Crime books

In the last two weeks, I revisited two of my favourite crime writers and learned a thing or two – not all of it positive.

Both of these authors have long reached the stage where their names dwarf the actual book titles on the covers. This, more than any printed claim, is the sure sign that an author is successful. So, kids, dreaming of publishing a book isn’t the ticket any more – you have to dream of publishing a book where your name is bigger than the title. To achieve success, the author has to become a brand.

But what happens to authors once they’ve become a brand? Suddenly there’s an expectation that they’ll write more books of the same type and quality, and do so with great regularity.

For Mankell, especially, this is a great challenge, as he’s known primarily for a series of books featuring one character, the detective Kurt Wallander. Being a cop, Wallander can be involved in a new crime as many times as is needed, so the plot permutations are virtually unlimited. The problem is the character itself. How many twists and turns can one man’s private life take before it becomes totally ridiculous?

Mankell has seemingly found a way out of that conundrum by shifting his focus to Kurt’s daughter, Linda Wallander. In Before the Frost, she takes over as the lead character.

The plot of this book feels unusually contrived. It’s not so much that it’s any less believable than the norm for books of this type, but that the plot comes across as a lifeless joining of dots, lacking the inspiration or gusto of earlier Wallander books. This is, however, offset to some extent by the clever game the author plays with dates, giving his fictional tale a deftly handled resonance in the real world of his readers.

Mankell has, of course, also written books that have nothing to do with Wallander. Based on the one I have read (Depths), these books should be well worth seeking out.

Without the expectation to stick to one character, coming up with a new book every year or so should be easier for Elmore Leonard than for Wallander. All his readers expect is that trademark stripped-down style and smart characters who are a law unto themselves. Leonard has done essentially the same thing in his early Westerns, the modern crime stories he’s most famous for and occasionally in novels with a historic bent. What he does is undoubtedly great, and in the pantheon of crime writers Elmore Leonard ranks with the handful of giants of the genre up in the Chandlersphere.

The problem is that he’s been at it an inordinately long time, and seems to be struggling a bit, if Up in Honey’s Room (2007) is anything to go by. The book seems to consist of highlights from previous books retold and bits of somewhat jarring research, joined together in a not altogether involving plot. And alarm bells always start to ring for me if an author has his characters telling jokes.

Leonard dusts of Carl Webster of The Hot Kid (himself the son of Virgil Webster of Cuba Libre), which is fine. What’s more worrying is that so many of the other characters become indistinguishable from Elmore Leonard characters in other books and even from other characters in this particular book.

Roger Ebert made the point about modern American movies that the characters in most movies are unbelievably dumb. In this book, the problem is the opposite – everyone is unbelievably clever.

The typical Elmore Leonard hero is smarter than the people around him, always first to catch on to what’s happening. In this book, Carl, Honey, the cop Kevin, German POW Jurgen and spy Vera are all exceedingly quick on the uptake. They catch on to things about each other and events so quickly that you wonder if they’re not all reading each other’s minds.

There’s just too much cleverness and this causes confusion rather than tension – something that’s not helped by the fact that the book doesn’t have a clear main character, nobody we really want to root for. Even the two villains (one charmingly evil, one a dull fool) are not hateful.

The lesson from all this, I guess, is that it’s unrealistic of readers and publishers to expect these marquee authors to keep churning out equivalents of their best books time and again. Perhaps becoming one of those writers isn’t the best thing in the world after all.

Inspector Espinosa, hero of the crime series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, is a reader of crime stories himself.  His flat in Copacabana is overflowing with books. You get the feeling this is where he wants to spend all his time, but… there’s crime on the streets and he has to solve it. On foot, mainly.

As a real cop, Espinosa would be unusual. As a crime fiction hero, not so much. He’s a thinking man, but not averse to action and the odd bit of bed gymnastics. The kind of hero a professor of psychology or philosophy might dream up in his leisure hours. (Which  reflects Garcia-Roza’s academic career in those fields before he turned to writing at the age of 60.)

The appeal of the Inspector Espinosa series lies in the way the reader is aware of the depth of thought behind it, without those deep thoughts getting in the way of the entertainment.

After rushing through his first novels as fast as I could find them, Pursuitbroke my momentum exactly because in that book the balance tilted too far into psychology. After ploughing through it with a heavy heart, I actually stopped looking for Garcia-Roza’s books. However, nostalgia for those early books got the better of me this week and I tried his latest, Alone in the Crowd… and it was good!

I now have the exciting prospect of hunting out Blackout and seeing if that’s up to his usual standard as well.

Apart from tightly plotted, psychologically motivated crime stories, you get the additional bonus of virtual visits to what must be a fascinating environment – the inner suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. The action takes place at Ipanema beach and the Copa, Copabana. (Which is much more fun if you can keep Barry Manilow at bay.)

Read them in order, starting with The Silence of the Rain, and you have a good 12 hours or so of low-cost travel to an exciting destination where everyone goes ah!

Janwillem van de Wetering was up against it. Not only did he write in a language other than English (initially at least), but his crime novels are something of an acquired taste. It is a taste worth acquiring though, and Van de Wetering had significant success in his lifetime.

My library service recently seems to have made the decision to dump all their Janwillem van de Wetering novels, which is sad. The good news is that I was able to pick up a fair number of them for next to nothing.

His main series of books features four cops of the Amsterdam municipal police, where the author himself worked part-time. The commissaris, whose name is never given, leads the murder squad. He suffers from rheumatism and doesn’t suffer fools. Wise and detached, he is the guru of the team.

They are supported by the young Cardozo, who tends to be in the background, doing the less glamorous work.His supporting team includes Grijpstra and De Gier, the two main characters in the series. Grijpstra is middle-aged, heavy-set and had dreams once of being a painter and jazz musician. De Gier is young, strong and handsome, a womaniser with a yen for Zen. (Van de Wetering was a Zen Buddhist acolyte in Japan for some time.)

The Amsterdam series, as the De Gier and Grijpstra novels are often referred to, usually features less violence than you’d expect in a typical American crime novel, and proportionally more reflection.

Much of these Dutch crime books are taken up by conversations, especially between Grijpstra and De Gier. These tend to go off on tangents. The two cops are as likely to discuss philosophical attitudes as the facts of the cases they’re trying to solve. And when the team does solve a case, it is often by very unorthodox means, meting out their own form of justice.

If you don’t keep your wits about you, these conversations can become confusing, with the result that the characters blend somewhat. In this sense, they are the most significant weaknesses of the Grijpstra and De Gier crime series. But they are also what give these books their charm.

Personally, I find Janwillem van de Wetering’s Amsterdam crime novels a welcome respite from the mindless violence that seems so prevalent in crime writing. I make a point of reading a Grijpstra and De Gier novel every now and then. If you haven’t tried one of this Dutch writer’s books, do yourself the favour. And read with relish.