Magdalen Nabb and Thomas Perry: mystery-thriller writers from different worlds

The Marshal and the Murderer by the late Magdalen Nabb is another foray into Florence and its nearby villages under the watchful eye of the ever-delightful and self-deprecating Marshall Guarnaccia. However, the events that transpire are not nearly as pleasant as the portly Marshall himself. In this episode, the murder of a foreign student leads Guarnaccia to a small town to assist the local authorities, or authority, as it turns out. There is the possibility of a turf war between the investigators, but after a few awkward moments along the way, they end up being a rather good-natured team. Food is a great common denominator for these Italian men, but it is their different backgrounds that end up providing crucial, complementary insights into the crime.

In fact, the mystery can't be solved at all without intimate knowledge of the closed-in, rather inbred village and its history, a history not readily yielded to outsiders. Guarnaccia contributes his usual insights, but remains somewhat mystified about how he actually helped the investigation.

The events that created a dangerous and volatile environment in the village date to before and during World War II. The terrible past meets the murderous present when the life of a young Swiss pottery student is taken violently. The village where the crime takes place is devoted largely to making clay pots and similar products, mostly for purely commercial rather than artistic reasons. There is at least one artist present, however, and he was the victim's teacher. Though quite elderly, he is as lecherous as he is brusque, and he falls under suspicion.

The villagers themselves make assumptions about the murder based on what happened in town 60 years earlier, during the war, and try their hand at vigilante justice. However, the Marshall and his new colleague are not convinced that the villagers understand who the real criminal is.

The story provides a view of how the war divided Italy, and how deeply those divisions might still run in some places. What is the protocol for interacting with the children of fascists and Nazi sympathizers in the aftermath of such a deadly war: must the parents' sins be carried on the shoulders of their children?

We see alliances and hatreds that formed in an isolated, working class village over its long history, a history written as much by the distance of modern highways as by the war itself. We experience first-hand accounts of the complex and terrible interactions between the Germans and Italians in latter stages of World War II.

Be sure to read this wonderfully-plotted mystery from the pen of a master- it is recommended to all.

The Butcher's Boy
I also recently read The Butcher's Boy by Thomas Perry. This is a good thriller, though forgive me if I find it hard to empathize with a mob hit man as protagonist. Yes, that goes for Lawrence Block's work, also: I much prefer Block's mysteries such as In the Midst of Death (from the Matthew Scudder series) to Hit Man (one of the John Keller Mysteries).

The new paperback edition of The Butcher's Boy has a laudatory introduction by one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly (e.g. The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde), and seems to be a favorite of many readers and reviewers, but I'm a bit less enthusiastic in my support.

The Butcher's Boy follows a female Department of Justice investigator who tries to tie a set of suspicious deaths together, and the man who has done the killing. While law enforcement is trying to sort through the seemingly disconnected crimes, or apparent accidents, the clever killer makes a mistake with his mob employers, and becomes their next target. The hit man doesn't take this well, to say the least, and his field of view becomes a dangerous place for all involved.

At the end of a hard month or so of hard and harrowing work, both the hit man and the insightful Justice Department analyst, Elizabeth Waring, earn much needed vacations...

While I found the first few Jane Whitfield novels by Perry (Dance for the Dead, Vanishing Act) to be more compelling than The Butcher's Boy, I do enjoy reading about women with good aim, excellent survival and crime solving skills, and good hearts. Ms. Waring is highly capable and well worth following, but she is no force of nature the way Jane Whitfield is. The Butcher's Boy offers more sardonic pleasure than flat-out exhilaration.

Thomas Perry has written a number of novels with unusual characters, and I recommend most of them to fans of crime fiction (the later Whitfield novels seemed to me to have lost their way). I reviewed the crime thriller Nightlife here: it is about another of Perry's strong female protagonists named Catherine Hobbes. Memory tells me that Nightlife has more hard-core violence and suspense than The Butcher's Boy, and it lacks the dark humor hidden in Ms. Waring's world; Nightlife receives the stronger recommendation from me, especially for readers who can enjoy its rougher edges, but both these books deserve your time.

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Detective Fiction Set in Laos, Australia and Spain

In keeping with my recent, brief remarks about the books I've been reading, some gems from SOHO press are presented here. My reviewing is far behind my reading, so there's still plenty more to come.

Thirty-Three Teeth
by Colin Cottrell. One doesn't normally expect to end up in the "recently liberated" Communist Laos of 1977, especially in the company of a very elderly doctor who serves as national coroner. However, what a delight Dr. Paiboun is- he takes us on a journey through the ancient and semi-modern traditions of a country trying to establish a "proper" Communist bureaucracy... what an ambition to have... but the ambition is not shared by the good doctor or most of his friends and acquaintances. The book stays away from overt politics for the most part, though there is reference to a Washington delegation that demands access to American MIA's, in spite of continued insistence that there never were U.S. troops in or over Laos.

An important character in Cottrell's novel is Nurse Dtui, whom her boss thinks highly of, but who is consistently underestimated by everyone except her mother. The combination of Paiboun and Dtui, both independent, one old and the other young, ends up being formidable. Add traditional Laotian spirits into the mix as Cottrell did, and a rich, unusual story results. The wonderful journey is far more important than the satisfying conclusion.

