Rob Kitchin's Blog, page 192

Soon to be relaxing at the Diggers Rest Hotel

Having vented my frustration at some of the vagaries of Australian publishing, I now have a more positive note.  A friend has managed to purchase a copy of The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin (quite possibly the last for sale in Oz), had it shipped to her and has tucked it into her suitcase for me, along with Sulari Gentill's A Decline in Prophets, for the long flight back to Ireland.  I hope to be checking into said hotel some time in the new year and hopefully it will have been worth the journey.

Review of The Information by James Gleick (Fourth Estate, 2011)

The Information is billed as the ‘story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know’, discussing a series of information revolutions: ‘the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, and the cracking of the genetic code.’  At best it only does a fraction of this and from a very particular perspective.  The book is principally a treatise on information theory within mathematics and physics and how information is encoded and communicated in a technical and theoretical sense.  It is especially concerned with the reduction of information to constituents parts, how this is encoded and transmitted, and the notion that information is the constituent component of life and the universe.  This is a view of information shorn of meaning and context.  Consequently the reader does not get the full story of information revolutions with respect to the written word, and the visual (art, maps, photography, television, film) and aural (voice, music) is all but absent.  Oddly, there is no discussion of broadcast media such as radio and television, though there is a fair amount of discussion dedicated to the telegraph and internet.  There is no discussion of discourse or how information is used.  The book then is filled with absences.  What is included, however, is often fascinating and intriguing, although my feeling is that the level is often not for the average lay reader - it is quite advanced and requires a fair degree of pre-requisite knowledge.  In this sense, it’s sold as a popular science book, but given its technical nature and length I suspect it has far more sales than readers who manage to get from start to end.  Overall, an interesting book but doesn’t quite live up to its billing.

Bosch, Rebus and Maxine

It was interesting to read Michael Connelly’s The Black Box and Ian Rankin’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave back to back.  There’s a lot of similarities between the two series.  Both follow the exploits of maverick cops who have analogous characteristics and histories.  Harry Bosch and John Rebus both started out in the army before becoming cops.  Both are laws unto themselves who have their own approaches that bend rules and set them in conflict with their bosses, and both are no strangers to be investigated by internal watchdogs.  They survive because they solve difficult puzzles and get results, and they have been protected by senior cops who have watched their backs.  Their careers trajectories are also similar, with both cops having retired as detectives to be taken back on in cold case units.  In both cases their personal lives are a bit of a mess, each has a daughter with whom they have a difficult relationship, and they are obsessive about music.  Both detectives have featured in eighteen novels, and both authors are published by Orion.  I’ve read 15 of the Bosch books and all of Rebus. 

So what are the differences?  For me, the main differences are that Bosch acts more in a solo capacity, whereas Rebus is anarchic but tries harder to bring his colleagues along with him; the Bosch novels tend more towards thriller-like finales, whereas Rebus cases tend to play out in more understated but equally dramatic ways; and Rankin tends to have more layered and complex stories with nuanced subplots and stronger secondary characters (especially in the latter books in both series).  That said, both are exceptionally strong series, with main characters that have built up loyal followings for good reasons - compelling lead characters, strong sense of place, good contextualisation, and strong plotting.

I’m sure that this would have been a post that Maxine Clarke, an avid crime fiction fan, reviewer of books on her blog Petrona, and curator of the Crime and Mystery Friendfeed, would have commented on.  Connelly and Rankin rated amongst her favourite authors and she always had a perceptive observation to offer.  Sadly, Maxine passed away on Monday morning after a long illness.  She was a great friend of this blog, especially when I first started out, inviting me into the Friendfeed community and introducing me to other crime fiction bloggers.  She will be sadly missed by authors and readers for her constructive critical appraisal and by the community of crime fiction bloggers for whom she was a key catalyst and energetic friend.  A measure of the esteem in which she is held is the number of tributes that have been written in her honour over the past couple of days - links to them all are listed on Margot Kinberg's blog.  I hope she’s comfortably settled in the ‘big library in the sky’.

