THOMAS H. COOK'S TRAGIC SHORES

Note: This review appeared last week, in a somewhat different form, in the TLS. It had been shortened from the original edited version, where it had been improved greatly by some reordering and a change of focus, which I appreciated greatly, because this is a deeply-layered book that provokes often conflicting reactions. The printed piece is locked behind the TLS paywall; I recommend the new-look paper if you are interested. But I thought I would offer you the chance to chance my original version, improved by sensitive editing, which I think get further into and closer to the heart of a moving book.

Thomas H. Cook is one of the finest crime writers in the world. His protagonists tend to be observers; his books are often set in the world of their memory, dealing with the dead and the past. Stories tend to become clearer gradually, like a photograph developing, and his style, while displaying gothic overtones, is measured and straightforward. “My characters are fighting inevitability”, he told me once in an interview. “The sense that life is not designed to live up to our imaginations. Instead it’s incredibly cruel.” There is an autobiographical touch; in two of his novels, characters are writers who have specialized in travel to dark places. One of them is a man who has lost his son, kidnapped as he waited in the rain for his father to pick him up from school; the father, caught up in his writing, had forgotten the time.

Tragic Shores begins with a prologue, Cook's visit to Alcazar, where in 1936 the commander of the fortress refused to surrender to Republican forces, then listened over a telephone as the commander of those forces murdered his son. Later in the book, Cook tells the story of waiting in the rain for his mother to collect him after school. He refuses the offer of a lift from the mother of a classmate. 'Get in, Tommy, I won't hurt you,' the woman says. 'That's what they all say,' the young Cook replies.

On the surface, this is a journal of “dark travel”, to places where human cruelty and tragedy have left their marks, where they remain a living presence and have not, as Cook puts it, “retreated into history”. It proceeds from Lourdes to Auschwitz; from the leper colony at Kalaupapa to Hiroshima; from Cambodia’s Year Zero to New York’s Ground Zero; from New Echota, capital of the Cherokee nation before the Trail of Tears, to the site of massacres in Ghana; from Machecoul in Northern France, where Gilles de Rais, the West’s first recorded serial killer, preyed on local youths in the fifteenth century, to the cliffs of Okinawa from which Japanese parents threw their children, then followed them to their deaths, rather than face the atrocities they believed the Americans would visit upon them. At Verdun, being told “no one comes here anymore”, Cook ponders the “well of forgetfulness” into which so many lost lives have sunk, and attempts to pull those memories back into the light.

It is not schadenfreude; he does not seek comfort from the fact that the tragedies visited on others have somehow passed him by. Yet, this might seem an unattractive basis for a travel book. Indeed, much of the description can seem mundane in the face of such overwhelming emotion. Cook, his wife Susan and their daughter Justine try bravely to become travellers absorbing new places, rather than tourists carrying their own worlds with them. But many of these sites rest uneasily with the tourist trade; watching the mothers of Cinco de Mayo in Buenos Aires disperse after their weekly demonstration for their “disappeared” relatives is not the only scene that provokes a sense of disconnection.. But the more everyday the picture, the more intensely the reader perceives Cook’s real intent, which is easy to miss even though he states it clearly in the first line of his prologue: “I have come to thank dark places for the light they bring to life”.

After touring a small hall dedicated to the Apprentice Boys of Derry commemorating the siege of the city in 1688–9, and the origins of the staunchly Unionist Protestant association, his guide offers a hand, saying, “we’re not bad people”. When Cook takes the hand, responding “most people aren’t bad”, it sounds like a wistful warning, recalling his mother's long-ago advice. This is the central dilemma with which Cook wrestles, the reason why he immerses himself in the darkness, the question of why, if most people are not bad, so much evil seems to define their lives.

Oddly enough, in this worldwide compendium of human misery, a hint of an answer comes from a tragedy visited on birds. It is perhaps the saddest tale in the book, sad because of its seeming inevitability. The extinction of the heath hen on Martha’s Vineyard followed, not evil, but the requiste callousess of humans, when a century ago a forest fire destroyed the preserve in which they had been protected from human agency. Most of the female birds died protecting the nests they would not abandon; the last male disappeared a few years later in 1932. His disappearance speaks to a sense of selflessness with which Cook, with a novelist’s sense of climax, intended to end his book.

But soon after his visit to Martha's Vineyard, his wife took ill. Susan Terner died before this book was finished. Before she died, she admonished Cook to remember the “value of knowing”, and though the heath hens had brought the book to conclusion, he still needed to explain what that knowledge meant.

The Cooks had visited the tomb of Abelard and Héloïse in Père Lachaise, the graves of Elvira Madigan and Sixten Sparre in Landet, Denmark; two sets of lovers who ended their own lives when faced with society's refusal to allow them their loves. But that sense of despair finds contrast at the jumping point on the Golden Gate Bridge, where thousands of suicides have taken their last steps, when a passerby seems pleased and relieved to see him walking back from the spot. In that man's relief, Cook senses “life’s ultimate gimmick”, the “selfless, anonymous care” that persuades humans to live. It is altruism, an engrained instinct to protect the wider nest. That is the light which the dark places have revealed. Tragic Shores is not tragic at all. It is a love story, and a hymn to our ability to go on, in the face of the ultimate darkness.

