Thursday Extracts: an Oriental viewpoint

In the third century AD was written the Lieh-tzu. In this book, Yang Chu says: ‘There are four things which do not allow people to have peace.
‘The first is long life, the second is reputation, the third is rank, and the fourth is riches.
‘Those who have these things fear ghosts, fear men, fear power, and fear punishment.’

Blade of Grass, the things you want are the things you do not want.
Hear the ancient story of the man who knew what he wanted.
He was walking by the riverside when he saw an Immortal. The man was very curious. He looked at the person from Heaven.
‘I suppose you want something special from me?’ said the Immortal.
‘Yes,’ said the man.
The Immortal touched a stone with his finger. It changed to gold. He said: ‘You can take.’
The man did not go. He stayed.
‘Do you want something more?’ said the Immortal.
‘Yes,’ said the man.
The Immortal touched three rocks nearby. They turned to gold. He said: ‘You can take.’
But the man still did not go.
The Immortal said: ‘What do you want? What is more valuable than gold?’
The man said: ‘I want something very ordinary.’
The Immortal said: ‘What do you want?’
The man said: ‘Your finger.’

The Feng Shui Detective
Nury Vittachi
2000
Allen & Unwin

Review: Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

If you saw the recent BBC drama Shetland you might find Ann Cleeves's Raven Black confusing. Clearly part of the TV programme was based on it, but it seems that maybe two books were combined. It was the drama production that convinced me to try this novel. I enjoyed the show immensely and thought the characters were worth more attention.  I wasn’t wrong. The brooding scenery and the intensity of island relationships come across very well.  There was enough emphasis on detective Jimmy Perez’s position as an outsider – a Fair Isle man making a living on Shetland – to highlight the oppression of living in a community where everyone else has always known your business.

At least I finally got an explanation of why a Fair Isler had a name like Perez in the first place! I just wish I hadn’t spent the whole read swinging from parts I recognised to a completely new tale.  And I was stuck with Douglas Henshall's face as the main character. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a perfectly fine face, but I probably wouldn’t have cast him if I’d read before I viewed.

If you didn’t see the programme you will have no problems at all with this well crafted and well written tale. Cleeve’s writing is tight and easy to read.  The plot is convincing and the killer’s motives are justifiable (in crime writing terms) .  There are sufficient red herrings among the genuine clues and a smattering of old Shetland history and culture woven among the details of a more universal crime.

The book opens with two young girls on their way home after a New Year night on the town, visiting an old man to wish him well for the coming year. He has been a recluse since the death of his mother and is distrusted by the locals for his suspected part in the unsolved disappearance of a young girl many years before.  When one of the girls is later found strangled in the snow near his house the rumours begin.
Since I knew the TV version of the story I can’t tell you whether you’ll see the ending coming or not. I suspect you might. But it doesn’t really matter if you do. Read the book for the atmosphere and enjoyment of it. You won’t be sorry.

Book review: Murder on Ice

Backwoods Canada, depths of January, and the townspeople of Murphy's Harbour are getting ready for their Winter Carnival. One of the events is a beauty pageant, which turns sour when the out-of-town winner is snatched by kidnappers, just as she is about to receive her crown.

At first it looks as if it's a publicity stunt by a Women's Liberation group, but when local cop Reid Bennett and his police dog Sam find the strangled body of one of the feminists in a nearby motel it's obvious there's more to the crime than first suspected.

Bennett sets off to rescue the snatched beauty queen but his efforts are hampered by the interference of other group members, who seem not to understand that their scheme has been hijacked by vicious thugs with a murderous agenda of their own.

Corpses turn up in unlikely places and Bennett battles both the killers and the weather in his efforts to bring all the gang to justice.

It has to be remembered that the book was written in 1984, so some of its attitudes need to be forgiven. The world has matured since then. Much of the phraseology about feminism and homosexuality can be explained as being correct for the characters, but the book also gives the impression that author Ted Wood might have had a few issues of his own.


Murder on Ice, Ted Wood, 1984.

Thursday extracts: A Bon(e)fire

Zozobra started to growl. It was like the deep noise an old man makes when woken from a good nap. It was like the sound of an engine revving on a Dodge Charger. The growling didn’t stop.



