Rob Kitchin's Blog, page 199

Review of The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman (Blasted Heath, 2011)

March 1st 1929 in Dusseldorf and working girl Emma Gross is murdered in a pay-by-the-hour hotel.  The murder and a handful of others are attributed by Inspector Michael Ritter to a young man with learning and behavioural difficulties, cast as copycat murders of a notorious killer, nicknamed ‘the ripper’, who’s at work in the area.  May 1930, the killings are continuing, a young girl has disappeared, and the infamous Inspector Gennat has been drafted in from Berlin Kripo to head up the investigation.  Detective Thomas Klein has been tipped off as the identity and location of the ripper by a young woman who escaped his clutches.  Ritter’s former partner, Klein has been banished to the suburbs for sleeping with Ritter’s wife, his reputation smeared with allegations of communist sympathies.  Seeking a lifeline back to headquarters, Klein tries to bring in the ripper by himself, but his plan is thwarted and he instead ends up in hot water.  Ritter wants him drummed out of the force, but the only person that the ripper, Peter Kurten, will talk to is Klein.  The more Klein interviews Kurten, the more convinced he is that the copycat murders were performed by him, with the exception of Emma Gross.  The young man might well have killed Gross, but in the other cases the prosecution was fabricated.  Klein starts to secretly investigate the old case, but soon he is being followed and threatened.

The Killing of Emma Gross is a well constructed historical police procedural that is based on the story of the real Dusseldorf ripper, Peter Kurten, using real characters from the case such as Gennat and the pathologist.  The story is gritty, edgy and dark, with a nice tension running throughout centred on the fraught rivalry between Klein and Ritter, and Berlin Kripo's presence.  The plot is well paced and as it unfolds becomes a real page-turner.  The characterisation is excellent throughout, with adequate back story to get a good sense of the main actors, and Klein was engaging as a flawed copper looking for redemption and revenge.  Moreover, Seaman does a good job of placing the reader in the Weimar Republic and its unsettled social and political landscape.  Overall, a taut, sinister, well told tale and I’d be interested in spending more time in Klein’s company. 

Last seen wearing ...

Having read the book Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter a couple of weeks ago, I decided to dig out the DVD and watch the adaptation for TV as portrayed in Morse.  The most striking thing about the TV version is that it bares very little resemblence to the book.  Just about everything has been changed - context, the characters and their lifestyles, the relationships between the characters, the storyline, the killer's identity.  It's a wonder that they even called it 'Last Seen Wearing'.  I really don't understand why the writer did this.  The book could have been adapted as is and it would have worked just as well, if not better than the adaptation (if one can call it adaptation).  What I do know is, it annoyed the heck out of me and the person I gave the running commentary to on what had been altered!  If I was Colin Dexter I probably would have been livid.  I'd love to hear a rationale explanation as to why so many changes were made as I really can't think of any.

September reviews

Another good month of reading, with five 4 star and two 5 star reads.  My book of the month was We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay, a darkly comic mash-up of police procedural and reality television that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing ***.5
Brenner and God by Wolf Haas **.5
A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis ****
Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter ****
Homicide by David Simon *****
No Sale by Patrick Conrad ****
Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson ****
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollack ****
We Are the Hanged Man by Douglas Lindsay *****

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm presently reading Parker Bilal's The Golden Scales, a mystery novel set in Cairo.  I was intrigued by this short passage - that the inventor of writing was accused of undermining learning.

Long before that, of course, this was the site of the Temple of the Sun, said to be the place where the god Thoth had invented writing, an act so controversial that he was accused of undermining learning since writing would allow people to appear to know things of which they had no real understanding.

On reading student essays I can see how such a perception arises - it's relatively straightforward to lift the ideas of others in a written form, much more tricky to convincingly articulate them verbally.  That said, writing revolutionised learning as it allows knowledge to be portable across time and space.

My posts this week:
Review of Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing
Evidence-informed policy and the siting of primary care centres
Review of Brenner and God by Wolf Haas
Review of A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis
Due process

Due process

The two men stared over at the dilapidated house, it’s lawn two feet high.

McHenry pushed open the car door.

Lowry grabbed his jacket, held him in place.  ‘Where the fuck are you going?’

‘The fucker’s guilty.  I know it.  You know it.  The whole fucking community knows it.’

‘Gut instinct and rumour is not the same as knowing.’

‘The fucker did it.  And he’ll do it again if we don’t stop him.’

‘And we will, but we’re cops not a lynch mob.’

‘So we just wait until he kills again?’

‘No.  We find some evidence, then we lynch him.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words
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Review of A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis (Arrow, 2006)

1902 in Vienna and a beautiful and alluring spiritualist, Charlotte Löwenstein, is found dead in her home.  The room has been locked from the inside and, although shot, there’s no bullet.  Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt is assigned to the case, but he’s quickly floundering given the apparent supernatural nature of the murder.  He turns for help to his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a follower of Sigmund Freud, who has his own troubles fighting against his superiors who prefer electrotherapy over psychoanalysis.  Between them they start to investigate the spiritualist’s death, focusing on the group that attend her weekly séances, including a stage magician, a locksmith, a wealthy banker and his wife, a seamstress, a Hungarian count fallen on hard times, and a politically ambitious seller of surgical instruments who dates a rich but unattractive heiress.  Slowly they start to piece together what happened that night, with Oskar Rheinhardt playing Watson to Liebermann’s Holmes.  They are aided by the talented scientist, Amelia Lydgate, an English woman in Vienna hoping to study medicine that Liebermann has been treating for hysteria bought on by a traumatic event.  Then a second murder occurs.