Tragic Shores by Thomas H. Cook
Quercus, £20.00, ISBN 9781849163262

THOMAS H COOK'S TRAGIC SHORES: THE TLS REVIEW

My review of Tragic Shores, Thomas H Cooks memoir of 'dark travel' is in the current issue of the Times Literary Suuplement. You can get a taste of it if you link here, but the rest of the piece is behind a subscription paywall. Or you can buy the paper. There is an outstanding article about Marsden Hartley by Patrick McCaughey, as well as a number of other pieces that will keep your attention.

Thomas is one of the very best crime novelists in America, and as I have written before, works in a manner that is almost sui generis. It is a style that suits his subject here very well, indeed, as he, his wife and daughter travel to those dark places, from which they draw a certain amount of life. More on that later...

The piece as published is notably shorter than the one I originally wrote. I did a rewrite to change the emphasis slightly and re-order it; then it was cut for space and a couple of key points lost. I will post the original up here some time in the future.

MEGAN ABBOTT'S YOU WILL KNOW ME: BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF NOIR

Devon Knox is an immensely promising young gymnast, despite having lost two toes in an accident with a lawn mower when she was just three. She's worked obsessively hard, and her parents, Eric and Katie, have had to work just as hard, and make serious sacrifices, devoting themselves to her career. But when the handsome young assistant coach at her gym is killed in a hit and run, the finely tuned cocoon around her begins to come apart, and the family face difficult choices as blame and suspicion permeate their tightly-wrapped world fraught with competition, pressure, and jealousy.

All parents know that feeling that 'one morning you wake up and there is this alien in your house', but even as she says it Megan Abbott is reinforcing the darkness behind it with the story of cave fish who, when seeing their parents for the first time, still cannot be seen by them. Around this tension flows the classic noirish theme of the man with the one-train mind, but half-track brain; the innocents and the temptresses, tempered by the family and 'the smell of chloraseptic and panic'.

One of the beauties of Abbott's writing is the way she can transform the most mundane narrative into a dream-like state, where the characters are fighting as much with fate as with each other. This would come as no surprise to readers of her first five novels, with titles like Die A Little and Bury Me Deep, which drew on classic film noir themes and settings, in a way which heralded her as an original and unique voice in crime writing. You Will Know Me is her ninth novel; the last four have been set in a suburban world that is indeed more mundane, but every bit as threatening as the world of those earlier books.

I was surprised the marketing people didn't try to retitle this one something like The Girl On The Balance Beam, in an attempt to lure in that 'Girl whatever' audience. But You Will Know Me is a title which points the way to what this story is at heart, a true noir thriller. At a time when everything from Danish political dramas to cozy kitchen mysteries has the label 'noir' slapped on it, rendering the term virtually meaningless, what Abbott has done is to drawn out the essence of noir from these modern settings, and subtly transmuted the basics of noir to serve her purposes. There's a touch of Thomas H Cook in this, a bigger touch of Dorothy Hughes, but each of Abbott's novels has had its own approach to this darkness. Her dilemma is how to make our world and its optimism jibe with the futility that lurks at the heart of the world of noir.

She does it with the help of the kind of classical allusions that Devon's injury recalls, as much Nathaniel Hawthorne as James M Cain, as well as the contemporary (Amanda Knox?). The dreamy images of seeing, of illness, of fever, that run through the tale draw you into its world. They immerse you in its uncertainty. Not in the mystery puzzle sense, but in the sense of how does life continue? how is life measured? how do children grow up and parents help and hinder them? It brings the dilemmas of real noir down to an everyday level, which, if you study it, is the essence of noir, the everyday turned upside down. This tale of everyday obsession may well be Megan Abbott's finest piece of writing to date, which means it is exceptional.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Picador, £14.99, ISBN 9781447226352

THOMAS H. COOK'S DANCER IN THE DUST

Ray Campbell runs a risk assessment business in New York City, where he lives a life of quiet loneliness. But twenty years before, Ray had been an aid worker in the African country of Lubanda, where he fell in love with Martine Aubert, the child of Belgian colonists, but a woman who considered herself a native Lubandan, with all the contradictions and risks that entailed.

Ray lost Martine, his only love. Two decades later, his old boss in Lubanda, Bill Hammond, who now runs a major aid fund that distributes millions of dollars of largesse, gets in touch with Ray. There has been a murder in New York, and the victim is Seso, the man Bill had assigned to Ray as his assistant when he'd first arrived in Africa. Lubanda has had its second change of government since Ray arrived; in the first Martine was lost, and an Amin-like dictator too over the country. There's a new government back in Lubanda now, but in New York Seso has been tortured before he was killed, and was supposedly bringing a message to Bill, and Bill wants Ray to look into it, because the police are not very interested. For Ray it means opening up a locked box of memories, and, more importantly, feelings.