Review of Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin (Orion, 2012)

After being forced to retire from CID, John Rebus has ended up as a civilian working in a cold case unit.  He’s frustrated to be away from the energy of live cases, but it’s better than no job at all.  When a woman approaches the unit claiming a link between a number of missing person cases, including the recent death of a teenage girl, Rebus manages to inveigle his way onto the fringes of the main case via his ex-colleague DI Siobhan Clarke.  Rebus has lost none of his old, anachronistic ways, seeing potential leads that others miss, prodding and probing potential witnesses, and kicking up the sand at the bottom of the pool to see what rises, rather than relying on formal procedure, forensics and files.  Beyond Clarke, nobody seems happy with his presence or methods, but he produces leads.  The question is whether he can hang on in until the case is solved or survive the attention of ‘the complaint’s unit’.  Given his track record, neither look likely, especially given his weekly drinking sessions with his nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty.

Having retired his famous detective a couple of books ago, Ian Rankin places him front and centre in Standing in Another Man’s Grave.  It’s a very welcome return in a thoroughly entertaining story.  Rankin always scores well on several fronts - characterisation, sense of place, contextualisation, plotting - and it’s no different with this tale, which is layered and complex.  Although the main focus is Rebus and the main case under investigation, Rankin does not neglect the host of secondary characters and their interrelations, and he interlinks several subplots that give the story a rich texture.  For the most part the plotting is excellent, though it unravels a little in the final scenes, the resolution somewhat weak and a little unconvincing.  Nevertheless, Rankin shows his skills at producing a multi-textual, engaging police procedural that hooks the reader in and tugs them along on a compelling jaunt.  Despite eighteen outings, there’s still plenty of life in the old detective and hopefully there’s more to come.

Review of The Black Box by Michael Connelly (Orion, 2012)

Harry Bosch is a detective with the open-unsolved unit of the LAPD.  Twenty years earlier he’d been a homicide detective investigating suspicious deaths as the 1992 LA riots unfolded.  One such case was the murder of a Danish photojournalist who’d been on vacation in the US and who'd decided to combine business with pleasure; for her trouble she’d been lured into an alley and shot.  When the riots were concluded the case was given to a different division and Bosch lost sight of it.  As the anniversary of the riots approaches the LAPD has decided to take a fresh look at its unsolved murders and Bosch gets another chance to solve the case.  Running the one solid clue he has - a shell casing - through ballistics reveals that the gun used to fire the fatal bullet has subsequently been used in three other murders.  That’s not quite enough to open up the black box to reveal the killer, but it provides an initial trail.  A trail that his bosses don’t seem keen for him to follow. 

As police procedurals go, The Black Box was pretty average (especially compared to some of Connelly’s earlier books in the series).  The focus of the plot is interesting, but it felt a little too linear and straightforward, lacking in subplot (beyond his usual run in with his bosses and internal affairs), layers and twists or turns - Harry unearths all the clues, but doesn’t seem to have to work that hard to locate them.  The ending in particular felt shallow, rushed and lacked credibility in parts, using weak plot devices to create a bloody climax. After 18 outings (I've read 15 of them), Harry seemed somewhat tired and drawn, a shadow of his former self trapped in a cycle of endlessly reliving his modus operandi as a solo, maverick cop who bends rules and annoys his superiors whilst unpicking puzzles lesser men would fail to solve.  For the series to have new life my feeling is the stories are going to need to become more complex, layered and believable, and some of the secondary characters are going to have to come to the fore and there be sustained interaction.  I’m sure there are plenty of Connelly fans out there who will disagree, but whilst The Black Box was entertaining enough way to spend a few hours, Connelly is capable of spinning more gripping and engrossing tales (as evidenced by his back catalogue).

