Cosmopoetica

I’ve had The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my shelf since it was first released (a spontaneous purchase courtesy of a significant sale price and a prominent floor display). I’d tried to get into it at least three times before, but always stalled early and moved onto different things.

I only got around to finishing it because I listed “International Mystery” as a category in my 10*10*10 Reading project… proof the reading project works because it really is a pretty good read that I may never have otherwise experienced.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a kind of open-air, closed-room, cold-case murder mystery involving a girl who goes missing from a small island while the only road in is blocked by an impassable traffic accident. After forty years of obsessive investigation into the case the girl’s grandfather and scion of one of the last of the family owned national companies in the country hires Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced financial journalist, ostensibly to write a family history about his complicated, bickering, conniving family but secretly to look into his granddaughter’s disappearance. Mikael comes to be assisted by Lisbeth Salander, an anti-social, punk-inspired hacker who possibly suffers from Asperger Syndrome—the girl with the dragon tattoo—who was first hired to investigate him.

Stieg Larsson, a journalist himself, was clearly comfortable with technology, leading to an odd dichotomy in the book: it’s a rare case of fiction that actually (and accurately) uses specific names of technology and software (including links to web sites in a few cases), but the technical wizardry displayed by Salander goes beyond the unbelievable and into the realm of the impossible. Being decidedly unfamiliar with Swedish politics, I can’t tell if Larsson’s characterization of them is similarly stretched. It’s certainly believable that the country’s financial system is as warped and corrupt as Larsson makes it out to be, but unlike the technical fantasies, I have no way of knowing. In life, Larsson was a well-known left-wing activist. Take from that what you will.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is entertaining. It strikes me as a product of its time, with a lineage that owes as much to television, movies and the Internet as it does the mystery fiction that Mikael Blomkvist reads and refers to throughout. It’s not, as a whole, particularly realistic, existing instead in the space of the cinematically unreal, where real pieces and parts are combined to create something no one would mistake for our reality. I’m not saying this to knock the book—I don’t demand true realism from mystery fiction—just to try to place it into context.

Though I still don’t quite have all the family connections and relationships figured out (even with the help of the family tree provided as part of the book’s front matter), that didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the simple pleasures of a well-crafted, thrilling story set in a foreign locale. I’ll certainly read the other two novels in the trilogy at some point…

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No Happy Ending was one of those fortuitous discoveries made while browsing the used book shelves when I should’ve been working. Previously unknown to me, Paco Ignacio Taibo II appears to be one of Latin America’s most renowned authors. Reading this novel, I can see why. No Happy Ending is both a lyrical hard-boiled detective novel and a socially responsible and—as far as I can determine such things—realistic novel of Mexico City and its political history… with a touch of magical realism thrown in. It’s a spare and beautiful and, for this too-parochial American, sometimes deeply strange novel.

I enjoyed Taibo’s melding of hard-boiled prose, humorous irony, and philosophical musings. For instance, this passage occurs early on in the book after the taciturn Shayne has discovered the body in the bathroom next to his office (a body dressed up as an ancient Roman, no less) and spent the day wandering the city in nearly complete silence:

He was becoming quite a talker. He preferred his old style, the taciturn and enigmatic Belascoarán Shayne. The other face of the clueless, uneasy, perennially surprised Belascoarán Shayne. The public face. Because, when all is said and done, a man is a hunter after images. After his own image. Sometimes he’s successful in the hunt and comes with something consistent, warm, something close to reality. Other times he spends all night pursuing an illusion, clinging to shadows. And sometimes the shadow turns around and comes after him, and everything goes to hell. His only chance for survival was to accept the chaos and quietly become one with it. Take yourself lightly, but take the city seriously, the city, that inscrutable porcupine bristling with quills and soft wrinkles. Shit, he was in love with Mexico City. Another impossible love on his list. A city to love, to love with abandon. Passionately, wildly.

Héctor’s mind fed on all this and more (the cold air, the ranchera music drifting up from the record store, the roofs of buses passing before his eyes without really registering) as he watched the street from the roof of his office building, where he’d gone to smoke a cigarette, to pursue the night, watching from above, keeping his distance.

The best thing was to wait. The killers would show their faces sooner or later. He tossed his cigarette over the edge and watched the tiny spark’s descent with pleasure, a dot of light slowly dropping seven floors to the street.