If you're familiar with Thomas Cook's writing, you will know that emotions are the dangerous fulcrum on which lives rest. Small decisions reverberate, and the echoes of those decisions, their influences, stay with his characters forever. It is immensely fitting that Ray works in risk assessment, the perfect metaphor for Cook's characters' view of life, as risk to be assessed. Typically they are thoughtful, and self-examining if not always self-aware, and Ray is like that. He is a classicist, and his reflections are full of aphorisms, as when Ray reflects on “that elusive, perhaps unknowable but always painful line that in every life divides what we should have done from what we did.”

In order to examine that line, Cook tells this story with multiple flashbacks: to Lubanda twenty years earlier, and ten years earlier, when Ray made a solitary trip back to visit the spot where Martine had lived, and the one where she had died. Within those three time frames multiple flashbacks occur, as Ray's thoughts drift into memory, his and Cook's way of reminding us that the past is still very much part of the present. It's a brilliant piece of structure held together by Cook's perfectly crystalline prose, a prose that's able to convey both the beauty and brutality of the land, the people, and of life.  Along its way it also dissects the crucial and difficult issue of aid to the 'third world', cutting through our assumptions about its efficacy and intentions, without ever being didactic. 

As Ray reminds us, "some things, once lost--innocence, for example, and sometimes hope--are irrecoverable." This is what plays out before our eyes, and the denouement carries the modest disappointment of slight anti-climax; little changes except perhaps Ray himself. But its ending is a scene of such touching beauty A Dancer In The Dust might be one of the very best of Cook's remarkable career. Compelling, engrossing, and beautiful.

A Dancer In The Dust by Thomas H Cook

Head Of Zeus £18.99 ISBN 9781784081652

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

THOMAS H COOK'S SANDRINE

Samuel Madison considered himself a lucky man to be married to Sandrine, beautiful, artistic, and a far more brilliant scholar than he was. That she gave up a prestigious career path to teach at a small Georgia college that would hire the two of them together, so he could work on his novel, merely confirmed his amazing good fortune, something far beyond what he'd ever expected or thought he'd deserved.

Years later, their daughter grown, and still at sleepy Coburn College, Madison comes home to find Sandrine dead, overdosed on Demerol, an apparent suicide. But few people believe Sandrine would take her own life. Madison, aloof and seemingly unemotional about her death, finds circumstantial evidence building up against him. Soon he is on trial for murder, which is where Thomas Cook's novel, told in flashbacks growing from the daily testimony in court, begins.

This is in many ways classic Thomas Cook country. Sam is a passive character, a watcher, failed in what was his one ambition, to write a novel, a reactor to Sandrine's glowing brilliance. It was she who proposed to him, in Albi, and the perceptive reader will feel the dynamic of the relationship, and its influence on the plot, before Sam himself does. Of course, being Cook, even glimpsing the realities behind the story doesn't cover the way it twists itself into the worst of all possible dilemmas for Sam.

The academic setting is downplayed, but will still remind many of Cook's best-known novel, The Chatham School Affair, though the only connection is the one I've noted in so many of Cook's books, the essentially academic, observer quality of his protagonists. Sam is one of the best of those, partly because of the skill with which Cook delineates the limits of his character, and partly because he allows Sandrine to do the same, more tellingly. The beauty of that is the way in which it forces a modicum of self-awareness on Sam—again, like many of Cook's protagonists, he is incredibly inward-focused, yet not deft in his self-analysis.

The result is unexpected, and the coda, while appropriate, may be somewhat too glib-- it is what is suggested by the story, but still it seems like something we should see at the beginning, rather than the end. That's a small matter, however. What resonates from this book like muted bells is the person of Sam Madison, a man whose flaws become exposed to both himself and the reader as we go along. They are recognisable, these character traits, and that is the sign of a expert novelist. Cook is a writer who makes us look into ourselves, and those we know, as well as his own characters. It is what gives his novels such moving intensity. 

Sandrine by Thomas H. Cook

Head of Zeus £16.99 ISBN 9781781855133

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)

MEGAN ABBOTT'S END OF EVERYTHING

It might become a challenge to discuss Megan Abbott's books without reference to the words 'fever' or 'dream'. Her first four novels approached the world of noir from the inside, or perhaps, in a genre where the protagonists are usually men, often superficially attractive (qualities we're supposed to judge in women) but possessed of one-track minds and/or half track brains, we might better say from the other side. This reclaiming of the world of noir has been, for me, the most interesting and original work done in the crime field in this new millennium.

Although her fifth novel, 2011's, The End Of Everything, is, on the face of it, a novel about adolescence, whose 'crime' sits mostly offstage while Abbott provides a stunning take on the power of sexuality, and the even greater power of repression. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense, because that is at heart what noir is all about at heart—the feeling a child has, of being caught in the grip of a force he or she cannot control, a primal urge beyond understanding or coping-- isn't that exactly what noir protagonists wind up feeling? That they are adults merely intensifies the predicament, intensifies the temperature of the fever dream in which it takes place.It's why the best noir is filmed in shadow, in fog, in haze, in darkness, where no one can see what is coming.

