Rob Kitchin's Blog, page 162

December reviews

Another interesting month of reading.  The two standout books were Michael Russell's The City of Strangers and Patti Abbott's Home Invasion, the first of which was my read of the month.  I'll post my best reads of the year tomorrow.


Frank Sinatra in a Blender by Matthew McBride ***
The Guts by Roddy Doyle ***.5
Home Invasion by Patti Abbott *****
Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton ****
The Dark Angel by Dominique Sylvain ***
Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland by Brendan McGrath ***.5
A Loyal Character Dancer by Qui Xiaolong ***
Snuff by Terry Pratchett ****
The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang ***
The City of Strangers by Michael Russell *****

Review of Frank Sinatra in a Blender by Matthew McBride (New Pulp Press, 2012)

St Louis PI, Nick Valentine, is a former cop with an addiction problem to alcohol, prescription drugs, and whatever else he can get his hands on, who’s only real friend is his Yorkshire Terrier, Frank Sinatra.  When a credit union boss is found dead in suspicious circumstances his old police boss calls him to help with the investigation.  Not long after the credit union is robbed, but it doesn’t go to plan when one of the thieves is shot in the back and a car driver is murdered.  Valentine knows the perfect place to find the word on the street - a strip-joint, Cowboy Roy’s Fantasyland.  Soon, along with a pair of strip-joint buddies, he’s on the trail of two local hoodlums, English Sid and Johnny No Nuts.  Valentine’s plan is to solve the crimes but to keep the money, but that may prove easy said than done given the rising body count.

In Frank Sinatra in a Blender, Matthew McBride takes a typical PI story and max everything up to eleven -- the hardboiled style, the excessive drug-taking, the violence and mayhem.  Nick Valentine used to be a decent cop, but is now a man living on the edge, bedding down in his office which he shares with Frank Sinatra, his Yorkshire Terrier, who can’t function without excessive quantities of alcohol or drugs, travels round with a small armoury, and is familiar with the underbelly of St Louis.  He doesn’t solve cases with subtlety or in ways that are always legal, and he’s quite happy to work with both cops and criminals.  He’s the kind of character that appeals to my baser tastes in crime fiction, and the caper plot and all show and no tell style of storytelling meant that Frank Sinatra in a Blender should have pushed all my buttons.  However, whilst the tale does have its merits as an escapist, excessive, fast-moving story, I never fully connected with either Valentine or the yarn.  In part, I think this is because the tale is told through the first-person voice of Valentine which curiously never modulates despite excessive drug-taking. Moreover, the prose is workmanlike, the characterization is largely skin deep, and the plot is premised on the criminals and cops being complete idiots and has a number of plot devices that felt a little too clunky.  Given the style and alcohol-fuelled state of the characters, the story is also thin on humour beyond parody, such as wisecracks and sarcasm.  The result is a fast paced, action-packed tale, but one that didn’t quite live up to its promise.  Nevertheless, it was for the most part an entertaining read. 

Lazy Sunday Service

A busy week of reviewing in amongst the festivities.  I have another one to go up tomorrow - Frank Sinatra in a Blender by Matthew McBride - which will probably be the last of the year.  I've made a start on Dead Lions by Mick Herron, but doubt I'll have it finished and reviewed by the end of Tuesday.  I'm still thinking about my top ten reads of the year, but will post on New Year's Day.

My posts this week
Review of The Dark Angel by Dominique Sylvain
Review of Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton
Happy Christmas
Review of Home Invasion by Patti Abbott
Review of The Guts by Roddy Doyle
Ready-made family
2013 travels

2013 travels

2013 passed in a bit of blur.  I think I did more travelling this year than ever before, mostly connected to work.  In total I gave 27 presentations outside of my own institution, mostly in Ireland, and visited Venice, Los Angeles, Tucson, Aberystwyth, Reykjavík, Durham, Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Brussels, New York, Boston, Lisbon, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and London (I visited way more places through fiction, though that'll be another post in the next few days).  They were all great trips, but I'd like to go back to Iceland and China for a bit more of an exploration.  My plan for 2014 is to try and spend a bit more time at home, though I've already agreed to travel to Stirling, Brussels, Oxford, Tampa, Paris, and Copenhagen in the first half of the year (though I've turned down trips to Lyon and Montreal). 

Ready-made family

‘Come-on sleepy head, time to get up.’

‘Wha-?’

‘Can you take Charlie to football practice?  I need to run the girls to hockey and ballet.’

‘Wha-?’

‘Come-on, Steve, it’s nearly nine o’clock.’

‘Nine o’clock?  For fuc ...’  Steve reluctantly opened his eyes.