Lucy shifted from foot to foot in the dark, not sure what to expect next. She had to admit she was a little bit anxious. She had never been to Zozobra before, but then she’d only lived in Santa Fe for a year and a half. Her boss, Harold Richards, who had been city editor at the Capital Tribune for the past twenty years, described it as “a bunch of people standing around while they torch a big puppet.” She hadn’t believed him at first. It had sounded so silly—and so pagan in a city as Catholic as Santa Fe, whose very name means “Holy Faith.”


Still, Zozobra had been a Santa Fe tradition for more than eighty years. It was the opening salvo in the fiesta party arsenal. The actual Fiesta de Santa Fe didn’t begin until tomorrow. Like any good Catholic celebration, the weekend started with the fires of salvation and ended in acts of sin. Tonight was about redemption. Tomorrow was about partying your ass off.
 
The Bone Fire  Christine Barber  2010 Minotaur Books (Thomas Dunne) e-edition
 

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I reviewed this book yesterday so I don't want to waste too much time explaining the plot.  This is from very early in Chapter 1 - the set up for the rest of the novel. It turns out there's a child's skull inside the burning effigy and it starts a major murder investigation. Getting essential information into a story without losing the flow is a key skill. I admire the way Barber sums up all you need to know in the phrase “a bunch of people standing around while they torch a big puppet” and how she introduces it. The rest is pure atmosphere.
 

Thursday extracts: A lesson in forensics – and suspense – from Jeffery Deaver

Crime fiction is one of my little indulgences. I love reading a good murder story, and one of my favourite authors is Jeffery Deaver. He has a number of regular characters but maybe his best known is Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic detective (played by Denzel Washington in the film The Bone Collector). Rhyme is not only a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, who can determine the most obscure facts from the least obvious observations, but he is also a forensics master.

Deaver loves to pass on the how and why of crime science and relates his lectures to the relevant stage in whatever investigation Rhyme is running. In this extract the crime scene technicians have removed a complete door and its frame from a site where a bomb was supposed to have gone off and destroyed all the evidence - except it failed to explode. The detectives assume that the perpetrator would not have bothered to use gloves because he was not expecting the door to survive. They are hoping to lift fingerprints.

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Fingerprints fall into one of three categories. Visible (the sort left by a bloody thumb on a white wall), impressible (left in pliable material like plastic explosive), and latent (hidden to the unaided eye). There were dozens of good ways to raise latent prints but one of the best, on metal surfaces, was simply to use store-bought Super Glue, cyanoacrylate. The object would be put in an airtight enclosure with a container f the glue, which would then be heated until it turned gaseous. The vapors would bond with any number of substances left by the finger – amino and lactic acids, glucose, potassium and carbon trioxide – and the resulting reaction created a visible print.

The process could work miracles, raising prints that were completely invisible before.

Except not in this case.

"Nothing," Pulaski said, discouraged, "Only glove smudges."

Jeffery Deaver. The Burning Wire. 2010. Hodder & Stoughton.

3 word monday (only it's Wednesday): Disguise

“Perfect disguise”, Amanda said to her reflection in the cheval mirror. “No-one will recognise you.” The wig made her head look like a coconut and the mouth was a delightful touch. She gnashed her teeth and pulled back her lips, gurning at herself to get a better look. Yellow and crooked: what they call ‘English teeth’ in the US. Then, of course, there was the fat suit.

Amanda knew from bitter, adolescent experience that the best way to stop people from seeing you was to be overweight. She had suffered a long time to learn that lesson. All through her teens she had been the butt of the jokes, left out of invitations and spurned by her peers, just because she had a weight problem. Behind the size she was actually quite attractive but they never knew because they never looked. They deemed her invisible. Talk about the elephant in the room!

But when she reached twenty one she inherited some money and used it to change her image and her identity. Not because she was unhappy with herself, but because she realised by then she would have to play by ‘their’ rules to win their game. And she had won. Her face appeared nightly on TV as a respected anchor-woman on a national news programme. Every one of her old tormentors could see her now. She was relishing her triumph and planned to crown it with a visit to each of them to point out the error of their old ways.