Beside the unabashedly activist, political and historical aspects of the novel, and setting aside the style, what makes this mystery so different from others is that throughout the narrative the police and the government aren’t just understood to be corrupt sometimes, but assumed to be corrupt all the time. Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the one-eyed private detective protagonist of the novel, is truly a man against the world who nevertheless operates wholly in service of his world. There are no sympathetic detectives in this novel, no policemen who recognize Shayne’s essential rightness and help him out from time to time. Shayne operates in a fundamentally corrupt environment rife with ghosts and dreams and hints of the waking dead.

No Happy Ending is a formally inventive novel as well. Each section takes on a different tone, voice and point of view, reminding me of Bolano’s 2666, but on a vastly reduced scale.

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While perusing the (only) local used bookstore I came across The Oxford Murders) by Guillermo Martínez, which fit nicely into my 10*10*10 Challenge (in "international mysteries"). Only when searching for the Wikipedia link I just used did I discover it was recently made into a film starring Elijah Wood & John Hurt).

Unfortunately, the serendipitous discovery was almost the best thing about my experience with the book, which isn’t very well written. Some of this could be due to being a translation, but the formulaic phrasing, odd pacing, and stereotypical characterization don’t bode well. As a Planeta Prize winner, it certainly supports the contention that the award is a self-aggrandizing and political, rather than literary, prize…

The only really interesting thing about the book are the mathematical clues sprinkled throughout. One, in particular, is left as an exercise for the reader and I’ve not been able to solve it: what comes next in the sequence "2, 4, 8, …" The obvious answer is 16, but in the novel Martínez writes (as part of the general idea that almost any sequence can be justified) that it could just as well be 10 or 2007. But how?

[side note: a very interesting, tangentially related mathematical puzzle for which I do know the answer is: how can you support 31 as the next in the sequence: 2, 4, 8, 16 ...]

I’ll trade the answer for my puzzle for either answer to that posed in the novel. I have a feeling the ‘10′ is going to make me smack myself on the forehead and think "of course!"

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It’s hard not to include the adjectives phlegmatic, tired, and brilliant to describe Inspector Martin Beck, the main character in Roseanna, the first of 10 Swedish detective novels written in the late 60s and early 70s. I get tired and fearful of catching yet another cold or flu just reading about him! But Beck– and the milieu of small-town Sweden– is intriguing enough that I plan to read more in the series.

The plot of Roseanna is simple: a dead woman is found in a lake in rural Sweden prompting a long, exhausting investigation led by Inspector Beck. The case proceeds over a long period of time– it takes months for the team to discover the victim’s identity and then, because she was an American visiting on a cruise, there are more than 80 potential suspects to consider, most of whom have long since returned to their distant homes– and is almost entirely without "drama."

The setting is a bit anachronistic, but the shape of the novel is familiar. Roseanna isn’t a whodunit– for a long time no one involved has any idea who the killer is and then suddenly it’s pretty clear– but a police procedural centered on the methods of investigation rather than, as has become so popular today, the technology used in that pursuit. The tools used are of some interest: the murder victim is an American killed while on a cruise in Sweden, so we as modern readers get a taste of the slow and pace (within a plot that is already intentionally slow) of communication, and the difficulties of simply sifting through– and sharing– evidence before the age of databases, digital photographs and email.

My understanding is that further novels in the series delve into the politics of the time, which I look forward to discovering.

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My only disappointment with Inspector Imanishi Investigates was discovering that it’s the only novel in the late Seicho Matsumoto’s Imanishi series (at least one blurb implies there is a series) that has been translated into English. Close on the heels of that disappointment was learning that Matsumoto died in 1992.

I was excited to find out, however, that this novel was made into a 1974 film titled Suna no utsuwa (aka Castle of Sand), which not only garnered an impressive number of awards, but has been called “one of the masterpieces of Japanese cinema.”

In the novel, Inspector Imanishi—an older, haiku-writing policeman in Tokyo—is investigating the brutal murder of a retired policeman, found beaten to death near a Tokyo train station. Along with Yoshimura, a younger policeman who sometimes assists him, Imanishi doggedly pursues the killer, through many seemingly hopeless dead ends, for years. Utimately Imanishi uncovers a complex crime that involves members of an elite young group of “Noveau Art” intellectuals: musicians, writers, architects and critics.