There’s lots to like about A Death in Vienna (also published as Mortal Mischief).  The plot is cleverly conceived and well executed, with a couple of substantial subplots that add, rather than detract, from the story.  The locked room element of the story is well realised and Tallis does a good job of keeping various suspects in the frame.  The characterisation is nicely executed with respect to all the principle and secondary characters, with Rheinhardt and Liebermann being nice, complementary foils.  There is also a strong sense of place and attention to historical detail.  The story is very much set in Vienna, with its streets, shops and galleries, and is rooted in its culture, politics and science at the turn the twentieth century.  Despite all these qualities, the storytelling was a little flat and wooden at the start, but it soon livened up to become an engaging and engrossing read.  I’ll be checking out the next book in the series.


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Review of Brenner and God by Wolf Haas (Melville International Crime, 2012; German 2009)

A former cop, Brenner now works as a chauffeur, shuttling two year old Helena between her mother, an abortion clinic doctor living in Vienna, and her developer father who spends most of his time in Munich.  When Brenner forgets to fill the car with gas the night before a trip he has to stop at a petrol station.  When he goes inside the shop to pay and get some chocolate for Helene he returns to find her gone, seemingly kidnapped.  A short while later, Brenner has lost his job and has decided to find Helena himself, starting his investigation with the leader of the pro-life group that campaigns outside the clinic of the young girl’s mother.  In so doing, he unwittingly starts a murderous spree.

Brenner and God is a curious book.  The story is told through an anonymous narrator who both tells the story and 'talks to' the reader, sometimes telling them what to do ('My dear Swan, pay attention, this is important').  It’s a style that I found increasingly irritating, partly because it comes across as somewhat patronising.  There are also a number of what are meant to be profound digressions, providing insights into modern society, but most fall flat.  As for the story, it’s a kidnapping story with a twist, based on two unrelated but coincidental threads.  The plot is interesting enough, but its telling felt a little underdeveloped in terms of its realisation, characterisation and sense of place.  I never felt as if I got to know any of the characters in any substantive way and some barely played a role or were under-used (for example, the cop to whom the reader is given a relatively substantial introduction near the beginning then disappears until the end when he very briefly re-appears).  This should have been a book I that I thoroughly enjoyed given the theme and supposed dark humour, but it just didn’t click into place for me, mainly due to its voice and underdeveloped narrative.


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Review of Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing (Little Brown, 2011)

Whilst intelligence gleamed from spies on the ground in the form of resistance, double and SOE agents, and spies in the ether in the form of signal intercepts and their decryption, has received quite a bit of attention in recent years, the role of aerial photography and its interpretation during the Second World War has been relatively understudied.  Downing’s book goes some way towards to filling the gap by providing an overview of British and American air photo reconnaissance and interpretation, focusing in particular on the RAF Medmenham at Danesfield House, sited to the west of London on the Thames.  The book provides an initial, sketchy overview of the early development of aerial photography and its uses during the First World War, before detailing a more in-depth history of aerial photography in the immediate run-up to the Second World War (very underdeveloped and promoted by private interests not the military) and during the war itself.  Within a year of the war starting aerial photography was being routinely used by the British, with over a million photos a month being processed and analysed in Medmenham.  Every port in Europe was being photographed at least once a week, and aerial photography and physical models developed from them were used to brief troops ahead of every major battle and campaign.  The photographic programme led to many important success stories, such as the neutralisation of the Italian navy in the Mediterranean and the starving of resources to Axis troops in North Africa, the sinking of key German battleships, the identification and destruction of German secret weapon development and launch sites, and the Normandy landings.  The techniques and processes developed in Medmenham were replicated in other locations, notably in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and South Asia.

Spies in the Sky provides a popular history overview, written in a breezy, accessible and engaging style.  The narrative does suffer from some over-generalisations and assertions, for example, that a new science was developed at Medmenham, that of photogrammatery and military photo interpretation, which is not the case (though some new technical developments were achieved), and sometimes the pace is a little too fast.  It would have been nice to have a bit more technical detail at times, also some more biographical details of some of the key players and the political machinations they were caught up in, and more information of aerial intelligence in other arenas.  That said, this book is aimed at wide, generalist audience, rather than the specialist.  And in fulfilling that brief, the book succeeds admirably.  It certainly makes a strong case that aerial intelligence played a very important, but unappreciated role, in the Allies strategising and execution of war plans.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've just got back from Vienna.  A fairly hectic trip, though I did get a chance to wander round the city on Saturday afternoon and see some of the sights and architecture.  All three evening dinners were memorable.  Thursday was in the Palmenhaus, Friday at the Semperdepot (right), and last night in Saigon Restaurant.  In the latter I sat a table next to a grandmother and her granddaughter who spent the evening talking to each other in German, French and English, swapping language every two or three sentences, sometimes mid-sentence.  It was kind of odd, but also seemed completely natural.  I also had chance to finish both Brenner and God and A Death in Vienna on the trip, reviews in due course.


My posts this week
The crisis in Ireland in graphs and maps
All Due Respect
Review of Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter
Vienna reads
Review of Homicide by David Simon
Selfish

Selfish?

‘Selfish bastard.’

‘I’d say desperate, rather than selfish.’

‘He’s left two kids, both under the age of five.’

‘You think he was thinking rationally?  That he simply decided to suit himself?’

‘He knew what he was doing.  It didn’t just happen.  It was planned.  He thought it all through and decided to take the easy option.’

‘Easy option?  He’s dead!’

‘Yeah and the hard option would have been to face and tackle his problems.  Instead he ran away from them.  Left his wife and kids to face them instead.’

‘Sir?’ a third man asked.

‘Yeah, cut the selfish bastard down.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words[image error]