Hence the disguise: the wig, the fake teeth and the fat suit made her look exactly like she did at school. That was the point. She wanted to make sure they knew who was responsible as she murdered them, one by one. It was the perfect disguise for the perfect crime. Only the victims could identify her and they did not live to tell tales. She had even been captured on security cameras a few times and earned herself the nickname of The Fat Slasher but no-one linked the obese image with the svelte news reader. She knew she would never be caught. She just had to remember not to laugh when she reported the latest killing to her eager viewers. 

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Three Word Monday is run by Steve Isaak. Each week he chooses three words and our challenge is to write a 600-word (maximum) story including all three.  This week's words were: coconut, gnash and deem.

A weekend read

I finished reading Arnaldur Indriðason's Tainted Blood  this weekend. If you want to know what I thought, checkout the Just Read page.

FFF55: Bloodstain

It all began with a stain on the bathroom floor. Smeared and ill-defined, but, unmistakeably, it was blood. A trail of gory prints led from the red pool, downstairs and into the kitchen. What kind of horror was I about to find?

Another battered field mouse corpse.
I wish my cats weren’t such keen hunters. 

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FFF55 is the G-Man's weekly challenge to write a story in just 55 words. Take a stroll over to see him at Mr. Knowitall's Blog to see what the rest of the world has written.

The Great Transworld Crime Caper 3: The Business of Dying by Simon Kernick

I've been very lucky to have been accepted to take part in the Great Transworld Crime Caper and that gave me the chance to read and review three novels from their catalogue.  This is number three.  If you'd like to read the other reviews too, they are linked at the bottom of the page.

A writer friend once told me that all the best stories start with a great "what if?" and that might explain what makes The Business of Dying such a riveting read. It begins with one of the best "what if?" assumptions I have ever encountered. What if a mid ranking police officer became so disillusioned with his job that he decided to moonlight as a professional hitman? It's a thrilling place to start a book because within a few pages three men have been murdered in a gangland style killing and the reader does not discover that the gunman is actually Detective Sergeant Dennis Milne until a roadblock forces him to use his warrant card to escape. (Unless you read the jacket blurb, of course.)

It soon becomes obvious that he has been set up, however, when news reports reveal that the dead men were customs officers, rather than the drug dealers he thought he had assassinated. In spite of his part-time occupation Milne is not a bad man. He joined the force to help remove some baddies from the world. He began executing them only after it became clear that modern policing was unlikely to have any long term effect on crime rates or to apprehend the real offenders. There is some interesting and thought provoking discussion on how he justifies his double life and readers are left wondering whether, in the same circumstances, they might not be driven to doing the same thing.

Given that Milne is a senior detective it is no surprise that bodies arrive thick and fast in this tale, and not all as a result of his handiwork. There is enough police procedure to satisfy the amateur sleuths who want to work out for themselves whodunnit but this is not a polished forensic drama. It has none of the glib crime-fighting paraphernalia that has taken over a lot of detective fiction since the advent of CSI.  Neither are the murders quite as straightforward as many writers would have us believe. Guns jam. Victims fight back. Blood squelches. Corpses make revolting noises. The business of dying is truly messy.

The book is Simon Kernick's first, and is a much better novel than an author's debut outing usually achieves. It has been re-released on the strength of his later success with Relentless, but this one deserves to be widely read too. Milne comes across as a real guy, facing real dilemmas in a very real world. He is also lacking in many of the now clichéd world-weary copper attributes that have littered crime novels for the last decade. For example, he drinks because he enjoys it, or because he has had a bad day at work, or because he has just killed someone. We imagine we would have a glass or two for the same reasons. His habit is not a plot device, it is a genuine part of the character.   OK, so his love life is not too promising, but police work is often cited as having a high divorce rate so that is also believable. (It does mean that he is free to sleep with a suspect, however, even after she makes some startling and incriminating admissions, which is a little far-fetched.)

Beyond that there is little to detract from this cracking tale with its unusual premise. It spins along at a swift pace and is far from predictable along its route. Read it soon. Because life’s too short.



The other two reviews were:



Robert Goddard
Past Caring




Simon Beckett
The Chemistry of Death