Lizzie and Evie are best friends, with Evie's older sister Dusty their glamorous role model, and Evie's father, Mr. Verver, as the perfect dad, at least in the mind of Lizzie, who's being raised by her single mother, who herself has just begun an affair. Then, Evie disappears, and it soon appears she has been kidnapped by the Verver's insurance agent, Mr. Shaw. But nothing, it seems, is the way it seems.

Although the setting appears to be the 1980s, but the story has the feel of the 1950s—so much so that it reminded me of Thomas H. Cook at his best, the same sort of emotional undercurrent which reveals itself in its own repression, that same sort of quiet build-up which goes beyond noir, but still stirs the perfect surface in search of the imperfections underneath. Abbott, through Lizzie's teenaged eyes, builds an undercurrent of sexual malice which permeates virtually every scene, boiling just beneath the surface. And Lizzie's perceptions are modern, the only really modern thing in the story—she is the author's stand-in, seeing a Fifties noirish reality beneath that 80s world. The reader feels like a youngster who's stumbled across their parents' cache of steam-covered 50s paperbacks. So Mr. Verver, the seemingly perfect father, more and more takes on the appearance of a predator, an abuser, not so different perhaps from Mr. Shaw.

Except that Mr. Shaw is also not quite what he appears to be, and Evie's kidnapping is not quite that either. Without wanting to spoil the story, Abbott has also written a look back at Lolita, again, as I suggested at the start, told from the other side. After all, what is Nabokov's novel, if not a look at 1950s masculinity, and its fatal attraction to the unspoiled, perfect, uncomplaining, unthreatening femininity of the 50s teen, just starting to be sexualised in the post-war modern world.

It's a brilliant book, whose tone never falters, whose tension is wrenched tighter and tighter with each page, and whose vision is resolutely noirish. Megan Abbott's fiction remains fascinating in its obsessions, and in The End Of Everything, she takes them out of their classic setting, and proves she can make them work on a wider, more surprising canvas.

The End Of Everything by Megan Abbott
Picador, £7.99, ISBN 9780330518314

THOMAS COOK'S LAST TALK WITH LOLA FAYE

Lucas Paige is an historian, teaching and writing books that fall far short of the dreams he once had. His wife has left him, and he is in St. Louis, giving a reading of his latest disappointing book to a disappointing crowd of mostly disappointed people. Apart from one of them. Because after the talk, Lola Faye Gilroy introduces herself. The Lola Faye who worked for his father, at his father's unsuccessful little variety store, and whose husband shot his father for stealing her affections away. Luke's life was ruined in that moment, and he has always blamed Lola Faye. And she insists on talking with Luke.

Thomas Cook's novel recounts that conversation, and the flashbacks it triggers for Luke, his memories, believes, all the shadows and frustrations of his life now and their deep roots in his life then. Luke was the smartest boy in Glenville, Alabama, something everyone knew, something his mother cherished and his father frustrated. Glenville was not part of the genteel South, its decay and lack of amenities is something we've seen before in Cook's 'southern' books. I've written before about how his novels seem to divide into southern and northern, and it isn't just the setting. In this case, the work of Edgar Allen Poe resonates through the conversation engaged in by Luke and Lola Faye; Cook builds it slowly, with hints of mysteries unresolved, revenges untaken, lives needing to be accounted for. I kept hearing 'The Cask of Amontillado' in their conversation, and in those moments Luke snaps back from his memories Lola Faye seems very threatening indeed, in that classic Southern gothic way.

Luke's intelligence did not make him a pleasant child. We see him taking cruel advantage of his girlfriend, we feel his sullen resentment of his father, we sense the depth of devotion from his mother. When this fragile system is disturbed, the results might well be incalculable. It's not the run of the mill problem of the bright, arty boy in the physical Southern world, and in this sense it's not a Southern gothic at all. It's more the sense described by the recently-deceased Alice Miller, who wrote The Drama Of The Gifted Child, how the child's talents, and the parent's encouragement of them, along with their expectations, seem to drive the child away from them and into himself. This is the internal world Cook describes, and in its subtle accuracy it is often more chilling, and always more heart-wrenching, than the remarkable suspense he creates from one conversation. As Lola Faye's second husband, a retired detective, told her, 'Things aren't pretty in the human heart'.

The resolution, to which he has built so slowly and carefully, is one of the most surprising in all of Cook's work; it is not a 'typical' Cook ending, and that, for fear of spoiling is all I will say. One of Luke's books was titled 'The Touch Of Time: How History Is Felt', and that might have served as a good title for this book too. For history is the study of ghosts, and this is a novel about the ways those ghosts haunt is. But in the end I went back to the book's epigraph, which Cook takes from Marianne Moore, that least Southern gothic of poets. 'When what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived'. No, it's not a Southern revivial. But it's a brilliant piece of moody suspense writing, and it's a moving novel.