The depiction of Japanese life in the late 50s/early 60s (I think…the exact dates are never given) is fascinating. There’s no question that the events in the novel are of a different time and place, the whole suffused with a foreignness that is enhanced by the very utilitarian translation. Imanishi, representative of the older order, dignified and mannered, is starkly at odds with the young intellectuals who are determined to remake art, architecture, and finally politics into a new form suitable for their perception of modernity. Yoshimura, who is of the same age as the revolutionary-minded Nouveau crew, is nonetheless an admirer of Imanishi, learning from the older, weary detective crucial methods that are in danger of being lost in a new political landscape.

That Imanishi is also a (very modest) author of haiku, a formal and intensely polite man, whose depiction never veers into cliché significantly enhances the complex, but believable plot. Inspector Imanishi Investigates is more than just a murder mystery, but a fascinating cultural artifact.

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Peter Lovesey’s second entry in the (ex)-Detective Peter Diamond series won’t win any awards for plausibility—Diamond, no longer a member of the Bath police force due to a (bogus) charge of unlawful force, has been reduced to working as a security guard at Harrods, where he discovers a young, apparently mute Japanese girl hiding in the store and is then enlisted by one of Japan’s top Sumo wrestlers to engage in a global search to find her when she subsequently goes missing. Like I said, not a particularly plausible plot.

But I found the book enjoyable as further entree into the mind of the rotund, rowdy, and undeniably bright Peter Diamond. I’ll be looking for the next in the series. Recommended.

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[I’m going to have a difficult time catching up with my 999 Challenge reading if I keep reading books that even I can’t creatively fit into one of my categories. Nonetheless, I do keep reading, though I have fallen off the wagon when it comes to making entries here. So…]

Peter Lovesey’s The Last Detective is the first in a series of contemporary British mysteries featuring the—I must invoke the necessary clichés here—irascible and cynical Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond. I picked the book up by chance, intrigued by the description and having been impressed (as you’ll see in future entries here) with other novels in the Soho Crime series.

In many ways, Peter Diamond is one of a number of stereotypical detectives—cantankerous and gruff but with some softness left in his heart, bright and tenacious but not politically adept—but Lovesey portrays him in such a way that it’s impossible not to like him even if the reader sometimes has to cringe while doing so. Given these facts, that Diamond is regularly in the midst of political intrigues in which his continued employment—much less his present position—are at risk almost goes without saying.

The Last Detective’s plot is a bit convoluted, involving the death of a washed-up actress, a complex of events surrounding various suspects—including her English Literature professor husband, and some missing letters by Jane Austen. I did guess who the killer was about 2/3 of the way through, but I couldn’t be sure until the end… and there was plenty of plot left to be interested in.

Lovesey’s novel has an interesting construction, featuring two interludes in which primary suspects tell their story rather than relaying it through the process of interrogation. This worked well, though the voices weren’t wholly convincing… they escaped the fate of sounding too much like the main character, but they didn’t exactly sound authentic either.

All in all, a very satisfying debut of an interesting character in a novel that deservedly won an Anthony Award for Best Novel. In fact, after reading the second in the series (more on that later), I revised my opinion of the novel even higher as I start to see a better picture of how unique Peter Diamond really is. Recommended.

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A while back I posed a question about “literate genre fiction” to a list I belong to, specifically in the areas of mystery/suspense and scifi/speculative fiction and one of the people who responded said they “weren’t sure how literate they were, but the mystery stories of Dorothy Sayers sure are fun!” That’s a pretty accurate assessment of this collection of these short morsels. All but a few of the stories feature one of two detectives– the accustomed to fine things but not quite pretentious, Sherlock-like Lord Peter Wimsey, or Montague Egg, highly observant travelling salesman of fine wines who is always sharing maxims– usually rhyming– from The Salesman’s Handbook. For example: “Don’t trust to luck but be exact, and certify the smallest fact.” As long as you overlook the “Murder She Wrote problem– the fact that death seems to follow these characters everywhere they go and they are always in a unique position to solve them– the stories are charming and clever. And far more satisfying than many of the bloated, overwritten, bloody wrecks that fill the popular mystery shelves today.

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