Death by Demonstration
by Patricia Carlon is not the masterpiece that I found her novel The Unquiet Night to be (see my review of that great thriller here). Death by Demonstration seems dated in its treatment of "naive" student protesters and in its rather blind respect for government authority, a respect that one would be hard-pressed to find these days in most places I'm familiar with. The story itself does involve an excellent mystery, a clever detective, and a cast of rogues, bystanders and victims who are not all what they appear to be. Carlon writes well, as usual, and reading for the words, paragraphs and characters is satisfying. Things droop only when the misplaced moralizing pops up in the text; it is quite organic to the story, but very much in the wrong, as we know now (in my opinion). A product of its time, Death by Demonstration is recommended with only minor reservations.


Death of a Nationalist (Soho Crime)
by Rebecca Pawel. This is a remarkably emotional story (it was, for me, anyway). Pawel's novel is about a fascist soldier/member of the guardia civil in Spain, and takes place immediately after the conclusion of Franco's takeover. Sergeant Tejada is a committed fascist, a believer, who is stationed in Madrid after taking part in some of the war's most terrible battles. He dispenses the fascist version of justice swiftly and without remorse, calmly shooting a woman dead for her suspected role in the murder of a fellow officer. However, Tejada is not a fool (in every way), and he doggedly, even creatively, continues his investigation of the murder, in part because the victim was a close friend.

The trail of evidence leads to the black market and provides some disturbing and seemingly out of character revelations about Tejada's former comrade-in-arms. As things progress, Tejada surprises even himself by developing an admiration for some enemies of the state. There is no middle ground, of course, and the parallels between Franco and recent US administrations are disturbing: you are either on their side or you are not a patriot. Of course, in post-war Spain, the punishment for dissent was brutal.

This terrific first novel recreates Spain in the aftermath of civil war and describes the deprivations of regular citizens who suffered through food shortages, purges and burgeoning totalitarianism. Death of a Nationalist is a remarkable story of a character development that occurs against all odds, as the truth keeps showing its inconvenient self through the investigative work of the diligent and dogged Sergeant.

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Nightlife, thrilling crime fiction by Thomas Perry– a Review

Nightlife: A Novel

I have enjoyed a number of Thomas Perry’s books, especially the early books in the Jane Whitefield series, a set of books about a Native American woman whose special gifts allow her to help people disappear from the face of the earth, assume new identities, and escape the evil that men would do.

Like the Whitefield series and many of my favorite detective stories (see books by Cara Black (Cara Black's books), Linda Barnes, and many others discussed on this blog), Nightlife also has a woman protagonist: Catherine Hobbs, who is a homicide detective from Portland, Oregon. Catherine is on the trail of a murderer and possible kidnapper, or perhaps several murderers; her picture of the crimes is muddled at first by a profusion of contradictory and incomplete evidence. We, on the other hand, have the advantage of hearing the killer’s own thoughts, though they are dissociated enough from reality that it takes some time to filter them properly and obtain some semblance of the truth.

The first victim whose murder Catherine investigates is Dennis Poole. She is joined nearly from the start by a private detective and retired member of the L. A. district attorney’s office, Joe Pitt. Pitt is extremely charming and an experienced investigator, and was brought on board by Los Angeles-based crime boss Hugo Poole. Hugo and Dennis, as it turns out, were cousins. What bothers Hugo, and Catherine for that matter, is that Dennis was, in a nice way, simply “a nobody”: a nondescript computer salesman in a seemingly boring job, one that he actually loved and was good at. Dennis was not a “player”, he was just a pleasant and unadventurous fellow, highly unlikely to meet the kind of person who would do him in. Yet the murder was clearly committed by a close personal acquaintance, or, more likely, with the unwilling help of such a person. Certainly someone involved was intimate enough with Dennis to have access to his apartment while Dennis was taking a bath. Access enough to walk up to Dennis and shoot him in the head during that relaxing bath. At least he never saw it coming- his eyes were closed while he rested in the tub after a long day at work. Perhaps, Hugo worries, the killing is some kind of retaliation for one of Hugo’s criminal enterprises in L.A.

There is immediate concern about the location of Dennis’ new girlfriend, whose presence is indicated all over the apartment, but who has disappeared. Was she used by a thug to gain entrance to the apartment, is she still alive, was she a witness to the crime?

The excitement and considerable suspense of Nightlife make for an enjoyable ride. At the heart of things is a killer who is nuts (a technical term), but who has developed an extraordinary skill at identity theft, and at preying on unsuspecting victims carefully set up for the kill with detailed planning. The killer’s mental illness manifests in the way that each new personality and identity are truly inhabited, bringing to them an authenticity of performance that fools everyone.

Adding to the suspense, one never knows what the murder will look like, or what the murderer’s new name might be. However, Catherine applies insight and exhaustive detective work to track the schizophrenic killer, hoping to put a stop to the seemingly endless trail of victims who are apparently connected by nothing except their availability and ready assets. Catherine is, however, able to tease out of the matrix of assembled and possibly unrelated data a couple of threads that send her off to investigate.

With a small but significant amount of help from Joe, Catherine finally tracks the killer down, but she is off her home turf, without backup, and in serious danger before she figures out the complete story. When Catherine realizes the new identity that the killer plans to assume, she is horrified, frightened and more determined than ever to try to stop the serial killing. Who survives this final struggle? Read Nightlife to find out.

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