The Last Talk With Lola Faye
Quercus £20
ISBN 9781849162012

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

MY CHARACTERS ARE FIGHTING INEVITABILITY: An Interview With Thomas H Cook, 'the last of the midlist writers'

Thomas H Cook is a crime writer's crime writer, someone who in the course of 24 novels and a couple of true crime books has visited most of the staples of the genre, but whose reputation, and high-standing among fellow-writers and critics, has been built by a series of unclassifiable suspense novels, written in a superbly gentle prose style, which share a careful, cumulatively-building construction, and a concern with examining the various nuances of loss, and the persistent impact of the past on the present.

Appropriately, then, I met Cook in the old-fashioned bar of an old-fashioned London hotel, where his distinguished white beard contrasted sharply with the black T-shirt acquired at a French crime festival just a few days before. Although he's lived most of his adult life in America's north, New York City and Cape Cod, his speech is still coloured by the graceful tones of the American south, where he grew up, and I half expected to hear him ask the barman for a mint julep. Cook speaks authoritatively and with much enjoyment about his writing; with the beard and accent he reminded me slightly of Shelby Foote, the historian who became the star of Ken Burns' television documentary on the American Civil War, though he lacked Foote's avuncular self-amusing glee. Cook was in London to promote his 24th novel, The Fate Of Katherine Carr, which marks a slight departure for him, in that it suggests elements of the supernatural. When I ask if this were a deliberate decision, he says, 'no, it was simply the story that came to me. In the autumn of my years I've made it a personal campaign to expand crime fiction. I say it can do whatever it wants to do.

'I never really know what my books are going to be about. It would probably be easier to go with a sure-fire formula, but I just can't work that way. But it makes the book harder to market: I may be the last of the 'mid-list' writers—and it's a tougher commercial road because we're not talking fame, which a series can generate. In the old days a writer could survive on the midlist, look at Fitzgerald, while the publisher waited for a best-seller. I'm basically just sustained in America, though I'm tremendously up in France, and Japan, and in Britain now.'

Katherine Carr tells the story of George Gates, formerly a globe-trotting travel writer, who's content to be a jobbing feature-writer on a small-town newspaper after losing his son, who was kidnapped and murdered while he waited for his father to pick him up after school on an especially rainy day. Gates had been caught up in the writer's trade, chasing the end of a sentence, and forgot his promise to the boy. Now he is haunted by his loss. He is jolted out of his zombie-like existence by a retired cop's suggestion he investigate the unsolved disappearance, some twenty years earlier, of Carr, small-press poet and assault victim. The detective produces some of Carr's writings, including a story which seems to detail her own disappearance, and in the course of his work, Gates begins sharing them with a young girl dying of a disease which is aging her far faster than nature intended. It's a multi-layered novel, with stories within stories, and very much about the story-telling process; Gates is actually narrating the whole tale to someone else.

'It was difficult, trying to capture the voice of a New England travel writer,' Cook says, 'but I find I'm paring my writing down as I get older, and I think that helped.' As it happens, Cook is now working on a travel book himself, much like Gates' own, gathering the 'saddest places in the world', including Saipan, whose story Gates mentions, when American soldiers offshore watched as Japanese threw themselves and their children off cliffs, plunging to their deaths rather than enduring the atrocities they were convinced the invaders would visit upon them. For someone named Thomas Cook to essay a travel book takes a certain amount of courage, an idea which draws laughter, and another round of gin and tonics, from Cook.

The sense of stories within stories echoes another of Cook's trademarks, the slow development of his plots. I likened it to watching a black and white photograph develop, and mention that a number of his books actually feature characters who are photographers themselves. 'A photo can be contradictory,' Cook says. 'It shows you a moment, but that moment may be false; in my novel Red Leaves he says it's like Seurat's painting, pixellated, you have to step far enough away to see the image, and that is exactly what time does; forces you to step away to see the image clearly.'

Katherine Carr is set in the countryside north of New York, and I suggest to Cook that much of his work might be divided into books set in the North, where characters are often alone, and the South, where they seem more a part of the landscape. The novel which preceded Katharine Carr, 2008's Master Of The Delta, is set in the south, and Cook says 'Well, having grown up in the South, I feel the density of community there, the sense that the family unit actually expands.' I likened it to the difference between Nathaniel Hawthorne versus William Faulkner. 'There is that Faulknerian sense of growing up part of a defeated people; when I was twelve worked in a dairy store, and at the end of each day I'd go to the post office, and when I looked at the flag hanging in front I'd think, “that's not exactly MY flag, it's the flag of my occupiers. So I think southerners are closer to Europeans in the way they sense history can sweep over you.' So does he feel an outsider in the North? 'Not at all. I moved to New York in 1969, which was not necessarily the best time to be a white southerner, but I never felt an iota of hostility. It's the most American of cities; it loves you if you work hard, and even more if you succeed.' And what about when he returns to his native south? 'Well, most of my beliefs don't fit in too well with my relatives, who are mostly more conservative, but the core things, like loyalty and honesty, they remain, and they are family, and would do anything for their families.'