A small boy wearing a Liverpool top was staring at him.

‘We’re going to be late,’ Charlie said.

‘We’re?’

‘If you’re going to be our new dad you better pull your socks up.’

‘Dad?’

‘Did you enjoy last night, Steve?’ Susie asked.

‘What?  Yeah.’

‘Then think of it as a ready-made family.’

‘Ready-made family?’ 

‘Come-on, they’ll be late!’





A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of The Guts by Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape, 2013)

Back in the 1980s Jimmy Rabbitte was a wannabe manager who put together The Commitments, a soul band of Dublin northsiders.  Now 47 he’s still working on the fringes of the music industry, specialising in hunting down Irish punk and prog rock bands from the 1970s and re-releasing their back catalogue and hosting gigs.  Married with four kids he’s barely scrapping by in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger bust and to top it off he’s been diagnosed with bowel cancer.  Struggling to cope with the anxiety of treatment and work, Jimmy is in a slump, but then he hits on a plan to revive his fortunes -- the Eucharistic Congress is going to return to Dublin in 2012 and they’ll release a CD of risqué Irish songs from 1932, the last time it had been held in Ireland.  All he needs to do is wade through old record collections to find a dozen suitable tracks.  On the journey he rediscovers Imelda Quirk, the gorgeous singer from The Commitments, Outspan, the rhythm guitarist who now has terminal lung cancer, and his brother Les, who left for England twenty years ago and hasn’t been heard of since, as well as forming new bonds with his family. 

It’s about twenty years since I read The Commitments, following Jimmy Rabbitte’s attempts to put together a soul band in North Dublin in the recession hit 1980s.  I remember it as a short, sharp book, full of wit and keen observation that rattled along at a fair clip.  The Guts picks up Jimmy’s story in 2012 as he battles bowel cancer and a mid-life/end-life crisis, trying to stay alive, keep his business afloat, and his family happy.  The book is full of humour and charm, some excellent passages of dialogue and nice observations about family, friends and Irish life, and the characterisation and social interactions are very well portrayed.  However, the book suffers from two issues, plot and pace.  After an excellent start, the pace slowed and the plot meandered, a bit like Jimmy as he tried to find focus and purpose.  Many of the passages were too long and did not move the story forward.  As a result the story felt aimless, indulgent and in need of a good edit (for example, removing a good chunk of redundant dialogue; to make it more like The Commitments in form).  What rescues the book is the latter third.  From the incident cleaning the brown bin onwards the book is simply brilliant.  The plot gains direction, the sections shorten, the pace picks up and the energy, pathos and humour are dialled to eleven.  I laughed out loud dozens of times, stopping to share lines with others.  It was simply an inspired piece of writing.  If the rest of the story had been as good as this it would have been a contender for my book of the year.  Unfortunately, the first two thirds are too uneven in pace and directionless in plot.  Nevertheless, a good read and a heartening rejoinder to the Barrytown trilogy (of which The Commitments was the first book).

Review of Home Invasion by Patti Abbott (Snubnose Press, 2013)

1961 and Billie and Kay are living in Philadelphia.  Kay has recently re-married and is obsessed with pleasing her new husband, her young teenage daughter unsure of her place in the relationship and world. A few years later and Billie has tracked down her real father to a born-again church in Detroit, but he’s a disappointment and the trip ends badly.  At seventeen she’s married to Dennis, a con-artist who’s always on the lookout for a quick buck.  By 1977, Billie and Dennis have two kids, Greg and Charlie, who when not fending for themselves are trying to marshal their drunken mother and scheming father as they move about trying to stay one step ahead of the police and their father’s cons.  Billie has maintained the family tradition of boozing and scraping by, the question is whether her sons will follow suit?

Patti Abbott has a well deserved reputation for writing thoughtful short stories about ordinary people who find themselves living on the edge or caught up in criminal activities.  Home Invasion is her first novel and parses out her skill as a short story writer into a longer narrative that follows the trials and tribulations of different generations of a dysfunctional family of grifters over nearly half a century.  Each chapter is set in a different year at a key inflection point in a family history that involves a whole tapestry of selfishness, misfortune, poor decisions and various crimes -- fraud, rape, cons, neglect, robbery, kidnap, murder -- and prison sentences.  These episodes are told through evocative prose and a narrative that perfectly captures the unfolding scenes, the tenuous web of social relations, complex swirl of emotions, and the foreboding that things will never quite work out as desired.  Although cast as a crime novel and published by a press specialising in noir and hardboiled stories, Home Invasion is more of a social commentary about a family struggling on the edge of the underclass, unable or unwilling to find upward mobility into respectability; a dark, unsettling, sympathetic and thoughtful tale that never quite extinguishes hope.  Whilst not the cheeriest of reads, I thought it was wonderful.