Lazy Sunday Service

I picked up three new novels in the local bookshop yesterday - The Nameless Dead by Brian McGilloway; In Search of Klingsor by Jorge Volpi; and The City of Shadows by Michael Russell.  With a selection of others from the TBR pile I think that's me sorted now for the seasonal break.  I'm looking forward to tucking in to one of them once I've finished Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin.

My posts this week
Reading shelf
Review of Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith
100 up
Northern Ireland census data visualization
Run out of steam
Why have you applied for this job?

Why have you applied for this job?

‘It’s not that I hate my job.  I mean, I’m not going to lie, it’s a dead end, the people are ... well, they’re interesting, the commute is a nightmare, and the work is ... work.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy. Well, happy-ish.  It’s my boss; we don’t see eye-to-eye.  Given he’s two feet shorter than anyone else he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with anyone!  Sorry, bad joke.  He does think he’s Napoleon though.  What was the question again?  Oh, yes, why have I applied for this job?  Well, I ... I’m not going to get this job, am I?’



A drabble is a story of exactly one hundred words.

Run out of steam

I think I have officially run out of steam for 2012.  All year I’ve been running two research institutes and the experience has worn thin.  You know when you’ve been carrying an excessive load when it’s announced that you will be relinquishing your present roles and your employer starts to look for three new people to take up the duties.  In this case, three full professors.  Anyway, that’s my excuse for not yet writing up my review of The Black Box by Michael Connelly.  Maybe I’ll get to it over the weekend.  Or perhaps I’ll start marking the essays from two of the modules I taught this semester.  At some point next week I’ll post the review.  It would be nice to post it from California as a bit of winter sun would go down a treat right now.  Oh well, at least I’ll be in LA in April; I might try and check out some Bosch haunts on the trip.

100 up

Yesterday's review of Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead was my 100th review of 2012. The plan was to read less and write more this year. So much for plans.  Maybe next year I'll stick to the plan.  Or perhaps not.  Full list of reviews is here. 

Review of Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith (Serpent’s Tail, 2010)

Billy Afrika is an ex-cop turned security mercenary.  After the charge he was guarding in Iraq is killed he heads back to South Africa, looking for the pay he’s owed.  American ex-model Roxy Palmer has washed up in Cape Town, married to Joe, a gunrunner and owner of the security firm for whom Billy works.  After dining out with a despot keen to secure a new wave of arms for an obscure African war Roxy and Joe are carjacked at the gates to their house by two lowlifes from the Cape Flats, the sprawling ghetto outside the city.  Joe is shot and left for dead, the thieves speeding away with an attaché case full of cash.  Caught in the heat of the moment, Roxy makes a decision that ties her fate to her attackers and to Billy Afrika.  It’s a decision that plunges them both into the gangland underworld of the Flats, a place no-one wants to be.

If you’re heading on holiday to South Africa do not pack this book; indeed, the South African Tourist Board probably has a contract out on Smith’s head.  It’s difficult to think of a crime that it is not committed in Wake Up Dead - armed robbery, murder, theft, blackmail, rape, fraud, bribery, assault, kidnapping, cannibalism, abandonment, carjacking, drug dealing, the harvesting of body parts; the list is endless.  And they happen multiple times.  In other words, Wake Up Dead is not for the faint hearted.  From its inception it’s a fast moving, violent tale, whose pace and body count rises as it progresses to its bloody conclusion.  Few of the characters have any redeemable qualities; one way or another they are all on the make, scrabbling and fighting to stay alive and out of each other’s clutches.  And yet it is oddly compelling, sucking the reader into a gritty, gripping story that is full of twists and sucker punches.  At times the violence seems a little gratuitous, but in the main illustrates the social realities of gang culture in the ghetto and prison, and the cheapness and tenuous nature of such lives.  Given the pace and intricacies of the interlocking subplots, the story could have easily slipped into a narrative mess, but Smith writes with an assured hand that keeps everything in motion but straightforward to follow.  I was hooked from the start, caught in the headlights as the carnage and life histories of its victims unfolded on the page.  The most visceral, action packed rollercoaster ride of a novel I’ve read this year.