Cook never intended to go into crime writing. 'I think it was because I didn't know what a so-called “crime novel” was. When I started, I had read Poe, but not Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.' He laughs, saying 'Crime And Punishment was probably the first crime novel I read'. But his first effort, Blood Innocents (1980) was nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel, and was about cops. Cook explains, 'my first job in New York was on the suicide shift in a motel in Brooklyn, and one night I had to call the police and force open the door to a room where I thought a woman had overdosed—we went in and she's face down on the floor, and there was a two-year old baby in a cot. They revived her, but one of the cops grabbed the baby and as he started out the door he said to me “this is what it's all about”. That went through me like a spear, and that's what I wanted to convey, to write a novel about a person who has a difficult job to do but who manages to maintain his humanity despite that.'

Three more novels followed, including Elena (1986) which he describes as 'a full-scale literary novel', whose narrator is someone who's 'never been able to write'. I mention that his characters are often aspiring writers, or secret writers, and Cook says, 'yes, they're often overwhelmed with feeling, but have no way to express it. It is extreme frustration, like being able to feel every sentiment of music, but not be able to play at all.'

Then Cook tried to develop a series character, in the late eighties writing three novels about the New York detective Frank Clemons; books that grew more depressive as the series continued. 'After the third one, I said to my wife “if I ever write a book worse than this I will stop”. All the joy, the spontaneity of art had gone out of it. It was like doing something by rote, and I said that's not what I want to do. My guy had crossed-over into self-pity, which may have reflected my getting tired of him. A lot of serial writers have that energy, and can keep putting it into their books, but I just couldn't'.

Alongside his next novels, a couple of which (The City When It Rains and Breakheart Hill) featured photographers, Cook also wrote two true-crime books. 'The most difficult thing is to control the pacing, which is harder than in a novel, because you have to include the components, the crime, the investigating, and the bringing to justice—sort of like the Law & Order television show-- but you can't just go chronologically as they don't always have equal weight at any given time. But I was interested because they are stories of people in crisis, and we seem obsessed today with putting these people before the cameras, which shows only the surface.'

Cook's 1996 novel The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar Award for best novel of the year, which should have made his career. 'I suppose it was because readers didn't know quite what to expect next, or from my earlier books,' Cook says. Which is a shame, because although it's a fine book, he's bettered it at least twice, with Places In The Dark (2000) and Red Leaves (2005). Like Chatham School, both are set in the north, and again, I mention Hawthorne. This time Cook responds. 'Places In The Dark is actually very much like Hawthorne, though the Hawthorne of his short stories, very much more focused. I like a novel to work like a short story.' Red Leaves, currently being developed as a screenplay by Alan Parker's son Nathan, who scripted the recent Moon, is a shattering tale which, like Katharine Carr, builds from the parent-child relationship. I wonder if Red Leaves may have been popular in France for the some of the same reasons the French loved Harlan Coben's Tell No One; that it suggests great darkness behind the idyllic image of small-town (or suburban) America. 'Yes, in that sense that our towns are supposed to supply our imaginations with perfection. My characters are fighting inevitability, the sense that life is not designed to live up to our imaginations. Instead, it's incredibly cruel. Thomas Hardy once said that if God existed he should be executed, that's it's cruel when a creature reaches the level of consciousness to ask questions that he can't answer'. Which seemed, after asking that many questions myself, a good point to end the interview.

NOTE: This interview will also appear at www.crimetime.co.uk

THOMAS H COOK'S STREETS OF FIRE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Streets Of Fire was published in 1989, in the middle of Thomas Cook’s series of police procedurals featuring the ever-more-depressive Frank Clemons, and it shares some of that tone. But it’s a very different sort of novel, because rather than being set in the New York of the present, it’s set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, as the civil rights movement is gathering momentum and the streets of that city seethe with frustration and fear. When the body of a young black girl is dug up in a park in the Negro section of town, no one is too concerned, except for detective Ben Wellman--a loner on the force and soon to be even more alone as he works a case no one wants him to work.

Cook himself is dismissive of the book today (‘what do you want to look at that old thing for?’ he said) but it is interesting to look at it in light of where he’s gone since. Its weak point is the police procedural plot, which becomes far too involved and mechanical in its resolution. You can almost feel the same sort of frustration Cook says he felt with the Clemons books; at one point he felt he couldn’t 'write any worse' than he was doing in that series.

More interesting is the social setting of the civil rights movement itself, and the deeply engrained ethos of prejudice which determines life in Birmingham. It’s interesting because Cook is a transplanted southerner, and the easy thing to say is that he is writing from a ‘northern’ standpoint. But that wouldn’t be true, because what he is working at is a sense in which the oppressed and the oppressor collude, in some ways, in maintaining their status; it is that unpleasant reality against which Wellman winds up butting his head more than once. He is also particularly sensitive to the way in which Wellman’s own attitudes to the racial issue are opened up, and changed: subtly, gradually, somewhat reluctantly, as he investigates.

Cook’s later novels can be divided into those set in the north and those set in the south, but this one seems to come before the tones of those two kinds of books began to pull apart. If anything, the actual social conflict is used as background, visible more for the internal pressures it places on the police department, and on Wellman, than as an event in itself. At times it has the feel of fantasy, as if no one really believes their world will be changed by this protest. It’s not piece of reportage about the civil rights movement; in fact its best line may be when one cop complains about the tripartite menaces of ‘communists, socialists, and journalists’. But it is very good at evoking the internal pressure of justice, the increasing force of an idea whose time has come on those who realise that is the case.

