, which means it's one of the best, full stop.

Far Cry by John Harvey,
William Heinemann £14.99 ISBN 9780434016921

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

MORE ON JOHN HARVEY'S COLD IN HAND

John Harvey's excellent Resnick novel, Cold In Hand, will be hitting the shelves in paperback in February. Meanwhile, my review posted earlier this month here, has just been posted at Crime Time (you can hit it again, here). But why wait for the paperback?

I've been talking a lot about Resnick lately, because you can see the influence of Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck in him, but there's a very special quality to way Harvey delineates the man's inner strength, something different from the more obsessive character of Beck or Wallander, and the way in which Harvey has always been able to reflect his wide story and Resnick's inner conflicts and personal stories, so they illuminate each other. It's one of the top police series ever, anywhere.

WHO PUT THE 'NO' IN NORDIC? SCANDINAVIAN CRIME CREATES BRITISH CRITICAL CONUNDRUM

Seems like Open Book got in ahead of the wave (see here). Friday was a big day for Scandinavian Crime in the broadsheet arts sections, with the Independent featuring this piece by Boyd Tonkin on Stieg Larsson's success and the Guardian running 'Move Over Ian Rankin' by John Crace here.

Tonkin had already discussed the Nordic crime wave back in December (here) when he noted that 'many gifted (Scandinavian) novelists had chosen to adopt the form (crime novel) and push its boundaries'. Contrast that to the Guardian's sidebar to Crace's piece, which presented a roster of writers and informed us with some condescension that Mankell wrote 'serious plays and novels' before he 'hit it big time' with Wallender, and that Peter Hoeg 'started out as a serious writer before Miss Smilla'. It's the Guardian's 'Telegraph Crossword' theory of crime fiction rearing its head again, see here for an explantion. They also described Wallender as a 'hard-drinking...angry everyman,' ...there is a difference between heavy drinking and hard drinking (and I'm not sure Wallender qualifies on either count--Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole, now he's hard-drinking!) just as there is between angry and morose.

I doubt Crace actually wrote the sidebar, especially since he wondered, quite rightly, why Britain lagged behind Europe in appreciating Nordic crime in translation, and put it down to that 'old national weakness for effortless superiority combined with instinctive parochialism.' But it was nice to see his paper's sidebar immediately prove his point, plus they'd already trumpeted the same prejudice in their '1,000 novels everyone must read' supplements that very week (see my take here, or scroll down to the previous post on IT). The sidebar on the 'husband and wife' team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (actually, of course, wife and husband, that's Maj on the right) mentioned that their Martin Beck series is still in print, but 'almost certainly overdue a revivial'. In fact, the series has just been reissued over the past two years, in uniform editions, by Harper Collins. I wrote the introduction to Murder At The Savoy, other introductions were by the likes of Michael Connelly, Michael Ondaatje, and Val McDermid.

The key introduction was provided by Henning Mankell himself for the first novel in the series, Roseanna, and gave a good background to the whole Scandinavian crime phenomenon. It's important, because Martin Beck lies at the centre of a cross-fertilization which helps understand both where Nordic crime comes from and why it's so popular here. Mankell noted how British cozies, and their Swedish imitations, were immensely popular before, in the 1960s, influenced by Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, Sjowall and Wahloo decided to do something new, and dissect Swedish society while they were doing it. Beck's own sombre character was in marked contrast to McBain's Steve Carella, though like McBain they populated the supporting cast with colourful characters. This is the field in which Mankell, and many of the others of this new wave (Fossum and Indridasson in particular) plow.

The Beck novels had a huge influence in both American and British crime fiction; it's evident in John Harvey, Ian Rankin, Connelly and many others, crucially, it provided a way for British writers in particular to move into a more hard-boiled territory without adopting American-style private dick heroes. If Inspector Morse indicated a breaching of the cozy puzzle by the police procedural (Morse of course is both hard drinking and angry when he's not listening to opera), Rebus, Resnick, Mark Bellingham's Tom Thorne and Graham Hurley's Joe Faraday all reflected with a keen eye on British society and it made all of them as morose as Beck.

Tonkin noted that where Larsson follows Mankell (and Beck) is in starting with the idea that the 'welfare state has been corrupted from the top'. But it's surprising that he then asks 'where are the native stars of crime who might expose the broken parts of this society and convert them into electrifying entertainment? Let's hope, and search, for a home-grown Larsson'. It's an interesting question, because in answer to the first part, there are, as noted, many British writers dissecting their society with the same sort of acuity as Mankell. But it's the second part of the equation, the 'electrifying entertainment', where Larsson is slightly different, and more difficult to follow, in two ways.

