Часы для мистера Келли

by Arkady Vayner, Georgy Vayner

В повести "Часы для мистера Келли" у знакомого читателю старшего инспектора Станислава Тихонова новое дело. В Одессе убит бедный, нищий старик Коржаев - "Гобсек с Малой Арнаутской", в тайнике у которого найдены золото и бриллианты, а дома - похищенные детали московского производства к экспортным часам "Столица". Московской милиции удается выйти на след преступной шайки и предотвратить незаконную сделку с "закордонным" коммерсантом.

Океан и людская память - вечны. Далекие голодные 20-е годы. Молодая Советская Республика организует Карскую хлебную экспедицию: направляет караван судов Северным морским путем за сибирским хлебом. Сумеют ли герои приключенческой повести "Карский рейд" доставить груз по назначению? Об этом мы узнаем, прочитав повесть, в которой наряду с историческими личностями, такими как Л.Б.Красин, В.П.Ногин, действуют вымышленные персонажи - рядовые строители революционной России.

В благополучную семью Зои Михайловны Шерстобитовой, председателя горисполкома, из киноповести "Нелюдь" пришла беда: похищен сын, третьеклассник Марат. Кто тот изверг, покушающийся на жизнь ребенка: уголовник по кличке Валет, или топограф геологической партии, или неудачливый жених Зои Михайловны, или ее бывший любовник? Майор милиции Плужников приступает к поиску...

560 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Arkady Vayner (1938 - 2009) was a Russian playwright and author. After graduating from high school with honors, he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute, and later joined the law faculty at Moscow State University.

Together with his brother, Georgy Vayner, he is the author of many works of detective stories, often taken from their own forensic practice. In addition, Vainer wrote plays and scripts for film and television.

Reviews

[Artsalnov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ну, какая-то откровенная скукотень. Рад был герою Шарапова, но внезапно он оказался не ГГ, а очень-очень второстепенным.

Вопрос к аудитории: остальные книги в том же формате?

[Tububa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the Vayner bros' first novel. I remember seeing somewhere that maybe it was inspired by real events? The Vayners were both in the crime fighting business, one a cop and the other a prosecutor or something. So it's not unlikely. And the crime at the heart of this book is so essentially Soviet. The setting is a planned, top-down-controlled economy where it is illegal to not work. You can be charged for "freeloading" if you cannot prove some sort of employment. So what is a criminal mind to do? You can live underground, as many criminals did (certainly during times of unrest like right after WWII, on which see Эра милосердия). You can keep a nominal job but do crimes on the side. Or, as in this book, you can steal from your job. And in the Soviet Union, it was a very popular thing to do. It no doubt felt like a victimless crime, and the general inefficiency of the system made it relatively difficult to detect.

So, the main criminal in this book is Balashov--a thoroughly unlikable and effective villain. You really want him to get it by the end of the book. His indentured accomplice is Krot, an escaped convict who is dependent on Balashov in strange ways. One of the questions I had is why, given that Krot was shown to be capable of murder, he hadn't given more thought to getting rid of Balashov that way. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The mystery is reasonably compelling. It starts with a pedestrian in a hit-and-run who has on his person a pill bottle full of mysterious silvery objects, which turn out to be watch parts. There are so many of them that the cops become curious why the hit pedestrian refuses to acknowledge that the parts are his. This is a couple thousand rubles' worth of watch parts, after all. And then, just a few days later, he is found dead. Okay, I'm curious! What would one do with watch parts? As the title of the novel suggests, they are bound towards a foreign customer, and the rest of the novel unspools the details of the scam and builds some tension as the criminal investigation continues.

I found the presentation of foreign-accented Russian in the book to be somewhat laughable, because the nature of the guy's mistakes is really inconsistent from the point of view of Russian grammar. But then most Russians did not interact with that many foreigners from Western Europe in the 50's and 60's, so this is understandable. The Vayners do know what they ought to know, though, namely, the Soviet criminal system. This was a solid debut novel.

[Eliso Elisabedashvili · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5