But the real focus of the book is Wellman, and more than being a depressive cop in the Frank Clemons mode, he is also the prototype for any number of Cook’s lonely heroes. They are usually men who, for whatever reason, exist detached from the world. Cook at one point describes Wellman as he ‘curls into his aloneness like a bed‘, and when he says ‘But Ben had kept his distance in this, as in almost everything else,’ he conveys the sense that Wellman may indeed be a misnomer. What the book does is hold out hope for Ben’s wellness through his engagement with the changing world, and that, to me is interesting because it is precisely in engagement that Cook usually offers his characters redemption, or meaning, or whatever it is they are seeking. Streets Of Fire may not be one of Cooks’s best novels, and it lacks the slow-burning layering of his best writing, but it is a book that grips the reader, a good attempt at putting an early version of the classic Cook hero into a historically familiar situation, and if it is less than a total success it is a very interesting one, whether or not you’ve immersed yourself in his later oeuvre.

THOMAS H COOK'S THE FATE OF KATHERINE CARR

Thomas Cook's characters are often haunted, but usually they are forced to face, and sometimes resolve, the past without recourse to the supernatural. However, when supernatural elements begin to intrude in his latest novel, The Fate Of Katherine Carr, it seems as normal as anything else in the day-to-day life of George Gates.

Gates (and yes, the name carries connotations) was a travel writer, an adventurer who sought out the unusual places on his journeys. Unusual, and, in a sense haunted; early in his story he tells about the cliffs of Saipan, off which Japanese threw their children and leapt to their deaths rather than face the atrocities they expected from the invading Americans. Gage is haunted too, by the memory of his son, kidnapped as he waited for his father to pick him up on a rainy afternoon, and murdered by his kidnapper, who'd never been found. Haunted by the knowledge he had forgotten promising Teddy a ride if it rained, forgotten because he was wrapped in trying to find the right words to finish a line in his book.

Now Gates writes for the local paper in Winthrop, which appears to be in upstate New York, or maybe western Connecticut, up past the end of route 34, and his traveling is limited to his now empty (haunted?) house, the newspaper, and O'Shea's Tavern. There, one night, he meets Arlo McBride, retired state police missing persons investigator, and becomes interested in Katharine Carr, amateur poet, novice writer, who became a recluse after a vicious attack on her doorstep, and who later disappeared without a trace. That was twenty years ago. Soon Gates is reading Carr's poems, and a story she wrote about a woman who disappears, taken away by a strange person named Maldrow (and yes the name suggests connotations), and his Chief, whose purposes might be evil, or might not.

It's been noted that Cook's stories unfold gradually, and the process has been compared to peeling the layers of an onion. His characters are often writers, people looking for the write word, the right way to express their feelings. In this novel, the layers of the onion are obvious, but so skillfully drawn that they become forgotten: Gates is telling the entire story to a Mr. Mayawati; apparently while traveling again in exotic places. Within the story, Gates has started writing an article about a young girl, Alice, dying of a disease which is aging her prematurely. Gates winds up reading Katherine's story to Alice (and yes, the name suggests connotations), stories within stories within stories, and those tales start to melt together, until the boundaries between what has happened and what hasn't, between this world and the next, seem to disappear.

What makes it work, makes it compelling, is Cook's prose. Although there are moments when he seems to be echoing Poe's 'Cask Of Amontillado', and where the rhythms take on the a slightly more ornate, Lovecraftian feel, the reality is that the style is measured but straightforward, much of it, despite the rhythms of the gothic tale, told in simple language that suggests this form of travel is no stranger than any other. You might compare it to John Connolly, who early on borrowed the tropes of horror writing to remake his detective novels, but Cook is doing something different, merely extending slightly the reach of his usual concerns. The supernatural is a world of memory, of the dead and the past, and that has always been the territory Cook's novels have explored. Katherine Carr is not a ghost story, but it is. Maldrow and the Chief are not real, but they are. In these ambiguities, Cook has created another small gem of a novel. He deserves a wider audience, but perhaps his work his too idiosyncratic, his books, while recognizably Cook's, too different from each other. Or perhaps the audience isn't as comfortable with being totally captured by ambiguity as they ought to be.

The Fate Of Katherine Carr, by Thomas H Cook
Quercus, £17.99, ISBN 978184728404

this review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk

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?

SOUTHERN MASTER: THOMAS H COOK'S MASTER OF THE DELTA

Master Of The Delta
Thomas H Cook
Quercus £16.99 ISBN 9781847242112

There is a temptation to divide Thomas Cook’s novels into ‘northerns’ and ‘southerns‘, with those set in what seem to be small New England towns featuring more direct action, more contemporary dilemmas, and a more straight-forward writing styles. The ones set in the south tend to move more slowly, often digging deeper into the past, and seem imbued with a kind of Faulknerian feeling, where it always a bright July morning just before Pickett's Charge is about to begin.