First is the unique interplay of his two heroes. One is a cynical, but not disillusioned journalist, whom you might argue is based as much on Per Wahloo as on Larsson himself. The other is a young woman almost completely disaffected and at odds with Swedish society, abused by it, yet able to manipulate it in ways the older, powerful generation can't quite imagine. Sarah Weinman perceptively suggested (here) Martyn Waites as a British writer who's done something similar, and Waites' books do feature a cynical ex-journo, diaffected youngsters, and hackers, though his scope might be more limited than Larssons, not least because of the Newcastle setting (though that's as close to Scandinavia as England gets!).

But the other thing Larsson does is work with narrative space, in multiple points of view; I compared him to Dumas in this essay. His books may be over-long, but his talent resembles someone like Richard North Patterson, whose approach to issues is somewhat more simplistic, but who within the omnisicient narration manages to assume multiple viewpoints, and keep his characters and story moving at great and involving length. This is something which is not uncommon in the 'mainstream', or what the Guardian might call 'serious' writers, and its the ability to draw the big picture without inflicting authorial taste on the audience that is Larsson's real gift. His authorial aims sneak in while his characters move in their own worlds.

The question of translation in general is an interesting one. Of course one reason so many fewer translations are published here is that the English-language market is so large, and books written by Americans don't require extensive translation. The predominance of Scandinavian crime is partly because Mankell is so good, partly because Scandinavian society has many of the same reserves and divisions as British, and partly because Scandinavian prose translates so well into English. Remember too that there are lots of good writers because the Nordic countries are the world's great readers: proportionately selling many times what books sell here, and keeping far more newspapers and magazines alive.

The current wave is a case of follow the leader, without Mankell, no Larsson (or Fossum, or Indridasson, or Theorin, or Jungstedt) and Larsson's success has made publishers search twice as hard for the next marketable Nordic. In this, the market has changed in 40 years; Martin Beck's success led to publication in English for the Dane, Anders Bodelsen, but I can't think of many others, and the most popular and critically successful Swedish crime books, the spy novels of Jan Guillou, remain strangely under-published here. Harvill, over the years, have been an outstanding publisher of fiction (not just crime) in translation, and in the crime fiction, smaller publishers like Bitter Lemon and Gallic struggle to make an impact, even in the same review sections that wonder why we don't read more foreign fiction.

It's great to see such good fiction being translated into English, and ever better that it is attracting so much attention. But it remains puzzling to me why, when contemporary British crime writers have done so much to move their genre into more challenging territory, it takes two Swedes to get British critics to notice.

JOHN HARVEY'S COLD IN HAND

Charlie Resnick is nearing retirement age, not that he hasn’t been out of step with the policing times for years. But he’s settled into a comfortable relationship with his colleague Lynn Kellogg, and although a happy smile is something that would find great difficulty establishing itself on Resnick’s face; he’s content. Then Lynn gets shot, caught in a Nottingham gang-style shooting, and Resnick’s happy interlude is shattered. It gets worse when Lynn’s massage-parlour murder case, involving Eastern Europeans and forced prostitution, starts to take on deeper implications within the police force which Resnick of course cannot let lie.

John Harvey always writes well about the conflicts within the police: not necessarily blatant corruption, but the sort of injustices which adherence to bureaucratic priorities and politics produces, and of which Resnick, of course, remains contemptuous. But his books are also usually about more than the crimes and the way the police solve them; Cold In Hand is, at heart, a study of aging, of the way times change and the world becomes unfamiliar, and the way age and loss, while going hand in hand, often appear to us as a disconnect, in unexpected ways. There’s a deep sensitivity in Harvey’s prose, one that is sometimes hidden behind the macho bravado of the police world, and disguised by the details of Resnick’s life, the food, the music, the cats. If Resnick was, in many ways, an English Martin Beck, Harvey’s eye has always been turned more sharply toward the personal than the societal, and his Resnick has always had a more sympathetic, if no less solitary, private world.

Cold In Hand is also a fine, pacy novel that brings its crime down to the local level, and whose cops are first and foremost working people, with all the limitations that implies. There’s never been a detective less super-human than Charlie Resnick, and there’s never been one who’s more human either. He may be Harvey’s best creation, and this book certainly does both of them justice.

COLD IN HAND by John Harvey, William Heinemann, £12.99, ISBN 9780434016945

OAKLEY HALL OBITUARY

You can follow the link below to my June 18 Guardian obit of Oakley Hall, who, while not nominally a crime writer, committed some crime novels in his past, and, in Warlock, wrote a marvelous reinvention of the Gunfight At The OK Corral. As I generally argue, westerns are crime novels in the sense that blues is jazz....

Speaking of which, jazz and westerns, a tip of the sombrero to John Harvey for alerting me to Hall's death and suggesting I ought to prevail upon the G to take note of it.

here's the link:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2286104,00.html