Happy Christmas

Wishing you and your family a happy Christmas.  We've already created a mess with wrapping paper.  Two of my presents were books: The Guts by Roddy Doyle and Dead Lions by Mick Herron.  They've both risen to the top of the pile.  Really looking forward to catching up with Jimmy Rabbitte twenty odd years after The Commitments.

Review of Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton (2013, Arrow Books)

Writer Dean Quinner has finally got his wish and The Tunnels, his first movie, has started to shoot in his home city of Liverpool, with Ben Noone, a charismatic Californian, in the lead role.  Working on the shoot is Terry Peters and his nephew, Nicky.  Not long after filming has started Nicky’s parents, suburban dentists, are murdered and the teenager has disappeared.  DCI Frank Keane of Merseyside’s Major Incident Team is assigned the case.  Newly promoted, recently separated and involved in a messy affair with a colleague, Keane is ready to stir things up, but his boss wants a softly, softly approach given the value of the movie industry to Liverpool, the celebrity status of one of the movie’s investors, and the interest of the media.  Still getting used to office politics in the upper echelons of the force and not known for his softly approach to cases, when another body linked to the film is discovered Keane continues to blunder on certain he has the perpetrator in his sights despite the lack of evidence and warnings to drop his line of enquiry.

Down Amongst the Dead Men is a book of two halves.  The first half is set in Liverpool and is a very good, straightforward police procedural.  Chatterton immerses the reader in the world of DCI Frank Keane, DS Em Harris and their colleagues and sets up an intriguing puzzle involving the death of two dentists and the disappearance of their son, who was working on a movie shoot.  The characterization and social interactions are nicely portrayed and the story is riveting and compelling with a nice blend of personal tribulations, police politics, and difficult investigation.  The second half shifts the action to Los Angeles and becomes much more thriller-like in its style, with Keane operating at the edge or outside of the procedures that gave him power but boxed him in in Liverpool.  The plot links Keane up with Menno Koopman, his former boss who also made an appearance in the first book, who has flown in from Australia to help with the investigation.  Whilst this part of the book is gripping, culminating in a tense finale, it is also less believable in substance given its political turn and presence of a shadowy organisation and I just didn’t buy the ending.  If Chatterton had found a way of wrapping up the story in Liverpool this would have been a five star read for me.  Nevertheless, it was engaging and entertaining read despite the shift in location and style and I’m very much looking forward to the next DCI Keane case. 

Review of The Dark Angel by Dominique Sylvain (2004 French, 2013 Maclehose Press)

After leaving school Khadidja and Chloe work in Maxime Duschamp’s cafe, sharing their Parisian apartment with blond haired Vanessa.  Returning home one afternoon, Khadidja and Chloe discover Vanessa’s body minus her feet and half a million euros in cash.  Commissaire Jean-Pascal Grousset is assigned to the case.  Labelled the ‘garden gnome’ by his colleagues, he is arrogant and useless.  He initially focuses his attention on the two flatmates, convinced they murdered their friend.  Unhappy with his boss’ approach, Lieutenant Jérôme Barthélemy calls on his recently retired commissaire, Lola Jost, who lives nearby for advice.  When the gnome shifts his focus to the womanising Maxime Duschamp, whose wife was murdered twelve years before and whose case was never solved, Lola joins forces with American wanderer and masseur, Ingrid Diesel to try and discover who really killed Vanessa.  

The Dark Angel was originally published in French with the title ‘Passage du Désir’ in 2004.  The story teams up the elderly, overweight, crotchety and brilliant former commissaire Lola Jost, with the tall, athletic, impulsive and forthright American, Ingrid Diesel, who try to solve a local murder given the ineptitude of the assigned commissaire.  Lola and Ingrid make for an interesting double act, but whereas Lola is well developed and engaging, Ingrid is less well flashed out, lacking in personality and depth -- a colourful back story and striking physique is not the same as ‘aliveness’.  The result is a somewhat lopsided relationship.  Similarly, the other characters are a little flat and one-dimensional, especially Maxime, who did not come across as an attractive lothario.  The story itself is enjoyable enough, with a few action sequences and twists and some nicely observed scenes, as long as one is happy to accept that it is simply a vehicle for introducing Lola and Ingrid given the procedural elements are weak, the police are fools, the pair make some silly decisions for dramatic effect, and the resolution is somewhat contrived.  Overall, a mildly amusing and dark tale of love, jealousy and rage.