MASTER OF THE DELTA is very much in the southern category. Set in 1954, before the violent upheavals of the civil rights movement, the story is told by Jack March, a teacher in a Mississippi high school. But in a society still organised along the racial and class divides of the ante-bellum South, he comes from one of the town’s first families, and teaching is for him a ‘vocation’ not an ‘occupation’. Still, he tries to involve his students, although sometimes in the manner of a scientist looking for movement from bacteria in a petrie dish. He assigns his class an essay on evil people, and one withdrawn student, Eddie Miller, decides to write about his father, ‘The Coed Killer’, who murdered and dismembered a girl when Eddie was just five years old.

Eddie blossoms under the assignment, but his investigation begins to trouble many people, including the police chief, the school principal, and some of his fellow students. It also attracts the attention of Jack’s father, who once taught Eddie’s father himself, but now lives in quiet seclusion, working on his ‘Book Of Days’, which Jack assumes is a diary, and which will never be finished. Meanwhile, Jack has fallen in love with another teacher, a girl from ‘across the tracks’, and Eddie appears to be forming a relationship with the girlfriend of the school’s star jock and bully.

The reader knows, because Jack is telling the story long after the events took place, that there is tragedy behind it. And the suspense comes from the parallel stories about to be revealed: Eddie’s look at the truth about the Coed killing, and Jack’s telling of the effects Eddie’s quest produced. But the story is also about distances: of fathers from their sons, of intellectual snobbery from the cause and effect of real life, of the past from the present. These are barriers which are always in flux, and sometimes not really there at all; as for Faulkner, for Cook the past is always with us.

Perhaps because I’m a Yankee, my favourite Cook novels have been ‘northerns‘ (THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR, PLACES IN THE DARK, RED LEAVES), but in this atmospheric ‘southern’ Cook shows how he can wring suspense from the most simple aspects of the quotidian; it’s not the crimes themselves, but way life in Mississippi goes on, the way the people react, absorb, ignore, and live with those crimes that makes MASTER OF THE DELTA so powerful.

JOHN HART'S DOWN RIVER: Edgar meets Richard & Judy

John Murray £7.99 ISBN 9781848540958

Down River appears in paperback in this country following its capture of the Edgar Award for best novel from America’s Crime Writers, and more importantly from a British point of view, its selection as a 'summer read' by the Richard and Judy Book Club. Its covers compare John Hart to Grisham and Turow (presented as single-word brand names, like Oprah, Madonna, or Cher), but the unacknowledged master to whom he aspires in this novel seems to me to be Thomas H Cook, a more challenging writer than either of those best-sellers. That Hart gets at least part of the way there is no small compliment.

Although the R&JBC was born in copycat hommage to America’s Oprah, you can make a case that, although Oprah may have engaged with some more challenging literature, her bias toward ‘worthiness’, a traditional American approach to self-improvement that goes all the way back to the Puritans, shortchanges some fiction, including so-called ‘genre’ fiction, and may make her list less interesting overall. Two years ago Richard and Judy (or their producer Deborah Ross) were perceptive enough to pick Michael Connelly, whose work no one would suggest provides Oprah’s necessary moral uplift, and they may have made an equally astute call with Hart.

Down River begins with Adam Chase returning to his North Carolina home, five years after he was acquitted of a murder there. Three weeks earlier, his best friend had asked for unspecified help, but it had taken him that long to decide to leave his protective anonymity in New York. When he arrives home, he finds his friend has taken off, and soon people start dying. To Chase, who witnessed his own mother’s suicide, this is not unusual; he’s a sensitive brawler, a tough but tender hero who has a strong determination to get to the bottom of things.

The set-up is pure Cook, small-town America and dark secrets from the past which will be revealed in the chaos of the present. There has always been a somewhat gothic element to Cook, and what makes this story so interesting is the strong Southern flavor of the gothic. Deeply buried family secrets, hot and humid repression, and heavy undertones of violence; as if Cook were being merged with Erskine Caldwell.

Adam’s stepmother had been the main witness at his trial, identifying him as the killer. His step-brother is now running the family business, his step-sister was a friend of the boy Chase was accused of killing. His father’s best friend has a daughter, Grace, whom Adam thought of as a younger sister, and just to make things interesting, half the town wants to sell their river land to a corporation to build a nuclear power station, but Chase’s father, the area’s biggest landowner, will not. After all, the land has been in the family for two hundred years.

You can see where the story might be going, and for the most part it does go in that direction, although Adam’s old girlfriend also just happens to be a detective on the local police force. There aren’t that many twists, some things are pretty obvious to the reader long before they are to Adam, but in the end Hart handles the suspense very well. The core of the book, however, is the dealing with the deep waters of the river of family relations. The book ends on a note of slight ambiguity, just enough to lead me to consider that two of its characters would be a perfect pair to start a detective agency, and the backwoods of North Carolina, even though they might be starting vineyards these days, might offer enough outré crime to be worthwhile hunting grounds. Just a thought. Is this the crime novel most worthy of R&J? Maybe not. But is it a fine crime novel? Yes it is.